SPACE

Virgin Galactic on Friday announced it had sent three paying customers on an hour-long journey to space and back, racking up its fourth successful flight in as many months.

The mission is called the "moon sniper" because it aims at landing within 100 meters (roughly 330 feet) of its target on the lunar surface. If successful, this could be a game-changer because it is far less than the conventional range of several kilometers.

Days after making history by being the first nation to land on the moon's south pole, India successfully launched the Aditya-L1 mission to the Sun from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on Saturday.

Countries like China, India, Russia and the U.S. are strong contenders in the space race for extraterrestrial resources.

The rover also detected the presence of aluminum, calcium, iron, chromium, titanium, manganese, silicon and oxygen during its research on the lunar surface.

Japan's shot for the moon comes after India's Chandrayaan-3 mission saw a successful soft landing on the moon last week.

The Pragyan rover, weighing about 57 lbs (26kg), traveled to the moon in the belly of the Vikram lander to collect data that will be sent back to Earth for further analysis.

The Chandrayaan-3 mission aims at finding insights into lunar water exploration, which could eventually help in lunar mining and also the discovery of extraterrestrial resources beyond.

A successful soft landing on the lunar south pole would put India in the elite space club of nations that have managed to achieve a soft landing on the moon. The U.S., China, and the former Soviet Union are currently the only members of that club.

Moscow's Luna-25 lander was successfully placed in the Moon's orbit Wednesday, the first such Russian mission in almost 50 years, space agency Roscosmos announced.

The plans for Aditya-L1 include placing the spacecraft in a halo orbit around the Lagrange point 1 (L1)--around 1.5 million km from the Earth--of the Sun-Earth system.

Russia's plan to launch its lunar lander on Friday is the latest in an international push to return to the Moon that includes the world's top powers but also new players.

"There is no danger that they interfere with each other or collide. There is enough space for everyone on the moon," the Russian space agency said.

"This is the third time in succession that ISRO has successfully inserted its spacecraft into the lunar orbit, apart from doing so into the Martian orbit," the space agency noted in a statement.

India's space agency "might decide to send a team out to Australia to look at the location and look at the actual rocket itself ... or they may decide to actually leave it in Australia," Flinders University Associate Professor Alice Gorman said.

"Unless the manpower in R&D sector is raised by at least 10 times, it cannot compete with China in the same sector. It has to raise by a factor of 40-50 to complete with USA. So that's a big vacuum,"

"After failure of Lander on Chandrayaan 2, ISRO has been working incessantly to rectify problems in lander" and the new lander has seen "many improvements," said Sandip K. Chakrabarti, one of India's most notable scientists in the field of astronomy and astrophysics.

The twin-rocket plan includes sending a pair of launch vehicles — one with a moon surface lander and another carrying the astronauts — into lunar orbit, said Zhang Hailian, deputy chief engineer with the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).

The European Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's BepiColombo spacecraft conducted the third of its six flybys of Mercury this week.

NASA shared new "cosmic harmonies" from the James Webb, Spitzer, Chandra and Hubble space telescopes.

An eerie green light is visible near the edge of a massive storm in a citizen scientist-processed image from the Juno spacecraft.