Europe's Rosetta spacecraft, due to switch off Friday after a 12-year odyssey, carried eleven scientific instruments to sniff and photograph a comet from all angles.

Street lighting in Reykjavik will be switched off for an hour Wednesday evening to give residents of the Icelandic capital a better view of the Aurora Borealis, city authorities said.

Most parts of the world's northernmost capital city, including the center, will go dark from 10:00 pm.

Europe's Rosetta spacecraft, due to switch off Friday (Sept 30) after a 12-year odyssey, carried eleven scientific instruments to sniff, smell and photograph a comet from all angles.

Russia on Saturday cancelled a planned manned space launch expected in one week due to "technical reasons," giving no explanation or a new launch date.

Tunisian and British researchers have unearthed Stone Age tools showing humans lived in southern Tunisia nearly 100,000 years ago, they said Thursday.

Britain will stay in the European Space Agency when it leaves the EU, but will have to renegotiate terms to continue participating in certain projects, the ESA said Wednesday.

The Gaia space probe, launched in 2013, has mapped more than a billion stars in the Milky Way, vastly expanding the inventory of known stars in our galaxy, the European Space Agency said Wednesday.

Released to eagerly waiting astronomers around the world, the initial catalogue of 1.15 billion stars is "both the largest and the most accurate full-sky map ever produced," said French astronomer Francois Mignard, a member of the 450-strong Gaia consortium.

A suspected meteor triggered a flash of light and loud explosions in the skies over Cyprus before dawn on Friday, prompting hundreds of calls to police from alarmed residents.

There were no reports of casualties or damage from the phenomenon which was reported across a wide area of the south of the Mediterranean island between midnight and 1 am.

The US space agency on Thursday launched its first mission to collect dust from an asteroid, the kind of cosmic body that may have delivered life-giving materials to Earth billions of years ago.

The unmanned spacecraft, known as OSIRIS-REx, blasted off at 7:05 pm (23:05 GMT) atop an Atlas V rocket in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

As Hermine worked its way up the East Coast, scientists deployed several underwater drones they say will help them better understand what sustains and strengthens hurricanes and tropical storms — and ultimately better protect life and property.

The ocean gliders, as they are called, resemble yellow-winged torpedoes. They were released into the ocean roughly 100 miles offshore at the continental shelf, where at depths of 100 to 300 feet they measured water temperatures, salinity and density before, during and even after the storm.