WASHINGTON — Bahrain became the latest country to join the Artemis Accords as the agreement regarding principles for cooperation in space exploration continues to expand beyond traditional spacefaring nations.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced March 11 that Ingenuity completed its 21st flight on the planet, traveling 370 meters during the 129-second flight. The helicopter has now traveled more than 4.6 kilometers since its first flight in April 2021.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Missile Defense Agency decommissioned two missile-tracking satellites that have operated in low Earth orbit for more than 12 years, MDA said March 14.

“When our space station is completed and running, we will actively encourage the private sector to engage in space through various ways,” Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s human spaceflight program, told China Central Television March 9.

More than a dozen former Soyuz satellite missions need new rides after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, raising questions over how fast the launch market can absorb the loss of the workhorse rocket.

NASA’s Mark Vande Hei and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov have long been scheduled to come home from the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on March 30. And that remains the plan, despite the strain that Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has placed on Russia’s many space partnerships.

In just a few days, NASA’s immense Crawler-Transporter 2 vehicle will carry the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion spacecraft on a 4-mile (6.4 kilometers) journey to Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This rollout will deliver the rocket and Orion to the pad where they will prepare to launch on a moonbound mission, currently set for no earlier than May of this year.

Close-up pictures from NASA’s Dawn mission that orbited Ceres between 2015 and 2018 revealed salt deposits in a crater known as Urvara, spotted for the first time in a new study. The salt deposits may be associated with icy volcanoes, the research team says, whose brine rose to the surface over time.

Ghost-like particles called neutrinos hardly ever interact with normal matter, giving the teensy apparitions supreme hiding powers. They are so elusive that, in the decades since their initial discovery, physicists still haven’t pinned down their mass. But recently, by plopping them onto a 200-ton “neutrino scale,” scientists have put a new limit on the neutrino’s mass.

WASHINGTON — The Russian rocket engines that United Launch Alliance needs to complete the remaining launches of the Atlas 5 are stored in the United States. The company said the operation of the vehicle will not be affected by the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the Biden administration in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

What’s inside a black hole? Quantum computers and deep learning may finally reveal clues. A visualization of a black hole shows gas swirling around the superdense object. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman) What happens inside a black hole — and how does whatever goes on inside relate to the universe outside it?

The biggest airplane ever built, Stratolaunch’s Roc carrier aircraft, just aced its fourth test flight. Roc, which will eventually haul hypersonic vehicles into the air, successfully finished its latest flight on Thursday (Feb. 24), a jaunt that came on the heels of another test flight in January.

Steve Howard is not superstitious, at least about a particular number. “Thirteen is my favorite number,” said Howard, the administrator of Camden County, Georgia, in early January.

WASHINGTON — Globalstar has selected MDA Ltd. and Rocket Lab to supply a set of satellites to replenish its constellation, funded by a mystery customer.

Millions of new objects have just been cataloged in a vast new sky map that will lead to more investigations about our universe’s environment, the discovery team says.

An underwater volcano in the South Pacific erupted last month and shattered two records simultaneously: The volcanic plume reached greater heights than any eruption ever captured in the satellite record, and the eruption generated an unparalleled number of lightning strikes — almost 590,000 over the course of three days, Reuters reported.