China has sent a probe on an ambitious mission to grab rocks from a near-Earth asteroid and return them to Earth before ...

China's ambitious Tianwen-2 mission will soon be heading to two extremely different space rocks, and should provide vital ...

Most orbit insertions are tricky because a speeding craft has to slow down or risk overshooting its ... the two largest members of the asteroid belt. It's also the largest interplanetary probe ...

Currently some 117 million miles from Earth, Vesta is the second-largest resident of the asteroid belt, a zone between Mars and Jupiter filled with hundreds of thousands of space rocks orbiting ...

The Kinetica-1 rocket launched Wednesday for the first time since a failure doomed its previous attempt to reach orbit in ...

No one has ever developed a truly reusable orbital heat shield, it’s extremely difficult to do so. Even the Shuttle’s heat ...

One Pluto year equals 248 Earth years. At 1473 miles in diameter—about half the width of the United States—Pluto is the ...

Tianwen, which means "questions to heaven," is the name given to China's program of robotic Solar System exploration. Tianwen ...

New research challenges the long-held belief that asteroid Vesta is a protoplanet. Scientists at Michigan State University suggest Vesta is a fragment ...

China embarked on Thursday on its first mission to retrieve samples from a nearby asteroid, with the nighttime launch of its Tianwen-2 spacecraft, set to make the fast-growing space power the third ...

Most asteroids orbit within the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But some follow paths that circulate into the inner solar system, including so-called near-Earth ...