Live coverage: Mission control loses contact with Indian moon lander

India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle is set for liftoff Friday with five satellites built in Britain to look down on Earth and test a solar sail’s ability to clean up space junk.

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.

After three weeks of intense analysis and troubleshooting, European Space Agency flight controllers have finally succeeded in freeing a jammed boom critical to the Jupiter-bound JUICE probe’s ice-penetrating radar instrument.