Chang'e-4's rover, Yutu2, may have found the first samples of the moon's mantle.

Our neighbour has shrivelled up like a raisin

Harvard’s Ana Bonaca says there is evidence of a “dark substructure” in the Milky Way’s halo.

A sharp-eyed NASA spacecraft spotted the probable remains of an Israeli spacecraft that crash-landed on the moon last month.

SpaceX is lofting a pioneering phalanx of internet satellites tonight (May 15), and you can watch the liftoff live. A two-stage Falcon 9 rocket carrying the first 60 spacecraft in SpaceX's "Starlink" megaconstellation is scheduled to launch tonight at 10:30 p.m. EDT (0230 GMT on May 16) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of SpaceX, or directly via the spaceflight company.

A senior NASA official said Tuesday that the Space Launch System, a huge heavy-lift rocket years behind schedule, could launch astronauts on a moon landing mission in 2024 on just its third flight to meet a goal announced last month by Vice President Mike Pence, while commercial companies will be entrusted with more responsibility to develop a lunar lander and a modest mini-space station, or Gateway, in lunar orbit.

A recent parachute test of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule “was not satisfactory,” a NASA official said during a House subcommittee hearing yesterday. Few details were disclosed, but it’s now looking even less likely that NASA will have the capability to fly astronauts to space anytime soon.

NASA's administrator warned that the threat of a meteor crashing into Earth is bigger than we might think. Jim Bridenstine told the International Academy of Astronautics' Planetary Defense Conference on Monday that "the reason it's important for NASA to take this seriously is something you call the 'giggle factor,'" or scientific theories that seem too ridiculous to be likely.

Scientists have made the first measurements of water in samples collected from the surface of an asteroid, according to a new study. The Japanese space probe Hayabusa completed a sample return mission from the asteroid Itokawa, retrieving 1,500 particles. Another mission, Hayabusa2, is conducting a sample return mission on the asteroid Ryugu.

Look at this and you can see 265,000 galaxies reaching back across 13.3 billion years. It took 7,500 exposures from the Hubble Space Telescope to make this mosaic of the distant universe called the Hubble Legacy Field. Take a moment and feel the awe. The Legacy Field follows a succession of Hubble images that have captured more and more previously unseen galaxies. This new view combines observations from several Hubble deep-field surveys taken across 16 years.

Nasa is already preparing for the arrival of a huge asteroid named the “God of Chaos” that will skirt past Earth in 10 years. On 13 April, 2029, people looking towards the sky will see a speck of light streaking across it, which will quickly get brighter and faster. It will be travelling so fast that it will cross the width of the Moon in a minute and be as bright as stars in the sky.

Dangerous asteroids flying past Earth are not rare, and more meteor strikes happen than the public is aware of, the head of NASA has said. At the International Academy of Astronautics' Planetary Defence Conference on Monday, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said: "I wish I could tell you these events are exceptionally unique ... but they're not." He said more work is now underway to protect our planet from the impact of meteor strikes. While the subject has long been the preserve of big-budget action films, he said: "What we're doing is very serious.

A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft successfully made its way to the International Space Station (ISS), with approximately 5,500 lbs of NASA cargo and science experiments. It launched Sunday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and it arrived today, joining five other spacecraft currently docked at the station.

SpaceX has confirmed that its Crew Dragon capsule suffered an "anomaly" during routine engine tests in Florida. A US Air Force spokesperson told local press the incident, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, had been contained and no-one had been injured. An unmanned Crew Dragon successfully flew for the first time last month. This latest incident, however, could delay plans to launch a manned mission to the International Space Station later this year.

The American space agency's InSight lander appears to have detected its first seismic event on Mars. The faint rumble was picked up by the probe's sensors on 6 April - the 128th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. It is the first seismic signal detected on the surface of a planetary body other than the Earth and its Moon.

Beijing plans to send a manned mission to the moon and to build a research station there within the next decade, state media reported Wednesday, citing a top space official. China aims to achieve space superpower status and took a major step towards that goal when it became the first nation to land a rover on the far side of the moon in January.

NASA’s Mars InSight lander has measured and recorded for the first time ever a likely “marsquake.”

Portugal just became the latest country to establish a national space agency. The country made its plans official on March 18, when its Council of Ministers signed the charter at a formal ceremony at Ponta Delgada, Portugal — the capital city of the Azores archipelago, where the new space agency will be based.

China plans to build a scientific research station on the moon in "about 10 years," according to the state news agency Xinhua. The China National Space Administration (CSNA) intends to build the research station in the region of the moon's south pole, Zhang Kejian, head of CSNA, said in a public statement, Xinhua reported. That's a bit of a departure from the six successful NASA Apollo moon landings, which took place closer to the moon's equator between 1969 and 1972.

