Video: Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager, previews Ultima Thule flyby (members only)

The problem for NASA and Boeing is that the Starliner’s service module, which houses the helium lines, thrusters and other critical systems, is discarded before re-entry and burns up in the atmosphere. Engineers will not be able to study the hardware after the fact and as a result, they want to collect as much data as possible before NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams head home.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft sailed over Jupiter’s cloud tops early Monday, the fourth time the solar-powered probe has approached the giant planet and collected science data since its arrival last July 4.

Keith Gendreau, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, recently spoke with Spaceflight Now about a new experiment on the International Space Station to demonstrate X-ray communications in space for the first time.