Q&A with Scott Bolton, principal investigator on NASA’s Juno mission

Just before settling to a soft crash landing Friday, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft captured close-range images of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, peering into a stadium-sized pit and recording a final dataset to keep scientists busy long after the mission’s end.

United Launch Alliance teams at Cape Canaveral launched an Atlas 5 rocket at 6:13 a.m. EDT (1013 GMT) Thursday with the U.S. Air Force’s fifth Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications satellite. The AEHF 5 satellite will join a network of geostationary relay stations providing secure, jam-resistant video, voice and data links for the U.S. military.

As NASA turns up support for future commercial lunar landers, the space agency last week canceled a mission that would have placed a rover on the moon to survey resources, such as water and helium, that could be used by future human explorers.