While Hollywood has long flagged the dangers of asteroid and comet impact via its science fictional disaster movies Meteor (1979), Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998), real life space seemed to have no solution to the threat. Now NASA, in conjunction with John...
The Israeli privately-financed SpaceIL Beresheet (B’reshit) unmanned lunar landing probe has crashed on the Moon following a complication that caused its landing engine to be cut off at a key moment. Having hitched a paid-for ride on a Falcon 9 launch on 22 February,...
At the 35th Space Symposium in Colorado on 9 April, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine put some meat on the bare bones of a plan to return humans to the Moon by 2024 – a challenge made last month by Vice President Mike Pence and accepted by Bridenstine on behalf of...
The Japanese space probe Hayabusa 2 has released an explosive-charge armed impactor called Small Carry-On Impactor (SCI) It was released at 0156 GMT on 5 April to deliberately explode on the asteroid 162173 Ryugu to carve out crater. Before the explosion, a small...
The Trump Administration has signalled a change of space policy on a human return to the Moon. Addressing the National Space Council in Huntsville, Alabama, and hinting that the USA was in effect in a race with China, US Vice President Mike Pence called for a human...
While the 4,100kg PSN-6 communications satellite for Indonesia’s PT Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (PSN) was the SpaceX Falcon 9’s main payload, it was one of its co-payloads that got all the headlines. The launch took place successfully at 0145 GMT on 22 February, on the...
