Washington (AFP) Jan 21, 2024
NASA has re-established contact with its tiny helicopter on Mars, the US space agency said Saturday, after an unexpected outage prompted fears that the hard-working craft had finally met its end. Ingenuity, a drone about 1.6 feet (0.5 meters) tall, arrived on Mars in 2021 aboard the rover Perseverance and became the first motorized craft to fly autonomously on another planet. Data from t

Tokyo (AFP) Jan 20, 2024
Japan on Saturday became the fifth nation to achieve a soft lunar landing, but said its "Moon Sniper" spacecraft was running out of power due to a solar battery problem. After a nail-biting 20-minute descent, space agency JAXA said its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) had touched down and communication had been established. But without the solar cells functioning, JAXA official

Washington (AFP) Jan 20, 2024
An all-European crew including Turkey's first astronaut arrived at the International Space Station on Saturday on a voyage chartered by Axiom Space. Dubbed Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3), it is the company's third launch to the space laboratory and the first where all three of the paid seats were bought by national agencies, rather than wealthy individuals. The spacecraft docked at the ISS at 10

Video: 00:03:52

ESA project astronaut Marcus Wandt took off on 18 January 2024 as part of the Axiom-3 crew for a 14-day mission to the International Space Station. After 36 hours catching up to the Space Station, the Dragon docked to the Space Station, the seal between the two tested and finally Marcus started his Muninn mission as he entered the International Space Station. ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen along with the rest of the crew of Expedition 70 was waiting to welcome them to space!

UPDATE: Tune in on Saturday 20 January from 07:30 GMT (08:30 CET) to see ESA project astronaut Marcus Wandt dock to the International Space Station for his first mission, Muninn. Watch the action live on ESA Web TV 2 and ESA YouTube.

Yesterday, Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander returned to Earth, burning up upon its reentry through the atmosphere. Although the spacecraft was not able to land on the lunar surface, ESA’s Exospheric Mass Spectrometer, the heart of a joint NASA and ESA instrument onboard destined to sniff the Moon’s surface, was able to demonstrate full functionality in space.

Paris (ESA) Jan 19, 2024
One of the key missions of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is to probe the early Universe. Now, the unmatched resolution and sensitivity of Webb's NIRCam instrument have revealed, for the first time, what lies in the local environment of galaxies in the very early Universe. This has solved one of the most puzzling mysteries in astronomy - why astronomers detect light from hydrogen at

Los Angeles CA (SPX) Jan 18, 2024
NASA's collaborative mission with Astrobotic, featuring the Peregrine lunar lander, has concluded with the spacecraft reentering Earth's atmosphere. This event marks the end of a mission that, while not achieving a lunar landing, provided some scientific data and insights. The Peregrine lander, carrying a suite of NASA science and technology instruments, safely reentered Earth's atmosphere

Kennedy Space Center FL (SPX) Jan 18, 2024
As part of NASA's efforts to enable more access to space, four private astronauts are in orbit following the successful launch of the third all private astronaut mission to the International Space Station. Axiom Space astronauts lifted off at 4:49 p.m. EST on Thursday from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket propelled the company's Dragon