Launch of the Curiosity Mars rover

A Soyuz rocket arrived at a launch pad Tuesday in Kazakhstan for liftoff later this week with a satellite to monitor natural disasters and track forest fires from orbit and 72 secondary payloads from Russia, the United States, Germany, Norway and Japan.

Andrew Driesman is project manager for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, leading a team of engineers and operators in charge of the first mission to fly through the sun’s atmosphere.

An upgraded model of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket fired into orbit early Sunday from Florida’s Space Coast, hoisting a record-setting 7.8-ton communications satellite for Telesat toward its planned perch more than 22,000 miles over the equator.