After its most ambitious Florida test flight to date, NASA’s Morpheus prototype planetary lander will undergo a significant guidance system upgrade at Kennedy Space Center for the installation of Autonomous Landing Hazard Avoidance Technology (ALHAT) sensors, to evaluate the unpiloted vehicle’s ability to steer around boulders or steep crater slopes while in flight to achieve a safe touchdown.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who served as principal investigator for the “Spheres” satellite-software testbed on the International Space Station will advise Administrator Charles Bolden as the agency’s next chief technologist, NASA announced March 13. David Miller, an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics who also directs the institute’s Space Systems Laboratory, will succeed Cornell University professor Mason Peck, who has returned to his teaching post.

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HOUSTON — NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, home to Mission Control for the International Space Station and lead installation for development of the Orion/Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, would be the highest funded agency field center in 2015 and second ranked in number of civil servants, according to additional information on the agency’s budget request released this week. The rankings in both categories fall in line with previous spending and employment trends.

Astronomers are finding that rocky planets in the same size range as Earth are extremely common in the Universe, and a better understanding of what it takes for a planet to be habitable suggests more of them may be able to support life than previously thought, at least in theory. Work is ongoing to develop spacecraft able to test that theory, but for now it remains to be seen whether extraterrestrial life exists and can be detected by humans.

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HOUSTON — NASA’s Human Research Program has selected 10 medical and psychological studies of identical astronaut twins Scott and Mark Kelly as Scott launches in March 2015 on a one-year mission to the International Space Station—the longest spaceflight ever by an American, and a voyage intended to establish a health care baseline for future missions beyond Earth orbit.

New green propulsion technology developed by Swedish Space Corp.’s Ecaps division will help enable Skybox Imaging to sell black-and-white images at resolutions well below 1 meter, positioning the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup to compete with established remote-sensing service providers in the U.S., Europe and Israel.