Harry Baker

Live Blog Tuesday, March 31, 2026: Get the latest news and updates on the Artemis II mission as the countdown begins for NASA's return to the moon.

NASA is gearing up to send astronauts back to the lunar environment for the first time in nearly 55 years. We've broken the 10-day mission into 12 key steps, from the historic liftoff to a record-breaking splashdown.

The Artemis II astronauts will soon launch on the first crewed mission to the moon in more than 50 years. During this trip, they will travel farther and faster than any humans in history — and will each claim a different individual record.

The solar system has many more moons than the one we can see in the sky. But how many do we actually know about? And how many more are waiting to be discovered?

A suspected space rock, around the size of a cantaloupe, was found in the bedroom of a Houston home after crashing through the building's roof. It is likely a fragment of one of several "fireball" meteors that exploded over the U.S. in the past week.

NASA has revealed that Russia's Progress 94 spacecraft failed to deploy one of its antennae, making it impossible for the uncrewed freighter to autonomously dock with the International Space Station. An orbiting cosmonaut will now have to manually guide the stricken vessel using a "backup system."

Astronomers have detected strange "wobbles" in the light curve of a super bright supernova, hinting that a magnetar was born inside the extreme stellar explosion.

A fridge-size space rock spectacularly broke apart over Ohio at 40,000 mph, creating a loud boom and a "fireball" that shone in the bright blue daytime sky. The rare sight, which exploded with the equivalent force of 250 tons of TNT, was also seen from space.

A powerful "gamma-ray burst" has been seen exploding from merging neutron stars hidden within a previously unknown mini-galaxy leftover from an ancient cosmic crash. The "collision within a collision" could help answer multiple astrophysics questions, researchers say.

A German town has been peppered by meteorites after a stunning "fireball" exploded in the skies over central Europe. One extraterrestrial fragment landed in a bedroom after punching a soccer ball-size hole through the building's roof.

Astronomers have discovered the brightest and most distant "megamaser" to date. The cosmic energy beam is shooting toward Earth from 8 billion light-years away and was spotted thanks to a weird space-time trick first predicted by Einstein.

Earlier this week, the number of visible sunspots on our home star fell to zero for the first time in 1,335 days. This normally indicates a period of greatly reduced solar activity, but it's still too soon to relax, experts say.

New photos captured by NASA's Curiosity rover show that Mars' giant, spiderweb-like "boxwork" features are covered in tiny, never-before-seen nodules that bear a striking resemblance to arachnid eggs. And researchers are struggling to explain them.