On April 19, the Cygnus spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. Among plenty of other cargo, it carried special passengers: two small robots named Honey and Bumble. These “Astrobees” will soon become part of the station’s working crew, helping with such tasks as checking inventory, recording astronauts and experiments and running their own research projects.

SpaceX has received Federal Communications Commission approval to halve the orbital altitude of more than 1,500 planned broadband satellites in order to lower the risk of space debris and improve latency. SpaceX's satellite project, named Starlink, aims to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband around the world. In a statement on the new FCC approval, SpaceX said that "Starlink production is well underway, and the first group of satellites have already arrived at the launch site for processing."

When the launch of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory and Glory missions failed in 2009 and 2011, the agency said it was because their launch vehicle malfunctioned. The clamshell structure (called fairing) encapsulating the satellites as they traveled aboard Orbital ATK's Taurus XL rocket failed to separate on command. Now, a NASA Launch Services Program (LSP) investigation has revealed that the malfunction was caused by faulty aluminum materials. More importantly, the probe blew a 19-year fraud scheme perpetrated by Oregon aluminum extrusion manufacturer Sapa Profiles, Inc., which Orbital ATK fell victim to, wide open.

The International Space Station has been hit by a major power shortage that has forced a delivery from SpaceX to be delayed. SpaceX was supposed to launch a shipment on Wednesday. But an old power-switching unit malfunctioned at the space station on Monday and knocked two power channels offline. The six remaining power channels still worked normally, according to Nasa.

According to the agency, a contractor lied about the quality of its metals for years, causing two failed rocket launches.

Visions of space rocks slamming into Earth aren't just for dinosaurs and Hollywood movies.

NASA gave its final go-ahead on Friday to billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX company to conduct its first unmanned test flight of a newly designed crew capsule to the International Space Station on March 2. The approval cleared a key hurdle for SpaceX in its quest to help NASA revive America’s human spaceflight program, stalled since space shuttle missions came to an end in 2011.

In 1889, near the remote border town of Embudo, New Mexico, John Wesley Powell, the famous explorer of the Grand Canyon and second head of the U.S. Geological Survey, started a quiet scientific revolution. He knew that water would be increasingly important to the American West, but no one had developed a way to figure out how much was available. Powell set up a field camp with 14 students, three instructors, two laborers and a cook, and tasked them with developing the first gauge to measure how much water flows through a U.S. river.

Getting to Mars is a journey that could involve 140 million miles of travel. Astronauts on a Mars mission will be subjected to extreme conditions requiring problem-solving skills and creative thinking. How are we preparing for a Mars mission?

Our Solar System is full of planets and moons that are quite interesting, varying from dusty rock worlds like Mars to frigid collections of methane lakes like on Saturn’s moon Titan. But of all the objects orbiting the Sun, Jupiter has to be the most interesting to look at. There’s just so much going on in its swirling clouds that you could stare forever and never get bored.

Canada is joining a U.S.-led project that will see humans return to the moon and set the stage for further exploration to Mars, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday. Known as the Lunar Gateway, the project includes an outpost that will provide living space for astronauts orbiting the moon, a docking station for visiting spacecraft and laboratories for research.

SpaceX is moving quickly toward one of the most important launches in its 17-year existence: The first launch of Crew Dragon, a spaceship that Elon Musk's aerospace company designed to fly NASA astronauts into orbit. Crew Dragon is part of NASA's roughly $8 billion Commercial Crew Program, which was created to restore the agency's ability to launch people to the International Space Station. (NASA retired its space shuttle program in July 2011, and has been sending astronauts on Russian Soyuz spacecraft since then.)

Mars wasn't always a dusty, barren planet. Previous modelling has demonstrated the planet was once overflowing with water that eventually retreated under the surface. But new research details the first direct geological evidence for a "planet-wide groundwater system" explaining Mars's watery history and providing new sites for future missions to hunt for signs of life.

After almost 50 years of being neglected, it appears the moon is once again a hot destination. On Thursday morning, alongside both former and current astronauts — as well as David Saint-Jacques via satellite from the International Space Station — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada has committed to participate in the Lunar Gateway, a NASA-backed orbiting space platform. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2022.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has taken the first of many steps that would be needed to extract resources like oxygen and water from the moon. It has signed a one-year contract with Europe’s largest launch services provider and former lunar XPrize competitor to study the feasibility of mining the moon.

"We can confirm hard capture is complete." Those words at 6:02 a.m. ET Sunday confirmed that SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule had successfully attached itself to the International Space Station, about 27 hours after lifting off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Plans call for it to remain docked with the station for five days. On March 8, it will undock and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean around 8:45 a.m. ET.