Q&A with Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator

NASA and United Launch Alliance will offer the first-of-its-kind live webcast in 360 Virtual Reality format of Tuesday morning’s Atlas 5 rocket liftoff from Cape Canaveral with a space station cargo ship.

Watch the pre-launch news conference held Thursday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to preview liftoff of the agency’s TDRS-M data relay satellite aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral.

A NASA spacecraft under construction for launch in 2016 to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu could benefit from an extra load of fuel, allowing an extended stay at the asteroid or a return to Earth a year early.