Q&A with George Whitesides, CEO of Virgin Galactic

An air-launched rocket built by Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit reached orbit Sunday for the first time, delivering 10 experimental CubeSats for NASA and positioning the company for the start of commercial operations.

Carol Raymond helps lead the Dawn science team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where she oversees research investigating comets and asteroids, including the two objects visited during Dawn’s decade-long mission: Vesta and Ceres.

Jamie Bock, a professor of physics at Caltech, is principal investigator of the SPHEREx astrophysics mission selected by NASA on Feb. 13 as the next medium-class mission in the agency’s line of Explorer probes.