Live coverage: Russian-American-British crew launches toward space station

A flying drone fitted with counter-rotating blades, on-board autonomy, and a lightweight carbon-fiber fuselage will ride to the Red Planet with NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, officials announced Friday.

A video from SpaceX shows the company’s Crew Dragon capsule plunging toward the Gulf of Mexico, then unfurling a series of parachutes to slow the spaceship carrying two NASA astronauts from 350 mph to a relatively gentle 15 mph for splashdown Sunday.

A first look at the red planet from the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, now in its second month at Mars, gave scientists a sample of the three-dimensional imagery and detailed atmospheric measurements expected over the spacecraft’s five-year mission.