NASA’s Mars sample-return plan continues to come together.
The agency announced on Monday (Feb. 7) that it has selected the aerospace company Lockheed Martin to build the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), a small rocket that will launch pristine Red Planet samples back toward Earth a decade or so from now.

Perseverance drilled into a rock called Issole on Dec. 29, 2021, collecting its sixth cored sample since touching down inside the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater last February. But the car-sized rover couldn’t seal up the titanium tube as planned, a problem the mission team soon traced to a few meddlesome pebbles clogging up Perseverance’s sample-handling system.

The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet, identified in 2021, is officially the biggest comet ever observed. 
The new record, reported on the preprint website arXiv and now accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, bumps the Hale-Bopp comet from the top spot. Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995 and became visible to the naked eye in 1996; it was about 46 miles (74 kilometers) across. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, also known as comet 2014 UN271, has now been calculated to be about 85 miles (137 km) across

TAMPA, Fla. — Arianespace launched another batch of OneWeb satellites Feb. 10 in the launch provider’s first mission of 2022.

Geoengineering is the use of technology to alter Earth’s climate. It may have become the topic of daily small talk, but the weather and its changing states has a big impact on individuals, localized areas and our planet as a whole. 

One of China’s newest launch startups has been raising serious amounts of money for its range of increasingly complex “Gravity” launch vehicles.

TAMPA, Fla. — Viasat plans to deploy an antenna in Sweden in April to give its ground station-as-a-service business polar coverage for the first time, the California-based satellite operator said Feb. 9.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Kongsberg Satellite Services is providing ground network support for the Lunar InfraRed Imaging (LunIR) mission with ground stations in Punta Arenas, Chile, Svalbard, Norway, and Antarctica’s Troll station.

HELSINKI — A number of China’s emerging rocket companies have secured major funding rounds in recent weeks as competition to reach orbit intensifies.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA has selected a spacecraft to study the sun’s corona and a cluster of smallsats to monitor turbulence in the solar wind as its next Explorer-class heliophysics missions.

The team behind NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released some of the first images from the much-anticipated observatory on Friday (Feb. 11). The main photo, which doesn’t even hint at the power Webb will bring to the universe once it’s fully operational, shows a star called HD 84406 and is only a portion of the mosaic taken over 25 hours beginning on Feb. 2, during the ongoing process to align the observatory’s segmented mirror.

It’s not often that the sudden appearance of a new impact crater on the moon can be predicted, but it’s going to happen on March 4, when a derelict SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will crash into it.

WASHINGTON — Commerce Department officials on Feb. 11 unveiled a prototype for a space catalog and traffic software platform that would provide basic situational awareness and traffic management services.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — SpaceX is prepared to shift testing of its Starship next-generation launch vehicle from Texas to Florida if there are extended delays in an ongoing environmental review, company founder and chief executive Elon Musk said Feb. 10.

Some of the first James Webb Space Telescope investigations will focus on a variety of planet very different from what’s found in our cosmic neighborhood.

A new study suggests that a period of heavy cratering on the Red Planet (and elsewhere in the solar system) persisted 30 million years longer than thought. Studies of the Late Heavy Bombardment, as this period is called, also has implications for the rise of life on Earth.