This artist’s concept obtained December 1, 2014 courtesy of NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI), shows the New Horizons spacecraft as it approaches Pluto and its three moons in summer 2015. The New Horizons spacecraft has come out of hibernation mode in anticipation of rendezvous with Pluto and its moons. The spacecraft will be exploring... 

Concept art showing LADEE over the lunar surface. After spending months in space analyzing the lunar atmosphere, NASA’s latest robotic space explorer crashed and burned onto the moon’s surface. Nothing sinister occurred to cause such a result, though – NASA crashed the vending-machine-sized probe on purpose following what it dubbed a successful mission. In a statement released on Friday, the... 

Mexican interior minister has ordered a major probe into reports of US electronic spying on its current President Enrique Pena Nieto as well as his predecessor Felipe Calderon. Miguel Angel Osorio Chong announced on Tuesday that he had instructed Mexico’s CISEN intelligence agency and federal police to conduct an “exhaustive” investigation into the spying operation and to determine whether... 

Two giant swaths of radiation, known as the Van Allen Belts, surrounding Earth were discovered in 1958. Scientists assumed that there were only two radiation rings around the Earth, but a recently-launched NASA probe has detected a new “temporary” belt. As radiation rings pose serious hazards, the finding have implications for future manned flights. The third belt of radioactive energy particles... 

More than three decades after launching, NASA’s workhorse spacecraft is inching closer to leaving the solar system behind. Currently 11 billion miles away from the sun, Voyager 1 has been exploring the fringes of the solar system since 2004. On Monday, the spacecraft entered a new region, known as the ‘stagnation zone’ – an area close to the very edge of our solar system, affording... 

Russia’s Phobos-Ground interplanetary space station, the connection with which was lost soon after launch on November 9, showed a sign of life. A European station received a signal from the Russian spacecraft on Tuesday night, Gazeta.ru website reports. The ESA’s station in Perth, Australia, made contact with the probe with the link holding from 20:25 GMT to 21:11 GMT, Interfax reports. The... 

Phobos-Grunt probe is doomed to fall Chances of reviving an unresponsive Russian space probe headed for a moon of the Red Planet are now virtually zero. Hopelessly off-course, it is apparently doomed to fall back to Earth, though it is not clear when or where. Fixing the Phobos-Grunt and putting it back on track is now impossible. The probe will not be able to carry out its mission – to land on Phobos... 

The Phobos-Grunt lander is designed to land on the Martian moon Phobos, return soil samples to Earth, study its physicochemical characteristics, collect data on the origin of Mars moons, Mars atmosphere and the interaction between small bodies of the Solar System and solar winds. Constructors of the Fobos-Grunt probe have revealed details of the space mission to Mars, which is to break a 20-year absence... 

NASA's GRAIL-A lunar probe is lifted from its workstand and across the clean room towards the spacecraft adapter ring (L) where GRAIL-B is already secured at the Astrotech Space Operation in Titusville, Florida. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has delayed the launch of its moon probes due to a technical issue with the satellites’ launch vehicle. The agency’s... 

NASA’s Juno robotic probe has started its journey to the heart of Jupiter to gather detailed information about how our solar system is formed. The Atlas 5 rocket carrying the spacecraft blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 12:25 p.m. (1625 GMT) Friday with an almost one hour delay, Reuters reported. “Next stop is Jupiter,” head of the Juno science team Scott Bolton... 

Russia called on the US Thursday to carry out a detailed investigation into allegations contained in leaked Iraq war documents published by WikiLeaks. “The US authorities bear the responsibility to conduct a thorough, independent and transparent investigation of all the reports that have appeared in the media,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. The statement pointed out that Washington...