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

NASA has narrowed its choices for a new billion-dollar robotic space mission: A plutonium-powered quadcopter to explore the hazy landscape of Saturn’s largest moon Titan, or a probe to scoop up a piece of a comet and return it to Earth.

Guglielmo Aglietti is the director of the Surrey Space Center in Britain, and he leads a team of scientists and engineers who developed an experiment named RemoveDebris to demonstrate techniques to approach, capture and remove space junk from orbit.

Kurt Eberly, who helps lead the Antares rocket program at Orbital ATK, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about the launcher’s return-to-flight with newly-built engines later this year.