The Shenzhou-12 spacecraft, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China's Gobi Desert. The launch was telecast live by the state-run CGTN-TV.
A three-man crew of astronauts will blast off in June for a three-month mission on China's new space station, according to a space official who was the country's first astronaut in orbit.
Automated spacecraft Tianzhou-2 docked with China's new space station carrying fuel and supplies for its future crew.
With rubble from an asteroid tucked inside, a NASA spacecraft fired its engines and began the long journey back to Earth on Monday, leaving the ancient space rock in its rearview mirror.
OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made one final flyby of asteroid Bennu on April 7 to take photos of disturbance left by October's sample collection.
Launched 20 years ago on April 7, the orbiter, which takes its name from Arthur C. Clarke's classic sci-fi novel "2001: A Space Odyssey", was sent to map the composition of the Martian surface, providing a window to the past so scientists could piece together how the planet evolved.
The U.S., for its part, is dispatching a six-wheeled rover the size of a car, named Perseverance, to collect rock samples that will be brought back to Earth for analysis in about a decade.
OSIRIS-REx's primary goal in the Nightingale flyover was to collect the high-resolution imagery required to complete the spacecraft's Natural Feature Tracking image catalog
SpaceX said the Dragon will leave the ISS in about 30 days and return to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, where teams from the company, which is owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, will recover the spacecraft for reuse in future missions.
According to Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the orbit of Chandrayaan-2 was raised to an orbit of 276x142,975 km by firing the spacecraft's onboard motors for 1,041 seconds. All spacecraft parameters were normal.
The goal of the Mars 2020 rover is to look for signs of ancient life. It will be the first spacecraft to collect samples of the Martian surface, caching them in tubes that could be returned to Earth on a future mission, Xinhua news agency reported on Thursday.
"We definitely crashed on the surface of the moon," said Opher Doron of Israel Aerospace Industries.
In theory, this spacecraft could be patterned with nanoscale structures and accelerated by an Earth-based laser light. Without needing to carry fuel, the spacecraft could reach very high, even relativistic speeds and possibly travel to other stars.
An Israeli spacecraft blasted off to the moon in an attempt to make the country's first lunar landing, following a launch on Thursday night by SpaceX.
It has been over a month since engineers have heard from MarCO, which followed NASA's InSight to the Red Planet.
According to mission details published by NASA, New Horizons was scheduled to complete the flyby at around 11 am IST Tuesday.
The spacecraft's full name, Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, has revealed its major tasks. It is expected to return the sample to Earth in September 2023, according to NASA.
With a take-off weight of 2,000 tonnes, the new rocket is expected to have carrying capabilities of 25 tonnes for lunar trajectories, 70 tonnes for low-Earth orbit.
The Mars lander carries a unique instrument that is capable of measuring heat flowing out of the planet. This could shed light on how the Mars' massive mountains, which eclipse Mt Everest here on Earth, first formed, NASA said in a statement.
The spacecraft has travelled approximately 1.8 billion kilometres since its 2016 launch and is scheduled to arrive at Bennu on December 3 this year.
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