Spacecraft

For The First Time, There Has Been an Unplanned Spacecraft Crash With The Moon

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Add one more crater to the long list of pockmarks on the lunar surface. According to orbital calculations, a rocket hurtling through space for years crashed into the Moon on Friday, but the strike wasn’t directly observed, and there might be a wait for photographic evidence.   The impact would have taken place at 7:25 … Read more

Looming Rocket Impact Forecasts Trouble for Future Lunar Exploration

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On March 4 a four-metric-ton spent rocket stage will end its uncontrolled, 7.5-year voyage through space with a flourish: it will slam into the far side of the moon, close to the 570-kilometer-wide crater Hertzsprung, at about 9,300 kilometers per hour, creating a modest crater of its own. Earth is no stranger to space junk … Read more

NASA’s daring Parker Solar Probe spacecraft zips past the sun again today

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The Parker Solar Probe is ready to make its 11th close flyby of the sun during its quest to understand how our neighboring star works. The plucky spacecraft, heavily shielded against the sun’s radiation and extreme heat, will dip to within 5.3 million miles (8.5 million kilometers) of the solar surface on Friday (Feb. 25). … Read more

China Plans Asteroid Missions, Space Telescopes and a Moon Base

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China has had a bumper few years in space exploration, and its ambitions are about to get bolder. The China National Space Administration has released an overview of its plans for the next five years, which include launching a robotic craft to an asteroid, building a space telescope to rival the Hubble and laying the … Read more

A Cygnus cargo spacecraft is launching to orbit today. Here’s how to watch live.

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A private Cygnus freighter is set to launch on a resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday (Feb. 19), and you can watch the whole thing live. Launch coverage is scheduled to start Saturday at 12:15 p.m. EST (1715 GMT) on the NASA website, the NASA app, NASA social media and here … Read more

Solar Orbiter spacecraft captures huge eruption on the sun (video)

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The Solar Orbiter spacecraft made a milestone observation in space as it captured a huge solar prominence, or eruption. It’s the largest such event ever observed in a single image along with the full solar disk and will add to the joint NASA-European mission to better understand solar activity, mission officials said in a statement. … Read more

NASA Eyes Electric Car Tech for Future Moon Rovers

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Of the many “firsts” from NASA’s Apollo program of lunar exploration, one often overlooked is that the Apollo missions included the first—and so far only—times that humans have driven on another world. Presaging today’s eco-conscious market for carbon-neutral transportation, Apollo’s battery-powered lunar roving vehicles were all-electric as well. Astronaut David Scott, who was the first … Read more

What We Learned from the Perseverance Rover’s First Year on Mars

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One year ago NASA’s Perseverance rover plunged through the Martian atmosphere and safely landed in Jezero Crater, a 45-kilometer-wide gouge that scientists suspect once hosted a deep, long-lived lake. The rover’s ultimate target is near Jezero’s western edge: a large, fan-shaped pile of sediments that washed into the basin through a notch in the crater … Read more

Radical Idea Shows Laser Propulsion Could Rapidly Accelerate Trips to Mars

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NASA and China plan to mount crewed missions to Mars in the next decade. While this represents a tremendous leap in terms of space exploration, it also presents significant logistical and technological challenges.   For starters, missions can only launch for Mars every 26 months when our two planets are at the closest points in … Read more