Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

A late afternoon launch from French Guiana on Wednesday sent two communications satellites into orbit aboard a European Ariane 5 rocket for the Australian and Indian governments, and imagery recorded the powerful booster blasting off into a clear sky over the tropical space base.

Data collected by NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft in its first two years at Mars confirm suspicions that the solar wind is blasting away the planet’s atmosphere and helped transform the world from a warmer, wetter and potentially habitable world into the barren landscape seen today, scientists said.

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.