Live coverage: Soyuz crew lands in Kazakhstan

The first images beamed back to Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft after it briefly landed an asteroid buoyed expectations Wednesday that the probe collected enough samples to meet the mission’s minimum requirement for return to Earth.

A NASA space telescope studying X-ray emissions from a nearby galaxy has discovered the brightest pulsar ever detected, the fast-spinning remnant of a collapsed star that shines so intensely it was initially mistaken for a massive black hole, a possible “missing link” between compact stellar-mass black holes and the unseen monsters lurking at the cores of many galaxies.

A Russian Soyuz booster climbed into orbit Monday with a U.S. Army colonel, a veteran Russian cosmonaut and a Canadian flight engineer, kicking off a six-hour chase of the International Space Station.