Radar data collected by ESA’s 15-year-old Mars Express spacecraft’s MARSIS instrument has revealed a 20km-wide lake of salty water under 1.5km of ice at the South Pole of Mars. The lake is said to be similar to Lake Vostok, which lies 4km under the South Pole. While...
China has launched a new lunar satellite called Queqiao. This is no scientific probe or lunar rover, however. Instead it is a lunar communications relay satellite that will be used to relay data from future lunar exploration missions, including those to the far side...
The West Coast launch site of the United States of America, Vandenberg Air Force Base, hosted its first interplanetary mission on 5 May, at 1105 GMT. The mission saw a ULA (United Launch Alliance) Atlas V 401 carrying the NASA InSight Mars lander, and two CubeSats...
Sentinel-3B, now officially called Copernicus Sentinel 3B in being part of the European Union’s Copernicus environment programme, was launched at 1757 GMT on 25 April 2018 from the Russian Plesetsk launch site. Rockot’s upper stage delivered the 1150 kg Sentinel-3B...
The 362kg Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) satellite was launched for NASA by a SpaceX Falcon 9v1.2 FT Block 4 rocket. The Cape Canaveral launch which occurred at 2251 GMT on 18 April 2018, took the satellite into a long elliptical transfer orbit on its...
Professor Stephen Hawking, the eminent theoretical astrophysicist, has died at the age of 76 – about 50 years longer than he was expected to live. A victim of motor neurone disease, diagnosed while he was a postgraduate student in his early twenties at Cambridge...
