Q&A with Rolf de Groot, head of ESA’s robotic exploration office

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.

Europe’s Rosetta mission ended its 12-year mission Friday with a slow-speed belly-flop on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, concluding an interplanetary odyssey that gave humanity a first close-up introduction to a class of objects which has stimulated imaginations for millennia.

Guglielmo Aglietti is the director of the Surrey Space Center in Britain, and he leads a team of scientists and engineers who developed an experiment named RemoveDebris to demonstrate techniques to approach, capture and remove space junk from orbit.