The German military on Tuesday launched a "space command" tasked with overseeing satellites, watching for dangerous space junk and analyzing other countries' activities.

Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer launched the new operation during a visit to its base at Uedem in western Germany.

The military is "responding to the increasing significance of space for our state's ability to function, the prosperity of our population and the increasing dependency of the armed forces on space-supported data, services and products," Kramp-Karrenbauer's ministry said in a statement.

The aim is to bring together existing capabilities in one place, where the military's center for air operations is already based, and add new ones.

Kramp-Karrenbauer said that the term "Weltraumkommando," or "space command," might draw far-fetched associations with the novels of Jules Verne or starship Enterprise, but the reality is "far from being so sensational," news agency dpa reported.

The German military, or Bundeswehr, itself has six satellites in orbit. The minister said space operations for Germany "are always defensive operations"—for example to ensure that infrastructure isn't endangered.

The United States already has a Space Command, whose role is to conduct operations such as enabling satellite-based navigation and troop communication and providing warning of missile launches.

In the 1970s four spacecraft began their one-way trips out of our Solar System. As the first human-built objects to ever venture into interstellar space, NASA chose to place plaques on Pioneer 10 and 11 and golden records on Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft to serve as messages to any alien spacefarers that may someday encounter these spacecraft. Continuing this legacy, NASA's Lucy spacecraft will carry a similar plaque. However, because Lucy will not be venturing outside of our Solar System, Lucy's plaque is a time-capsule featuring messages to our descendants.

As the first-ever mission to the Trojan asteroids, Lucy will survey this enigmatic population of small bodies that orbit the Sun beyond the main asteroid belt—trapped by Jupiter and the Sun so that they have led and followed Jupiter in its orbit. As these never before explored asteroids are in many ways "fossils" from the formation and evolution of the planets, the Lucy spacecraft is named in honor of the fossilized human ancestor discovered the year after Pioneer 11 began its journey out of the Solar System.

With Virgin Galactic making its highest profile test flight to date with boss Richard Branson aboard, it's only a matter of time before paying customers get their chance and New Mexico realizes a dream that has been decades in the making.

Former Gov. Bill Richardson is among those who have been watching the progress of the space tourism company, ever since he and his team recruited the British billionaire to New Mexico.

A moon-scanning method that can automatically classify important lunar features from telescope images could significantly improve the efficiency of selecting sites for exploration.

There is more than meets the eye to picking a landing or exploration site on the moon. The visible area of the lunar surface is larger than Russia and is pockmarked by thousands of craters and crisscrossed by canyon-like rilles. The choice of future landing and exploration sites may come down to the most promising prospective locations for construction, minerals or potential energy resources. However, scanning by eye across such a large area, looking for features perhaps a few hundred meters across, is laborious and often inaccurate, which makes it difficult to pick optimal areas for exploration.

Siyuan Chen, Xin Gao and Shuyu Sun, along with colleagues from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, have now applied machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the identification of prospective lunar landing and exploration areas.