This morning - Wednesday, January 27 - 2 NASA astronauts perform the first in a pair of International Space Station spacewalks, to finish installing a European science platform and complete long-term battery upgrade work.

In the animation in this post, the rhythmic movement of newly discovered planets around the star TOI-178 is represented through a musical harmony, created by attributing a note (in the pentatonic scale) to each of the planets. Hear the music of these planets.

A new study of the seven Earth-sized exoplanets around TRAPPIST-1 indicate that all 7 planets are extremely similar to each other in makeup, but potentially quite different from Earth.

A lunar sample collected during Apollo 17, the final mission to the moon, is now on display in President Biden's Oval Office.

China's Chang'e 5 moon mission successfully returned moon rocks to Earth in December 2020 for the first time in 45 years. It's now headed toward an Earth-sun Lagrange point, with the goal of making sun observations.

A commercial nanosat called SpaceTy Beihangkongshi-1 - launched November 2020 - has successfully used an iodine thruster to change its orbit around Earth. This new thruster might help clear space junk by steering small satellites, at the end of their missions, back into Earth's atmosphere where they'd burn up.

The mission team for NASA's InSight lander called off its attempts to try to dig deeper into Mars with the heat probe known as "the mole." Meanwhile, the rest of the mission gained an extension to December 2022.

FAST's 500-meter (1,640-foot) dish makes it the world's largest single-dish radio observatory. It's expected to open to international observers in 2021.

SpaceX launched 60 more of its Starlink satellites on January 20, 2021. SpaceX ultimately intends to launch tens of thousands of these satellites, to provide global internet access. Here's why astronomers are concerned.

This final test of NASA's SLS megarocket was needed to launch the first uncrewed mission in the Artemis program - Artemis 1 - by the end of 2021. Now the program's schedule is uncertain.