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

Fresh off its fifth passage through a gap between Saturn’s atmosphere and rings, NASA’s robotic Cassini spacecraft is looping toward a close brush with the planet’s innermost ring next week, when the probe will again use its high-gain antenna as a shield against icy particles that may lie in its path.

Images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft when it flew by an object the size of a large metropolitan area at the frontier of the solar system Jan. 1 have revealed the miniature world has a more flattened shape than the flyby’s initial pictures suggested.

A recap of the successful start to Orbital ATK’s OA-7 resupply mission to the International Space Station is given in this post-launch news conference held at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center following the Atlas 5 rocket’s delivery of the Cygnus cargo ship into space.