Time-lapse: The Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon roll to the launch pad (members only)

Twenty-eight thousand students across the United States submitted essays and proposed names for NASA’s newest Mars rover and on Thursday, the agency announced the winner: Perseverance, submitted by Virginia seventh-grader Alexander Mather.

International Space Station astronaut Jeff Williams opened the hatch and floated into the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, experimental habitat today for the first time.

A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows a rare glimpse of a massive star 15,000 light-years away shedding a halo of gas and dust, seeding the cosmos with elements necessary for forming other stars, planets, and the building blocks of life.