Outer space

 China unveiled on Tuesday a replica of its first permanently crewed space station, which would replace the international community's orbiting laboratory and symbolises the country's major ambitions beyond Earth.

An undersea quake measuring 4.4 on the Richter scale occurred in the Ionian Sea shortly before 5 a.m. on Monday, the latest in a series of temblors to shake the area.

According to the Geodynamic Institute of the Athens Observatory, the quake occurred at 4.44 a.m. some 70 kilometers southwest of Zakynthos.

Humanity is building powerful rockets like the SpaceX BFR and NASA Space Launch System that can take a payload far away from Earth. However, making the return trip means you have to lug a lot more fuel with you. Efforts to send humans to Mars in the coming decades would be helped if we could make fuel on the red planet.

NASA's Voyager 2 probe, currently on a journey toward interstellar space, has detected an increase in cosmic rays that originate outside our solar system. Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 is a little less than 11 billion miles (about 17.7 billion kilometers) from Earth, or more than 118 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.

Well known German astronaut Alexander Gerst says it is not possible to miss Cyprus from space, and he proved it with a post on social media.

Two American astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut returned to Earth on Thursday wrapping up a six-month mission at the International Space Station as tensions between Washington and Moscow threaten a rare area of cooperation, reports AFP. 

Los Angeles. SpaceX on Thursday announced a new plan to send a tourist around the Moon on its Big Falcon Rocket (BFR), a massive launch vehicle that is being designed to carry people to deep space, AFP reported.

Two years after launching from Florida, a NASA spacecraft is closing in on an ancient asteroid, Bennu, for a sample of space dust that could reveal clues to the start of life in the solar system.

The spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, has even snapped its first, blurry pic of the cosmic body, which is about the size of a small mountain, about 500 yards (meters) in diameter.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Amazon.com (AMZN.O) founder Jeff Bezos is racing to pull his private space company out of start-up mode and move into production amid signals that his firm's heavy rocket set for lift-off in 2020 may slip behind schedule, according to people familiar with the project.

The quake hit 5.6 miles (9km) north-west of Huajuapan de Leon, a city in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, with aftershocks felt in Mexico City.

It had a depth of 34 miles (55 kilometres), according to the US Geological Survey. 

There were no immediate reports of injuries or major damage following the quake, which struck at 8:31am local time (2:31pm UK time).