Beijing (XNA) Apr 26, 2023
China's Chang'e 5 robotic mission created history when it brought back samples from the lunar surface in 2020, and now, Chinese space scientists have set their sights on another celestial body - Mars. According to Wu Yanhua, chief designer of China's deep-space exploration programs, the nation plans to bring Martian soil back to Earth around 2030. The mission has been named Tianwen 3, whic

Beijing (XNA) Apr 26, 2023
HEFEI - China plans to launch the Tianwen 2 mission around 2025 to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid and explore a comet, a senior space expert said Monday. The main goal of the Tianwen 2 mission is to send a probe to a near-Earth asteroid coded 2016HO3 to retrieve samples, Zhang Rongqiao, the chief designer of China's planetary exploration program and chief designer of the Tianwe

Beijing (XNA) Apr 26, 2023
China is proposing to establish a multinational organization to take charge of the construction and operation of the International Lunar Research Station. Wu Weiren, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chief planner of the country's lunar programs, said on Tuesday in Hefei, Anhui province, the organization will be responsible for planning, building and running the luna

Lunar lander developer Astrobotic announced April 25 it will launch a third mission to the moon in 2026 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

AST SpaceMobile announced April 25 it made the first voice call last week with a standard smartphone using its BlueWalker 3 test satellite in low Earth orbit.

Tokyo (AFP) April 26, 2023
Japan's ispace on Wednesday became the latest company to try, and fail, at a historic bid to put a private lunar lander on the Moon. Only Russia, the United States and China have made the 384,000-kilometre (239,000-mile) journey and landed safely on the Moon's surface. Here are some of the companies who have made the journey, or plan missions soon: - SpaceIL - In February 2019, t

Washington DC (UPI) Apr 25, 2023
SpaceX on Tuesday delayed its latest effort to populate the low Earth orbit with Internet communication satellites. The company announced on Twitter that the launch of 46 new Starlink satellites, originally scheduled for Tuesday morning would be delayed 24 hours as it was now targeting a launch window of 9:40 a.m. EDT on Wednesday from the Vandenberg Space Station in California.

Tokyo (AFP) April 25, 2023
A Japanese startup attempting the first private landing on the Moon said Wednesday it had lost communication with its spacecraft and assumed the lunar mission had failed. Ispace said that it could not establish communication with the unmanned Hakuto-R lunar lander after its expected landing time, a frustrating end to a mission that began with a launch from the United States over four months

Colorado Springs CO (SPX) Apr 24, 2023
Hypersonix USA, Inc is partnering with established launch provider Rocket Lab USA, Inc for the first launch of DART AE. Defense Innovation Unit's (DIU's) hypersonic and high-cadence testing capabilities (HyCAT) project and its mission partners are prototyping a suite of modern, low-cost, high-cadence, dual-use airborne testing platforms (vehicles) that provide data that accelerates the eva

Paris, France (SPX) Apr 25, 2023
The European Space Agency (ESA) challenged cybersecurity experts in the space industry ecosystem to disrupt the operation of the agency's OPS-SAT demonstration nanosatellite. Participants used a variety of ethical hacking techniques to take control of the system used to manage the payload's global positioning system, attitude control system1 and onboard camera. Unauthorised access to these