The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope will blast off from Cape Canaveral on Saturday on a mission to shed light on the ‘dark universe’ dominated by dark matter and dark energy. Liftoff atop a Falcon 9 rocket from pad 40 is set for 11:12 a.m. EDT (1512 UTC).
A planet with at least 1.3 times the mass of Earth has been discovered orbiting within the habitable zone of the nearest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri, which is just 4.2 light years away.
The UK’s Beagle 2 mission to Mars, which was lost in Christmas week 2003 during the final stages of its voyage to the red planet, has been rediscovered by NASA’s eagle eye in the Martian sky, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Ten years ago Wednesday, on Jan. 14, 2005, a compact, flattened cylinder called Huygens, chock-full of sensors, cameras and scientific experiments, went hurtling through the orange skies of the mysterious moon Titan.