Science News Roundup: Japan delays H3 rocket's second launch due to bad weather; Private US moon lander set for launch half century after last Apollo lunar mission and more

The company's Nova-C lander, dubbed Odysseus, was due for liftoff shortly before 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Japan delays H3 rocket's second launch due to bad weather The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said on Tuesday it would delay the launch date of the second model of its new H3 flagship rocket from the initially planned Feb. 15 because of forecasts of poor weather.

Following is a summary of current science news briefs.

Private US moon lander set for launch half century after last Apollo lunar mission

A robotic moon lander built by Houston-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines was set for launch early on Wednesday on a NASA mission to conduct the first U.S. lunar touchdown in more than a half century and the first by a privately owned vehicle. The company's Nova-C lander, dubbed Odysseus, was due for liftoff shortly before 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Japan delays H3 rocket's second launch due to bad weather

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said on Tuesday it would delay the launch date of the second model of its new H3 flagship rocket from the initially planned Feb. 15 because of forecasts of poor weather. The new launch date will be announced later. Weather conditions at the launch site, Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, appear to set recover late Friday, JAXA's H3 project manager, Masashi Okada, told a news conference.

The first dinosaur was named 200 years ago. We know so much more now

On Feb. 20, 1824, English naturalist and theologian William Buckland addressed the Geological Society of London, describing an enormous jaw and limb bones unearthed in a slate quarry in the village of Stonesfield near Oxford. Buckland recognized that these fossils belonged to a huge bygone reptile, and gave it a formal scientific name: Megalosaurus, meaning "great lizard." With that, the first dinosaur was officially recognized, though the actual word dinosaur would not be coined until the 1840s.