HOUSTON — NASA’s ongoing studies of a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa include evaluating the use of the agency’s Space Launch System to showcase the heavy lifter’s utility for the robotic exploration of the outer Solar System, according to James Green, the agency’s director of planetary sciences.

The third SpaceX commercial cargo mission to the International Space Station has been delayed until no earlier than March 30 because of payload contamination that may require some new parts to be installed. Originally set for March 16, the Falcon 9 launch was delayed on March 14 to “ensure the highest possible level of mission assurance and allow additional time to resolve remaining open items,” according to a NASA update that quoted SpaceX and referred additional questions to the Hawthorne, Calif., commercial-cargo launch service provider.

ViviSat, a satellite-servicing startup developing life-extension vehicles for end-of-life commercial communications satellites in geostationary orbit, has signed three customers and expects to begin building its specialized spacecraft by the end of 2014.

HOUSTON — U.S. and Russian flight control teams coordinated the first debris avoidance maneuver for the International Space Station in 16 1/2 months late March 16, to avoid a debris fragment from Meteor 2-5, a weather satellite launched by the former Soviet Union in October 1979. The ISS crew — commander Koichi Wakata, of Japan; NASA’s Rick Mastracchio, and Russia’s Mikhail Tyurin — were asleep and in no danger as the debris of unknown dimensions passed at 12 p.m. (Midnight on Sunday, EDT March 16), NASA spokesman Josh Byerly said.

A specialized telescope at the South Pole has detected what scientists say is the first direct evidence of the dramatic expansion of the Universe an instant after the Big Bang, according to scientists who spent three years examining their data before making the announcement in Cambridge, Mass., today. Known at BICEP2, the instrument takes advantage of the still, dry environment at the South Pole to avoid interference that might obscure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, an artifact of the Big Bang that is the oldest light there is.

Will test high-speed broadband satellite in the Indian Ocean

Once NASA begins delivering its astronauts to the International Space Station with commercial crew vehicles, it may also be possible for industrial or academic researchers to spend time there without being selected as astronauts, according to the top space station manager at agency headquarters.

GRoK Technologies LCC, a Houston startup, plans to develop alternatives to the animal-based testing of new human medications, cosmetics and environmental toxins, as well as noninvasive medical therapies, through licensing agreements reached with NASA’s Technology Transfer Program. The accords will be backed by patented technologies in 3-D human tissue growth using rotating wall vessels (RWV), or bioreactors, and time-varying electromagnetic fields.