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

The launch of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is less than a year away, and the steady pace of work inside the craft’s pristine assembly hall in California is keeping the mission on schedule for liftoff from Cape Canaveral next July, despite growing costs, according to mission managers.

Arianespace and CNES, the French space agency, have released sensational slow-motion video from shielded engineering cameras at the Ariane 5 rocket’s launch pad in French Guiana, showing the launcher’s fiery evening takeoff Feb. 5 with communications satellites for Saudi Arabia and India.

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft closed out a historic 4.9-billion-mile journey Friday with a slow-speed crash into the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the tiny world it has studied for the last two years, capturing some of the mission’s best science data to help unravel the inner workings of the comet. Confirmation of the crash landing arrived on Earth at 1119 GMT (7:19 a.m. EDT).