Live coverage: New Horizons returns first close-up image

A crescent Pluto stars in pictures captured just after NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s July flyby of the distant dwarf planet, exposing eerie backlit fog banks and glacial flows that scientists say hint at an Earth-like weather cycle.

An Israeli-built spacecraft seeking to become the first privately-developed probe to land on the Moon crashed on descent Thursday, but the mission was widely lauded as a breakthrough for the commercial space industry, and Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu said the country would try again.

A new study reveals similarities and relationships between certain types of chemicals found on 30 different comets, which vary widely in their overall composition compared to one another. The research is part of ongoing investigations into these primordial bodies, which contain material largely unchanged from the solar system’s birth some 4.6 billion years ago.