China is on track to land its first crew on the lunar surface by 2030 and establish a base at the resource-rich south pole — a site that offers continuous sunlight, access to water ice and control of the most valuable real estate beyond Earth.

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ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer walks across the dusty terrain of LUNA, Europe's Moon on Earth. Nearby, ESA's Argonaut lander mock-up stands ready as he carefully navigates the simulated regolith - the dust, soil and rock on the Moon's surface. Alongside a fellow operator, he rehearses a moonwalk under the harsh glare of Sun simulators that mimic lunar lighting to test scientific tools designed to analyse lunar soil and rock.

ESA's robotic explorers, Interact and Spot, join the scene. Spot, the agile robot dog, picks up a sample while Interact, a wheeled robotic arm, supports this rehearsal of autonomous

The launch campaign of the next satellite to join the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission is progressing on schedule for launch on Tuesday, 4 November, on board an Ariane 6 rocket.

Washington DC (UPI) Oct 16, 2025
SpaceX set a milestone Thursday morning as it marked the 130th launch of its Falcon 9 rocket. The Falcon 9 that launched 28 Starlink satellites took off at 5:57 a.m. EDT Thursday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and deployed the devices into low-Earth orbit some 64 minutes after leaving the planet. It represented Falcon 9's 130th flight of the year, only

University Park PA (SPX) Oct 17, 2025
Frozen in time, ancient microbes or their remains could be found in Martian ice deposits during future missions to the Red Planet. By recreating Mars-like conditions in the lab, a team of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Penn State demonstrated that fragments of the molecules that make up proteins in E. coli bacteria, if present in Mars' permafrost and ice caps, could remain

Gothenburg, Sweden (SPX) Oct 17, 2025
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and the US space agency NASA have made an unexpected discovery that challenges one of the basic rules of chemistry and provides new knowledge about Saturn's enigmatic moon Titan. In its extremely cold environment, normally incompatible substances can still be mixed. This discovery broadens our understanding of chemistry before the emerge