We think of the Moon as a dry and dusty sort of place, but over the years, scientists have learnt that Earth’s satellite is actually rather loaded with water – in volcanic deposits, in its chilly poles, in the permanent shadows of its craters. But it looks like water has also been hiding somewhere else, …

Launched on March 31, 1972, the Kosmos 482 spacecraft was supposed to voyage to Venus as part of the Soviet Union’s Venera program. Its sister probe, Venera 8, blasted off four days earlier, and eventually touched down on Venus in July 1972, becoming the second lander to accomplish this feat. The USSR remains the only …

ESA’s planet-defending Hera mission will set a new record in space. The asteroid investigator will not only be the first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid system – the Didymos pair – but the smaller of these two worldlets, comparable in size to Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza, will become the smallest asteroid ever visited. …

To land the kind of heavy spaceships that can carry human astronauts to Mars, engineers will need new methods to touch down. As humans get more ambitious with their plans for exploring Mars, we’re going to need to land bigger spacecraft on its surface. Up until now, NASA’s robotic missions have used parachutes, inflatable bubbles, …

NASA has officially declared an end to the mission of the six-wheeled rover on Mars. Opportunity lost power in a dust storm last June, and all efforts to make contact have failed. “Our beloved Opportunity remained silent,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said Wednesday at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, …

FREMONT, Calif. — The twin cubesats that played a key role in NASA’s most recent Mars lander mission have been out of contact with the Earth for more than a month, suggesting their trailblazing mission has come to an end. In a Feb. 5 statement, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that it not heard from …