On the third day after lifting off from Florida bound for the Moon, the Orion spacecraft is "exceeding performance expectations," NASA officials said on Friday.

The spacecraft is to take astronauts to the Moon in the coming years—the first to set foot on its surface since the last Apollo mission in 1972.

This first test flight, without a crew on board, aims to ensure that the vehicle is safe.

"Today we met to review the Orion spacecraft performance... it is exceeding performance expectations," said Mike Sarafin, head of the Artemis 1 mission.

The spacecraft's four solar panels, about 13 feet (four meters) long, deployed correctly and are providing more energy than expected, said Jim Geffre, the Orion manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Micrometeoroid strikes are an unavoidable aspect of operating any spacecraft. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope was engineered to withstand continual bombardment from these dust-sized particles moving at extreme velocities, to continue to generate groundbreaking science far into the future.

"We have experienced 14 measurable micrometeoroid hits on our primary mirror, and are averaging one to two per month, as anticipated. The resulting optical errors from all but one of these were well within what we had budgeted and expected when building the observatory," said Mike Menzel, Webb lead mission systems engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "One of these was higher than our expectations and prelaunch models; however, even after this event our current optical performance is still twice as good as our requirements."

To ensure all parts of the observatory continue to perform at their best, NASA convened a working group of optics and micrometeoroid experts from NASA Goddard's Webb team, the telescope's mirror manufacturer, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Japan and Germany have a history of collaboration in scientific and technological endeavors. The countries have a Joint Committee on Cooperation in Science Technology that has met many times over the decades. Both countries have advanced, powerful economies and sophisticated technological know-how, so it makes sense they'd collaborate on scientific activities.

This time, their cooperation concerns a small, potato-shaped chunk of rock: Mars' moon Phobos.

In 2024, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) plans to launch the Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission to Phobos and Deimos. Deimos will get the fly-by treatment, but JAXA has more ambitious ideas for Phobos.

An advanced X-ray monitoring instrument tested for space aboard an ESA CubeSat will serve as an operational space weather payload on the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Next Lagrange 1 Series satellite, currently planned for launch in 2028, which will operate 1.5 million km from Earth, keeping watch for eruptions from our sun.