July 20, 1976: Landing on the red planet

Alvaro Giménez Cañete manages the European Space Agency’s science program, a portfolio with a budget of nearly $600 million this year, and he recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about Europe’s hopes to build a gravitational wave observatory, the ExoMars mission to Mars, and tagging along with NASA’s probe to Jupiter’s moon Europa.

American and Soviet crews were launched today in 1975 for the first handshakes in space between the two superpowers as part of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

Intermittent flows that appear on steep slopes on Mars are likely formed by flowing sand, and not water as some scientists previously suspected, according to a new study.