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

Europe’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and Schiaparelli lander arrived at Mars Wednesday, with the orbiter safely captured by Martian gravity after a critical engine firing. The lander’s fate is unknown after mission control lost contact just before touchdown.

Anton Zeilinger first proposed the idea for a satellite-based quantum communications experiment to the European Space Agency in 2001, but officials did not forward with the idea. A decade-and-a-half later, the world-renowned physicist’s former student leads a Chinese project aimed at proving quantum teleportation and ultra-secure data links at global scale for the first time.

NASA announced Monday it will order at least six reusable Orion crew capsules from Lockheed Martin for $4.6 billion to fly astronauts to the vicinity of the moon in the 2020s, and the agency said it plans to purchase hardware for up to 12 Orion vehicles by 2030.