On Monday, Congress made good on those promises, releasing a $24.4 billion budget plan for NASA as part of the conferencing process, when House and Senate lawmakers convene to hammer out a final budget. The result is a budget that calls for just a 1 percent cut in NASA’s science funding, to $7.25 billion, for fiscal year 2026.

The James Webb telescope's search for habitable exoplanets is getting a big boost from its new star-watching companion, Pandora.

NASA’s Scientific Balloon Program has reached new heights, both literally and figuratively, with four successful long-duration balloon flights over Antarctica, as reported by NASA. From detecting antimatter to tracing elusive neutrinos,

The closure of NASA's largest research library at Goddard Space Flight Center represents a deliberate attack on scientific infrastructure and marks another step toward the privatization of space exploration.

NASA's plans for Mars sample return are effectively cancelled as part of a bill approved by the U.S. Congress, ending efforts to collect Perseverance rover samples that could contain evidence of alien life.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, recently announced that they would finance, out of their own pocket, a number of new observatories, including a space telescope dubbed “Lazuli.” Lazuli will be a replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, which is due to end its operational life in the early 2030s.

Last year President Trump pitched a severe chop to NASA’s proposed annual budget for 2026, but the House and Senate on Monday released an appropriations bill that would mostly ignore those cuts. The minibus bill put forth by both congressional bodies’ appropriation committees includes NASA as well as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Science Foundation,

The U.S. Senate voted on Thursday to approve billions of dollars in funding for federal science agencies, rejecting deep cuts proposed by President Donald Trump in space and other areas.

"Today, we sent funding bills to the president's desk that reject the steep cuts he wanted and protect investments that families across America depend on every day."

A Congressional bill restores funding for most NASA space science missions, but there is no money for returning samples already collected on the red planet.

During their 167-day mission, the four crew members traveled nearly 71 million miles and completed more than 2,670 orbits around Earth.

MAVEN has remained silent since Dec. 6 despite repeated attempts to contact it, according to NASA. As part of the recovery effort, the Curiosity rover attempted twice to image MAVEN when it was expected to pass overhead, "but MAVEN was not detected," the agency said in its most recent update, issued Dec. 23.