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

After an exhaustive investigation, SpaceX engineers have identified the most likely cause of the spectacular explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket during a pre-launch test Sept. 1 that destroyed the booster and its $195 million satellite payload, the company announced Monday.

Nearly two months after NASA’s Juno spacecraft slipped into orbit around Jupiter, the solar-powered probe made a passage 2,600 miles over the giant planet’s colorful banded clouds Saturday, the closest planned encounter during its 20-month exploration of the solar system’s largest world.

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT, and she serves as deputy science director on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which aims to find planets around stars relatively close to the sun, searching for worlds that are ideal follow-up targets for missions like the James Webb Space Telescope.