Q&A with Keith Gendreau, principal investigator of the first X-ray space communications experiment (members only)

Forecasters predict a 60 percent chance of favorable weather for launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to carry more Starlink broadband satellites into orbit.

SpaceX has pushed back the liftoff of a Bulgarian television broadcast satellite on the company’s second previously-flown Falcon 9 rocket until at least Friday, giving ground crews time to replace a valve on the launcher inside a hangar at its Florida launch pad.

In the final months of Europe’s LISA Pathfinder mission, scientists have found an unexpected use for the trailblazing testbed for a future gravitational wave observatory by tracking the tiny dings made by microscopic particles that strike the spacecraft in deep space, exploiting the impacts to learn about the population of dust grains cast off by comets and asteroids across the solar system.