Live coverage: India’s Chandrayaan 2 moon mission blasts off

An optical reconnaissance satellite for the French military took off atop a Soyuz launcher Tuesday, riding the Russian-made rocket from a tropical spaceport in South America into a 300-mile-high polar orbit to begin a 10-year mission surveying the globe.

NASA has released the first high-resolution aerial color image of the Opportunity rover’s landing site on a sprawling Martian plain, where the airbag-cushioned robot fortuitously rolled into a Eagle Crater in January 2004, putting its scientific instruments face-to-face with a block of sedimentary rock that gave ground teams confirmation Mars was once a warmer, wetter, and habitable planet.

After back-to-back launches last weekend, SpaceX could launch its next Falcon 9 mission as soon as Sunday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a high-power Intelsat communications satellite.