This glittering group of stars, shining through the darkness like sparks left behind by a firework, is NGC 2660 in the constellation Vela, best viewed in the southern sky. NGC 2660 is an open cluster, a type of star cluster that can contain anywhere from tens to a few hundreds of stars loosely bound together by gravity.

The stars of open clusters form out of the same region of gas and dust and thus share many characteristics, such as age and chemical composition. Unlike globular clusters—their ancient, denser, and more tightly-packed cousins—open clusters are easier to study since astronomers can more easily distinguish between individual stars. Their stars can be old or young, and they may disperse after a few million years into the spiral or irregular galaxies where they are born.

The spikes surrounding many of the stars in this image are "diffraction spikes," which occur when the glow from bright points of light reflects off of Hubble's secondary mirror support.

SpaceX is set Wednesday to launch the first private—and Japanese—lander to the Moon.

A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to blast off at 3:39 am (0839 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a backup date on Thursday.

Until now, only the United States, Russia and China have managed to put a robot on the lunar surface.

The mission, by Japanese company ispace, is the first of a program called Hakuto-R.

The lander would touch down around April 2023 on the visible side of the Moon, in the Atlas crater, according to a company statement.

Measuring just over 2 by 2.5 meters, it carries on board a 10-kilogram rover named Rashid, built by the United Arab Emirates.

In our daily lives, we rely on weather forecasts to know whether it will rain tomorrow. The monitoring and prediction of space weather such as geomagnetic storms and substorms are also vital for the operation safety of satellites outside the atmosphere and the living conditions of astronauts in space. However, space weather is far more unpredictable than the weather on Earth, which depends on in-situ measurements of plasma parameters by satellites.

A research team, led by Prof. Wang Yuming and Prof. Shan Xu from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, developed a low-energy ion spectrometer (LEIS) onboard a Chinese geosynchronous satellite, the BeiDou-3 satellite.

The LEIS is designed for measurement of the ion energy per charge distribution with good energy-, angular-, and temporal-resolutions, which is helpful for space weather monitoring and early warning. Recently, the scientific data acquired by the LEIS were published in Science China Technological Sciences.

Starting in 2012, the research team designed and realized the LEIS payload that meets the requirements of a magnetospheric mission. Through simulation and experimental tests, the LEIS payload had been valuated and calibrated, and it was finally finished in 2017.