Space
An autonomous quadcopter could be landing space rovers on the Martian surface in future explorations of the Red Planet.
The European Space Agency's (ESA) "dropship" quadcopter steers itself, and can identify suitable areas to safely lower and land a rover onto the rocky surface of Mars. The so-called "Dropter" project is the latest development from ESA's StarTiger initiative, a program designed to bring together researchers from different fields to focus on one space exploration project at a time. ESA officials unveiled a video of the Dropter concept for Mars rovers this month.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
