Tag Archives: spacecraft

California-based Rocket Lab has completed systems integration for its Photon spacecraft ahead of the upcoming LOXSAT mission with Eta Space and NASA. Designed to showcase in-orbit cryogenic refueling, the system will now complete environmental testing at Rocket Lab’s facility in Long Beach before launching atop an Electron rocket from New …

NASA has announced that for the first time, it will contract out a private spacecraft to reboost one of its falling satellites: the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The observatory has spent the past 20 years searching for gamma-ray bursts. The commercial company will launch a new reboosting spacecraft in spring …

The ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), which launched in April 2023, has completed another successful flyby aimed at boosting its speed ahead of a Jupiter orbital insertion sometime in 2031. This latest flyby saw it come close enough to Venus that it had to turn off many of its …

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab/Adriana Gutierrez NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is having difficulties with its solar panels. The spacecraft launched on Oct. 16th without incident, and sucessfully unfolded both its solar panels. But only one of its panels successfully latched into position. Telemetry via NASA’s Deep Space Network shows …

  Space around Mars is much busier than usual right now. The red planet made a close pass of Earth last summer, and numerous space agencies planned their Mars missions around this event. Now, the spacecraft are starting to show up — NASA’s Perseverance rover will land later this month, …

  NASA is going back to the moon; at least that’s the plan. To get there, the agency has to develop a new generation of crewed spacecraft, including the Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and the Orion crew module. While the SLS is still in development, Orion has already passed …

  NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has completed the most critical phase of its mission: booping an asteroid. The probe has been orbiting the asteroid Bennu for almost two years, but yesterday it descended to the surface to scoop up a few grams of precious primordial material for eventual return to Earth. …

Today, the Cassini Spacecraft is going where no spacecraft has gone before — on a dive in between Saturn’s rings to take photos and collect data. Google is celebrating this historic mission with an animated Google doodle, a special logo, to grab people’s attention. The doodle shows a cartoon spacecraft …

Continuing on its path through the outer regions of our Solar System, New Horizons has now traveled half the distance from the dwarf planet Pluto to its next target, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69. Artist’s impression of New Horizons encountering a Kuiper Belt object. Image credit: NASA / Johns …

A great deal of our future in space is going to rely upon private space firms, but NASA isn’t sitting on the sidelines when it comes to human spaceflight. It’s working on the powerful Space Launch System and associated Orion crew capsule for long-range space missions. The agency recently conducted …