Yutu (Jade Rabbit) was a robotic lunar rover that formed part of the Chinese Chang'e 3 mission to the Moon. It was launched at 17:30 UTC on 1 December 2013, and reached the Moon's surface on 14 December 2013. The mission marks the first soft landing on the Moon since 1976 and the first rover to operate there since the Soviet Lunokhod 2 ceased operations on 11 May 1973.

Europa Clipper is an interplanetary mission in development by NASA comprising an orbiter. Set for a launch in June 2023 the spacecraft is being developed to study the Galilean moon Europa through a series of flybys while in orbit around Jupiter. This mission is a scheduled flight of the Planetary Science Division, designated a Large Strategic Science Mission, and funded under the Planetary Missions Program Office's Solar System Exploration program as its second flight. It is also supported by the new Ocean Worlds Exploration Program. Europa Clipper will perform follow-up studies to those made by the Galileo spacecraft during its eight years in Jupiter orbit, which indicated the existence of a subsurface ocean underneath Europa's ice crust. Plans to send a spacecraft to Europa were initially conceived with projects such as Europa Orbiter and Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, in which a spacecraft would be injected into orbit around Europa. However, due to the adverse effects of radiation from Jupiter's magnetosphere in Europan orbit, it was decided that it would be safer to inject a spacecraft into an elliptical orbit around Jupiter and make 45 close flybys of the moon instead. The mission began as a joint investigation between the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Applied Physics Laboratory.

I work at NASA. We made alien contact yesterday. I can't tell you who I am, and I can't tell you the name of the program, but what I can tell you is that if what they say is true, we're in trouble. Now, we didn't make contact in the way you would think we would. We didn't beam out an episode of The Office towards Andromeda and hear back from alien critics. And we definitely didn't meet them face to face. We found another way to communicate. Something, apparently ancient humans had figured out as well. There are countless dilapidated ancient structures around the world, and some of them, not all, but some, were communication arrays. At least a handful on each continent. I'm sure you'll be able to think of a few after I describe what we did. We've been working on this technology for a while. There has been a long standing theory that sound has a much larger part in the universe than just being random vibrations. That the universe is simply a bunch of vibrations and sound, and if you find a way to manipulate those vibrations properly, you could do things that seem impossible. We proved that yesterday. By creating an extremely, extremely, EXTREMELY, precise echo chamber, and playing certain frequencies into it, at precisely the right volumes, and the exact right timings, we broke some sort of barrier. Nothing really happened, visually at least. We had run countless tests like these with tiny, minute differences, and this one seemed pretty mundane. There was a slight unnatural thrumming, the glass between us and the echo chamber shook in regular intervals as if we were playing a bass heavy song too loudly. The first thing that tipped us off that something was happening was that once we turned the speakers off, the thrumming didn't stop. My three coworkers and I could all feel this thrumming in out chests still, kind of like being next to a very loud drum. We talked for a moment, before we all fell silent. There was something else now. It wasn't a voice. It was, some sort of, intellegent vibration. I can't explain it. It was like a voice was inside my chest, but it wasn't speaking, I could just feel what it was saying. My cohorts and I debated on the exact wording afterwards, but we all agreed on the overall messages each time. Like I said, they weren't really talking, so I'll do my best to phrase it in ways that get across what they said, in the way they "said" it. "Wooooaaaahhh, you guys are back?" Is what I felt in my chest. My colleagues and I stared at each other in utter confusion. One of the spoke up. "Hello?" He asked hesitantly. There was a silence for a moment, before the thrumming spoke back. "I think I have it set right now, say that again?" "Hello?" I repeated back to it in place of the other scientist. "Yep, there it is." He said quickly. "You guys figured it out again! That's crazy!" It exclaimed. This wasn't what I was thinking the first human/alien conversation was going to go. I wasn't even sure that this was first contact at this point though. "Who is this? What is this?" I asked loudly into the open air of our control room. "I'm not sure if I'm allowed to give you details like who we are, but, what this is, is the ultimate form of communication in our universe. Your ancestors figured it out briefly too." With some quick deduction on how it was wording things, I think each of us figured out what we were talking to was alien in origin around the same time. "Where are you from?" I asked. "You have to be close." Hell, with the way we were talking back and forth, they had to be REALLY close. It takes communications to Mars a few minutes to get there, just because that's as fast as light is. If we were talking this quickly back and forth they basically had to be on Earth. "I guess you wouldn't know. We didn't tell your ancestors. We didn't think they'd get it. Let me do some math real quick." It was about a minute before it spoke again. "What you see as your observable universe, thats not the whole universe. Not even close. Multiply that by about 15, and thats about how far we are away. And theres a lot past that." We all looked at each other. It was speaking utter bullshit to us now. That was impossible, we'd never be able to communicate, ever. Physically impossible. We explained that to the chest-voice, and we were met by an equal level of confusion. "Why are you still using light as a yardstick?" It asked incredulously. Suddenly, its voice grew slightly dire. "You're still not advanced enough. You don't even know." "Know what?" One of my friends asked. "You are dead center in the Life Abyss. There is no life on any planet around you, for more than ten of your observable universes around you in any direction. Its a universal mystery how you're even alive." It spoke grimly. Never in my life had I felt smaller, more insignificant and more alone. It continued. "And there is a reason for that." Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/c1wxxu/i_work_at_nasa_we_made_alien_contact_yesterday/

Astrophysicists Szabolcs Marek from Columbia University and Imre Bartos from the University of Florida have identified a collision of 2 neutron stars 4.6 billion years ago, this gave the source part of the Earth's matter. In this one cosmic collision, which occurred close to the Solar System, 0.3% of the heaviest elements on Earth were created, including gold, platinum and uranium.