There’s water ice buried below the surface of Mars, and all you’ll need is a shovel to dig some up, according to research published in Geophysical Research Letters this week. “Our results are consistent with widespread water ice at latitudes as low as 35°N/45°S buried sometimes a few cm below sand‐like material, with high …

Round UpSpaceX landed another Falcon 9, Rocket Lab took a first step toward reuse, and it was handbags at dawn for lunar boffins in this week's curation of all things space. SpaceX sends a malting kit to the ISS, sadly not for thirsty 'nauts After a delay caused by pesky upper-altitude winds, SpaceX successfully launched the CRS-19 …

NASA’s science team has a new female recruit and she's probing the watery depths of the Antarctic in a quest to help climate eggheads understand our climate. Armed with no prior research or any academic qualifications, just a metallic antenna strapped to its head, a southern elephant seal has been quietly helping scientists …

RoundupThe Arianespace launch may have been delayed, but there remained plenty to bring delight to the hearts of rocket fans last week as Starliner neared launch and Boeing bit back at NASA. Boeing's Starliner has been mated to an Atlas V The Boeing CST-100 Starliner capsule took another step toward space last week as the spacecraft …

A total of 14 companies have now entered the race to develop landers to deliver goodies to the Moon as NASA plans to send the first woman and the next man to our nearest rocky companion by 2024. Five vendors joined the growing list on Monday, according to a media teleconference broadcast on NASA Live. Some of the most …

RoundupLast week SpaceX proved its Crew Dragon abort engines can work, ISS 'nauts embarked on an EVA to fix their particle physics detector, and Searching for Skylab got a director's cut of sorts. SpaceX fires up Crew Dragon's abort engines, nothing explodes SpaceX successfully completed a full-duration static fire test of the …

Auditors minced no words in their assessment (PDF) of NASA's Commercial Crew providers: overdue, overbudget and overpaid. This was not supposed to have happened. SpaceX and Boeing should have been flying crew to the International Space Station by now thanks to fixed-price contracts. Or not so fixed, as the inspectors observed …

NASA's Office of the Inspector General has emitted a report (PDF) yesterday that made for difficult reading for agency bigwigs, as the bean counters made clear the challenges presented by the agency's headlong rush to the Moon. As NASA has lurched from one presidential goal to another over the last decade (the latest being the …

Part 1It is half a century since NASA's second crack at landing a crew on the Moon had a shocking encounter on the way to orbit. It was almost as if NASA bigwigs were looking for some way to inject a bit of drama into Apollo as the US taxpayer tired of the agency's costly jaunts off-planet. A jolly trio (when compared the Apollo 11 …

NASA has given the Kuiper belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule the official name Arrokoth, which means sky in the Native American Powhatan-Algonquian language. Before the rock was known as Ultima Thule or Arrokoth, it was dubbed the rather tongue-twisting 486958 2014 MU69. After NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft arrived at the …

A new Martian mystery has left scientists baffled. The oxygen in the planet’s atmosphere seems to rise every spring and summer and fall during autumn and winter, and scientists have no idea why. The startling discovery was made after the team analysed data from the Gale Crater taken by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) …

RoundupThis week Boeing unveiled its lunar lander ambitions after a sort-of successful commercial crew test, Virgin Orbit revealed plans to shoot smallsats as far as Mars, and SpaceX dried off fairing recovered from the ocean for use in a static fire test. Boeing parachute 'anomaly' While rival SpaceX was bragging about its run of 13 …

NASA's Voyager 2, launched to study the Solar System's outer planets, has had its first readings from interstellar space, collected after travelling more than 11 billion miles over forty years, analyzed by scientists. It was the second human-made probe known to have sailed beyond the heliosphere – the expansive region made of …

The heat probe aboard NASA’s InSight lander is having trouble digging into the surface of Mars due to “unusual soil conditions,” the space agency announced on Sunday. Designed to burrow up to five meters below Martian ground, the device, affectionately named “the mole”, has only managed to descend 35 centimeters since it began …

RoundupLast week the International Space Station celebrated its first all-woman spacewalk, ESA politely asked NASA for some help with parachutes and boffins said "goodnight, sweet prince" to the last Van Allen Probe. From me to BCDU After a postponement due to suit sizes, which said more about the parlous state of NASA's spacewalking …

NASA brought a smile to faces of Boeing shareholders this week with the announcement that it would be ordering 10 Space Launch System (SLS) core stages from the US aviation giant for Artemis rocket launches to the Moon. Although paying for the things could be tricky. The news came as NASA was trumpeting the arrival of the …

There was good news for Martian miners this week as NASA's stuck mole began making progress into the red planet's soil once more. The multinational instrument, a key part of the payload of NASA's InSight spacecraft, had been stuck at the 30cm mark out of a hoped-for 5m after hammering began in February. Boffins used the lander …

PicAstroboffins have released images taken by the Hubble telescope of the second-ever interstellar object and the first-ever verified comet to enter our Solar System from the depths of the universe. Dubbed comet 2I/Borisov, the speeding bundle of rock and dust was detected back in August by Crimean hobbyist Gennady Borisov and …