Q&A with Heino Falcke, principal investigator of the Netherlands-China Low-Frequency Explorer (members only)

Douglas Loverro, a veteran manager with broad experience in national security space operations, has been selected by NASA to lead the agency’s human space flight programs. He takes over at a critical moment as the agency assesses the readiness of new commercial crew ships amid a full-court press to land astronauts on the moon in 2024.

China’s space agency said Friday the country’s first Mars rover safely touched down and began sending data back to Earth, joining the United States as the only two nations to successfully land and operate a spacecraft on the surface of the Red Planet.

As Japanese ground controllers struggle to restore communications with a tumbling space telescope in orbit, the U.S. military’s space surveillance experts have eliminated one cause for the satellite’s troubles.