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

The launch is a rideshare mission with secondary payloads from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, AstroForge and Epic Aerospace. Liftoff happened Wednesday, Feb. 26, at 7:16 p.m. EST (0016 UTC).

NASA’s Juno spacecraft fine-tuned its orbit around Jupiter this week, helping steer the spinning space probe on a course to dip beneath the giant planet’s radiation belts in late August for the first time with all its science instruments activated.

An armored re-entry capsule carrying pristine specimens from an asteroid streaked into Earth’s atmosphere and parachuted to a landing in the Australian outback Saturday, bringing home extraterrestrial rocks that could hold clues to the origin of life on Earth.