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The Andromeda Galaxy through the lens of Hubble The space telescope has captured its sharpest-ever image 🛰. Andromeda is located 2.5 million light-years away, contains one trillion stars, and is considered the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way.

NASA’s Bold Shortcut to Mars: Twin Probes Just Pulled Off a First-of-Its-Kind Gravity Slingshot Two small NASA spacecraft have spent the past year looping through a long, bean-shaped “holding pattern” around the Sun. Now they’ve swung back past Earth, fired their engines at the closest possible point, and are finally on a direct path to Mars — using a maneuver no previous NASA mission has ever attempted. The probes are ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers). Their job is to study how the solar wind interacts with Mars’s thin upper atmosphere and how the planet’s magnetic fields and plasma behave. They launched in November 2025 aboard Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, but they missed the ideal 2024 launch window because the rocket wasn’t ready. Instead of waiting another 26 months for the next favorable alignment of Earth and Mars, mission planners invented a detour. They sent the twins onto a large, looping trajectory that brought them back to Earth’s neighborhood in early November 2026. Then came the critical step: each spacecraft had to perform a precise engine burn while deep inside Earth’s gravitational field. The idea is a hybrid of a classic gravity assist and a powered flyby — the planet’s gravity bends and accelerates the trajectory, and the thrusters add extra speed at the exact moment it counts most. The first probe fired on November 7, the second on November 9. Both burns were flawless. “No NASA mission has ever done anything like this before,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator at UC Berkeley. “For most missions it’s simply not necessary.” Asal Naseri, acting deputy flight director for NASA’s Heliophysics Division, added: “For the first time NASA has used a powered Earth flyby to boost a spacecraft toward Mars. And we did it twice, only two days apart, perfectly.” By accepting a longer, more complicated path and then using Earth itself as a launchpad, the team turned a delayed rocket into an opportunity to test a new way of reaching the Red Planet. The two probes are now on course and expected to arrive at Mars in the coming years to begin mapping the invisible forces that shape its atmosphere. The maneuver shows how mission designers can still find creative routes when launch windows close — turning Earth’s gravity and a carefully timed engine burn into a second chance.