Live coverage: ExoMars orbiter steers into orbit around Mars, lander’s fate TBD

Track the progress of the MASCOT lander, a tiny robot developed in Germany and France, as it explores asteroid Ryugu for a daring mission to hop across the austere world’s boulder-strewn landscape, taking pictures and collecting scientific data along the way. The robotic probe was released from the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft around 0200 GMT Wednesday (10 p.m. EDT Tuesday), and touched down a few minutes later.

SpaceX has launched its fourth Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Space Coast in less than 16 days. A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off with 60 more Starlink internet satellites at 2:42 a.m. EDT (0642 GMT) Sunday. The reusable booster, making its 10th flight, landed on a drone ship parked in the Atlantic Ocean.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, nearly halfway through its exploration of the dwarf planet Ceres, has returned its best images yet of a mysterious grouping of bright spots inside a crater on the Texas-sized world, bolstering evidence that Ceres is geologically alive.