Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

The European Space Agency’s $1.6 billion Rosetta spacecraft closed in Thursday for a deliberate crash landing on the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko early Friday, a slow-motion kamikaze plunge to bring the enormously successful mission to an end after more than two years of unprecedented close-range observations.

An Israeli-built moon lander aiming to become the first privately-funded mission reach another planetary body rocketed away from Cape Canaveral on Thursday night aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, riding piggyback with an Indonesian communications spacecraft and an experimental U.S. Air Force space surveillance microsatellite.

The UAE’s Hope mission is set for liftoff this week from Japan, taking aim on Mars with a package of scientific instruments designed to probe weather and climate change on the Red Planet.