Spacecraft

Virgin Galactic today completed the second successful glide test of its VSS Unity spaceplane since relocating there earlier in the year. It saw the spacecraft hit new speeds as the company presses ahead with its testing program at Spaceport America.

ESA’s Solar Orbiter is set to have a chance encounter with the tails of a disintegrating comet. The probe is currently en route to the inner solar system and has had instruments rushed through commissioning to be ready for the unexpected rendezvous.

This week Earth will be visited by a spacecraft that has traveled 1.4 billion km to get here. But no, it’s not aliens – it’s BepiColombo, just slingshotting around our planet for a gravitational speed boost on its roundabout journey to Mercury.

The radio antenna that acts as Earth’s sole transmitter to Voyager 2 will soon undergo important upgrades, so for the next 11 months we won’t be able to send commands to The Little Spacecraft That Could.

Virgin Galactic has come one step closer to full commercial operations as it relocates its SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, from the company's manufacturing facility in Mojave, California, to its Spaceport America’s Gateway to Space building in New Mexico.

Preliminary results of an inquiry into the malfunctions that forced the CST-100 Starliner to return to Earth early on its first Orbital Flight Test indicate only intervention by ground control kept the unmanned capsule from being destroyed.

Voyager 2 has been going strong for over 40 years, but it’s beginning to show signs of its age. NASA is reporting that a fault has caused the spacecraft to lock itself down in safe mode, as engineers work to get it back up and running again.

Science stands still for no one, and with a new year comes a new calendar of exciting events in spaceflight and exploration. New Atlas rounds up some of the most important milestones to look forward to in 2020.

ESA's Mars Express spacecraft has captured a rare movie of the Martian moon Phobos. The moon is set to be the target of an international mission to survey the Red Planet’s two natural satellites, and return a surface sample to Earth.

Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft has been stacked atop its United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V launcher in preparation for its December 17, 2019 liftoff. It will undergo final tests before transport to the Space Launch Complex-41 launch pad.

ESA is delving into how astronaut hibernation would affect space missions. The study suggests that using hibernation on a Mars mission would reduce the mass of the spacecraft by a third and cut the amount of consumables by about the same amount.

In this week's edition of "Into the great unknown," the spacecraft built to study Saturn and its surroundings in one of our most ambitious space missions to date.