NRM writes "Having travelled to a distance some 450 kilometres above the Atlantic Ocean and outside of Earth's atmosphere, before detaching from its launch rocket, inflating itself with nitrogen and proceeding to fall through Earth's atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, NASA's test of the latest iteration of inflatable heat shield has been a huge success."
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Engineers expect to lose contact with the private US moon lander Odysseus on Tuesday, cutting short the mission after its sideways touchdown last week.
NASA announced Tuesday that a $32.7 million Capstone spacecraft intended to try out a skewed lunar orbit had lost contact, but agency engineers are confident
