Photos: First ULA mission of the year blasts off

Attempts to restore the U.S. Air Force’s newest weather satellite to service have ended, a military spokesperson said Wednesday, cutting a planned five-year mission short less than two years after it launched.

A Proton rocket and Block DM upper stage climbed into space Saturday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan with Spektr-RG, an astronomical observatory with dual X-ray telescopes developed by Russian and German scientists on the hunt for the signature of dark energy.

Ten days after a swingby to receive a gravitational boost toward its asteroid target, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft turned one of its cameras back toward Earth, resolving its bluish home planet hanging in the void of space accompanied by the moon.