Q&A with Jamie Bock, principal investigator of NASA’s SPHEREx mission (members only)

A compact exoplanet observatory built in Europe to help astronomers determine the sizes of distant worlds around other stars is scheduled for launch Wednesday from French Guiana aboard a Soyuz rocket.

United Launch Alliance has completed stacking of the major elements of the Atlas 5 rocket assigned to power NASA’s Perseverance rover toward Mars, but the mission’s launch date has been pushed back three days to July 20 after teams repaired an issue with a crane in the Atlas 5’s assembly building.

Astronomers culling imagery from NASA’s Kepler space telescope have found eight new worlds around other stars, raising the number of verified discoveries made by Kepler to more than 1,000 planets.