NASA astronauts splash down after journey home aboard SpaceX capsule

U.S. astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who flew to the International Space Station in SpaceX's new Crew Dragon, splashed down in the capsule in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday, August 2 after a two-month voyage that was NASA's first crewed mission from home soil in nine years.

Behnken and Hurley undocked from the station on Saturday and returned home to land in calm waters off Florida's Pensacola coast on schedule at 2:48 p.m. ET following a 21-hour overnight journey aboard Crew Dragon "Endeavor." The successful splashdown, the first of its kind by NASA in 45 years, was a final key test of whether Elon Musk's spacecraft can transport astronauts to and from orbit - a feat no private company has accomplished before.

Spectators in private boats surrounded the splashdown site dozens of miles from shore as SpaceX and NASA recovery teams used a crane to hoist the spacecraft out of the water and onto a boat. At one point, a boat bearing a Trump flag was seen passing by the capsule. "I'm just proud to be a small part of this whole effort to get a company and people to and from the space station," Hurley said, giving a thumbs up as he was wheeled out of the spacecraft on a stretcher - a normal procedure as astronauts adjust to Earth's gravity.

For the return sequence, on-board thrusters and two sets of parachutes worked autonomously to slow the acorn-shaped capsule, bringing Behnken and Hurley's speed of 17,500 miles per hour in orbit down to 350 mph upon atmospheric reentry, and eventually 15 mph at splashdown. During reentry to Earth's atmosphere, the capsule's outer shell withstood temperatures as high as 3,500 Fahrenheit while Behnken and Hurley, wearing SpaceX's white flight suits strapped inside the cabin, experienced 85 Fahrenheit.

The pair were due to undergo medical checks onshore in Pensacola ahead of a flight to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The landmark mission, launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on May 31, marked the first time the U.S. space agency launched humans from American soil since its shuttle program retired in 2011. Since then the United States has relied on Russia's space program to launch its astronauts to the space station."Great to have NASA Astronauts return to Earth after very successful two month mission," President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter. "Thank you to all!"

NASA astronauts riding SpaceX capsule poised for weekend return, weather permitting

The two NASA astronauts who rode to the International Space Station aboard SpaceX's new Crew Dragon are heading home for a Sunday, August 2 splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, capping a two-month voyage in space that marked NASA's first crewed mission from home soil in nine years.

Crew Dragon "Endeavor" decoupled from the orbital station at 7:35 p.m. ET carrying U.S. astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley ahead of a Sunday afternoon splashdown off the coast of Pensacola, Florida - the first procedure of its kind in a privately built space capsule. NASA and SpaceX - monitoring the crew's return from Houston, Texas and SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California - ruled out splashdown options in the Atlantic earlier this week due to Tropical Storm Isaias, a cyclone expected to churn alongside Florida's east coast as a hurricane in the coming days.

Upon a successful splashdown at 2:48 p.m. ET Sunday, the spacecraft will have completed its final key test to prove it can transport astronauts to and from space - a task SpaceX has accomplished dozens of times with its cargo-only capsule but never before with humans aboard.

NASA's new Mars rover launches from Florida to seek signs of past life

Florida, US: NASA's next-generation Mars rover Perseverance blasted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral on Thursday, July 30 atop an Atlas 5 rocket on a $2.4 billion mission to search for traces of potential past life on Earth's planetary neighbour.

The next-generation robotic rover - a car-sized six-wheeled scientific vehicle - also is scheduled to deploy a mini helicopter on Mars and test out equipment for future human missions to the fourth planet from the sun. It is expected to reach Mars next February. It soared into the sky under clear, sunny and warm conditions carried by an Atlas 5 rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance. The launch took place after the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California where its mission engineers were located was rattled by an earthquake.

This marked NASA's ninth journey to the Martian surface.

Perseverance is due to land at the base of an 820-foot-deep (250 meters) crater called Jezero, a former lake from 3.5 billion years ago that scientists suspect could bear evidence of potential past microbial life on Mars.

Scientists have long debated whether Mars - once a much more hospitable place than it is today - ever harbored life. Water is considered a key ingredient for life, and the Mars billions of years ago had lots of it on the surface before the planet became a harsh and desolate outpost.

