Snapshots: Soyuz takes off

Follow the key events of the Soyuz rocket’s ascent into orbit from the Guiana Space Center with the first COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation, or CSG 1, radar observation satellite, the European Space Agency’s CHEOPS exoplanet telescope, and three CubeSats.

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft closed out a historic 4.9-billion-mile journey Friday with a slow-speed crash into the nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the tiny world it has studied for the last two years, capturing some of the mission’s best science data to help unravel the inner workings of the comet. Confirmation of the crash landing arrived on Earth at 1119 GMT (7:19 a.m. EDT).

A Russian Progress cargo spacecraft laden with 5,300 pounds of fuel and supplies blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Saturday, riding a Soyuz rocket smoothly into orbit on the first of two resupply launches heading for the International Space Station in the next two days.