Boeing's crew capsule has rocketed into orbit on a repeat test flight without astronauts, after years of being grounded by flaws that could have doomed the spacecraft.

Only a test dummy was aboard. If the capsule reaches the International Space Station on Friday and everything else goes well, two or three NASA test pilots could strap in by the end of this year or early next for the company's first crew flight.

A total lunar eclipse provided a spectacular celestial show as it unfolded Sunday night into early Monday in the Americas.

The eastern half of North America and all of Central and South America were prime locations to see the eclipse, while partial stages were visible across Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

An international team of astronomers on Thursday unveiled the first image of a supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy -- a cosmic body known as Sagittarius A*.

The image -- produced by a global team of scientists known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration -- is the first, direct visual confirmation of the presence of this invisible object, and comes three years after the very first image of a black hole from a distant galaxy.

A NASA climate research scientist who has spent much of her career explaining how global food production must adapt to a changing climate has been awarded the World Food Prize.

Cynthia Rosenzweig, an agronomist and climatologist, was awarded the $250,000 prize in recognition of her innovative modeling of the impact of climate change on food production. She is a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and serves as adjunct senior research scientist at the Columbia Climate School at Columbia University, both based in New York.

SpaceX brought four astronauts home with a midnight splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday, capping the busiest month yet for Elon Musk's taxi service.

The three U.S. astronauts and one German in the capsule were bobbing off the Florida coast, near Tampa, less than 24 hours after leaving the International Space Station. NASA expected to have them back in Houston later in the morning.

The United Arab Emirates announced Friday it will send an astronaut on a six-month mission to space, as it seeks to become a major player in the industry.

Two of naturalist Charles Darwin's notebooks that were reported stolen from Cambridge University's library have been returned, two decades after they disappeared.

The university said Tuesday that the manuscripts were left in the library inside a pink gift bag, along with a note wishing the librarian a Happy Easter.

A NASA astronaut caught a Russian ride back to Earth on Wednesday after a U.S. record 355 days at the International Space Station, returning with two cosmonauts to a world torn apart by war.

Mark Vande Hei landed in a Soyuz capsule in Kazakhstan alongside the Russian Space Agency's Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, who also spent the past year in space.

To administer this COVID test, Todd Kautz had to lay on his belly in the snow and worm his upper body into the narrow den of a hibernating black bear. Training a light on its snout, Kautz carefully slipped a long cotton swab into the bear's nostrils five times.

For postdoctoral researcher Kautz and a team of other wildlife experts, tracking the coronavirus means freezing temperatures, icy roads, trudging through deep snow and getting uncomfortably close to potentially dangerous wildlife.

Nearly 7,000 Russian scientists, mathematicians and academics had as of Thursday signed an open letter addressed to President Vladimir Putin "strongly" protesting against his war in Ukraine.