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A team led by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin won a coveted $3.4 billion NASA contract to build a spacecraft to fly astronauts to and from the moon's surface, the US space agency said on Friday, a breakthrough for the company two years after it lost out to Elon Musk's SpaceX in another com Pet ition. Blue Origin plans to build its 52-foot (16-meter) tall Blue Moon lander in partnership with Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co, software firm Draper and robotics firm Astrobotic. NASA picked Blue Origin over a rival bid led by Leidos Inc-owned defense contract or Dynetics that also included Northrop Grumman Corp. NASA's decision to go with Bezos and Blue Origin will give it a second option for sending astronauts to the moon under its Artemis program. NASA awarded fellow billionaire Musk's SpaceX $3 billion in 2021 to build its Starship spacecraft to land astronauts on the lunar surface for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972. The first two Starshi...

LOS ANGELES: NASA's InSight lander has ended its mission after more than four years of collecting unique Science on Mars, NASA announced on Wednesday. Mission controllers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California were unable to contact the lander after two consecutive attempts, which led them to conclude the spacecraft's solar-powered batteries had run out of energy - a state engineers refer to as "dead bus." NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts. The last time InSight communicated with Earth was on Dec. 15, according to NASA. InSight was launched in May 2018 to study the deep interior of Mars. It touched down safely on the Red Planet in late November 2018, marking NASA's first Mars landing since the Curiosity rover in 2012. Insight has detected about 1,300 marsquakes, and made countless scientific discoveries in the past more than four years, according to NA...