Live coverage: Rosetta’s final hours

Engineers suspect a piece of foreign object debris may be intermittently stalling a motor needed to place the Curiosity Mars rover’s drill bit onto rocks, and the robot’s ground team is assessing the source of the potential contamination.

Wrapping up a busy two days on the lunar surface, a Chinese spacecraft carrying moon soil took off from a makeshift launch pad and fired back into orbit Thursday on the first leg of its journey back to Earth.

Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based company which is already developing a small satellite launcher, has signed an agreement with Israel Aerospace Industries to build lunar landers in the United States and carry NASA science instruments to the moon, officials announced Tuesday.