National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Summer has just begun in the Northern Hemisphere but a brutal heat wave is already gripping parts of Europe, China and the United States, where record temperatures expected this weekend are a stark illustration of the dangers of a warming climate.

Europe's Euclid space telescope is scheduled to blast off Saturday on the first-ever mission aiming to shed light on two of the universe's greatest mysteries: dark energy and dark matter.

The launch is planned from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 11:12 am local time (1512 GMT) on a Falcon 9 rocket of the US company SpaceX.

There will be a manned research mission to Mars by the end of the next decade, according to Stamatios "Tom" Krimigis, the pioneering researcher with wide participation in NASA's most important space program.

China plans to land astronauts on the moon before 2030, which would be another advance in what's increasingly seen as a new space race.

The U.S. aims to put astronauts back on the lunar surface by the end of 2025.

Deputy Director of the Chinese Manned Space Agency Lin Xiqiang confirmed China's goal at a news conference yesterday but gave no specific date.

Jeff Bezos' rocket company has won a NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon, two years after it lost out to SpaceX.

Blue Origin received a $3.4 billion contract to lead a team to develop a lunar lander named Blue Moon.
It will be used to transport astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2029, following a pair of crew landings by Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Slovenian physicist Dušan Petrač, who was a leading NASA scientist, has died aged 91. The news of the death of the long-term member of the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) has been announced by SDS leader Janez Janša.

NASA launched two small satellites designed to track tropical cyclones hour by hour from a base in New Zealand yesterday, in a project that could improve weather predictions on devastating storms.

A woman who makes dolls of female heroes from Anatolia has added Halide Edip Adıvar, one of the important figures of the War of the Independence, to her collection for the 100th anniversary of the foundation of modern Türkiye.

Flying chunks of concrete, twisted metal sheets, craters blasted deep into the ground: The thunderous power of SpaceX's first test flight of Starship - the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built - inflicted serious damage on its Texas launch site.

SpaceX's giant new rocket exploded minutes after blasting off on its first test flight on April 20 and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Elon Musk's company was aiming to send the nearly 120-meter Starship rocket on a round-the-world trip from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. It carried no people or satellites.