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

Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft dropped an explosive charge on asteroid Ryugu on Thursday night in an audacious attempt to carve a crater on the object, exposing pristine underground rocks to be retrieved by the probe for return to Earth.

Kurt Eberly, who helps lead the Antares rocket program at Orbital ATK, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about the launcher’s return-to-flight with newly-built engines later this year.

NASA is advancing a plan to send a robotic orbiter to Mars in the early 2020s, developing designs with five U.S. satellite makers for a mission to extend high-resolution mapping capabilities, telecommunications relay functions, and potentially act as a waypoint for Martian soil samples destined for return to Earth.