NASA’s Artemis Prepares Crews for Future Mars Missions

NASA's Artemis program is testing future crewed Mars missions on the Moon. With longer, crewed lunar missions, Artemis will showcase spacecraft and life-support technologies, establishing a long-term presence off Earth. This strategy goes beyond Apollo's short excursions by aiming for longer stays and collaborating with foreign and business partners. NASA intends to improve systems and collect knowledge that will directly guide future missions to the Red Planet and beyond by putting equipment and processes under stress both on the surface and in lunar orbit.

Testing technology and logistics on the Moon

According to NASA, astronauts will fly by the moon on Artemis 2, which is scheduled for 2026, to test Orion's life-support systems,. In the meantime, NASA has a Deep Space Logistics office to handle cargo deliveries outside of Earth orbit and is constructing Gateway, a mini-station orbiting the moon. Crews will test drills, lunar rovers, and other equipment on the surface. The south pole of the moon, which contains frozen water and other resources, will be the focus of numerous missions. It's important to learn how to harvest lunar ice because NASA claims that doing so will help get ready for crewed missions to Mars.

Mars mission planning

NASA now collaborates with industry and dozens of countries under the Artemis Accords, building a deep-space infrastructure (Gateway station and landers like SpaceX's Starship). Challenges remain: the Artemis 3 landing (target ~2027) depends on the Starship HLS arriving on time, and NASA faces sharp budget cuts and workforce losses. Artemis is shifting strategy: instead of Apollo's brief (three-day) missions, it plans to keep crews on the Moon for weeks or months — a step toward the year-long journeys needed for Mars.

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Hubble Uncovers Multi-Age Stars in Ancient Cluster, Reshaping Galaxy Origins

Astronomers call ancient star clusters like NGC 1786 “time capsules” for their galaxy, preserving some of its oldest stars. A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offers an unprecedented close-up of this dense cluster 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hubble's data show that NGC 1786 contains stars of different ages – a surprising find, since such clusters were once thought to hold a single stellar generation. This multi-age discovery is reshaping our view of how galaxies built their first stars, and suggests more complex early history. Mixed-Age Stars in a Galactic Time Capsule According to the official source, this Hubble image shows the globular cluster NGC 1786, a ball of densely packed stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers captured this picture as part of a program comparing ancient clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies (like the LMC) with clusters in our own Milky Way. The surprising discovery is th...

CSIRO Uses Quantum AI to Revolutionize Semiconductor Design

Researchers at Australia's CSIRO have achieved a world-first demonstration of quantum machine learning in semiconductor fabrication. The quantum-enhanced model outperformed conventional AI methods and could reshape how microchips are designed. The team focused on modeling a crucial—but hard to predict—property called “Ohmic contact” resistance, which measures how easily current flows where metal meets a semiconductor. They analysed 159 experimental samples from advanced gallium nitride (GaN) transistors (known for high power/high-frequency performance). By combining a quantum processing layer with a final classical regression step, the model extracted subtle patterns that traditional approaches had missed. Tackling a difficult design problem According to the study, the CSIRO researchers first encoded many fabrication variables (like gas mixtures and annealing times) per device and used principal component analysis (PCA) to shrink 37 parameters down to the five most important ones. ...

A Planet with a Death Wish: How HIP 67522 b Is Forcing Its Star to Explode

Scientists have caught a planet with a death wish, which is an alien world, orbiting very near to its star, and so speedy that it is causing the star to go to its death with bursting explosions. HIP 67522 b is the planet, and it is of the same size as Jupiter with a seven-day orbit around its host star. These orbits are disturbing the magnetic field of the star and causing enormous blasting eruptions to blow back the planet and make it wrinkled. This is the first time that a planet is influencing the host star, as the astronomers reported in a study published on July 2, 2025, in the Journal Nature. A Planet with a Death Wish: HIP 67522 b's Fiery Orbit As per the study by NASA, Ekaterina Ilin, the first author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said that the planet was observed to trigger the energetic flares. It has been predicted by the scientists that the waves are setting off explosions that are going to happen. Magnetic Chaos: P...

Kartavya Kant Tiwari

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