The climactic end of a seven-year voyage comes Sunday when a NASA capsule is due to land in the Utah desert, carrying to Earth the largest asteroid samples ever collected.

Scientists have high hopes for the sample, saying it will provide a better understanding of the formation of our solar system and how Earth became habitable.

The Osiris-Rex probe's final, fiery descent through Earth's atmosphere will be perilous, but the US space agency is hoping for a soft landing, around 9:00am local (15H00 GMT), in a military test range in northwestern Utah.

A recent study submitted to Acta Astronautica and currently available on the arXiv preprint server explores the potential for using aerographite solar sails for traveling to Mars and interstellar space, which could dramatically reduce both the time and fuel required for such missions.

This study comes while ongoing research into the use of solar sails is being conducted by a plethora of organizations along with the successful LightSail2 mission by The Planetary Society, and holds the potential to develop faster and more efficient propulsion systems for long-term space missions.

In an exciting milestone for lunar scientists around the globe, India's Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down 375 miles (600 km) from the south pole of the moon on Aug. 23, 2023.

In just under 14 Earth days, Chandrayaan-3 provided scientists with valuable new data and further inspiration to explore the moon. And the Indian Space Research Organization has shared these initial results with the world.

While the data from Chandrayaan-3's rover, named Pragyan, or "wisdom" in Sanskrit, showed the lunar soil contains expected elements such as iron, titanium, aluminum and calcium, it also showed an unexpected surprise—sulfur.

Planetary scientists like me have known that sulfur exists in lunar rocks and soils, but only at a very low concentration. These new measurements imply there may be a higher sulfur concentration than anticipated.