The European Space Agency has announced four candidate landing sites for the ExoMars rover, as a deadline looms to secure full funding for the mission in time for a scheduled launch to the red planet in 2018.
Officials with Canadian Earth observation company UrtheCast, which owns two cameras on the International Space Station’s Russian service module, outlined plans to install a remote sensing camera and a radar imaging payload on the outpost’s U.S.-owned Tranquility module in 2017.
Orbital Sciences Corp. plans to select a long-term propulsion supplier for the Antares rocket used to launch cargo to the International Space Station in the next few weeks, in time to include a potentially redesigned launcher in a bid for a follow-on NASA resupply contract.
NASA has directed Boeing and SpaceX to halt activities under contracts awarded last month to build commercial space taxis to ferry astronauts to the Space Station while the U.S. Government Accountability Office reviews a protest of NASA’s decision filed by Sierra Nevada.
Officials working on India’s Mars orbiter project are finalizing plans for a six-month science campaign after the spacecraft arrived in orbit last week, an achievement that has already satisfied the mission’s primary objectives, the head of India’s space agency said.
SpaceX broke ground on a new commercial spaceport on the shores of South Texas, committing to the construction of the world’s first privately-owned satellite launch pad scheduled to be operational as soon as late 2016.
Rocketing through gloomy skies with a payload clouded in a veil of secrecy, a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket fired away from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday to deploy a satellite thousands of miles above Earth.