One of the most complex maneuvers in Perseverance's journey will be what mission engineers call the "seven minutes of terror," when the robot endures extreme heat and speeds during its descent through the Martian atmosphere, deploying a set of supersonic parachutes before igniting mini rocket engines to gently touch down on the planet's surface. Aboard Perseverance is a four-pound (1.8 kg) autonomous helicopter named Ingenuity that is due to test powered flight on Mars for the first time.

This was scheduled as the third launch from Earth to Mars during a busy month of July, following probes sent by the United Arab Emirates and China. The state from which the rover was launched, Florida, is currently one of the hot spots in the United States for the coronavirus pandemic.

A space exploration fan, jazz artist Gregory Porter to sing for NASA launch

Jazz artist Gregory Porter, whose new single "Concorde" is an ode to space exploration, is set to perform on Thursday, July 30 as part of a ceremony marking the launch of NASA's next generation rover that will search for signs of habitable conditions on Mars.

The Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter is scheduled to sing the Ray Charles version of "America The Beautiful" during the U.S. space agency's broadcast of the countdown to the launch of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission at Cape Canaveral in Florida. Porter said he will perform from his living room in Bakersfield, California because of the coronavirus pandemic. His record label said Porter was invited after NASA officials heard "Concorde."

"I wrote the song when I was on an airplane thinking about the idea of ascension, both in the body but in the mind as well. Flying into the stratosphere," Porter told Reuters, adding how "surreal" it was first hearing from the space agency. "Anyway, NASA caught wind of it and they were interested... in partnering in the release of the song and the release of the video."

In the "Concorde" music video, Porter is dressed as an astronaut and appears opposite his young son, Demyan. "When I'm floating around in the galaxy, hanging out with the stars, the sweetest thing to do is to come back down, to drop down to and to be on the soil and to be with your loved ones. And that's what the song is about," Porter said.

Porter said he has been a spaceflight fan since watching NASA's first shuttle launch Colombia in 1981. He remembers as a 9 year old being concerned about how the astronauts would return to Earth and making sure they landed back at Edwards Air Force Base, not far from his childhood home.

Life in lockdown has meant Porter spending more time with his son, but his family has also been personally affected by the coronavirus. The singer said "Concorde" celebrates his late brother, actor Lloyd Porter's life, who sadly passed away in early May from complications due to COVID-19. The song that is featured on new album "All Rise" was launched on New York-based Lloyd's birthday of July 23. Porter said his passing has brought the family, now seven siblings even closer together than before.

"I'm celebrating his life and also his life in my music as well. So, yes, it is an extraordinary, extraordinary time," he said. The robotic rover is intended to study Martian geology and seek signs of ancient microbial life. "All Rise" is released August 28 by Blue Note Records/Universal Music Group.

First images taken by the Solar Orbiter are released by ESA

The European Space Agency and NASA released on Thursday the first images of their joint Sun-observing mission, the Solar Orbiter. The pictures, taken at an approximate distance of 77 million kilometres away from the Sun, revealed omnipresent miniature solar flares, dubbed 'campfires', near the surface of the Sun.

They are the first images taken of the star's surface from a closer distance, and it remains unclear whether the so-called 'campfires' are tiny versions of big flares or whether they are driven by different mechanisms. The Solar Orbiter was launched in February 2020. It carries six remote-sensing instruments, or telescopes, to picture the Sun and its surroundings, and four instruments aimed at monitoring the environment around the spacecraft.

By comparing the data from both sets of instruments, scientists hope to get insights into the generation of solar wind, that is, the stream of charged particles coming from the Sun that influences the entire Solar System. "This is not as close as we will eventually get. Our closest approach will be just over a quarter of the distance between the Sun and Earth and we will reach that in about two years time," promised Daniel Mueller, the ESA's Solar Orbiter Project scientist.

"that is really important to understanding the global magnetic field of the Sun. Those polar regions are important. So we will be able to model better the global magnetic field, how it is interacting with itself and how it is driving space weather. So it is going to be very exciting to see what those poles offer and determine a little more understanding about how the Sun operates and how it drives it heliosphere." solar orbiter project scientist at NASA, Holly R. Gilbert said.