Artwork: ULA Vulcan rocket revealed

NASA has decommissioned a long-lived satellite launched in 2000 that demonstrated remote sensing and surveying instruments and techniques common in today’s orbiting Earth observatories.

A three-minute test flight Tuesday morning over Cape Canaveral will help ensure NASA’s Orion crew capsule — the vehicle being built to carry astronauts back to the moon — can safely escape from a catastrophic failure on launch.

A novel communications experiment developed by NASA and the Naval Research Laboratory has arrived at the International Space Station to prove data can be transmitted in space using X-ray signals, a breakthrough that could have uses in deep space exploration and military technology on Earth.