Articles

Makoto Yoshikawa

IN THE EARLY hours of 22 February, light was just beginning to brighten the campus of JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences (ISAS) in Kanagawa, Japan. It should have been a quiet time, but the Hayabusa2 control room was packed with people. We were about to land on an asteroid.

Jason Davis

The reflective softball-sized sphere will give the spacecraft a visual guide during a second potential sample collection.

Meg Schwamb

Gonggong is the fan favorite name for this icy distant world, but the International Astronomical Union's (IAU) Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature has the final say.

Emily Lakdawalla

Wispy clouds of stunning beauty fly over Curiosity every evening.

Jason Davis

The spacecraft is healthy and safe, but time is running out to collect a second sample from asteroid Ryugu.

Emily Lakdawalla

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has successfully imaged the impact site of the Beresheet lander, which made a really good run at performing the first privately funded Moon landing on 11 April, but crashed after the failure of its main engine.

Andrew Jones

The first science results from the unprecedented Chang’e-4 lunar far side mission are in. The mission’s Yutu-2 rover, deployed from the lander shortly after the Chang’e-4 landing on 3 January, has, with the help of the Queqiao relay satellite, returned data which suggests it has discovered material derived from the Moon’s mantle.

Jason Davis

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is currently sweeping arcs between the asteroid's north and south poles.

Emily Lakdawalla

According to amateur spacecraft tracker Daniel Estévez, Longjiang-2 will crash into the Moon on 31 July after more than a year in lunar orbit.

Casey Dreier

The White House released a long-awaited supplemental budget request for NASA today. It proposes an additional $1.6 billion for an accelerated human spaceflight effort to land on the Moon in 2024. This boosts the President's budget request for NASA to $22.6 billion in fiscal year 2020, which is approximately $1.1 billion or 5% more than the amount provided by Congress last year.

Kaushik Mitra

Although we have acquired compelling evidence of flowing liquid water on early Mars, the fundamental question about how water could be stable under Martian atmospheric conditions remains unsolved.

Jason Davis

Hayabusa2's SCI experiment fell toward Ryugu for 40 minutes before detonating about 300 meters above the surface.

Jason Davis

India's combination lunar orbiter, lander, and rover spacecraft was previously scheduled to lift off in May.

Casey Dreier

Thirty years ago, President George H.W. Bush announced an ambitious program to return humans to the Moon. It failed. Today the Trump Administration wants the same thing. Can a failed lunar return effort help this one succeed?

A.J.S. Rayl

It’s a fall afternoon at Endeavour Crater. The summer winds finally lost their energy and the dust storm season is over. But there are no more signals coming from Earth. No more comm sessions with the orbiters. Nothing like it used to be.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Curiosity team is touring Glen Torridon, the Valley of Clay, south of Vera Rubin Ridge, happily photographing everything and zapping rocks. It’s clearly a delight for the team to be in a place they’ve been hoping to reach for 7 years.

Emily Lakdawalla

InSight has finally detected its first Marsquakes, but so far, none have been large enough to produce good science. Still, it’s great news that the seismometer is producing sensible data.

Alfred McEwen

Blurred images and battery issues are no longer an immediate problem.

Andrew Jones

China’s Chang’e-4 lander and Yutu-2 rover are continuing to function well and have completed their fourth lunar day.

Jason Davis

Six days after SpaceIL's Beresheet spacecraft crash-landed on the Moon, we now have an explanation for what went wrong.