Live coverage: Irma knocks out power at Kennedy Space Center

Cocooned inside the nose cone of its Falcon 9 rocket booster, the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B spaceplane journeyed from a former space shuttle hangar at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, past the Vehicle Assembly Building and toward launch pad 39A last week ahead of liftoff Thursday.

The Emirates Mars Mission, the first deep space probe from the Arab world, steered into orbit around the Red Planet on Tuesday to cap a 307 million-mile (494 million-kilometer), 205-day interplanetary voyage from Earth and begin a science mission studying the Martian climate. The critical 27-minute Mars Orbit Insertion maneuver began at 10:30 a.m. EST (1530 GMT).

A Russian Soyuz crew ferry craft departed the International Space Station and descended to an on-target landing in Kazakhstan on Saturday with a record-setting NASA astronaut, a veteran Russian cosmonaut and a former U.S. Air Force test pilot on-board. Undocking from the orbiting research complex occurred at 2158 GMT (5:58 p.m. EDT), with touchdown at 0121 GMT (9:21 p.m. EDT).