Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

A Moroccan military reconnaissance satellite secretly built in France lifted off Tuesday night aboard a European Vega rocket in Kourou, French Guiana. The launch occurred at 8:42 p.m. EST (0142 GMT).

If SpaceX is able to dispatch a robotic Dragon capsule to land on the red planet in 2018 on time and successfully, engineers stand to get a lesson on what it will take to eventually send humans there, capturing key data on an untested Mars landing scheme a decade sooner than NASA could do it, space agency officials said this week.

Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft is preparing to release three hopping robots to land on asteroid Ryugu in the coming month, with tiny instruments scientists hope will explore the airless world’s boulder-strewn landscape and return the first images from the surface of an asteroid.