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Photos: OSIRIS-REx prepped for encapsulation
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is about to be sealed inside the nose fairing of its Atlas 5 rocket booster for a seven-year voyage to asteroid Bennu and back to Earth on a mission to seek out clues to the origin of life and the chaotic early solar system.
One of NASA’s cleanest spacecraft ever is ready to fly
Five years after winning $1 billion from NASA to mount the first U.S. asteroid sample return mission, scientists and engineers will get their last look at the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft this week as it is closed up inside the nose cone of an Atlas 5 rocket for launch in September.
Sophisticated new U.S. weather observatory being readied for launch
On the cusp of advancing U.S. weather forecasting, a powerful new satellite was shipped from its Denver factory to the Cape today in preparation for launch in November.
Q&A with Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator
Dante Lauretta, a researcher based at the University of Arizona, leads the science team on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission scheduled for launch Sept. 8 on a round-trip journey to asteroid Bennu.
China’s Yutu rover dies on the moon
A Chinese rover sent to the moon in 2013 has stopped operating, officials announced Wednesday, ending a groundbreaking 31-month mission that made discoveries in lunar geology and catapulted China's space program to new heights.
NASA spells out support for SpaceX’s Red Dragon Mars mission
If SpaceX is able to dispatch a robotic Dragon capsule to land on the red planet in 2018 on time and successfully, engineers stand to get a lesson on what it will take to eventually send humans there, capturing key data on an untested Mars landing scheme a decade sooner than NASA could do it, space agency officials said this week.
ExoMars orbiter fine-tunes path toward red planet
A European spacecraft cruising toward Mars fired its main engine Thursday, tweaking its trajectory and helping set up for carefully-choreographed simultaneous maneuvers Oct. 19 to place part of the tandem mission into orbit around the red planet and deposit a stationary battery-powered lander on the Martian surface.
NASA developing plans for commercially-built Mars orbiter
NASA is advancing a plan to send a robotic orbiter to Mars in the early 2020s, developing designs with five U.S. satellite makers for a mission to extend high-resolution mapping capabilities, telecommunications relay functions, and potentially act as a waypoint for Martian soil samples destined for return to Earth.
40 years since Viking, scientists still on the hunt for life on Mars
Four decades after NASA's Viking landers acquired humanity's first view of the surface of Mars, a planet whose reality lived in the imaginations of skywatchers for millennia, a definitive smoking gun for microbial life there still eludes scientists.
Researchers eager for Juno’s first chance for Jupiter science
NASA's Juno spacecraft fine-tuned its orbit around Jupiter this week, helping steer the spinning space probe on a course to dip beneath the giant planet's radiation belts in late August for the first time with all its science instruments activated.