Photos: America’s 100th EELV blasts off

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said teams were meeting at the Kennedy Space Center on Friday, Dec. 20, to make some of the final determinations about how they will return dozens of samples from the Red Planet.

Five days after launching from Japan, an HTV supply ship arrived Monday at the International Space Station. Capture of the HTV with the station’s robotic arm occurred at 8:13 a.m. EDT (1213 GMT). It’s the last cargo mission to the space station before the arrival of two NASA astronauts on the first crewed U.S. flight to the orbiting research facility since 2011.

Three Chinese military satellites and a civilian data relay payload launched Thursday aboard a Long March 2C rocket.