Snapshots from Atlas 5 launch

A proud “Hubble Hugger,” the final commander of shuttle Discovery, the first person to fly a docking to the International Space Station and one of the first U.S. women to join the astronaut ranks were inducted into the Astronaut Hall of Fame on Saturday.

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.

Taking a major step toward an eventual robotic mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter believed to harbor ice-locked lakes and a vast sub-surface ocean, NASA has selected nine sophisticated instruments for a solar-powered spacecraft designed to find out whether the hidden realm could support life of some sort, agency officials said Tuesday.