Live coverage: NASA confirms successful first flight of Mars helicopter

Continuing a series of delays keeping NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer on Earth, NASA announced Tuesday that the satellite’s launch aboard an air-dropped Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket will not occur as scheduled Friday.

A three-man space station crew returned to Earth inside a Russian Soyuz capsule, making a parachute-assisted landing on the remote plains of Kazakhstan after 165 days in orbit.

Northrop Grumman engineers were able to create a new burn plan for the spacecraft after it missed two attempts to perform its “targeted altitude burn.” Capture using the robotic Canadarm2 happened at 3:11 a.m. EDT (0711 UTC) on Tuesday, Aug. 6.