The UK-built Solar Orbiter spacecraft is making a flyby of Venus, using the planet’s gravitational field to slingshot itself closer to the Sun. The spacecraft, which launched in February, will make its closest approach to the planet just after midday on 27 December. It will fly some 7,500 km from the Venus cloud tops while … Read more
The UK government has confirmed that work will soon begin on a state-of-the-art spacecraft that, for the first time, will track down and map comets in 3D. Thales Alenia Space, the French-Italian aerospace manufacturer with three sites in the UK, has won a contract to design the mothership for the ‘Comet Interceptor’ mission, which will … Read more
The UK-built Solar Orbiter spacecraft is making a flyby of Venus, using the planet’s gravitational field to slingshot itself closer to the Sun. The spacecraft, which launched in February, will make its closest approach to the planet just after midday on 27 December. It will fly some 7,500 km from the Venus cloud tops while … Read more
A British firm has won a European Space Agency (ESA) contract to develop methods to process Moon dust into its constituent elements of oxygen and metal alloys. With plans afoot to build a base on the Moon (possibly powered by nuclear fission) as a jumping-off point for a mission to Mars, work is being undertaken to … Read more