Unmanned

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has announced that it plans to send the first American unmanned rover to the Moon in July 2021. The miniature four-wheeled robot will ride aboard the Peregrine lander along with 14 other scientific payloads and will carry a miniature art gallery on its journey.

A NASA study of the Titan Submarine Phase I Conceptual Design outlines a possible mission to Saturn's largest moon, Titan, where the unmanned submersible would explore the seas of liquid hydrocarbons at the Titanian poles.

Curious about what's living on the deep sea floor? Well, the Autosub6000 AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) is helping us find out. It's claimed to be far more effective at identifying deep-sea life than the usual approach of scientific trawling.

NASA's Kepler space telescope shows that it still has life in it as its extended mission begins to bear fruit. This week, the space agency announced that the spacecraft detected a new exoplanet, demonstrating that its K2 life extension mission is working.

During Wednesday’s historic landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency (ESA) Philae lander suffered a setback that may cut its mission short.

Last month, ESA announced that the spot where Rosetta’s Philae lander will touch down on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12 is "Site J." However, the space agency didn't think that was zippy enough, so it's now known as "Agilkia," after an island on the Nile.

A secret mission came to a public end as the US Air Force’s top secret X-37B spaceplane landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The unmanned reusable spacecraft touched down on the runway like a conventional aircraft this morning at 9:24 am EDT after a record-breaking 674 days in orbit.

The private effort to recover the 35-year old ISEE-3 spacecraft has ended in apparent failure. The engines failed to fire properly to make the planned course correction and the craft will head back into deep space.

The ISEE-3 Reboot Project is a crowdfunding effort aimed at reactivating the comet-chasing space probe ISEE-3 launched in the 1970s.

Sierra Nevada Corporation carried out the first gliding approach and landing test of their Dream Chaser spacecraft last Saturday. While tests of gliding and landing maneuvers went flawlessly, the left landing gear did not deploy, causing the test spacecraft to flip on landing.

The Keck Institute for Space Studies has outlined a mission to tow an asteroid into lunar orbit by 2025 using ion propulsion.

The NASA Mars rover Curiosity began its mission of exploration this week and as it rolled out, it wrote the place of its birth on the Martian surface in Morse code.