Russia's Nauka module briefly tilts space station with unplanned thruster fire | Boeing Starliner OFT-2 launch to space station delayed following Russian module mishap | Ariane 5 rocket launching 2 communications satellites today: Watch it live
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Nauka's bumpy ride to the International Space Station didn't get any smoother after the new Russian science module docked on Thursday (July 29). A little over three hours after docking was complete, cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky and Pyotr Dubrov were preparing to open the hatch when thrusters on Nauka fired "inadvertently and unexpectedly," according to NASA spokesperson Rob Navias. As a result, the space station temporarily lost what engineers call "attitude control," which is quite rare, Navias noted. The crew is not in any danger.
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will have to wait to make its triumphant trip to space. On Thursday (July 29), officials at NASA and Boeing announced that Boeing's uncrewed Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2) mission for its Starliner astronaut taxi will be delayed from Friday (July 30) to Tuesday (Aug. 3). This delay follows a mishap with Russia's Nauka module.
Europe's powerful Ariane 5 rocket will fly for the first time in nearly a year today (July 30), and you can watch the liftoff live. An Ariane 5 topped with two communications satellites is scheduled to launch from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, this evening during a 90-minute window that opens at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT). You can watch the action live here at Space.com, courtesy of Ariane 5 operator Arianespace, or directly via the French company.
In a brand-new video, you can watch Ingenuity make its highest and most complex flight to date, which took the autonomous craft over an area known as Raised Ridges. During this trip, its 10th flight, Ingenuity covered a distance of 310 feet (95 meters) and soared to a record altitude of 40 feet (12 meters).
Bright reflections that radar detected beneath the south pole of Mars may not be underground lakes as previously thought but deposits of clay instead, a new study finds.
New data from the star-mapping Gaia satellite are helping scientists unlock the mystery of our Milky Way galaxy's spiral arms. Recently published studies exploring the Early Data Release 3 (EDR3), a batch of observations made available to the scientific community last December, reveal the spiral structure of our galaxy with a greater precision and detail than was possible before.
SpaceX's Super Heavy booster is a complicated beast. On Thursday (July 29), SpaceX chief Elon Musk gave us an inside look at the engine section of a Super Heavy that's coming together at the company's South Texas site, near the Gulf Coast village of Boca Chica. There is a lot of plumbing involved.
It's safe to say that UFOs, now branded UAPs, are back. In recent years, concerns have grown that supposed physics-defying craft are penetrating US airspace. This could represent a technological breakthrough by foreign competitors or something else entirely. But many people will no doubt have found the recent release of the Pentagon's highly anticipated UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) report to be underwhelming.
