Video: Highlights of weekend’s Delta 2 launch

China’s space agency released the first pictures from the Zhurong Mars rover rover Wednesday, showing the six-wheel robot ready to drive down a ramp from its landing platform to begin exploring the Red Planet.

The 330-foot-tall mobile service tower is rolled away from the United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket at Cape Canaveral’s pad 37B in the hours before the scheduled liftoff. The 9-million-pound gantry was retracted the length of a football field in preparation for launch of the Air Force’s WGS 9 communications satellite into Earth orbit.

The Biden administration supports continuing NASA’s Artemis program to return astronauts back to the moon, the White House said last week, without stating whether it will back away from the program’s already-in-doubt schedule for a lunar landing by the end of 2024.