Snapshots from Atlas 5 launch

Officials hailed an action-packed three-minute test flight Tuesday over Cape Canaveral that exercised the Orion spacecraft’s launch abort rocket, a key safety system on the capsule NASA is developing to carry astronauts back to the moon.

A United Launch Atlas 5 rocket is set to launch the U.S. Air Force’s sixth and final Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications satellite from Cape Canaveral. This timeline shows the major mission events planned over a nearly six-hour flight to an optimized geostationary transfer orbit.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft could perform the first close flybys since the early 2000s of three of Jupiter’s largest moons, including Europa, if the space agency grants the mission an extension, Juno’s lead scientist said recently.