Video: Marc Buie, New Horizons Occultation Team Lead (members only)

Elon Musk’s space transport company — chartered with a long-term goal of colonizing Mars — plans to send the first commercial mission to the red planet as soon as 2018, SpaceX announced Wednesday.

The MASCOT lander released from Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft this week made three hops to different locations on asteroid Ryugu before draining its battery, outliving its design life and sending back data from all four of its instruments, according to German and French officials who developed the surface robot.

Using 21st century images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, scientists have reconstructed the view Neil Armstrong had outside the window of the Apollo 11 lunar module as he guided the spacecraft to a safe landing site on the moon 50 years ago.