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

Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket will deliver a Cygnus supply ship into orbit Saturday to begin a two-day pursuit of the International Space Station.

If SpaceX is able to dispatch a robotic Dragon capsule to land on the red planet in 2018 on time and successfully, engineers stand to get a lesson on what it will take to eventually send humans there, capturing key data on an untested Mars landing scheme a decade sooner than NASA could do it, space agency officials said this week.

When the first Delta 2 rocket took off on Valentine’s Day 1989, ideas like navigating by smartphone and driving robots on Mars were science fiction. More than 150 launches over the last 30 years helped change all that.