Planetary surface

NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter, which made history by achieving the first powered flight on another world, has officially ended its nearly three-year mission after sustaining rotor damage during its last outing, the space agency said Thursday.

An asteroid known as Bennu will pass within half the distance of the Earth to the Moon in the year 2135 but the probability of an impact with our planet in the coming centuries is very slight, scientists said on Aug. 11.

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With rubble from an asteroid tucked inside, a NASA spacecraft fired its engines and began the long journey back to Earth on May 10, leaving the ancient space rock in its rearview mirror.

The trip home for the robotic prospector, Osiris-Rex, will take two years.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft landed on asteroid Bennu last week, and already it's found water on the minor planet, reported Geek.com

Early data from the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission revealed water locked inside Bennu.

AFP - A Japanese probe landed a new observation robot on an asteroid on Wednesday as it pursues a mission to shed light on the origins of the solar system.

The French-German Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout, or MASCOT, launched from the Hayabusa2 probe, landed safely on Ryugu and was in contact with its team, the lander's official Twitter account said.

A pair of robot rovers have landed on an asteroid and begun a survey, Japan's space agency said Saturday, as it conducts a mission aiming to shed light on the origins of the solar system.

The rover mission marks the world's first moving, robotic observation of an asteroid surface, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Two years after launching from Florida, a NASA spacecraft is closing in on an ancient asteroid, Bennu, for a sample of space dust that could reveal clues to the start of life in the solar system.

The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, has even snapped its first, blurry pic of the cosmic body, which is about the size of a small mountain, about 500 yards (meters) in diameter.

The Moon, long thought to be a dry, inhospitable orb, hosts surprisingly large sub-surface water reserves, which one day may quench the thirst of lunar explorers from Earth, scientists said on July 24.

"We found the signature of the lunar interior water globally using satellite data," Shuai Li, co-author of a study by scientists at Brown University in the United States, said.

The US space agency has released a series of sharp Pluto snapshots, billing them as the best close-ups of the dwarf planet we may see for decades.   

Two icy volcanoes may erupt at Pluto’s south pole, according to images from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft.

The images show two mountains in circular shape and with deep depressions in their centers. One, Wright Mons, is 3 to 5 kilometres high and the other, Piccard Mons, is up to 6 kilometres high.