Athena will touch down near the moon's south pole today | Space Quiz! When did Voyager 1 reach interstellar space? | Watch SpaceX launch its Starship Flight 8 today
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Intuitive Machines is poised to land its second spacecraft on the moon today (March 6). The lander, a Nova-C vehicle named Athena, is flying the IM-2 mission as a part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which contracts private companies to deliver agency science and technology payloads to the lunar surface. Now, the world will see if Intuitive Machines will deliver on that contract.
Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, is scheduled to lift off from SpaceX's Starbase site today, during a window that opens at 6:30 p.m. EST (2330 GMT; 5:30 p.m. local Texas time). If all goes according to plan today, Super Heavy will return to Starbase and be caught by the launch tower's "chopstick" arms about seven minutes after liftoff, while Starship's upper stage, meanwhile, will deploy four dummy versions of SpaceX's Starlink broadband satellites on a suborbital trajectory before splashing down in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia about 66 minutes after launch.
The wait is nearly over! In just one week, skywatchers across North America will witness a spectacular total lunar eclipse, also known as a Blood Moon. This will be the first total lunar eclipse since November 2022 and the first of three set to occur between 2025 and 2026.
'Every day could be our last.' NASA engineers are turning off two instruments to ensure that the twin spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, can continue exploring space beyond the limits of the solar system. To save energy for further interstellar exploration, mission engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) deactivated Voyager 1's cosmic ray subsystem experiment on Feb. 25. On March 24, they will shut down the low-energy charged particle instrument onboard Voyager 2.
Using NASA's Chandra observatory and Europe's XMM-Newton spacecraft, astronomers may have solved a 45-year-old cold case. The team of cosmic homicide detectives determined a strange X-ray signal is the dying scream of a planet destroyed by a superdense stellar corpse called a white dwarf.
SpaceX is again poised to launch its latest Starship megarocket on a test flight that will also attempt to catch the world's largest rocket booster with giant metal chopsticks. If you want to watch it live, we've got details on when and how to see it.
One million alien visitors from another star system could already be lurking in the solar system. We aren't talking about "little green men" here, however - more "little (and not so little) gray rocks," asteroids from the triple star system Alpha Centauri.
