In Pictures: Top Aerospace & Defense Stories, Feb. 09 2023

On Dec. 13, 2022, officials with the New Zealand Defense Force announced the retirement of its remaining P-3 Orion fleet. 

Credit: Petty Officer 1st Class Ryan Seelbach. Key lawmakers already are calling for improvements to air surveillance to better detect high-altitude intrusions over the U.S. such as the recent Chinese surveillance balloon, as senior Pentagon officials have taken to Capitol Hill to defend the plan to wait before shooting it down. 

Credit: JPL. A pair of small satellite NASA missions intended for two variations of first-ever Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) destinations around the Moon—one of them the planned home for the agency-led, human-tended Gateway—continue to encounter challenges that are providing lessons learned.

Credit: Army Research Laboratory. Early-stage technology for teaming air and mobile ground systems on the same mission will be reviewed at an event later in midsummer by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL). 

Credit: NASA. Russia’s Progress MS-22 cargo mission was on a course to dock autonomously with the International Space Station (ISS) following a successful liftoff Feb. 9 atop a Soyuz 2.1a rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

More than two years before a U.S. Air Force F-22 shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4, Zheng Zhenfeng, an employee for Taiwan’s weather service, photographed a similar object floating high above Taipei, Taiwan, on Sept. 26, 2021.