Spacecraft

Solar wind – charged particles from the Sun – pervades our solar system, but the exact mechanism behind it remains murky. Now ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft has observed previously unknown tiny flares on the Sun’s surface spewing plasma into space.

NASA has lost contact with its Voyager 2 deep-space probe. On July 21, 2023, Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent a series of commands that "inadvertently" caused the robotic spacecraft to turn its antenna away from Earth.

In cramped spacecraft or space stations, there isn't room to store multiple robots that are each designed for a specific task. The Mori3 system was designed with that fact in mind, as it can be used to create different types of robots as needed.

ESA is preparing to test a very cool new fold-out heat shield for protecting spacecraft on re-entry. The Pridwen won't burn away like ablative heat shields, and it'll also slow falling satellites down enough to be caught in a hover net.

NASA's Juno deep space probe has made its closest flyby yet of Jupiter's volatile moon Io. During its 51st orbit of the giant planet, the solar-powered robotic spacecraft came within 22,600 miles (35,500 km) of Io's volcanic surface.

ESA's Juice Jupiter mission is back on track after Mission Control in Darmstadt, Germany managed to shake loose and deploy the stuck ice-penetrating Radar for Icy Moons Exploration (RIME) antenna that was stuck due to a tiny pin.

Space startup Vast has announced that it intends to launch what it calls the world's first commercial space station, Haven-1, sometime after August 2025 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the first element of a 100-m (330 ft) rotating station.

Astronomers are tracking nearby asteroids, but there’s one glaring blindspot in the sky – the Sun. Thankfully, ESA plans to plug the gap soon with NEOMIR, a mission that will give us advance warning of any Earth-bound rocks from that direction.

Evolution has shaped the load-bearing skeletons of animals over aeons with incredible precision. Now, an accelerated simulation of the evolution process is helping NASA create stronger, lighter parts for its spacecraft projects – in record time.

Sci-fi fans may recall the bipedal robots from the 1972 film Silent Running, which performed maintenance on the outside of the spaceship. Well, the new MARM robot is reminiscent of them – except it has three limbs, for optimum dexterity and mobility.

Dark matter remains elusive despite decades of searching. Now physicists have proposed a new experiment that would try to find signals by sending atomic clocks to where dark matter should be at its most dense – right near the Sun.

With a reported sonic boom, the US Space Force's open-secret X-37B spaceplane returned to Earth on Saturday. The robotic craft touched down at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 5:22 am EST after a record-breaking 908 days in orbit.