Space does weird things to mice, Beresheet rises again, Falcon heavy lands key contract, and a lot more

Microgravity sends mice amusingly loopy

The woman behind the first ever picture of a black hole 

SpaceX's Falcon heavy super-rocket launches and (mostly) returns to Earth for re-use...

...and gets a role in a key asteroid re-direction mission from NASA.

Possible second planet spotted around nearest star to Earth

Beresheet 2 is already a go....

... and at least one experiment may have survived Beresheet's crash landing, and be waiting on the Moon for NASA.

Gigantic 'flying launchpad' makes it's first flight

Lastly, the new Star Wars trailer lands!

SpaceIL lands on the Moon... really, really hard.... ... but well done to them anyway!

My sympathies and congratulations to the SpaceIL team on the VERY hard landing of their Beresheet spacecraft on the Moon: The main engine cut out towards the end of the landing attempt - the engineers actually got it back online, but Beresheet had lost to much height and gained too much speed. The last recorded signal, as the engine came back, was still 100 meters up... but doing 150 meters a second. Just not enough distance to pull out of the dive. Even so, well done to them! To get so close is an astounding achievement, they still made their country the 4th nation to reach the lunar surface (although it was a private mission), and they really did fight it right to the finish - that was one of the most nailbiting 30 minutes of tweets I've ever read! 

Roll on Beresheet 2? 

Well... there's a good write up of the attempt here and it mentions the possibility. The ship took images (not great quality) before and during the attempt to land, which I've added below: 

 

On an even more successful note, SpaceX has launched it's super sized Falcon Heavy rocket for the second time, putting satellite cargo into orbit. What makes this a bigger achievement than a usual rocket launch is that the rocket, or at least the lower three quarters of it, has been landed afterwards for re-use! There're lots of cool pictures here, I've included a photo montage of the boosters landing seperately below, and I'll get a video up as soon as I can locate one that shows the whole launch end-to-end.

Juno snaps a storm on Jupiter, Israeli Moon missions nears landing, India's space weapon and more...

A cyclonic storm churns through Jupiter's northern hemisphere in this new view from NASA's Juno spacecraft. The swirling cloud formation looks a lot like a hurricane on Earth, with fluffy clouds popping up from the storm's spiral arms. Juno captured this view with its JunoCam imager on Feb. 12, when it was about 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops. — Hanneke Weitering

 

Israeli Moon  mission enters orbit and starts taking photographs.

 

Skylon takes another step towards testing.

SpaceX's 'Starhopper' rocket starts flight tests.

Rocketlabs launches experimental DARPA satellite. 

Indian space weapon test may have endangered the International Space Station.

 

Japanese spacecraft bombs and asteroid. 

Stand by for the first ever 'images' of our galaxy's central black hole.