California-based Rocket Lab said a launch of satellites from its facility in New Zealand failed Saturday.

The problem occurred during ignition of the Electron rocket's second stage, the company said in a statement.

The rocket was carrying two Earth-observation satellites for BlackSky, a global monitoring company.

"Today's anomaly occurred after 17 successful orbital launches of the Electron launch vehicle. With multiple launch vehicles currently in production, Rocket Lab is prepared for a rapid return to flight as soon as investigations are complete and any required corrective actions are in place," the statement said.

Rocket Lab said the rocket's first stage successfully parachuted into the ocean and crews were working to recover it. The company is trying to develop a capability to recover and reuse Electron first stages.

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China's "Zhurong" rover, part of its ambitious space programme to send a probe to Mars, is set to attempt the challenging landing on the Red Planet in the next five days, Beijing's space agency said Friday.

The tricky touchdown, if successful, would come a few months behind America's latest probe to Mars, as Beijing presses ahead with its increasingly bold space ambitions.

"Based on current flight conditions, the Tianwen-1 probe intends to choose an opportunity to land ... in the period from early morning Saturday to Wednesday Beijing time," the China National Space Administration said in an online statement.

Your smartphone may be able to sense space weather and even get a little disoriented by it, according to researchers, who tested how geomagnetic storms affect the magnetic sensors in cell phones. The new research suggests that apps being developed to use cell phone magnetometers to pinpoint locations could be susceptible to space weather errors. On the other hand, millions of phones sensing changes in Earth's magnetic field could potentially create a vast observatory to help scientists understand these geomagnetic storms.

Cell phone magnetometer chips are being explored as a backup for GPS, which uses satellite signals to triangulate location and thus is often inaccurate or unavailable in places where signals can't penetrate, such as inside large buildings or underground.

"Smartphone magnetometers are being commercially explored for applications as diverse as locating customers in shopping malls for targeted advertising, to precision needle-guided surgery," wrote Sten Odenwald, of NASA's Space Science Education Consortium at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, in Space Weather.