NASA will on Monday attempt a feat humanity has never before accomplished: deliberately smacking a spacecraft into an asteroid to slightly deflect its orbit, in a key test of our ability to stop cosmic objects from devastating life on Earth.

Saudi Arabia said Thursday it will launch a training program with the goal of sending its own astronauts, including a woman, into space next year.

The kingdom is actively promoting science and technology as part of its wide-ranging Vision 2030 plan to overhaul its economy and reduce its dependency on oil.

The United Arab Emirates will launch its first lunar rover in November, the mission manager said Monday.

Hamad Al Marzooqi told The National, a state-linked newspaper, that the "Rashid" rover, named for Dubai's ruling family, would be launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida sometime between Nov. 9 and Nov. 15. The exact date will be announced next month, he said.

NASA will try again Saturday to launch its new moon rocket on a test flight, after engine trouble halted the first countdown this week.

Managers said Tuesday they are changing fueling procedures to deal with the issue. A bad sensor also could be to blame for Monday's scrapped launch, they noted.

Years late and billions over budget, NASA's new moon rocket makes its debut next week in a high-stakes test flight before astronauts get on top.

The 322-foot (98-meter) rocket will attempt to send an empty crew capsule into a far-flung lunar orbit, 50 years after NASA's famed Apollo moonshots.

Stargazers gathered to watch the Perseid meteor shower among ancient statues atop Mount Nemrut in southeastern Turkey.

Hundreds spent the night at the UNESCO World Heritage Site for the annual meteor show that stretches along the orbit of the comet Swift–Tuttle.

A Russian rocket on Tuesday successfully launched an Iranian satellite into orbit.

The Soyuz rocket lifted off as scheduled at 8:52 a.m. Moscow time (0552 GMT) Tuesday from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan.

A malnourished beluga whale that has swum up France's River Seine is no longer progressing but is still alive, environmental group Sea Shepherd said Monday.

Russia will launch an Iranian remote sensing satellite into orbit next Tuesday, the two countries confirmed, two weeks after President Vladimir Putin visited Tehran.

Conjoined twins born in Brazil with a fused head and brain have been separated in what doctors described Monday as the most complex surgery of its kind, which they prepared for using virtual reality.

Arthur and Bernardo Lima were born in 2018 in the state of Roraima in northern Brazil as craniopagus twins, an extremely rare condition in which the siblings are fused at the cranium.