NEW YORK — A NASA spacecraft will make another close brush with the sun, the second of three planned encounters through the sizzling solar atmosphere.

The Parker Solar Probe made its record-breaking first pass within 3.8 million miles (6 million kilometers) of the scorching sun in December, flying closer than any object sent before.

Plans called for it to attempt that journey again on Saturday. Since the flyby happens out of communication range, the mission team won’t hear back from Parker until Tuesday afternoon.

Parker is the fastest spacecraft built by humans, and is once again set to hit 430,000 mph (690,000 kph) at closest approach.

Launched in 2018 to get a close-up look at the sun, Parker has since flown straight through its crownlike outer atmosphere, or corona.

Scientists hope the data from Parker will help them better understand why the sun’s outer atmosphere is hundreds of times hotter than its surface and what drives the solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles constantly blasting away from the sun.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

KYIV, Ukraine — Russian drones pummeled the Ukrainian Black Sea port city of Odesa, injuring three people and sparking massive fires, officials said Friday, an attack that underlined Moscow’s intention to pursue aerial attacks even as it agreed to temporarily halt strikes on energy facilities.

The strike came shortly before Czech Republic President Peter Pavel visited Odesa early Friday morning and held meetings with the city’s leaders and officials from other southern regions.

“This is another reminder to the whole world: the war continues and Ukraine continues to fight,” the head of the Odesa region, Oleh Kiper, said in a statement.

He reported blazes at at least three locations after the attack late Thursday. “Civilian infrastructure, commercial facilities are on fire, cars damaged,” Kiper said.

Over 70 people and 20 fire engines were involved in extinguishing what the emergency services called “massive fires.”

In another attack, Russian glide bombs injured at least six people, including a child, in the Zaporizhzhia region overnight Thursday to Friday. Regional head Ivan Fedorov published photos showing fire fighters extinguishing flames at multiple damaged residential buildings.

The Ukrainian air force reported that Russia fired 214 exploding drones and decoys in the latest wave of attacks. It said 114 of them were intercepted and another 81 were jammed.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said air defenses shot down 43 Ukrainian drones, 34 of them over the Volgograd region and others over Rostov, Kursk and Belgorod regions. The authorities didn’t report any casualties or significant damage.

Meanwhile, a massive blaze at an oil depot in the Krasnodar region has continued to rage since it was hit by a Ukrainian drone attack late Wednesday.

Ukraine and Russia agreed in principle Wednesday to a limited ceasefire after U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with the countries’ leaders this week, though it remained to be seen what possible targets would be off limits to attack.

After a roughly hourlong call with Trump on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told reporters that “technical” talks in Saudi Arabia this weekend would seek to resolve what types of infrastructure would be protected from attack under the agreement.

The three sides appeared to hold starkly different views about what the deal covered. While the White House said “energy and infrastructure” would be covered, the Kremlin declared that the agreement referred more narrowly to “energy infrastructure.” Zelenskyy said he would also like railways and ports to be protected.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov emphasized Friday that the agreement reached between Trump and Putin referred only to energy facilities, adding that the Russian military is fulfilling Putin’s order to halt such attacks for 30 days.

“The Russian military are currently refraining from strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in accordance with the agreement reached between Russia and the United States,” Peskov said in a conference call with reporters.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — It’s lights out for the first private lunar lander to pull off a fully successful moon mission.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander fell silent over the weekend, wrapping up two weeks of science experiments for NASA. The end came as the sun set at the moon, no longer providing energy for the lander’s solar panels.

“Mission is completed,” Firefly CEO Jason Kim said via X late Sunday night. “But the Ghost still lives on in our hearts and minds for the journey it’s taken us on!”

The lander operated five hours into the lunar night as planned before it died Sunday evening. Photos of the lunar sunset and glow will be released on Tuesday, Kim said.

Blue Ghost launched from Cape Canaveral in January as part of NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program. It landed at the moon’s far northeastern edge on March 2. It carried a drill, vacuum and other science and tech instruments for NASA. Firefly confirmed Monday that all 10 experiments worked.

Late last week, Blue Ghost observed a total solar eclipse from the moon — a total lunar eclipse as seen from Earth.

The Texas-based Firefly became the first private company to land on the moon without falling or crashing after a string of failed missions by other companies over the past few years. Only five countries — the United States, Russia, China, India and Japan — have achieved a successful landing.

A Japanese company’s lunar lander shared the SpaceX rocket ride, but took an even longer route to get to the moon. That lander from ispace is targeting an early June touchdown.

