Q&A with Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA

The ever-dependable Delta 2 rocket continued its flawless service to NASA and Earth sciences Saturday with the launch of a $916 million environmental probe focused on producing global maps of soil moisture from space.

A clandestine satellite owned by the National Reconnaissance Office has been raised atop its United Launch Alliance Delta 4 rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, for liftoff Jan. 10.

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at MIT, and she serves as deputy science director on NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which aims to find planets around stars relatively close to the sun, searching for worlds that are ideal follow-up targets for missions like the James Webb Space Telescope.