Engineers at NASA have completed an important milestone in developing the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft. It's now moving from development and design to the assembly, testing, and integration phase, targeting a launch in late Spring 2025. After launch, the spacecraft will fly to the Earth-sun L1 Lagrange Point and analyze how the sun's solar wind interacts with charged particles originating from outside the solar system.

IMAP will follow up on discoveries and insights from the two Voyager spacecraft and the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) and will help investigate two of the most important overarching issues in heliophysics: the energization of charged particles from the sun and the interaction of the solar wind at its boundary with interstellar space.

Iran said Wednesday it sent a capsule into orbit capable of carrying animals as it prepares for human missions in coming years.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule landed under parachute in the Utah desert on Sept. 24, 2023, and safely delivered a cannister of rocks and dust collected from near-Earth asteroid Bennu. Although the delivery was successful, the landing sequence did not go entirely according to plan, with a small parachute called a drogue not deploying as expected.

After a thorough review of the descent video and the capsule's extensive documentation, NASA found that inconsistent wiring label definitions in the design plans likely caused engineers to wire the parachutes' release triggers such that signals meant to deploy the drogue chute fired out of order.

The drogue was expected to deploy at an altitude of about 100,000 feet. It was designed to slow and stabilize the capsule during a roughly five-minute descent prior to main parachute deployment at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. Instead, at 100,000 feet, the signal triggered the system to cut the drogue free while it was still packed in the capsule. When the capsule reached 9,000 feet, the drogue deployed.

With its retention cord already cut, the drogue was immediately released from the capsule.

Someday, in the not-too-distant future, humans may send robotic probes to explore nearby star systems. These robot explorers will likely take the form of lightsails and wafercraft (a la Breakthrough Starshot) that will rely on directed energy (lasers) to accelerate to relativistic speeds—aka a fraction of the speed of light. With that kind of velocity, lightsails and wafercraft could make the journey across interstellar space in a matter of decades instead of centuries (or longer!) Given time, these missions could serve as pathfinders for more ambitious exploration programs involving astronauts.

Of course, any talk of interstellar travel must consider the massive technical challenges this entails. In a recent paper posted to the arXiv preprint server, a team of engineers and astrophysicists considered the effects that relativistic space travel will have on communications.

Set 6.5 feet (2 meters) away from NASA's Psyche spacecraft on the tip of a boom, the mission's gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS) hummed to life on Nov. 6 for the first time since launch in mid-October.

On August 23, ISRO's Vikram lander detached from its propulsion module and made a soft landing near the moon's south pole region. The lander then deployed its Pragyan rover, and for two weeks the endearing little solar-powered rover performed marvelously, detecting water ice and characterizing the makeup of the lunar regolith before succumbing to the darkness and cold of the lunar night.

But since the rover mission ended, the propulsion module that brought it to the moon has made a detour, performing a series of complex maneuvers that took it from a tight lunar orbit back to Earth orbit.

China notched a diplomatic victory in its race against the U.S. for influence in space, with Egypt agreeing to support Beijing's plan for a proposed project on the moon.

The China National Space Administration on Wednesday signed a memorandum of understanding with the Egyptian Space Agency that will see them cooperate on the International Lunar Research Station, a Chinese-backed base that's expected to begin operation around 2030.

The agreement builds on their collaboration, which saw a Chinese rocket send an Egyptian satellite into orbit from a launch center in the Gobi Desert on Monday.

That launch promotes "a shared future for mankind" and "fully demonstrates China's demeanor as a major country and the principle of extensive consultation, joint contribution, and shared benefits," said Kong Dejun, head of the international economic cooperation department at the Ministry of Commerce, according to a report by state-run broadcaster CCTV.

The new space race is adding to tensions between Beijing and Washington, as both compete to win allies in their plans to send astronauts to the moon in coming years. The agreement between China and Egypt comes just a week after the U.S.

This striking Hubble Space Telescope image shows the densely packed globular cluster known as NGC 2210, which is situated in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC lies about 157,000 light-years from Earth and is a so-called satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, meaning that the two galaxies are gravitationally bound. Globular clusters are very stable, tightly bound clusters of thousands or even millions of stars. Their stability means that they can last a long time, and therefore globular clusters are often studied to investigate potentially very old stellar populations.