A satellite the size of a microwave oven successfully broke free from its orbit around Earth on Monday and is headed toward the moon, the latest step in NASA's plan to land astronauts on the lunar surface again.

It's been an unusual journey already for the Capstone satellite. It was launched six days ago from New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula by the company Rocket Lab in one of their small Electron rockets. It will take another four months for the satellite to reach the moon, as it cruises along using minimal energy.

Nearly 20 million lives were saved by COVID-19 vaccines during their first year, but even more deaths could have been prevented if international targets for the shots had been reached, researchers reported Thursday.

On Dec. 8, 2020, a retired shop clerk in England received the first shot in what would become a global vaccination campaign. Over the next 12 months, more than 4.3 billion people around the world lined up for the vaccines.

A study documenting at least 22,000 Israeli overflights in Lebanon’s skies over the past 15 years has revealed the “huge scale and impact of Israeli incursions over Lebanon” as well as the “psychological effect on the country,” British newspaper The Guardian reported on Thursday.

Scientists have discovered the world's largest plant off the Australia coast — a seagrass meadow that has grown by repeatedly cloning itself.

Genetic analysis has revealed that the underwater fields of waving green seagrass are a single organism covering 70 square miles (180 square kilometers) through making copies of itself over 4,500 years.

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has announced the 2022 Kavli Prize Laureates in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience. Eleven scientists from six countries, including Lebanon, were honored for their research that has transformed our understanding of the big, the small and the complex.

Lebanese Huda Zoghbi and three other neuroscientists received the 2022 Kavli Prize Laureate in Neuroscience.

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.