Q&A with Mimi Aung, Mars Helicopter project manager at JPL (members only)

An Israeli-built spacecraft financed through donations from billionaire philanthropists is set to make history Thursday when it tries to become the first privately-funded probe to land on the moon.

The core piece of NASA’s first huge Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket designed to carry astronauts back to the moon fired its main engines more than eight minutes Thursday in southern Mississippi, acing a crucial test before the it ships to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare for liftoff.

Scientists crunching data from NASA’s orbiting TESS planet-hunting observatory have discovered a potentially habitable Earth-sized world circling a star a bit more than 100 light-years from the sun, the first such detection by the TESS mission since its launch in 2018, astronomers announced this week.