Kneeling on the edge of a deep crater, astronaut Alexander Gerst uses a chisel to collect a sample of volcanic rock which he carefully puts inside a white plastic bag.

Gerst is not on the Moon, even if it looks like it. He is in the middle of Los Volcanes Natural Park on the island of Lanzarote in Spain's Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa.

With its blackened lava fields, craters and volcanic tubes, Lanzarote's geology can be uncannily similar to that of the Moon and Mars—so much so that the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA have for years been sending astronauts to the island to train.

"This place has lavas that are very, very similar to the ones that we find on the Moon," Gerst, a 46-year-old German astronaut with the ESA, told AFP.

He said the island was "a unique training ground".

NASA's moon rocket needs only minor repairs after enduring a hurricane at the pad and is on track for its first test flight next week, a top official said Friday.

"Right now, there's nothing preventing us" from attempting a launch on Wednesday, said NASA's Jim Free, an associate administrator.

The wind never exceeded the rocket's design limits as Hurricane Nicole swept through Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, according to Free. But he acknowledged if the launch team had known in advance that a hurricane was going to hit, they likely would have kept the rocket indoors. The rocket was moved out to the pad late last week for its $4.1 billion demo mission.

Gusts reached 100 mph (160 kph) atop the launch tower, but were not nearly as strong farther down at the rocket.

A Tohoku University researcher has increased the performance of a high-power electrodeless plasma thruster, moving us one step closer to deeper explorations into space.

Innovations in terrestrial transportation technologies, such as cars, trains, and aircraft, have driven historical technologies and industries so far; now, a similar breakthrough is occurring in space thanks to electric propulsion technology.

Electric propulsion is a technique utilizing electromagnetic fields to accelerate a propellant and to generate thrust that propels a spacecraft. Space agencies have pioneered electric propulsion technology as the future of space exploration.

Already, several space missions have successfully been completed using electric propulsion devices, such as gridded ion thrusters and Hall thrusters. Solar power is converted into thrust energy when the propellant becomes ionized, i.e., a plasma, and gets accelerated by electromagnetic fields.