Live coverage: India’s Chandrayaan 2 moon mission blasts off

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft raced past a frozen remnant of the solar system’s birth early New Year’s Day, phoned home to confirm a successful flyby and readied a treasure trove of pictures and other data for transmission back to eager scientists some 4.1 billion miles away.

A European environmental satellite launched Tuesday from Russia’s Plesetsk Cosmodrome to begin a mission of at least seven years measuring the height, color and temperature of the world’s oceans. The Sentinel 3A spacecraft lifted off aboard a Rockot booster at 1757 GMT (12:57 p.m. EST).

Spaceflight Now members can watch a video replay of the static fire test of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket before the fourth launch dedicated to deploying the company’s Starlink broadband network.