Three residents of the International Space Station will take a spin around their orbital neighborhood in the Soyuz MS-17 on Friday, March 19, relocating the spacecraft to prepare for the arrival of the next set of crew members.

Researchers from Skoltech and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have analyzed several dozen options to pick the best one in terms of performance and costs for the 'last mile' of a future mission to the Moon—actually delivering astronauts to the lunar surface and back up to the safety of the orbiting lunar station. The paper was published in the journal Acta Astronautica.

Ever since December 1972, when the crew of Apollo 17 left the lunar surface, humans have been eager to return to the Moon. In 2017, the US government launched the Artemis program, which intends to bring "the first woman and the next man" to the lunar south pole by 2024. The Artemis mission will use a new orbital platform, dubbed the Lunar Gateway, which is going to be a permanent space station from which reusable modules will bring astronauts back to the Moon. This new approach requires a reanalysis of the optimal landing approaches; the private companies contracted by NASA to design the reusable landing modules are conducting this research, but keeping their findings to themselves.

At first glance this captivating scene peering through wispy clouds and down onto a dune field is reminiscent of a satellite view of one of Earth's deserts, but this is in fact a beautiful landscape on Mars.

This spectacular dune field sits in the center of Lomonosov crater, deep in the northern hemisphere of Mars (65ºN, 351ºE). It was imaged by the CaSSIS camera on the ESA-Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) on 2 December, 2020. The image was taken as part of a campaign to track the evolution of the dune field throughout the year.

At this time, northern winter was coming to an end on Mars and the frost over these areas had begun to sublimate. The darker spots indicate areas where frost has sublimated and the darker basaltic sand is visible. The crests of the dunes indicate the average wind direction, in this case, the wind comes predominantly from the bottom left to the top right of the image. To the right, darker, more basaltic rich and frost-free sediments are visible. It is also in the right of the image that bright white clouds stand out against the darker sediments on the ground.

After 20 years of continuous habitation, the International Space Station has entered its "Golden Age" and is abuzz with activity—thanks in large part to the return of US rocket launches via commercial partner SpaceX.

But though the near- future of this symbol of post-Cold War cooperation is assured, NASA wants to begin disengaging by the end of the decade, leaving a gap that the private sector and China hope to fill.