Scientists are about to decide where to send NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft next, and it is down to two candidates at the frozen frontier of the solar system to become the most distant object ever visited by a human-built space probe.
Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft has recorded a brilliant beam of gas and dust shooting into space from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the most spectacular such emission since the probe arrived at the tiny frozen world one year ago.
Engineers have so far been unable to restart a balky radar aboard NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive environmental satellite launched in January, robbing scientists of the most detailed maps of how much water is locked up in the top layers of Earth’s land masses.
Ruag Space, the Swiss manufacturer of nose shrouds for the Atlas 5 rocket, plans to relocate production of Atlas launcher components to United Launch Alliance’s rocket assembly plant in Decatur, Alabama.
The first pair of new Russian main engines for Orbital ATK’s modernized Antares rocket has arrived at the company’s Virginia launch base as engineers prepare to return the commercial booster to flight after a catastrophic failure last year.
NASA has signed a $490 million agreement with the Russian government to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the International Space Station in 2018 and 2019 as a hedge in case of delays to Boeing and SpaceX crew capsules.
Spectacular views from a NOAA space weather observatory show the sunlit far side of the moon crossing the face of the Earth from a distant vantage point a million miles away.
NASA has selected three finalists for a new Explorer-class astrophysics satellite mission scheduled to launch by the end of 2020, and two of the proposals aim to fulfill similar goals to an X-ray telescope shelved after cost overruns in 2012.
The pace of the European Space Agency’s development of a power and propulsion module for NASA’s Orion crew capsule will likely determine when an unpiloted test flight of the spaceship and its heavy-lift rocket will take off, NASA officials said last week.
U.S. military radars have little trouble tracking the flux of CubeSats filling orbital traffic lanes, diminishing worries that new commercial CubeSat constellations could generate collision hazards in space, according to a report issued by NASA last week.