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Departure of Europe’s first Mars rover delayed to 2020
Europe's ExoMars rover will not be ready for launch in 2018, officials said Monday, forcing a two-year delay for the ambitious mission to drill into the Martian surface and search for the remnants of past life.
SpaceX announces plan to send mission to Mars in 2018
Elon Musk's space transport company -- chartered with a long-term goal of colonizing Mars -- plans to send the first commercial mission to the red planet as soon as 2018, SpaceX announced Wednesday.
Environmental testing underway for JPSS 1 launching in January
The next American polar-orbiting weather satellite that will feed long-range forecasts and track environmental trends has slipped into space-like testing ahead of launch.
VideoDawn mission expected to go into overtime at Ceres
NASA's robotic Dawn spacecraft is now getting its closest look at the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest resident of the asteroid belt, and mission managers say the probe has enough leftover propellant to keep flying into early 2017, several months beyond the prescribed end of its survey.
Opportunity rover snaps photo of Martian dust devil
NASA's Opportunity Mars rover has captured a dust devil spinning across the barren floor of Endeavour Crater, an impact basin the robot has explored since 2011 in the mission's long-lived second act.
Jason 3 satellite begins surveying world’s oceans
Two months after its foggy blastoff from California on a Falcon 9 rocket, a $364 million oceanography satellite has returned the first data from its radar altimeter mapping global sea levels, catching this year's ongoing El Niño in the act.
InSight Mars lander escapes cancellation, aims for 2018 launch
The InSight Mars lander has won a reprieve from NASA's top managers after persistent problems with one of the probe's science instruments caused the mission to miss a narrow launch window planned for this month.
Fate of NASA’s InSight Mars mission to be decided soon
NASA is close to deciding whether to spend an extra $150 million to send the InSight lander to Mars in 2018 or cancel the mission after an instrument problem made the spacecraft miss a launch opportunity this year, with a verdict on the project's future expected within weeks, officials said.
Water ice abounds in Pluto’s frigid bedrock
New maps produced from data gathered during the New Horizons spacecraft's flyby of Pluto last year show surprisingly widespread water ice shaping mountains capped by methane snow and forming an underlying bedrock blanketing the distant world.
Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft breaks solar power distance record
NASA's Juno spacecraft bound for a rendezvous with Jupiter in July has set a record as the most distant solar-powered space probe ever flown.