BepiColombo spacecraft whizzes past planet Mercury for the 2nd time | NASA's Lunar CAPSTONE cubesat to launch to the moon on Monday | Space Quiz: An old European Mars probejust got a big upgrade. Which one was it?
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BepiColombo is a joint mission by the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The mission, consisting of two orbiters that travel to Mercury stacked on top of each other, launched into orbit around the sun in 2018.
The June 23 flyby was BepiColombo's second at Mercury, following the probe's first encounter with the planet in October 2021. The probe made its closest approach to Mercury's surface at 5:44 a.m. EDT (0944 GMT), when it passed only 125 miles (200 kilometers) from Mercury's crater-riddled surface, closer than the two orbiters will operate once the mission begins in earnest.
The launch of NASA's CAPSTONE moon mission has been delayed at least two additional days, to no earlier than June 27.
The microwave oven-sized CAPSTONE will head toward the moon atop a Rocket Lab Electron vehicle, which will lift off from the company's New Zealand launch site. Liftoff is set for 6 am ET (1000 GMT) on Monday.
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STEVE, short for "strong thermal velocity enhancement," is an atmospheric oddity first described in 2018, after amateur aurora chasers saw a narrow stream of gauzy purple light arc across the sky over northern Canada. Scientists who studied the phenomenon soon confirmed that STEVE was not an aurora — the multi-colored glow that appears at high latitudes when solar particles collide with atoms high in Earth's atmosphere. Rather, STEVE was a separate and unique phenomenon that's "completely unknown"
The rare five-planet alignment of 2022 remains in view through this first weekend of summer. To see it at its best, you must be up at the crack of dawn. But if you are, you'll be rewarded with what likely will be the most eye-catching celestial rendezvous between the two brightest objects in the night sky: Venus and the moon.
The country's science ministry says the proposed Apophis mission had a "lack of technical capabilities" that rendered the concept "unfeasible," SpaceNews reported June 7. Ultimately, the ministry decided not to request the nearly $308 million it wanted to run the mission.
"The mission involved launching a robotic spacecraft between July 2026 and January 2027 to accompany Apophis as it whips by Earth in April 2029," SpaceNews added. "The probe would observe and map Apophis the whole way, looking for changes in its structure due to its close encounter with Earth and the planet’s gravitational forces."
Artemis 1's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule wrapped up the wet dress — a roughly 50-hour series of fueling tests and countdown simulations — on Monday (June 20). Mission team members noticed a hydrogen leak during fueling operations, but they have now decided that it wasn't serious enough to require a do-over.
NASA now aims to launch Artemis 1 to the moon in late August, the agency says.
Three companies will demonstrate their potential to power lunar infrastructure using nuclear fission systems, under new joint NASA contracts announced on Tuesday.
NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy selected three design concept proposals that the government hopes could be ready for use on the moon by the end of the 2020s.
