Tag Archives: space

An uncrewed Chinese spacecraft successfully landed on the surface of Mars on Saturday, state news agency Xinhua reported, making China the second space-faring nation after the United States to land on the Red Planet. The Tianwen-1 spacecraft landed on a site on a vast plain known as Utopia Planitia, “leaving …

Remnants of China’s biggest rocket landed in the Indian Ocean on Sunday, with the bulk of its components destroyed upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, according to Chinese state media, ending days of speculation over where the debris would hit. The coordinates are given by state media, citing the China …

Debris from a Chinese rocket is expected to fall back to Earth in an uncontrolled re-entry this weekend. The main segment from the Long March-5b vehicle was used to launch the first module of China’s new space station last month. At 18 tonnes it is one of the largest items …

The dwarf planet Ceres — long believed to be a barren space rock — is an ocean world with reservoirs of seawater beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed Monday. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its …

The latest successful rocket test by SpaceX could mean we’ll see humans on Mars in the next decade, funded by private entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. But will they take charge of the newly conquered Red Planet too? On a clear night, there’s nothing better than gazing …

That’s one quick drop for man; one giant splash for mankind. The safe return of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is not on the scale of the moon landings, of course, but it could certainly be a step towards space travel successes of similarly soaring heights. The capsule left Earth some two …

A $2.7 billion NASA rover, Perseverance, is scheduled to launch from Florida’s Cape Canaveral at 7:50 a.m. Thursday atop an Atlas V rocket. If all goes well, the rover will land Feb. 18 on Mars on a mission to search for signs of ancient Martian life. “Sitting atop that rocket …

China launched a Mars probe on Thursday, aiming to complete orbiting, landing and roving in one mission, and taking the first step in its planetary exploration of the solar system. A Long March-5 rocket, China’s largest launch vehicle, carrying the spacecraft with a mass of about 5 tonnes, soared into …

For the first time ever, astronomers have directly imaged multiple planets orbiting a sun-like star. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile photographed two giant planets circling a very young analogue of our own sun that lies about 300 light-years from Earth, a new study reports. “This …

A Japanese rocket carrying the first Arab mission to Mars will blast into space on Monday, after being delayed by bad weather, the launch company said Friday. The lift-off of the United Arab Emirates’ “Hope” probe, originally planned for Wednesday, is now set for 6:58 am Monday (21:58 GMT Sunday) …

The liftoff of the United Arab Emirates’ Mars orbiter was postponed until Friday due to bad weather at the Japanese launch site. The orbiter named Amal, or Hope, is the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission. The launch was scheduled for Wednesday from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, but …

Billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc said on Monday it has signed up with NASA to develop a program to promote private missions to the International Space Station, sending the shares of the company up about 10%. As part of its agreement with the Johnson Space Center, the space …

Russia has lambasted the US’s newly-unveiled space strategy document as “aggressive”, saying Washington views space as a new “arena” to wage “war.” “The document confirms the aggressive course by Washington in the space sphere,” said Russia’s Foreign Ministry in a statement on Friday. “Space is seen by the US side …

A German-Russian space telescope has just acquired a breakthrough map of the sky that traces the heavens in X-rays. The image records a lot of the violent action in the cosmos – instances where matter is being accelerated, heated and shredded. Feasting black holes, exploding stars, and searingly hot gas. …

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is moving away from its planet a hundred times faster than previously established, according to a new study. The giant moon isn’t alone in this behavior; other moons among the 150 known moons in our solar system are also slowly distancing themselves from the planets they …

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of Proxima b, an Earth-size exoplanet orbiting the closest star to our sun. The European Southern Observatory’s High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) detected the planet in 2016. The Very Large Telescope based in Chile has a new and more powerful spectrograph named ESPRESSO, …

NASA confirmed reports Tuesday that the superstar actor is planning to shoot a movie at the International Space Station. “NASA is excited to work with Tom Cruise on a film aboard the Space Station! We need popular media to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to make NASA’s …

A group of researchers in Turkey is claiming to have come across the first credible records yet discovered of ‘death by a meteorite,’ dating from August 22, 1888. They cite multiple official documents recovered from the General Directorate of State Archives of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, which …

With so many pieces of high-tech hardware at its disposal, it’s easy to forget that some of NASA’s most impressive machines are rapidly aging. The Spitzer Space Telescope is one of those machines, and after over 16 long years in space, the trusty spacecraft is now finally being retired. NASA …

The Daniel K Inouye Solar Telescope on Hawaii has released pictures that show features as small as 30km across. This is remarkable when set against the scale of our star, which has a diameter of about 1.4 million km and is 149 million km from Earth. The cell-like structures are …