SpaceX catches giant Starship booster during epic Flight 5 | Watch NASA's Europa Clipper launch with SpaceX today! | NASA's Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter: Live updates
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The biggest and most powerful rocket ever built took to the skies again. And this time, it came back. The mission aimed to break new ground for Starship, and for spaceflight in general: SpaceX planned to return Starship's huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, directly to its launch mount, catching it with the "chopstick" arms of the launch tower in a bold and unprecedented maneuver.
NASA's first mission to another ocean world in our solar system will launch toward Jupiter today (Oct. 14), but if you want to watch it live, you'll need to know when to tune in. Europa Clipper, a $5 billion NASA mission to study the salty ocean beneath the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa, will launch on its way Monday atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Liftoff is set for 12:06 p.m. EDT (1606 GMT) from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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Fresh from its bright opposition in September, Saturn remains an excellent target for naked eye stargazers. As luck would have it, tonight it will rise with the almost full moon, appearing just after sunset in North America. Once the moon has risen into a darker sky and lost its golden yellow look, you'll see Saturn trailing behind it by just the width of your pinky finger at arm's length. From parts of South and East Africa, India, China and Southeast Asia, the moon will appear to occult Saturn, according to In-The-Sky.org.
Marc Garneau, who mostly flew with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), embarked on the country's first space shuttle mission in October 1984. Garneau celebrates that journey in his new book, "A Most Extraordinary Ride" (Penguin Random House, 2024). Four decades after his pioneering flight, Garneau told Space.com how amazed he was that CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen has been assigned to the Artemis 2 moon mission.
SpaceX's Crew-8 astronauts will have to wait a bit longer to begin their trip home to Earth after plans to depart the International Space Station Sunday morning were postponed by bad weather at their splashdown site.
The newly released photos, taken using Mars Express' High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC), capture seasonal polar caps composed mainly of carbon dioxide ice with some water ice. In spring, the ice partially sublimates, meaning it turns directly from solid ice into vapor, which releases large amounts of gas into the thin Martian atmosphere.
The Falcon 9 had been grounded since Sept. 28, when the rocket suffered an issue with its upper stage during the launch of the Crew-9 astronaut mission for NASA. (A Falcon 9 did launch Europe's Hera asteroid-inspection probe on Oct. 7, but that was a one-time exception granted by the FAA.) "The FAA notified SpaceX on Oct. 11 that the Falcon 9 vehicle is authorized to return to regular flight operations," agency officials said in an emailed statement on Friday afternoon. "The FAA reviewed and accepted the SpaceX-led investigation findings and corrective actions for the mishap that occurred with the Crew-9 mission (Sept. 28)."
With the clock ticking down to the historic launch of NASA's Europa Clipper mission to survey the mysterious frozen moon of Jupiter, a 1.8-billion-mile voyage that will take five-and-a-half years to complete, now is the perfect time to immerse our minds with visions of that life-promising satellite and its famous gas giant homeworld.
