A lunar sample collected during Apollo 17, the final mission to the moon, is now on display in President Biden's Oval Office.

China's Chang'e 5 moon mission successfully returned moon rocks to Earth in December 2020 for the first time in 45 years. It's now headed toward an Earth-sun Lagrange point, with the goal of making sun observations.

A commercial nanosat called SpaceTy Beihangkongshi-1 - launched November 2020 - has successfully used an iodine thruster to change its orbit around Earth. This new thruster might help clear space junk by steering small satellites, at the end of their missions, back into Earth's atmosphere where they'd burn up.

The mission team for NASA's InSight lander called off its attempts to try to dig deeper into Mars with the heat probe known as "the mole." Meanwhile, the rest of the mission gained an extension to December 2022.

FAST's 500-meter (1,640-foot) dish makes it the world's largest single-dish radio observatory. It's expected to open to international observers in 2021.

SpaceX launched 60 more of its Starlink satellites on January 20, 2021. SpaceX ultimately intends to launch tens of thousands of these satellites, to provide global internet access. Here's why astronomers are concerned.

This final test of NASA's SLS megarocket was needed to launch the first uncrewed mission in the Artemis program - Artemis 1 - by the end of 2021. Now the program's schedule is uncertain.

The surface features of brown dwarfs - objects midway in mass between planets and stars - can't be seen. But researchers have found a way to reveal Jupiter-like stripes and bands in the atmosphere of the closest brown dwarf, Luhman 16B.

Here are some of the space missions to keep an eye out for in 2021.

A close look at the "stellar stream" known as Theia 456 finds it contains contains 468 stars born at the same time.