India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission is getting closer to the Moon, gradually reducing its altitude above the celestial body’s cratered surface after entering lunar orbit.
A massive outburst from the Sun was felt across three worlds in a rare event that could help protect astronauts from harmful radiation during future missions.
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have detected nearly 40 boulders near Dimorphos—the target of NASA’s wildly successful DART experiment to deflect a non-threatening asteroid. This isn’t exactly positive news, since it suggests that hitting a bona fide hazardous asteroid might create a cluster of possibly…
Update: July 14, 9:17 a.m. ET: India’s LVM3 rocket blasted off from Sriharikota at 2:35 p.m. local time, sending the lander on a trajectory that will take it to the Moon.
Texas-based Firefly has been tasked with placing a lunar lander on the far side of the Moon, where it will drop off a pair of communications experiments.
The Hakuto-R spacecraft won’t land on the Moon until April, but the private mission is already in the record books.
Space exploration takes tons of planning, technological expertise, and daring. And given the long timescales involved, they often require considerable patience. Many upcoming missions to deep space aren’t happening any time soon, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be excited.
NASA’s interest in sending missions to Mars and beyond continues as the agency just tapped private space company Blue Origin to help it reach the Red Planet.
The Mars Sample Return Program is a bold plan to deliver precious samples of Martian soil back to Earth without human intervention.