The Most Amazing Space Stories This Week!

          What appears to be an "eye" in the night sky is actually a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket separating from its payload

China's lunar rover bites the dust, a NASA satellite captured "rain" on the sun and an artifact from the Apollo 11 mission lands at the center of two lawsuits. These are our picks for the best space stories of the week.

Another one bites the (moon) dust

     China's Yutu moon rover, photographed on the lunar surface by the Chang'e 3 lander on Dec. 16, 2013.      After 31 months on the moon, Yutu has ceased operations in early August 2016.

China's Yutu lunar rover touched down on the moon in December 2013, becoming the first robot to move around on the lunar surface since the Soviet Union's Lunokhod 2 rover in the early 1970s. After a record-setting 31 months in action, the little moon bot has ceased operations, Chinese officials announced earlier this month. [Full Story: China's Yutu Moon Rover Bites the Lunar Dust].

It's raining on the sun

An amazing solar phenomena known as "plasma rain" was captured on video by NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS). The "rain" occurs when superheated and electrically charged gas pops up off the surface of the sun, and streams back down. [Full Story: Solar Flare Unleashes Violent Plasma 'Rain' (Video)]

Lawsuits over a lunar artifact

The small white pouch used by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong to collect the first-ever rock samples from the surface of the moon is at the center of two lawsuits over who should own the historic item. [Full Story: Apollo 11 Lunar Sample Bag Lands at Center of Lawsuits]

A very puzzling star

Observations of a distant sun known as "Tabby's Star" continue to puzzle scientists. While it's unlikely that there is an alien megastructure orbiting this far-away world (as was previously theorized), recent observations show that the star's brightness appears to be decreasing. [Full Story: Kepler's 'Alien Megastructure' Star Just Got Weirder]

Another Earth?

Among the thousands of planets that have been discovered orbiting stars other than the sun, a new list highlights twenty worlds that seem to be most likely to resemble Earth. The list, assembled by an international group of astronomers, consists of 20 planets identified by the Kepler Space Telescope. [Full Story:Scientists Identify 20 Alien Worlds Most Likely to Be Like Earth]