Space exploration News

Bangalore - India’s Mangalyaan Mars Orbiter spacecraft left Earth orbit early Sunday, at the start of a 300-day trek, covering 680 million kilometers (425 million miles), to Mars.

Cologne - As the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter approaches the tenth anniversary of arrival in orbit at the Red Planet, the ESA has assembled a fascinating topographical ‘fly-by’ of Mars.

Sydney - Plutonium 238 is the fuel for Voyager as it leaves the solar system, and for many other space missions. The trouble is that the fuel is out of fashion, not being made for years, and the remaining stock is already mortgaged for other uses.

A new mission called JUICE may give better chances in finding life elsewhere in the Solar System as actual living organisms, compared to the desiccated and irradiated remnants of long dead microbes that scientists hope to find on the Red Planet

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Monday, the selection of ‘Biomass’ as the subject of its seventh Earth Explorer mission. The planned satellite will measure, to great accuracy, biomass and carbon stored in the world’s forests.

NASA has released some of the most breathtaking images yet from the Cassini-Huygens Saturn orbiter, showing a gigantic hurricane gyrating around Saturn’s north pole.

Wallops Island - Last Sunday NASA launched into Earth orbit three satellites in the shape of three smartphones likely to be the lowest cost satellites ever as part of NASA’s PhoneSat mission.

On September 5 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 left Cape Canaveral. Thirty-five years later, Voyager continues to transmit data back to Earth and may now, finally, have stepped beyond the perimeter of the Solar System.

Early yesterday morning NASA released details of an observed solar phenomenon, an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection with the potential to disrupt satellites and communications over the next one to three days.

Could Jupiter's moon Europa could be the health spa destination of the future? Maybe. A new research paper by scientists from California Institute of Technology and NASA/JPL indicates that part of Europa's surface consists of Epsom salts!