| In this week’s newsletter, get the latest updates on the Artemis II mission—including a potential launch date; learn more about the investigation of Boeing’s CST‑100 Starliner Crewed Flight Test; and discover how a new technology is helping NASA’s Perseverance rover pinpoint its exact location on Mars without human assistance. Plus, more stories you might have missed. |
 Artemis Forging New Frontiers |
| NASA successfully fueled its SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and demonstrated the launch countdown for Artemis II on Thursday during a wet dress rehearsal at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Engineers loaded more than 700,000 gallons of liquid propellant into the rocket, sent a closeout crew to the launchpad to demonstrate closing the Orion spacecraft’s hatches, and completed two runs of terminal count—the final phase of the launch countdown. During the rehearsal, teams closely monitored liquid hydrogen fueling operations, which proved challenging during previous tests. Hydrogen gas concentrations remained under allowable limits, giving engineers confidence in new seals installed in an interface used to route fuel to the rocket. While engineers fully review data from the test, the Artemis II crew is preparing to enter quarantine on Friday in Houston ahead of a potential launch no earlier than Friday, March 6. MISSION UPDATES |
 | HUMANS IN SPACE Starliner Crewed Flight Test Investigation NASA has released a report of findings from the Program Investigation Team examining the Boeing CST-100 Starliner Crewed Flight Test. Investigators identified an interplay of combined hardware failures, qualification gaps, leadership missteps, and cultural breakdowns that created risk conditions inconsistent with the agency’s human spaceflight safety standards. READ FULL REPORT |
NASA SCIENCE
Learning to Self-Locate
Imagine you’re alone, driving along in a rocky, unforgiving desert with no roads, no map, no GPS, and no more than one phone call a day for someone to inform you exactly where you are. That’s what the Perseverance rover has been experiencing since landing on Mars five years ago. Though it carries time-tested tools for determining its general location, the rover has needed operators on Earth to tell it precisely where it is — until now.
MARS GLOBAL LOCALIZATION
 AERONAUTICS Seeing the Invisible NASA engineers recently tackled the challenge of visualizing something invisible: the movement of air around aircraft and rockets. For decades, researchers relied on a technique called focused schlieren imaging, which reveals subtle changes in air movement—similar to how heat waves shimmer above hot pavement. The new Self-Aligned Focusing Schlieren system simplifies this process, offering a compact, low-cost, and easy-to-use tool for capturing airflow patterns with far less complexity than traditional focusing schlieren systems. LEARN MORE |  THE UNIVERSE Dark Galaxy In the vast tapestry of the universe, most galaxies shine brightly across cosmic time and space. Yet a rare class of galaxies remains nearly invisible—low-surface-brightness galaxies dominated by dark matter and containing only a sparse scattering of faint stars. The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed one such elusive object, known as CDG-2, an ultra-low surface brightness galaxy composed of 99% dark matter. LEARN MORE |
| More NASA News |
 | In the latest episode of Houston We Have a Podcast, NASA leaders Joel Montalbano and Ryan Landon reflect on 25 years of continuous human presence aboard the International Space Station, the milestones that shaped its legacy, and how international cooperation has been essential to the station’s success. |
 | A stream of charged particles known as the solar wind flows from the Sun toward Earth. Here, it meets the Earth’s magnetic fields, which shield our planet like a giant umbrella. The Space Umbrella project needs your help investigating this dynamic region, where the Magnetosphere Multiscale mission has been collecting data since 2015. |
 | A small but powerful piece of lab equipment—roughly the size of a cellphone—has arrived at the International Space Station after launching with NASA’s SpaceX Crew‑12 mission. The off‑the‑shelf device, known as a microplate reader, will allow astronauts to run critical biological experiments in space and get results immediately, instead of waiting for samples to be stored, sent back to Earth, and analyzed in ground laboratories. |
| Do You Know? |
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| 25 years ago this week, space shuttle Atlantis was completing the STS-98 mission after delivering an important new module to the International Space Station. The U.S. laboratory, shown here in Atlantis’s payload bay, was the fourth module installed on the space station. |
| What is the name of this module? A. Euclid B. Destiny C. Unity D. Columbus E. Einstein |
| Find out the answer in next week’s NASA newsletter! |
 | Last week, we asked what milestone NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker mission achieved as a first in space exploration history. The answer? It became the first spacecraft to ever land on an asteroid. On Feb. 12, 2001, after orbiting Eros for a year, mission planners slowly lowered the spacecraft down to the asteroid’s surface. Even though NEAR Shoemaker was not meant to be a lander, the spacecraft survived the landing and continued to send back data for two weeks. |
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