Q&A with Jamie Bock, principal investigator of NASA’s SPHEREx mission (members only)

The Atlas 5 rocket that will send NASA’s Perseverance rover toward Mars next month aced a countdown rehearsal Monday at Cape Canaveral, helping ensure the United Launch Alliance-built rocket is ready for liftoff during the rover’s 23-day launch window.

Six months into its mission scanning the sky for planets around other stars, NASA’s orbiting TESS observatory has found three previously-undiscovered worlds and hundreds more exoplanet candidates, the first batch of a potential haul of up to 10,000 exoplanet detections over TESS’s planned two-year mission, astronomers announced this week.

Emiliano Kargieman leads Satellogic, an Argentinian company founded in 2010 to develop a fleet of small satellites designed to cover the globe with high-resolution mapping images at least once every week, supplying data to customers in the oil and gas, agricultural and forestry, and government sectors.