Live coverage: Rosetta’s final hours

Don’t miss riveting slow-motion video of Thursday’s blastoff of four European navigation satellite satellites captured by high-speed cameras at the Ariane 5 rocket’s jungle launch pad, plus dramatic up-close snapshots showing the launcher’s climb into the sky on 2.9 million pounds of ground-shaking thrust.

The first of up to 22 launches on Arianespace’s schedule in 2020 successfully delivered a commercial European broadband satellite and an Indian communications payload to orbit Thursday using a heavy-lift Ariane 5 rocket.

Ground observations of the New Horizons spacecraft’s next target last month revealed the distant object, lurking in the outer solar system more than four billion miles from Earth, might have an unconventional elongated shape, or even consist of two icy bodies orbiting one another in an age-old cosmic dance.