Photos: Atlas 5 rolls out for launch

Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute leads the science team on NASA’s Juno mission, a robotic spacecraft now on final approach to Jupiter designed to probe the giant world’s deep interior and unravel how the solar system’s king planet formed.

The U.S. Air Force’s reusable Boeing-built X-37B spaceplane returned to Earth early Sunday with a touchdown at NASA’s Shuttle Landing Facility runway at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a few miles away from where it launched 780 days ago atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

United Launch Alliance plans to introduce a new payload fairing design on the next-generation Vulcan rocket, which will fly with composite parts made by Switzerland-based Ruag Space, the company’s chief executive said Wednesday.