Readying spacecraft to surf Venus' atmosphere

ESA's EnVision mission to Venus will perform optical, spectral and radar mapping of Earth's sister planet. But before getting down to work the van-sized spacecraft needs to "aerobrake"—lowering its orbit with thousands ...

NASA mirrors on ESA pathfinder to enhance lunar navigation

NASA will supply the upcoming European Space Agency (ESA) Lunar Pathfinder satellite with an array of laser retroreflectors, mirrored devices that reflect light back at its source. The retroreflectors will validate navigation ...

Image: Australian antenna ready to hear Aeolus' first words

Measuring 4.5 metres across, this relatively small antenna in Australia, dubbed NNO-2, will be the first to hear from the soon-to-be-launched Aeolus satellite, the first ever to measure winds on Earth from Space.

Image: Tiny cameras snap pictures of Lake Superior

These two images of Lake Superior and surrounding area show the first data downlinked from the CubeSat Multispectral Observation System (CUMULOS) cameras. The image on the left, taken by a short-wavelength infrared camera, ...

Dawn sets course for higher orbit

After studying Ceres for more than eight months from its low-altitude science orbit, NASA's Dawn spacecraft will move higher up for different views of the dwarf planet.

The 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake—felt from space

For the first time, a natural source of infrasonic waves of Earth has been measured directly from space—450 kilometers above the planet's surface. The source was the massive 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake in Japan, and its ...

page 1 from 2