Two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. Navy test pilot will buckle into custom-molded seats inside a Soyuz spaceship Wednesday, undock from the International Space Station and head for a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan to close out a 167-day space voyage.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft fine-tuned its path toward Pluto on Tuesday, firing its rocket thrusters for 93 seconds to aim for a fleeting flyby of the distant dwarf planet July 14.
With a commitment from the Obama administration finally in hand after more than a decade of studies and concept papers, NASA expects to give the green light this year for development of a robotic probe to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa that could launch as soon as 2022.
The largest solid rocket booster in the world, an extended version of the space shuttle motor, will be test-fired in Utah on Wednesday to check its qualifications to be part of NASA’s new heavy-lift Space Launch System.
Mission leaders Tuesday gave approval for rollout of the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket on Wednesday morning, leading to liftoff Thursday night of the Magnetospheric Multiscale science project for NASA.
Three months into an interplanetary cruise expected to last three-and-a-half years, Japan’s Hayabusa 2 probe is in good health as it begins an ion-powered pursuit of an asteroid to return a piece of it to Earth.
The next launch in SpaceX’s busy manifest this year is scheduled for March 21, when a Falcon 9 rocket will take off from Cape Canaveral and deliver Turkmenistan’s first satellite into orbit.
A $1.1 billion science investigation involving four formation-flying satellites circling the Earth will share a single Atlas 5 rocket launch Thursday night from Cape Canaveral to probe explosions in the magnetic field with millisecond speed.