Astrium

The first of three satellites for studying the Earth’s magnetic field took off on Tuesday morning from Munich airport aboard an Ilyushin-76 transport aircraft bound for Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia.

Normally, a spacecraft slamming into a planet’s surface at the speed of sound is considered a bad thing, but the European Space Agency (ESA) plans to do just that. Last July, the agency fired a pair of experimental surface penetrators from a rocket sled at a test facility in Wales.

This week, the European space technology company Astrium completed its Phase B1 study of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Lunar Landing Project.