NASA has suspended science operations with the Hubble Space Telescope and put the observatory into protective “safe mode” while engineers troubleshoot problems with one of the spacecraft’s three remaining gyroscopes, used to help aim the telescope and keep it locked on target, officials said Monday.
The MASCOT lander released from Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft this week made three hops to different locations on asteroid Ryugu before draining its battery, outliving its design life and sending back data from all four of its instruments, according to German and French officials who developed the surface robot.
A Russian Soyuz ferry ship carrying a Russian cosmonaut and two NASA astronauts undocked from the International Space Station early Thursday, flew a lap around the 20-year-old outpost for a photo survey and then plunged back to Earth, making a pinpoint landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan to wrap up a 197-day stay in space.
Two U.S. astronauts flanked a veteran Russian cosmonaut Thursday for a ride back to Earth from the International Space Station. The trio undocked from the station in their Soyuz spacecraft at 0757 GMT (3:57 a.m. EDT), beginning a return flight that culminated in a parachute-assisted landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan at 1145 GMT (7:45 a.m. EDT).
A cosmonaut and two NASA astronauts finished packing up their Soyuz ferry ship Wednesday and prepared to undock from the International Space Station early Thursday for a fiery descent to touchdown on the steppe of Kazakhstan to close out a 197-day mission that included four spacewalks, a full slate of research and an emergency leak repair.
A Falcon 9 rocket powered by a recycled first stage lit its main engines for a hold-down firing on a launch pad Tuesday at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in preparation for launch with an Argentine radar satellite on a mission that will feature the first SpaceX booster landing on the West Coast.
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