Stillwater OK (SPX) Apr 24, 2021
The closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri. It is about 4.25 light-years away, or about 25 trillion miles (40 trillion km). The fastest ever spacecraft, the now- in-space Parker Solar Probe will reach a top speed of 450,000 mph. It would take just 20 seconds to go from Los Angeles to New York City at that speed, but it would take the solar probe about 6,633 years to reach Earth's nearest neig

Washington DC (SPX) Apr 24, 2021
The SEIS seismometer package from the Mars InSight lander has collected its first continuous Martian year of data, revealing some surprises among the more than 500 marsquakes detected so far. At the Seismological Society of America (SSA)'s 2021 Annual Meeting, Savas Ceylan of ETH Zurich discussed some of the findings from The Marsquake Service, the part of the InSight ground team that dete

Nanjing (XNA) Apr 24, 2021
China and Russia's aerospace authorities have invited all interested countries, international organizations and partners to cooperate in a moon station project. The announcement was made by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) and its Russian counterpart Roscosmos at a conference for the international moon station in Nanjing, East China's Jiangsu province on Friday. CNSA de

Beijing (XNA) Apr 24, 2021
Saturday marks the sixth Space Day of China. Five years after it was established in 2016, the nation has made tremendous progress in various aspects of space exploration. On the first Space Day in 2016, Tiangong 1 space lab, China's first, had just finished its mission and fallen into the atmosphere. Tiangong 2 would not be launched until five months later. Now, with all the data collected

Wenchang (XNA) Apr 24, 2021
The Long March 5B carrier rocket tasked with launching the core capsule of China's space station was moved on Friday morning to the launch tower at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province. The China Manned Space Agency said that the rocket with the core capsule inside will begin pre-launch examinations. Currently, equipment at the coastal launch center is in good condition and

Beijing (XNA) Apr 24, 2021
China named its first Mars rover "Zhurong", a fire god in ancient Chinese legend, on Saturday. Announced at the opening ceremony of 2021 China Space Conference in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, the naming is intended to represent the rover's symbolic task to ignite the hope of China's inter-planetary exploration, encourage humanity's relentless adventure into the immense universe, and urge man

Paris (ESA) Apr 24, 2021
Today at 11:08 (CEST) the Crew Dragon spacecraft with ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide docked with the International Space Station's Node-2 Harmony module, marking the start of ESA's six-month mission Alpha. The crew spent around 23 hours orbiting Earth and catching up w

Kennedy Space Center, United States (AFP) April 24, 2021
The SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour docked with the International Space Station (ISS) early Saturday, a livestream showed. Soft capture - the first phase of docking - occurred at 5:08 am Eastern time (0908 GMT), 264 miles (424 kilometers) over the south Indian Ocean. Hard capture, the second stage, occurred about 10 minutes later, when 12 hooks were securely attached between Endeavour and the ISS's forward port.

Video: 02:33:30

The full replay of the ESA Web TV coverage of the liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft with ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, and Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide. The Crew-2 will spend around 24 hours travelling to the International Space Station. The rocket lifted off at 11:49 on 23 April 2021 from Launchpad 39A in Cape Canaveral at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA.

Thomas is the first ESA astronaut to fly in space in a vehicle other than the Russian Soyuz or the US Space Shuttle,

Today at 11:08 (CEST) the Crew Dragon spacecraft with ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide docked with the International Space Station’s Node-2 Harmony module, marking the start of ESA’s six-month mission Alpha.