Live coverage: Ariane 5 rocket deploys satellites for Australia, 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).

Keith Gendreau, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about a new experiment on the International Space Station to demonstrate X-ray communications in space for the first time.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is set for liftoff from Cape Canaveral on Thursday evening, heading due east over the Atlantic Ocean to deliver the BulgariaSat 1 communications satellite into orbit 35 minutes later.