The European Union wants to bolster its capacity to launch small satellites into space with a new launchpad in Arctic Sweden.

European officials and Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf inaugurated the EU's first mainland orbital launch complex on Friday during a visit to Sweden by members of the European Commission, which is the 27-nation bloc's executive arm.

Europe's largest known deposit of rare earth elements, essential for the manufacturing of electric vehicles, has been discovered in Sweden's far north, boosting Europe's hopes of cutting its dependence on China.

Now you see them, now you don't.

Some frogs found in South and Central America have the rare ability to turn on and off their nearly transparent appearance, researchers reported in the journal Science.

Scientists discovered the oldest known DNA and used it to reveal what life was like 2 million years ago in the northern tip of Greenland. Today, it's a barren Arctic desert, but back then it was a lush landscape of trees and vegetation with an array of animals, even the now extinct mastodon.

"The study opens the door into a past that has basically been lost," said lead author Kurt Kjær, a geologist and glacier expert at the University of Copenhagen.

NASA's Orion capsule reached the moon Monday, whipping around the back side and passing within 80 miles (128 kilometers) on its way to a record-breaking lunar orbit.

The close approach occurred as the crew capsule and its three test dummies were on the far side of the moon. Because of the half-hour communication blackout, flight controllers in Houston did not know if the critical engine firing went well until the capsule emerged from behind the moon, more than 232,000 miles (375,000 kilometers) from Earth.

NASA's new moon rocket blasted off on its debut flight with three test dummies aboard early Wednesday, bringing the U.S. a big step closer to putting astronauts back on the lunar surface for the first time since the end of the Apollo program 50 years ago.

If all goes well during the three-week, make-or-break shakedown flight, the rocket will propel an empty crew capsule into a wide orbit around the moon, and then the capsule will return to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific in December.

Better catch the moon's disappearing act Tuesday — there won't be another like it for three years.

The total lunar eclipse will be visible throughout North America in the predawn hours — the farther west, the better — and across Asia, Australia and the rest of the Pacific after sunset. As an extra treat, Uranus will be visible just a finger's width above the moon, resembling a bright star.

China on Monday launched the third and final module to complete its permanent space station and realize a more than decade-long effort to maintain a constant crewed presence in orbit, as its competition with the U.S. grows increasingly fierce.

Mengtian was blasted into space on Monday afternoon from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on the southern island province of Hainan.

Japan's space agency said a rocket carrying eight satellites failed just after liftoff Wednesday and had to be aborted by a self-destruction command, in the country's first failed rocket launch in nearly 20 years.

The Epsilon-6 rocket was not in the right position to orbit around the Earth and its flight had to be aborted less than seven minutes after takeoff from the Uchinoura Space Center in the southern Japanese prefecture of Kagoshima, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency President Hiroshi Yamakawa told an online news conference.

Ancient Mars may have had an environment capable of harboring an underground world teeming with microscopic organisms, French scientists reported Monday.

But if they existed, these simple life forms would have altered the atmosphere so profoundly that they triggered a Martian Ice Age and snuffed themselves out, the researchers concluded.