Less than a year after NASA's Dawn mission sent its last squawk back to Earth, the probe is to receive the Space Foundation's 2019 John L "Jack" Swigert Jr. Award for Space Exploration. Launched in 2007 for a planned nine-year mission, Dawn had already survived a few close shaves with cancellation before finally leaving the …

NASA’s twin probes studying Earth’s radiation belts are in the last stages of their mission – and will end their lives by nosediving into our planet’s atmosphere, the US space agency announced Thursday. The Sun constantly ejects streams of highly energetic protons and electrons that are deflected by Earth’s magnetic field. The …

Unfazed by the outpouring of grief over NASA's admission that its teenaged Opportunity rover had likely trundled its last, the agency's lander, InSight, managed to position its second instrument on the surface of the Red Planet. Ambitious scientists plan to send the device burrowing up to five metres, quite a bit further than …

NASA’s beloved Mars rover, Opportunity, has been officially laid to rest more than seven months after it was engulfed by a gigantic dust storm and fell silent. That planet-wide tempest of sand and debris in June was particularly powerful, leaving Opportunity’s solar panels saturated with material. Starved of sunlight, the poor …

Pics, videoScientists believe they may have found a second meteorite impact crater lurking under ice sheets on Greenland. Researchers say they've clocked a hole measuring 22.7 miles (36.5 kilometres) wide caused by an ancient space rock slamming into our home world. The exact historical timing of the cosmic prang isn’t clear, though it …

NASA has said goodnight to its two experimental CubeSats, sent into space to monitor America's InSight probe as it landed on Mars, after failing to communicate with the gizmo duo since January. Scientists relied on the mini machines, affectionately named Wall-E and Eve after the robots in the Pixar film WALL-E, to relay …

RoundupOver the past week in space, SpaceX pressed go on the first flight Raptor, the Lucy mission inched closer, and the ISS crew battled with some dodgy plumbing. SpaceX fires up the first flight engine for Starship Ol' Musky was justifiably chuffed with his band of boffins as a team of engineers fired up the first flight Raptor. …

PicNASA’s InSight lander has been revamped to let scientists study the interior of Mars for the first time. The lander’s seismometer was carefully placed on the surface of the Red Planet in December last year, and has now been enclosed in a metallic dome. The cap acts as a shield protecting the sensitive Seismic Experiment for …

Brainiacs have today revealed how they rejigged instruments aboard NASA’s Martian rover Curiosity to measure changes in the Red Planet's gravity over its surface. "Curiosity, essentially, has a new science instrument, six and a half years into its mission," said Kevin Lewis, lead author of a published paper describing the …

RoundupAs NASA continued to listen for its stricken Mars rover and SpaceX moved closer to a first crewed launch from US soil, rocket fans had plenty to occupy them last week. Black Arrow is back. Well, a bit of it The UK has the dubious distinction of being the only country to have successfully developed, then dumped, the capability …

Floating silently among the stars may sound idyllic, but the longer you stay in space, the worse it is for your immune system, according to this latest research. NASA teamed up with boffins at the University of Arizona, University of Houston, and Louisiana State University, in the US, to analyse blood samples from eight …

NASA scientists this week celebrated the fact their robot buddy Opportunity has spent the past fifteen years on Mars. The six-wheeled bot was booted into space on July 7, 2003, and reached its final destination in less than a year, on January 24, 2004. A day later, it beamed its first signal back to Earth. Designed to operate …

UpdatedThe main camera on NASA’s beloved Hubble Space Telescope is right now out of order due to a hardware glitch, the space agency confirmed this week. “At 1723 UTC on Jan 8, the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope suspended operations due to a hardware problem,” NASA officials said in a short statement. That camera …

The space telescope launched last year as the successor to NASA's long-running and very successful Kepler turned in three exoplanets in its first three months of observations. In spite of the US government shutdown, NASA found someone to press the "publish" dialogue on its website and announced the finds on Monday. Perhaps …

Roundup2018 was a tremendous year for spaceflight as commercial providers inched closer to carrying passengers and legacy launchers delivered more than a little drama. January 2018 sadly kicked off with the death of Apollo veteran John Young. As well as flying Gemini and the first Shuttle flight in 1981, Young also went to Moon twice …

RoundupIn the week that New Horizons snapped its snowman, China took its rover out for a spin on the lunar surface and SpaceX fired up another Falcon 9. Keep rollin', rollin', rollin' China continued stoking the fires of space fanbois desperate for an Apollo-style space race as its rover trundled off the Chang'e 4 lander and on to …

NASA's teenage New Horizons probe has successfully passed within 2,200 miles of 2014 MU69, some four billion miles from the Sun, three years after taking a close look at Pluto and nearly 13 years after launch. Nicknamed "Ultima Thule" (meaning "beyond the known world"), the object is thought to be a remnant from the formation …

Fifty years ago today, the third Apollo crew were strapped into a capsule perched atop the third Saturn V to undertake a journey to the Moon. It was in many ways more audacious than the eventual lunar landing itself. Third time lucky (on a Saturn V) The Saturn V the crew was to ride had a difficult birth. NASA had only …