Live coverage: Vega rocket launches with LISA Pathfinder

Just before settling to a soft crash landing Friday, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft captured close-range images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, peering into a stadium-sized pit and recording a final dataset to keep scientists busy long after the mission’s end.

A European supply freighter is set to undock from the International Space Station on Saturday, heading for a destructive dive into Earth’s atmosphere about 30 hours later after a power system failure forced the cancellation of an experiment to observe the dynamics of the re-entry of a large spacecraft.

A camera mounted on-board the upper stage of a Soyuz rocket launched Wednesday from South America captured dazzling views of the first six OneWeb broadband satellites separating from their carrier module more than 600 miles (about 1,000 kilometers) above Earth.