Live coverage: 400th Proton rocket takes off with Russian satellite

The final flight of a Delta 2 rocket, a mainstay of the U.S. launch industry for nearly 30 years, began at 6:02 a.m. PDT (9:02 a.m. EDT; 1302 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with NASA’s ICESat 2 Earth science satellite.

A week after a technical problem on the GSLV Mk.3 rocket thwarted a previous launch attempt, India’s Chandrayaan 2 lunar orbiter, lander and rover climbed into space at 0913 GMT (5:13 a.m. EDT) Monday.

Track the progress of the MASCOT lander, a tiny robot developed in Germany and France, as it explores asteroid Ryugu for a daring mission to hop across the austere world’s boulder-strewn landscape, taking pictures and collecting scientific data along the way. The robotic probe was released from the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft around 0200 GMT Wednesday (10 p.m. EDT Tuesday), and touched down a few minutes later.