Live coverage: Europe’s next environmental sentinel lifts off

A Falcon 9 rocket soars skyward from Cape Canaveral carrying NASA’s TESS observatory on a mission to discover planets around other stars. This was the view from the Kennedy Space Center Press Site.

A Mars orbiter developed by the United Arab Emirates in partnership with U.S. scientists has been mounted on top of a Japanese H-2A rocket and its battery charged for liftoff Tuesday from the Tanegashima Space Center.

ICEYE, a Finnish company that builds and operates a growing fleet of commercial Earth-observing spacecraft, has released the first radar image from a microsatellite with a resolution of less than 1 meter, showcasing advances in tech miniaturization that could aid environmental monitoring, military surveillance, and the exploration of other planets.