Space

After undergoing months of testing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the spacecraft, tasked with carrying out the first U.S. mission to bring back a sample from an asteroid, soon will be enclosed in the nose cone of its launch rocket. Then the countdown to the Sept. 8 liftoff will be underway.

The venue now features new seating, acoustic enhancements and lighting along with an improved layout for its shows. Flandrau Science Center & Planetarium first opened in 1975.

Digital? Who needs digital? That was the thinking back in the 1960s, and years later the UA Space Imagery Center has produced valuable digitized film from the project.

The UA-led mission's spacecraft, the first in the U.S. designed to return a piece of an asteroid to Earth, is now seven weeks from its scheduled launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

For decades, William Hubbard, a UA planetary sciences professor, has worked on getting a spacecraft to Jupiter, closer than any have gone before. When NASA's Juno probe fired its main engines to brake while hurtling toward the biggest and baddest planet in our solar system, it marked the beginning of a journey of discovery for Hubbard and his colleagues who can't wait to unlock Jupiter's secrets.

UA scientist Carl Hergenrother tells the whole story of how the space rock originally known as 1999 RQ36 was chosen — by process of elimination — as the destination for the UA-led OSIRIS-REx sample return mission.

The next stop will be the near-Earth asteroid Bennu for the spacecraft, which will undergo final testing and fueling at the Kennedy Space Center before its September launch.