Q&A with Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator on NASA’s Dawn mission

NASA’s Perseverance rover has been closed up inside its protective aeroshell, the structure that will protect the spacecraft when it plunges into the Martian atmosphere, in preparation for launch no earlier than July 20 from Cape Canaveral.

Three days after launching from the Virginia coastline, an Orbital ATK Cygnus supply ship completed its final approach to the International Space Station on Thursday with more than 7,000 pounds of cargo and experiments. The automated freighter was captured by the station’s robotic arm at 5:26 a.m. EDT (0926 GMT).

Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute leads the science team on NASA’s Juno mission, a robotic spacecraft now on final approach to Jupiter designed to probe the giant world’s deep interior and unravel how the solar system’s king planet formed.