Snapshots from Atlas 5 launch

A hundred days after the last U.S. commercial resupply of the International Space Station by a Cygnus cargo ship launched atop an Atlas 5 rocket, the booster and freighter duo will do it again Tuesday.

Flight controllers have not heard from NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover since June 10 when an increasingly severe global dust storm blocked out the sun, preventing its solar arrays from recharging the robot’s batteries. But the dust storm is finally abating and engineers are hopeful the long-lived rover will wake up and phone home in the next few weeks.

The privately-funded Israeli Beresheet lunar lander is ready for its historic mission to the moon, aiming to become the first space probe to land on another planetary body without government funding.