The Swiss sun-powered plane Solar Impulse is preparing to take off Wednesday from Rabat to southern Morocco's desert region in its first, and potentially dangerous, flight in a hot and arid climate.

The prototype piloted by Swiss Andre Borschberg plans to take off from Rabat's Sale airport at 0700 GMT and fly south to the city of Ouarzazate where it is expected to land sometime after 2300 GMT Wednesday, or past midnight local time, a statement said Tuesday.

A team of Japanese astronomers using telescopes on Hawaii say they've seen the oldest galaxy, a discovery that's competing with other "earliest galaxy" claims.

The Japanese team calculates its galaxy was formed 12.91 billion light-years ago, and their research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. The scientists with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan used the Subaru and Keck telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea.

NASA's Mars rover, nicknamed Curiosity, is zeroing in on its August landing on the Red Planet and aims to touch down closer than expected to its mountain target, the U.S. space agency said Monday.

With a mission to use its roving toolkit to drill for signs that microbial life may have once existed on Mars, the rover is now set to land about four miles (6.5 kilometers) closer to the mountain than initially planned.

Zoologists have for the first time bred a critically endangered turtle species using an artificial beach, Bangladeshi specialists announced on Monday.

The northern river terrapin, scientific name Batagur baska, is extinct in the wild in Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam, and survives only in tiny numbers in Bangladesh, India, Malaysia and Indonesia.

A NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars is in safe mode after it detected a problem.

The Mars Odyssey, which has been circling the red planet since 2001, noticed something odd with one of its gyroscope-like devices that helps control its orientation and entered standby mode as a precaution Thursday evening.

Parasitic mites linked to the deaths of millions of bee colonies worldwide may have destroyed them by incubating a potent virus and spreading it through the hives, according to a new report.

The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain the mysterious collapse of bee colonies in recent years, a threat to plant life and agriculture, which depend on the honey-making insects for pollination.

China will launch a spacecraft this month to conduct its first manned space docking, state media said Saturday, the latest step in a plan aimed at giving the country a permanent space station by 2020.

The Shenzhou-9 spacecraft and its carrier rocket have already been moved to the launch platform at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China, the Xinhua news agency said, quoting the country's manned space programme.

Russia’s News Agency Novosti assured Friday that the glowing object that appeared in the sky and witnessed by a number of Middle Eastern countries Thursday was the result of Russia’s inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) test.

A mysterious flying and shining object swirling around appeared in the sky and was witnessed in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Armenia, Cyprus and Israel, sparking havoc and astonishment among residents. The object gave off light and was followed by a smoke trail before it disappeared.

NASA killed a new X-ray telescope mission on Thursday, two years before its planned launch.

The Gravity and Extreme Magnetism Small Explorer mission, or GEMS for short, was supposed to blast off in 2014 to study black holes and neutron stars. But external reviews found the project would likely come in considerably over budget.

Environmental protection workers stripped seaweed and barnacles Thursday from a tsunami-wrecked dock washed up on a U.S. beach, to guard against "invasive species" from Japan.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife ordered the action after the 66-foot (20-meter) long concrete and metal structure, the biggest piece of tsunami debris to reach the U.S. West Coast so far, landed on a beach in Oregon.