Flight by Light: Mission accomplished for LightSail 2

Mission accomplished: the Planetary Society announced Wednesday that its LightSail 2 spacecraft, which was launched last month, had successfully raised its orbit using only the power of photons from the Sun.

First of two Van Allen Probes spacecraft ceases operations

On July 19, 2019, at 1:27 p.m. EDT, mission operators sent a shutdown command to one of two Van Allen Probes spacecraft, known as spacecraft B, from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, or APL, in Laurel, Maryland.

Gaia's asteroid discoveries

Animated view of more than 14 000 asteroids in our Solar System from the catalogue in the second data release of ESA's Gaia satellite, published in 2018.

Image: Instant space selfies

How many times have you taken a selfie and posted it instantly to your favourite social media channel? The Mercury Transfer Module of the BepiColombo spacecraft, currently en route to Mercury, is equipped with three 'selfie-cams' ...

Mass anomaly detected under the moon's largest crater

A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the largest crater in our solar system—the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin—and may contain metal from the asteroid that crashed into the Moon and formed the ...

SpaceX says 60 Starlink satellites will grow harder to see

SpaceX said Friday that the first 60 satellites in its "Starlink" constellation, which is intended to provide internet from space, will be less and less visible from Earth as they reach their final orbit.

Stolen comets and free-floating objects

Our solar system may contain alien comets that were stolen from another star flying past 4.5 billion years ago. Far away in a distant cluster of young stars, a similar close encounter might have also sent the inter-stellar ...

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