It's been several months, but NASA has finally prized the lid off the capsule that returned the Bennu asteroid to Earth. NASA engineers removed two metal fasteners from the TAGSAM robotic arm that were keeping the lid stuck and trapping the precious cargo inside. Now the business of analyzing the entirety of the 250g sample for clues about the history of the solar system can begin. It was back in October 2020 that the robotic arm aboard the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft nabbed a handful of the Bennu asteroid. Space fans rejoiced in September last year when the craft finally returned to Earth, marking the end of the 1.16 billion mission, one of NASA's most ambitious ever.

NASA's first mission to the moon's surface since the Apollo missions in the 1970s has begun with the launch of a new Vulcan rocket carrying a robotic lander with seven scientific instruments. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 7.18am GMT (2.18am EST) on 8 January, forms the first part of NASA's ambitious Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, with six more launches planned for this year. Unlike previous NASA missions, which were carried out almost entirely in-house, these efforts will be public-private partnerships, aided by space companies. The Vulcan rocket was built by both Lockheed Martin and Boeing as part of the United Launch Alliance (ULA), and the Peregrine lander was built by space robotics company Astrobotic. The lander will take 46 days to reach the moon, before attempting to land on 23 February.

The United States and China explore the lunar presence of critical minerals. Mexico will launch its first lunar mission next month, a historic step for the country and Latin America as a whole, according to officials. "This project will make history and is the first of its kind in Latin America, which elevates the name of our country, confirming once again that Mexican engineering is at the level of the best in the world," Salvador Landeros, director of the Mexican Space Agency (AEM), said in a press release. A team of scientists and nearly 250 university students developed five microrobots that the AEM will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, between Jan. 8 and Jan. 11 as part of project Colmena. Each robot weighs 60 grams -- a little over one-tenth of a pound -- and measures just under 5 inches in diameter.

The US military's secretive X-37B robot spaceplane blasted off from Florida on Thursday night on its seventh mission, the first launched atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket capable of delivering it to a higher orbit than ever before. The Falcon Heavy, composed of three liquid-fueled rocket cores strapped together, roared off its launch pad from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in a spectacular liftoff carried live on a SpaceX webcast. The launch followed more than two weeks of false starts and delays attributed to poor weather and unspecified technical issues, leading ground crews to roll the spacecraft back to its hangar before proceeding with Thursday's flight. It came two weeks after China's own robot spaceplane, the Shenlong, or'Divine Dragon,' was launched on its third mission to orbit since 2020, adding a new twist to the growing US-Sino rivalry in space. The Pentagon has disclosed scant details about the X-37B mission, conducted by the US Space Force under the military's National Security Space Launch program.

NASA's Curiosity rover has spent 11 years searching far and wide for signs of life on Mars. And now it has emerged that the car-sized robot may have found something. In 2021, it detected an unusual array of polygon-shaped cracks within the soil that scientists now believe is evidence that the Red Planet once had Earth-like conditions that could have allowed microorganisms to survive 3.6 billion years ago. The mysterious mud cracks on the bed of an ancient lake hint that wet and dry cycles comparable to the seasons we experience on our planet today may have existed on Mars. Such cycles are vital for encouraging the formation of carbon-based'polymers' - known as the building blocks of organic compounds and even DNA.

Researchers at the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL) of the University of Valencia, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the Phi-Lab of the European Space Agency (ESA), have developed a model for flood detection based on neural networks. It's called WorldFloods and has been launched into space by aerospace company D-Orbit from Cape Canaveral. In terms of flooding, observing the Earth from space provides valuable information for decision-making on the ground. Large constellations of small nanosatellites--the CubeSats--are a promising solution to reduce revisitation time from days to hours--as long as it takes a sensor to re-cover a location--in disaster areas. However, data transmission to terrestrial receivers is limited by the power and bandwidth restrictions of the cubes.

Researchers at the Image Processing Laboratory (IPL) of the University of Valencia, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and the Phi-Lab of the European Space Agency (ESA), have developed a model for flood detection based on neural networks. It's called WorldFloods and has been launched into space by aerospace company D-Orbit from Cape Canaveral. In terms of flooding, observing the Earth from space provides valuable information for decision-making on the ground. Large constellations of small nanosatellites – the CubeSats – are a promising solution to reduce revisitation time from days to hours – as long as it takes a sensor to re-cover a location – in disaster areas. However, data transmission to terrestrial receivers is limited by the power and bandwidth restrictions of the cubes.

Cape Canaveral, Florida – A NASA spacecraft is stuffed with so much asteroid rubble from this week's grab that it's jammed open and precious particles are drifting away in space, scientists said Friday. Scientists announced the news three days after the spacecraft named Osiris-Rex briefly touched asteroid Bennu, NASA's first attempt at such a mission. The mission's lead scientist, Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, said Tuesday's operation 200 million miles away collected far more material than expected for return to Earth – in the hundreds of grams. The sample container on the end of the robot arm penetrated so deeply into the asteroid and with such force, however, that rocks got sucked in and became wedged around the rim of the lid. Scientists estimate the sampler pressed as much as 19 inches (48 centimeters) into the rough, crumbly, black terrain.

A replica of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover is shown during a press conference ahead of the launch of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the rover, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. July 29, 2020. REUTERS/Joe SkipperThe $2.4 billion mission, slated for liftoff at 7:50 a.m. ET (1150 GMT) from Florida's Cape Canaveral, is planned as the U.S. space agency's ninth trek to the Martian surface. The United Arab Emirates and China separately this month launched probes to Mars in displays of their own technological prowess and ambition. Launching atop an Atlas 5 rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed (BA.N) (LMT.N) joint venture United Launch Alliance, the car-sized Perseverance rover is expected to reach Mars next February.

With eight successful Mars landings, NASA is upping the ante with its newest rover. The spacecraft Perseverance -- set for liftoff this week -- is NASA's biggest and brainiest Martian rover yet. It sports the latest landing tech, plus the most cameras and microphones ever assembled to capture the sights and sounds of Mars. Its super-sanitized sample return tubes -- for rocks that could hold evidence of past Martian life -- are the cleanest items ever bound for space. A helicopter is even tagging along for an otherworldly test flight.