NASA’s CAPSTONE (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) mission achieved its main objective when the 12U CubeSat spacecraft made a braking burn to enter a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon. It completed...
The NASA DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) experimental asteroid collision mission has been declared a major scientific success. This was after telescopes on Earth ascertained that the orbit of the 160-metre-wide asteroid, Dimorphos, had been significantly...
At 2343 GMT on 8 October, China launched a Long March 2D (CZ-2D) rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center to LEO. The payload carried was the ASO-S (Advanced Space-borne Solar Observatory) solar observation mission which is intended to monitor the sun 24 hours...
India’s Mars probe, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), has ceased to function over eight years after its launch on 5 November 2013, according to recent reports. It is also over seven years since its post-launch design life, of 1.5 years, expired. Communications...
There have long been concerns that the Earth could one day be threatened by the impact of a large object – usually an asteroid – from space. Scientists have mooted various ways of planetary defence ranging from nuclear missile strikes to asteroid deflection...
SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9v1.2FT Block 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral, USA at 2308 GMT on 4 August. The vehicle was carrying Danuri (meaning “enjoy the Moon”) – better known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO). As South Korea’s first Lunar...
