Contact has been lost with India’s new Vikram lunar lander and Pragyan lunar rover after they suffered a very cold two-week-long lunar night. Hopes of waking up the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover from their sleep mode are fading fast as attempts have, as yet, only...
The OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu has returned samples to Earth, fulfilling one of its main objectives seven years after it was launched in September 2016. After a two-year outbound journey, it went into orbit around Bennu in December 2018. The following...
India has become the first nation ever to land a spacecraft near the South Pole of the Moon, as well as only the fourth nation in the world to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon, after the US, the former Soviet Union and China. After a 19-minute descent from...
A Soyuz 2-1b/Fregat M rocket sent Russia’s Luna 25 lander, also known as the Luna-Glob, into orbit from Vostochny cosmodrome in far eastern Russia, at 2310 GMT on 10 August. The lander and the Fregat M stage were placed into an initial parking orbit of 280 x 267 km at...
An erroneous command sent to the venerable Voyager 2 spacecraft, now at the outer reaches of the solar system, inadvertently made the spacecraft move so that it tilted its antenna to point two degrees away from Earth. Communications were lost with the spacecraft –...
While Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTR) concepts (e.g. the NERVA project) have been considered for space missions since the 1960s, their lack of suitable application combined with their technical risk has held back their actual use – until now. Seeing that a...
