Live coverage: International Space Station crew lands in Kazakhstan

NASA officials announced Thursday that the agency will move forward with the development of a plutonium-powered robotic quadcopter drone to explore Saturn’s moon Titan, a hazy world covered with dunes and methane lakes that scientists say is reminiscent of the ancient Earth.

NASA has decided to launch the multibillion-dollar Europa Clipper mission — a spacecraft to study a moon of Jupiter with an icy crust covering a liquid water ocean — aboard a commercial heavy-lift rocket in October 2024, and not on the government-owned Space Launch System, officials said Wednesday.

Racing against the clock to meet the Trump administration’s 2024 deadline to land astronauts on the moon, NASA plans to select Northrop Grumman to build a pressurized habitation module derived from the company’s Cygnus cargo craft for living quarters for crews transiting to and from the lunar surface.