Most NASA missions feature one spacecraft or, occasionally, a few. The agency's Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) uses half a dozen. This month, mission members completed the construction of the six identical cereal box-size satellites, which will now go into storage and await their final testing and ride to space.

Ever want to play a game of cosmic billiards? That's commonly how the DART mission was described when it successfully changed the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid last year. If you want an idea of how it works, just Google it and an Easter egg from the search giant will give you a general idea. But DART was more like trying to brute force a billiards break—there are many other things you can do with a set of asteroids and impactors on the galactic stage. One of the more interesting is to try to force two asteroids together to form a "contact binary"—the goal of a mission design put forward by a group of scientists from Cornell in a recent paper in Acta Astronautica.

Colby Merill and his colleagues at Cornell's Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department first explain why such a mission would be a good idea.

The European Space Agency announced on Thursday that the long-delayed first launch of its next-generation Ariane 6 rocket will take place between June 15 and July 31 next year.

The rocket launcher system was initially planned to blast off in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic and repeated technical issues have kept it on the ground, depriving Europe of an independent way to send heavy missions into space.

ESA chief Josef Aschbacher told a press conference that the announcement of the 2024 launch date range came after the "complete success" of a dress rehearsal at Europe's spaceport in French Guiana last week.

That test involved firing up the launcher's Vulcain 2.1 engine and running it for more than seven minutes.

Aschbacher said it was a "good day" for European space efforts, adding that a more precise launch date is expected to be announced in March or April 2024.