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

Fifteen years after accomplishing the first-ever landing on Saturn’s moon Titan, lessons learned from the European Space Agency’s Huygens spacecraft continue aiding designers of future planetary probes, according to new results from a study looking at why the landing craft spun the wrong way as it descended through Titan’s thick, hazy atmosphere.

NASA’s InSight lander will fly from the outer edge of the Martian atmosphere at a speed of more than 12,000 mph to a controlled descent rate of 5 mph just above the red planet’s surface in less than seven minutes.

The sixth and final satellite in the U.S. military’s network of ultra-secure, nuclear-hardened AEHF communications relay stations has arrived in Florida for final preparations for liftoff in March on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, the first of nearly 20 U.S. Space Force missions planned for launch in the first year of operations for the new military service.