ESA

NASA's US$10 billion James Webb Space Telescope has completed its final deployment without a mishap. Starting today at 8:53 am EST, the starboard wing of the 21-ft gold-plated primary mirror began to swing, locking into position about 4 hours later.

The James Webb Space Telescope hasn't even finished unfurling itself after its December 25 launch and NASA says that its mission could already be extended beyond 10 years thanks to excess fuel for its onboard thrusters.

One of the most ambitious space projects since the Apollo era roared into space today as NASA's long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope lifted off at 7:20 am EST atop an Ariane 5 rocket from ESA's Centre Spatial Guyanais in French Guiana.

The endless expanse of space is a beautiful and fascinating subject for photography. From the dramatic births and deaths of stars, to galactic glamor shots and planetary close-ups, here are some of the most breathtaking space photos of 2021.

A huge deposit of water has been discovered on Mars in a formation often called its Grand Canyon. The Trace Gas Orbiter has detected an area the size of the Netherlands where water could make up as much as 40 percent of the material near the surface.

By conducting "flybys" of Phobos when it wasn't actually there, ESA's Mars Express orbiter provided researchers with a controlled experiment to learn more about the mysterious, intermittent interaction between the Martian moon and solar winds.

NASA has launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission to demonstrate a way to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids. The robotic probe lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket and is set to intercept its target in late September 2022.

Nearly three years after lifting off from French Guiana, the BepiColombo space probe has now set its sights on Mercury for the first time, completing a "flawless" flyby over the weekend and collecting its first images.

If there are two things that are essential to human life, they're water and oxygen – neither of which are easily available on the moon. Thanks to a new technique, though, astronauts may someday be able to harvest those elements from lunar soil.

The BepiColombo orbiter probe passed within 552 km (343 miles) of Venus as it completed one of nine flybys on its way to Mercury. Shortly after the encounter, the ESA/JAXA mission snapped a picture of Venus at a distance of 1,573 km (977 miles).

Two deep-space probes will make flybys of Venus within 30 hours of each other on their way to the inner reaches of the solar system next week. On August 9, the Solar Orbiter will pass by the planet, followed by the BepiColombo orbiter on August 10.

On June 26, ESA's OPS-SAT space lab went into Earth orbit with a computer running the European Ground System – Common Core (EGS-CC) "space brain" software that will be common to all European space missions from 2025.