Q&A with Heino Falcke, principal investigator of the Netherlands-China Low-Frequency Explorer (members only)

Europe’s Sentinel 5P satellite, fitted with a Dutch-developed spectrometer to measure gases in Earth’s atmosphere, was fueled and mated to its Russian Rockot booster over the last month at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a military complex around 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of Moscow.

A decommissioned missile originally built in Russia to deliver nuclear weapons to intercontinental targets in the United States vaulted out of a vertical canister Friday and fired into space with a European satellite to monitor global air pollution.

As soon as next year, NASA plans to launch a CubeSat the size of a microwave oven into a unique elliptical orbit around the moon as a scout for the future lunar Gateway, a mini-space station NASA intends to use as a staging point for crewed lunar landings beginning as soon as 2024.