Russia and China have unveiled plans for a joint lunar space station, with the Russian space agency Roscosmos saying it has signed an agreement with China’s National Space Administration (CNSA) to develop a “complex of experimental research facilities created on the surface and/or in the orbit of the moon”.

The CNSA, for its part, said the project was “open to all interested countries and international partners” in what experts said would be China’s biggest international space cooperation project to date.

During Parker Solar Probe’s seventh swing by the Sun, culminating in its closest solar approach, or perihelion, on January 172021, celestial geometry posed a special opportunity. The configuration of this particular orbit placed Parker Solar Probe on the same side of the Sun as Earth — meaning that Earth-bound observatories could observe the Sun and its outpouring of solar wind from the same perspective as Parker’s. This comes on the heels of a similar observation campaign in the winter of 2020.

“Along with the global science community, the Parker Solar Probe team can’t wait to see this new data,” said Nour Raouafi, the Parker Solar Probe project scientist from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “Combining it with contributions from observatories around the globe will help us to put Parker observations in a broader context and build a complete picture of the phenomena observed in the solar atmosphere.”

Read on for snapshots from a few missions that observed the Sun and the solar system during Parker Solar Probe’s seventh solar encounter.

Different methods of searching for and finding distant exoplanets give different information about the planets found.

The transit method — where an exoplanets passed in front of its sun and dims the bright sunlight ever so slightly — gives astronomers not only a detection but also its radius or size.

The radial velocity method — where an exoplanet’s gravity causes its host star to “wobble” in a way that can be measured — provides different information about mass and orbit.

Scientists have discovered the most distant radio blast ever known.

The blast came from a quasar that is so far away that its light took 13 billion years to arrive at Earth.

That means that the signals detected by scientists are coming from a time when the universe was just 780 million years old.

NASA’s Artemis program has teamed up with Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency to create the next generation lunar vehicle — an ‘RV for the moon’.

Nearly a half-century after the last Apollo astronaut stepped foot on the moon, NASA is working to send its first woman to the lunar surface. Bill Whitaker reports.