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

The future of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, running low on hydrazine fuel and now flying around the dwarf planet Ceres without the help of internal pointing wheels, will be decided in the coming weeks by top space agency managers.

The European-Japanese BepiColombo spacecraft flew by Venus late Wednesday, using the planet’s gravity to help redirect the probe toward its ultimate destination of Mercury.

NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft in orbit around Mars maneuvered out of the path of Phobos earlier this week after navigators predicted the spacecraft could run into the Martian moon in the near future, highlighting the challenge of tracking an international fleet of Mars probes set to double in size by 2021.