Space and Astronomy News 7th February 2026

Artemis II delayed due to hydrogen leaks during a dress rehearsal for launch

I think everyone had their fingers (and possibly toes!) crossed that all would go well with the wet dress rehearsal by NASA earlier this week so the launch of the Artemis II mission to the Moon could proceed. 

This entails loading the entire load of liquid hydrogen onto the rocket, checking systems and tanks, and then draining them again. Additional checks are then carried out to ensure that the Artemis II spacecraft will be certified safe to launch.

After some initial delays, the NASA team identified a number of challenges, especially around the loading and storage of liquid hydrogen. Because of the need to evaluate the data and fix and issues, the earliest that they will be able to launch Artemis II is now March 2026. 

NASA's administrator, Jared Isaacman, commented "As always, safety remains our top priority, for our astronauts, our workforce, our systems, and the public. As noted above, we will only launch when we believe we are as ready to undertake this historic mission.

This is just the beginning. It marks the start of an Artemis program that will evolve to support repeated and affordable missions to the Moon, in line with President Trump’s national space policy. Getting this mission right means returning to the Moon to stay and a future to Artemis 100 and beyond."

Read more here.

Could there be further delays?

Yes. 

The first Artemis I rocket was plagued by delays, taken some seven wet dress rehearsals from March 2022 until it was finally launched in November 2022. There were several techniques developed by NASA to help overcome the various liquid hydrogen leaks and hopefully issues will be resolved more quickly this time around.

John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis II Mission Management Team. said "When you’re dealing with hydrogen, it’s a small molecule. It’s highly energetic. We like it for that reason. And we do the best we can.”

Stay tuned!

Budget cuts sees Mars samples left on the planet's surface.

A few months ago, NASA  announced that there were strong indications that their Perseverance Rover had found what looked like signs or biosignatures that life once existed on Mars. (You can read about their findings in a blog article here.)

What was found wasn't truly definitive.  The science lab onboard Perseverance simply doesn't have the capabilities to perform the deep analysis to confirm whether or not these sample did in fact contain biosignatures. This wasn't something that took the scientists by surprise. They built into Perseverance the ability to leave behind samples collected for later retrieval by another spacecraft or possibly by human astronauts landing on the red planet.

The rover has now drilled into the surface of Mars and from carefully selected areas, left sealed cannisters containing precious samples that might reveal whether or not life did indeed exist once on another planet.

Illustration of the Perseverance Rover on the surface of Mars with samples of Martian soil. Image via NASA/JPL

A large number of spacecraft have flown to Mars. Some crash landed into the surface such as Beagle or lost, some remaining in orbit and others successfully touching touch on the Martian surface. However, none have made the return trip from Mars back to Earth.

The actual samples left on Mars by Perseverance. Image via NASA/JPL-CALTECH/MSSS

This Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission would be a major combined NASA/ESA undertaking requiring the development of a swag of new technologies and spacecraft.  

You can read more about the MSR at the NASA website here.

The ambitious and exciting program has run into a major snag. Due to budget cuts passed by the US Congress last month, the MSR program is effectively now dead in the water and will not proceed. 

That's right. There are curated samples of the contain possible biosignatures ready for collection and will now be left to collect (Martian) dust as there are not the funds to go there and retrieve them. More here.

Sydney University Student reverse engineers cosmic dust in a lab

It was great to see the amount of press from all parts of the world that Sydney University PhD student, Linda Losurdo, has received this week for her working on synthesising cosmic dust. 

Linda Losurdo at the laboratory Sydney University

Cosmic dust is abundant across the Universe and used to be a bit of a pain for astronomers as vast clouds of cosmic dust obscured some distant objects in visible light.

Since the development of infrared astronomy, the importance of cosmic dust in the complex history of the Universe and even for the development of life is being better understood. While the Earth is constantly being bombarded by cosmic dust much of it burns up in the upper atmosphere and that particles that do make it to the surface are next to impossible to find. 

Ms. Losurdo used mix of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and acetylene and subjected them to intense electrical currents resulting a carbon rich dust that mimicked the cosmic dust and contained many of the organic compounds found throughout the Universe.

“We no longer have to wait for an asteroid or comet to come to Earth to understand their histories,” Ms Losurdo said. “You can build analogue environments in the laboratory and reverse engineer their structure using the infrared fingerprints.

“This can give us huge insight into how ‘carbonaceous cosmic dust’ can form in the plasma puffed out by giant, old stars or in cosmic nurseries where stars are being born and distribute these fascinating molecules that could be vital for life.

“It’s like we have recreated a little bit of the Universe in a bottle in our lab.”

You can read more about how this achieved by Ms. Losurdo and even close up images of cosmic dust made in the lab at the Sydney University news website here.

SASI Astronomy Course

Finally for this week, I was chuffed to be asked back by the Sutherland Astronomical Society (SASI) to be their first guest speaker this week for 2026 and it was a wonderful evening at their observatory down by the Georges River in Oyster Bay in southern Sydney.

It was a great reminder that if you want to learn more about Astronomy, the Introduction to Practical Astronomy Course run by SASI in August. This multi-week course covers things like what's in the southern sky, setting up telescopes and understanding optics, intro to the Big Bang, new developments in astronomy and space plus lots more.

You can find out more here.

Highly recommended!

Cheers,

Earl White 

BINTEL

7th February 2026