Q&A with Scott Bolton, principal investigator on NASA’s Juno mission

The U.S. Air Force has been unable to send commands to the service’s newest weather satellite for nearly a month, and engineers are trying to determine if the spacecraft can be salvaged, officials said last week.

The solar wind, the million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles blasted away from the sun, is slowly but surely stripping away Mars’ atmosphere and likely played a major role in turning the red planet from a habitable world in the distant past into the dry, frozen wasteland seen today, scientists said Thursday.

Towering more than 20 stories tall, the 8-million-pound mobile gantry at the Atlas 5 rocket’s launch pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, was retracted into position late Friday for liftoff of NASA’s InSight mission to Mars.