Artemis II's lunar flyby return, NASA's Artemis roadmap revision, Perseverance's potential biosignature, Webb's latest images — the biggest NASA headlines from 2025 into early 2026, newest first.
LatestSLS launched the Orion spacecraft Integrity at 6:35 p.m. EDT on April 1 from Pad 39B; splashdown off San Diego at 5:07 p.m. PDT on April 10. Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen became the first humans to leave Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. Total mission: 9 days, 1 hour, 32 minutes. Full timeline on the Artemis II mission tracker.
Using a continuous 15-hour NIRSpec observation, JWST traced temperature and charged particles up to 5,000 km above Uranus's clouds, revealing rosy auroral bands shaped by the planet's 59°-tilted magnetic field. It's the most detailed vertical mapping of an ice giant's upper atmosphere since Voyager 2's 1986 flyby. Published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Administrator Jared Isaacman unveiled a revised architecture at Kennedy Space Center: **Artemis III (mid-2027)** becomes an Earth-orbit rendezvous/docking demo with SpaceX Starship HLS and Blue Origin Blue Moon, plus the Axiom AxEMU lunar EVA suit. **Artemis IV (early 2028)** is now the first crewed lunar landing; Artemis V in late 2028. Big lander/suit risks get shaken out in Earth orbit before humans go to the surface.
Administrator Isaacman visited Blue Origin's Lunar Plant 1 in Merritt Island, Florida, to view the MK1 lander Endurance. 8 meters tall, 21,350 kg dry, 3,000 kg to the lunar surface — a robotic cargo lander targeting a 2026 New Glenn flight to Shackleton Crater, carrying NASA's SCALPSS plume-surface cameras. Artemis's competing path to the surface.
Final flight of second-generation Starship. From Starbase, Texas: Super Heavy splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico 6.5 minutes after liftoff; the upper stage deployed dummy Starlinks, relit a Raptor engine in space, and completed re-entry to an Indian Ocean splashdown. Flight 12 (Block 3 / Ship 39) is in preflight, with the in-orbit propellant-transfer demo (two Starships docking, transferring fuel) still targeted for 2026 — a prerequisite for Starship HLS on the Moon.
After a year of peer review, the Mars 2020 team published in Nature that the "Sapphire Canyon" core — drilled July 2024 from the rock Cheyava Falls — contains "leopard spots" and "poppy seed" textures alongside organic carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus. The paper rules out the simplest abiotic explanations but does not claim proof of life. Perseverance has filled 33 of 43 sample tubes.
An April xenon-pressure drop paused Psyche's Hall thrusters; NASA switched to a backup fuel line and full propulsion resumed on June 16, 2025. In December, Psyche tracked interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS. The mission remains on track for its May 2026 Mars gravity assist and August 2029 arrival at asteroid 16 Psyche — real proof that solar-electric propulsion can absorb an in-flight failure without losing the mission.
The JWST GLIMPSE program combined nine NIRCam exposures totaling ~120 hours, using galaxy cluster Abell S1063 as a gravitational lens to hunt galaxies formed within 200 million years of the Big Bang. Released by ESA/Webb in May 2025 — pushes the observable-universe frontier further than any previous single-field Webb observation.
ESA's Hera (launched October 2024) passed within ~5,000 km of Mars and imaged Deimos from as close as 300 km. In October 2025, ESA confirmed Hera is now on track to reach the Didymos–Dimorphos binary system in November 2026, a month ahead of schedule — to survey the crater NASA's DART impactor left in 2022. First full post-impact planetary-defense characterization.
Europa Clipper flew 884 km above Mars, exercising its REASON ice-penetrating radar and E-THEMIS thermal imager en route to Jupiter. Next milestone: Earth gravity assist December 3, 2026; Jupiter arrival April 2030. First end-to-end instrument test in deep space — and ~0.5 km/s of delta-v saved for the actual Europa science campaign.
NASA announced parallel studies of two MSR approaches: (1) an upgraded JPL sky-crane at $6.6–7.7 billion, or (2) a commercially-provided heavy lander at $5.8–7.1 billion. Final architecture decision expected mid-2026; samples as early as 2035. Rescues the program from an earlier $11B / 2040-return projection and puts commercial providers on a real path into planetary science.
All images on this page are NASA, ESA, JAXA, CNSA, ISRO, or other space-agency public-domain archival materials, sourced via Wikimedia Commons; each image is credited to its specific photographer/institution inline. Fact sources: NASA History Office mission press kits, peer-reviewed journals (Nature, Geophysical Research Letters), space-agency official archives, Wikipedia cross-referenced. All quotes are from the historical record with sources given.