"This will put us in the right place at the right time," said Dan Johnston, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter project manager.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson says the investigation will “help make the fledgling commercial space industry safer and better.”

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board is expected to adopt findings that the co-pilot’s earlier-than-planned unlocking of the feathering tail mechanism on SpaceShipTwo was the probable cause of the fatal accident that struck the suborbital project on Oct 31, 2014.

A 1932 paper by famed German aerodynamicist Ludwig Prandtl inspires NASA Armstrong work on a tailless flying-wing aircraft that could eventually fly on Mars.

New Horizon mission scientists believe they may have caught Pluto’s atmosphere just as it is beginning to freeze onto the dwarf planet’s surface

Designated Kepler 452b, the planet is probably rocky, 60% larger than Earth and orbits its star – a G2 type like Earth’s Sun – every 385 days. It is the closest Earth-like exoplanet yet found.

"The vehicle is now safely docked to the International Space Station," said Kyle Herring, NASA public affairs officer, positioned in the agency's Mission Control Center.

"The high quality of the EPIC imagery exeeded all of our expectations in resolution," said Adam Szabo, NASA's DSCOVR project scientist.