Q&A with Alvaro Gimenez, ESA’s director of science

The first in a planned multi-decade series of European land imaging satellites is fastened on top of a solid-fueled Vega launcher at a French Guiana space base for liftoff Monday, kicking off a mission to track everything from global crop growth to urban sprawl.

NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover has captured a dust devil spinning across the barren floor of Endeavour Crater, an impact basin the robot has explored since 2011 in the mission’s long-lived second act.

Launching from the edge of the Amazon jungle in South America, a Russian-built Soyuz booster fired into orbit Friday night with a Spanish-owned communications satellite built in Germany to test new commercial telecom technologies and provide video, voice and data relay services.