A large asteroid will safely zoom between Earth and the Moon on Saturday, a once-in-a-decade event that will be used as a training exercise for planetary defense efforts, according to the European Space Agency.

The asteroid, named 2023 DZ2, is estimated to be 40 to 70 meters (130 to 230 feet) wide, roughly the size of the Parthenon, and big enough to wipe out a large city if it hit our planet.

At 19:49 GMT on Saturday it will come within a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon, said Richard Moissl, the head of the ESA's planetary defense office.

Though that is "very close", there is nothing to worry about, he told AFP.

There's a reason Jezero Crater was chosen as the landing site for the Perseverance Rover: it is considered one of the likeliest places to find any evidence if Mars was ever habitable for long periods of time. In this great new flyby video from ESA, you can get a birds-eye look at Perseverance's home.

Created from data ESA's Mars Express and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the video takes you on an aerial tour of the crater. From this perspective, you can see the water features in this ancient impact crater and understand why this was considered one of the best places to explore Mars.

Perseverance landed in Jezero crater in February 2021. The diverse rocks and mineralogy found in and around Jezero crater tell the story of Mars' complex geological history, which Perseverance is working to study and reveal. The roughly 45-km-wide crater is found on the border between the ancient region of Terra Sabaea—which contains rocks of up to 4.1 billion years old—and the younger Isidis Planitia basin, which formed via asteroid impact.

The Institute for Systems and Robotics and the Interactive Technologies Institute, both represented by the Laboratory of Robotics and Engineering Systems (LARSyS), are proud to announce their participation in the upcoming AMADEE-24 mission to Mars. The mission, organized by the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF), aims to advance the development of space exploration through international collaboration and scientific research.

As one of the scientific partners of the OeWF, LARSyS has been contributing to the analog missions to Mars since 2019.

An overheated rocket engine nozzle caused last year's Blue Origin launch failure that has grounded flights for six months, the company said Friday.

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin said it expects to resume its quick trips to space from West Texas sometime later this year.

The New Shepard rocket was carrying experiments but no passengers when its engine nozzle broke apart due to excessive temperatures last September.

As the rocket started veering off course a minute into flight, the escape system kicked in and the capsule catapulted off and parachuted to safety.

But the rocket came crashing down, with the wreckage confined to the designated keep-out zone.

No one was hurt and no property on the ground was damaged. All of the critical flight hardware was recovered within days.

The investigation found that a design change led to the problem, which is being fixed, according to Blue Origin. The next flight will carry the experiments that were on the failed launch.

It was the first launch accident for the Kent, Washington-based Blue Origin, founded in 2000 by Bezos, who also started Amazon.

Three astronauts who were supposed to leave the International Space Station this month will be brought back to Earth in late September, doubling their time aboard the orbiting laboratory to more than a year, Russia's space agency announced Friday.

The return of Russians Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin, and NASA's Frank Rubio was delayed after the Soyuz capsule they planned to ride in developed a coolant leak while docked to the space station.

An empty Soyuz was sent to the station in late February to serve as a rescue capsule. The three-person replacement crew that was originally scheduled to be aboard that capsule is now set to head for the space station on Sept. 15, the Roscosmos space agency said.

Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio are to return on Sept. 27; they launched into space on Sept. 21, 2022.

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