Stats: Delta 4 history and manifest

There’s a new launch being added to Vandenberg Air Force Base’s schedules — another Delta 4 rocket flight for the National Reconnaissance Office.

A three-man crew closed out a 196-day expedition in orbit late Wednesday with a parachute-assisted landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan aboard the Russian Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft. NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, Soyuz commander Anatoly Ivanishin, and flight engineer Ivan Vagner undocked from the International Space Station at 7:32 p.m. EDT (2332 GMT) Wednesday, and the trio landed at 10:54 p.m. EDT (0254 GMT).

A fresh image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft released Tuesday showed the mission’s distant flyby target a billion miles beyond Pluto — nicknamed Ultima Thule — has an elongated shape like that of a peanut shell or a bowling pin, and the prospect of higher-resolution pictures arriving on Earth later in the day had scientists salivating for more.