Q&A with Jonathan Lunine on Enceladus’ prospects for life

Steve Skladanek leads Lockheed Martin’s rocket sales force charged with pushing the Atlas 5 rocket, which has largely been on the sidelines of the commercial launch business in recent years, on the global satellite market.

NASA’s nuclear-powered Perseverance rover is set to arrive at Mars on Thursday with a make-or-break entry, descent, and landing. The rover will execute the arrival autonomously, while engineers and scientists back on Earth will have a nail-biting 11-minute wait for signals to reach home confirming the fate of the $2.7 billion mission.

Anton Zeilinger first proposed the idea for a satellite-based quantum communications experiment to the European Space Agency in 2001, but officials did not forward with the idea. A decade-and-a-half later, the world-renowned physicist’s former student leads a Chinese project aimed at proving quantum teleportation and ultra-secure data links at global scale for the first time.