An uncrewed Russian Soyuz capsule docked early Sunday with the International Space Station and will eventually bring home three astronauts whose initial return vehicle was damaged by a tiny meteoroid.

The MS-23 ship autonomously latched to the orbiting research lab, live video from ISS-partner NASA showed, completing the Soyuz's two-day journey after launching off from Kazakhstan.

It is expected to bring home US astronaut Frank Rubio and Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Petelin and Sergei Prokopyev in September.

The three arrived at the ISS last September aboard MS-22, and were originally only supposed to stay about six months, until the end of March.

But their capsule began leaking coolant in mid-December after being hit by what US and Russian officials believe was a tiny space rock.

Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, decided to send MS-23 to replace the damaged vessel, but without its own three planned crew members.

With no one to replace them, Rubio, Petelin and Prokopyev will now spend almost a year in space.

The damaged MS-22 is expected to depart the space station without passengers and return to Earth in late March.

For now, Europe's Euclid spacecraft sits quietly in a sterilized room in the south of France, its golden trim gleaming under the fluorescent light.

But in a few months the space telescope will blast off on history's first mission to search for two of the universe's greatest mysteries: dark matter and dark energy.

Though together they make up 95 percent of the universe, almost nothing is known about either—a glaring hole in scientific understanding that Euclid project manager Giuseppe Racca dubbed a "cosmic embarrassment".

Aiming to shed light on these dark secrets, the European Space Agency's mission will chart a 3D map of the universe encompassing two billion galaxies across more than a third of the sky.

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft entered safe mode on Feb. 16 after encountering an issue with its Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), which measures the spacecraft rate of rotation for use in determining its pointing. The IMU had been powered up in preparation for a minor maneuver targeted to reduce eclipse durations in 2027.

On Feb.17, MAVEN exited safe mode and is currently operating in all stellar mode, a mode that does not rely on IMU measurements such that the IMU can be powered off to conserve its lifetime. The maneuver will be waived as the team evaluates the path forward. Relay activities and nominal science operations are scheduled to resume on Feb. 23.

MAVEN launched in November 2013 and entered Mars' orbit in September 2014. The mission's goal is to explore the planet's upper atmosphere, ionosphere, and interactions with the Sun and solar wind to explore the loss of the Martian atmosphere to space. Understanding atmospheric loss gives scientists insight into the history of Mars' atmosphere and climate, liquid water, and planetary habitability.