China's probe to Mars touched down on the Red Planet early Saturday to deploy its Zhurong rover, state media reported, a triumph for Beijing's increasingly bold space ambitions and a history-making feat for a nation on its first-ever Martian mission.

The lander carrying Zhurong completed the treacherous descent through the Martian atmosphere using a parachute to navigate the "seven minutes of terror" as it is known, aiming for a vast northern lava plain known as the Utopia Planitia.

California-based Rocket Lab said a launch of satellites from its facility in New Zealand failed Saturday.

The problem occurred during ignition of the Electron rocket's second stage, the company said in a statement.

The rocket was carrying two Earth-observation satellites for BlackSky, a global monitoring company.

"Today's anomaly occurred after 17 successful orbital launches of the Electron launch vehicle. With multiple launch vehicles currently in production, Rocket Lab is prepared for a rapid return to flight as soon as investigations are complete and any required corrective actions are in place," the statement said.

Rocket Lab said the rocket's first stage successfully parachuted into the ocean and crews were working to recover it. The company is trying to develop a capability to recover and reuse Electron first stages.

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China's "Zhurong" rover, part of its ambitious space programme to send a probe to Mars, is set to attempt the challenging landing on the Red Planet in the next five days, Beijing's space agency said Friday.

The tricky touchdown, if successful, would come a few months behind America's latest probe to Mars, as Beijing presses ahead with its increasingly bold space ambitions.

"Based on current flight conditions, the Tianwen-1 probe intends to choose an opportunity to land ... in the period from early morning Saturday to Wednesday Beijing time," the China National Space Administration said in an online statement.

Scientists have long questioned why the bursts of hot gas from the sun do not cool down as fast as expected, and have now used a supercomputer to find out.

The team will compare the simulations with 'real' data from the Solar Orbiter mission, with the hope that it will confirm their predictions and provide a conclusive answer.

The solar wind is a stream of charged particles continuously shot out from the sun into the solar system. These ejections greatly impact the conditions of our solar system and constantly hit the Earth.

Impacts on Earth

If the solar wind is particularly strong, it can cause problems to:

• satellites
• astronauts in space
• mobile phones
• transport
• electricity networks

To successfully forecast and prepare for such space weather events, a team of scientists is trying to solve the mysteries that space weather holds. This includes how the solar wind is heated and accelerated.

The team, with funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and led by UCL, ran and analyzed simulations of the solar wind on a powerful supercomputer.

What if we had the ability to chase down interstellar objects passing through our solar system, like 'Oumuamua or Comet Borisov? Such a spacecraft would need to be ready to go at a moment's notice, with the capacity to increase speed and change direction quickly.

That's the idea behind a new mission concept called the Extrasolar Object Interceptor and Sample Return spacecraft. It has received exploratory funding from NASA through its Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.

"Bringing back samples from these objects could fundamentally change our view of the universe and our place in it," says Christopher Morrison, an engineer from the Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation-Tech (USNC-Tech) who submitted the proposal to NIAC.

The concept Morrison and his team propose is a radioisotope-electric-propulsion spacecraft that relies on Chargeable Atomic Battery (CAB) technology, a power system that USNC has been developing for commercial use. The batteries are compact and possess one million times the energy density of state-of-the-art chemical batteries—as well as fossil fuels.

The Gaia spacecraft is an impressive feat of engineering. Its primary mission is to map the position and motion of more than a billion stars in our galaxy, creating the most comprehensive map of the Milky Way thus far. Gaia collects such a large amount of precision data that it can make discoveries well beyond its main mission. For example, by looking at the spectra of stars, astronomers can measure the mass of individual stars to within 25% accuracy. From the motion of stars, astronomers can measure the distribution of dark matter in the Milky Way. Gaia can also discover exoplanets when they pass in front of a star. But one of the more surprising uses is that Gaia could help us detect cosmic gravitational waves.

A new study shows how this can be done. The work is based on an earlier study done using very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), whereby radio telescopes measure the position and apparent motion of quasars. Quasars are bright radio sources billions of light-years away. Because quasars are so far away, they act like fixed points in the sky.