HELSINKI — Three Chinese astronauts safely returned to Earth Sept. 17 after completing the first crewed mission aboard the Tianhe space station module.

Commander Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo touched down inside the designated landing zone near Dongfeng in the Gobi Desert, Inner Mongolia, at around 1:34 a.m. Eastern Friday.

The main, 1,200-square-meter parachute opened around 10 kilometers above the ground, with the heat shield jettisoned at around 5.5 kilometers up. The landing occurred within the time and area indicated by airspace closure notices issued earlier in the week. Ground search and rescue teams swiftly located and secured the capsule after touchdown.

The Johnson Space Center scientist was tasked with helping guide the way for mission’s first cored Mars rock sample.

How possible?

Wozniak’s Privateer Space hopes to address the growing orbital debris problem.

Are they being tugged by Planet Nine?

A six-year search of space beyond the orbit of Neptune has netted 461 newly discovered objects.

These objects include four that are more than 230 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. (An astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun, about 93 million miles or 149.6 million kilometers). These extraordinarily distant objects might shed light on Planet Nine, a theoretical, never-observed body that might be hiding in deep space, its gravity affecting the orbits of some of the rocky objects at the solar system’s edge.

The giant planet gets pummeled on a fairly regular basis.

Brazilian observer José Luis Pereira captured a bright flash on the solar system’s largest planet Monday night (Sept. 13), memorializing the fiery death of a space rock high in the Jovian atmosphere.

“No bunker in Greenland is going to save you.”

Roland Emmerich’s ‘Moonfall’ will bring the Moon crashing down to Earth early next year. But could that actually happen in real life? And if so, could we survive?

Space needs a burdensome and expensive deep clean, and Woz’s Privateer apparently wants to take care of the mess.

Japanese astronaut Aki Hoshide of JAXA and French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of ESA installed the mount for a solar array outside of the International Space Station during the first spacewalk to not include an American or Russian crew member.

The results provide a blueprint for finding such systems in the universe’s quieter, emptier regions.

By definition, dwarf galaxies are small and dim, with just a fraction of the stars found in the Milky Way and other galaxies. There are, however, giants among the dwarfs: Ultra-diffuse galaxies, or UDGs, are dwarf systems that contain relatively few stars but are scattered over vast regions. Because they are so diffuse, these systems are difficult to detect, though most have been found tucked within clusters of larger, brighter galaxies.

Now astronomers from MIT.