Europe's Hera spacecraft has completed a major deep-space maneuver, setting it on course to rendezvous late this year with the asteroid system targeted by NASA's DART mission back in 2022.
We’re getting close to launch day for Dragonfly! Engineers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, have officially kicked off the integration and testing stage for the car-sized, nuclear-powered helicopter bound for Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. According to a press release for APL, after years of designing, tweaking, and testing individual components in laboratories and on computer simulations, various organizations have started testing actual hardware ahead of the mission’s planned 2028 launch.

