The US space agency said Friday it plans to launch the first-ever helicopter to Mars in 2020, a miniature, unmanned drone-like chopper that could boost our understanding of the Red Planet.

NASA is poised to launch its first lander to Mars since 2012, an unmanned spacecraft called InSight that aims to listen for quakes and unravel the mystery of how rocky planets like Earth form.

In a move that shocked lunar scientists, NASA has cancelled the only robotic vehicle under development to explore the surface of the Moon, despite President Donald Trump's vow to return people there.

Europe's Gaia satellite has produced a "stunning" 3-D map, published Wednesday, of more than a billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, complete with their distance from Earth, their color, and their motion through space.

A car-sized asteroid that exploded in Earth's atmosphere in 2008, raining down diamond-bearing rocks, was a fragment of a Solar System planet that existed billions of years ago, researchers said Tuesday.

A relaxing soak in a hot tub is a time-honoured stress reliever but the advantages are not confined to humans -- with monkeys also benefiting from spa time, researchers in Japan say.

A defunct Chinese space lab disintegrated under intense heat as it hurtled through Earth's atmosphere Monday and plunged to a watery grave in the South Pacific, Chinese officials said.

India's national space agency has lost contact with a satellite days after it was launched into orbit with much fanfare, authorities said Sunday. 

The launch of NASA's next giant space telescope has been delayed until at least May 2020, the US space agency said Tuesday, in the latest setback for the much-anticipated project.

Yuri Gagarin, feted as a Soviet national hero for being the first man in space, was killed in a plane crash 50 years ago but the details of his death remain shrouded in mystery.