Q&A with Rolf de Groot, head of ESA’s robotic exploration office

Emiliano Kargieman leads Satellogic, an Argentinian company founded in 2010 to develop a fleet of small satellites designed to cover the globe with high-resolution mapping images at least once every week, supplying data to customers in the oil and gas, agricultural and forestry, and government sectors.

The European Space Agency’s $1.6 billion Rosetta spacecraft closed in Thursday for a deliberate crash landing on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko early Friday, a slow-motion kamikaze plunge to bring the enormously successful mission to an end after more than two years of unprecedented close-range observations.

Arianespace will fit in a bonus launch of a Soyuz rocket from French Guiana in May to deliver two more European Galileo navigation satellites to orbit, giving the French launch services firm 12 missions on its 2016 manifest, officials said Thursday.