Video: New Horizons phone home will confirm health of spacecraft

A Boeing Starliner crew capsule fired off a stand early Monday at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on a mile-high test flight to validate the spacecraft’s emergency escape thrusters. Only two of the ship’s three main parachutes deployed on descent, but Boeing officials do not expect any impacts on the planned launch of an unpiloted Starliner demonstration mission to the International Space Station in December.

A day after revealing mind-boggling ice mountains on Pluto, researchers from NASA’s New Horizons mission on Thursday released a detailed view of its companion Charon, showing a frozen, lightly-cratered world with an intriguing landform scientists have dubbed a ‘mountain in a moat.’

Headed to a relic from the solar system’s formation over four billion years ago, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample return craft was moved to Cape Canaveral’s Complex 41 launch pad today in preparation for liftoff Thursday aboard an Atlas 5 rocket en route to Asteroid Bennu hoping to find the seeds of life.