NASA | Pakistan

Four astronauts blasted off from Florida on Wednesday on Nasa’s Artemis II mission, a high-stakes voyage around the moon that marks the United States’ boldest step yet toward returning humans to the lunar surface later this decade in a race with China. Nasa’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, topped with its Orion crew capsule, roared to life just before sunset at the agency’s Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying its debut crew — three US astronauts and a Canadian astronaut — into Earth orbit. The 32-story-tall space vehicle thundered into clear skies, trailing a towering column of thick, white vapour. Nasa Administrator Jared Isaacman said the launch was an opening act for subsequent missions that would include construction of a moon base to support the “enduring presence we’re trying to create on the surface”. If the mission proceeds as planned, the crew consisting of Nasa astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will...

A Nasa rover has recorded evidence of lightning on Mars for the first time, its microphone picking up the sounds of tiny “zaps” whipped up by the dust storms constantly sweeping across the planet. Scientists have long debated whether electrical discharges could be sparking in the dusty and little-known Martian climate - but proof has been hard to come by. It turns out that Nasa’s Perseverance rover, which has been roaming the red planet since 2021, was inadvertently recording the sounds of lightning, according to a study published in Nature this week. These are far from the thundering, kilometre-long lightning bolts we see on Earth. Instead, they are “little zaps” similar to “what you might feel in dry weather when you touch your car door and there’s a bit of static electricity,” lead author Baptiste Chide of France’s CNRS research centre told AFP. While low in energy, these discharges are happening “absolutely all the time — and everywhere” on Mars, the planetary scientist said. The process starts when tiny ...

The United States space agency Nasa will lose about 3,900 employees under President Donald Trump’s sweeping effort to trim the federal workforce, at the same time as he prioritises plans for crewed missions to the Moon and Mars. In an emailed statement, Nasa said around 3,000 employees took part in the second round of its deferred resignation programme, which closed late on Friday. Combined with the 870 who joined the first round and regular staff departures, the agency’s civil servant workforce is set to drop from more than 18,000 before Trump took office in January to roughly 14,000 — a decrease of more than 20 per cent. Those leaving Nasa on the deferred resignation programme will be placed on administrative leave until an agreed departure date. An agency spokesperson said the figures could shift slightly in the coming weeks. “Safety remains a top priority for our agency as we balance the need to become a more streamlined and more efficient organisation and work to ensure we remain fully capable of pursuin...

U.S. President Donald Trump will soon announce a new candidate to serve as administrator of NASA, the White House said on Saturday, but did not explain why initial nominee Jared Isaacman was no longer in the running. Semafor, citing two people familiar with the matter, had earlier said the White House would pull Isaacman’s candidacy. […]