Another Texas company, Intuitive Machines, ended up sideways in a crater near the moon’s south pole earlier this month, dooming the mission. It was the second incomplete mission for Intuitive Machines. Its first lander put the U.S. back on the moon last year for the first time since the Apollo era after a less-than-perfect landing that hampered communications.

Firefly is already working on its next lunar lander and striving for one moon landing a year.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon Sunday, the latest in a string of companies looking to kickstart business on Earth’s celestial neighbor ahead of astronaut missions.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon’s northeastern edge of the near side.

Confirmation of successful touchdown came from the company’s Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, following the action some 225,000 miles (360,000 kilometers) away.

“We’re on the moon,” Mission Control reported, adding the lander was “stable.”

A smooth, upright landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Even countries have faltered, with only five claiming success: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan.

Two other companies’ landers are hot on Blue Ghost’s heels, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.

Blue Ghost — named after a rare U.S. species of fireflies — had its size and shape going for it. The squat four-legged lander stands 6-foot-6 (2 meters) tall and 11 feet (3.5 meters) wide, providing extra stability, according to the company.

Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.

The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.

It carried a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10 feet (3 meters) below the surface. Also on board: a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust — a scourge for NASA’s long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment.

On its way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander continued to stun once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the moon’s gray pockmarked surface. At the same time, an on-board receiver tracked and acquired signals from the U.S. GPS and European Galileo constellations, an encouraging step forward in navigation for future explorers.

The landing set the stage for a fresh crush of visitors angling for a piece of lunar business.

Another lander — a tall and skinny 15-footer (4 meters tall) built and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines — is due to land on the moon Thursday. It’s aiming for the bottom of the moon, just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the south pole. That’s closer to the pole than the company got last year with its first lander, which broke a leg and tipped over.

Despite the tumble, Intuitive Machines’ lander put the U.S. back on the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed out the Apollo program in 1972.

A third lander from the Japanese company ispace is still three months from landing. It shared a rocket ride with Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 15, taking a longer, windier route. Like Intuitive Machines, ispace is also attempting to land on the moon for the second time. Its first lander crashed in 2023.

The moon is littered with wreckage not only from ispace, but dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.

NASA wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realizing some missions will fail, said the space agency’s top science officer Nicky Fox.

Unlike NASA’s successful Apollo moon landings that had billions of dollars behind them and ace astronauts at the helm, private companies operate on a limited budget with robotic craft that must land on their own, said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.

Kim said everything went like clockwork.

“We got some moon dust on our boots,” Kim said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

NEW DELHI — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk during his visit to the U.S. to meet President Donald Trump. The exact nature of the meeting is unclear, although Modi said on X that the two men “discussed various issues, including those he is passionate about such as space, mobility, technology and innovation.”

Musk was recently chosen by Trump to head a new U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

Modi and Musk also met each other in New York in 2023. At that time Musk said he was “confident that Tesla will be in India … as soon as humanly possible.”

Modi and Musk met each other on Thursday during the Indian prime minister’s visit to the U.S. While Musk was accompanied by his three young children, Modi was notably flanked by his top advisers — including External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval.

Later, at a joint press conference with Modi at the White House, Trump said he wasn’t sure why Musk met the Indian prime minister but he assumed Musk “wants to do business in India.”

“I would imagine he met, possibly, because you know he’s running a company,” Trump told reporters.

India’s foreign ministry in a statement said Modi and Musk “discussed strengthening collaboration between Indian and U.S. entities in innovation, space exploration, artificial intelligence and sustainable development” and on “entrepreneurship and good governance.”

Musk, who previously called himself a “fan of Modi,” has long wanted his Starlink satellite internet service to make an entry into the Indian market. Its launch, however, has been delayed due to regulatory challenges, security concerns and opposition from domestic telecom giants like Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio.

Last November, India’s telecoms minister, Jyotiraditya Scindia, said Starlink was yet to comply with security norms, and a license for satellite communications services will be issued only after the company meets all the requirements.

Musk had earlier criticized India’s policy of granting spectrum for satellite services through auctioning. The Indian government later changed the policy and said it will assign satellite spectrum and not auction it.

India’s satellite broadband service market is highly competitive. At least six companies control the market, led by Ambani’s Reliance Jio.

Apart from regulatory roadblocks, Musk’s Starlink has also faced resistance by Reliance Jio, which last year said granting spectrum for satellite services through auctioning is necessary to ensure fair competition.

Musk’s Starlink has at least 6,900 active satellites orbiting Earth that provide low-latency broadband to some 4.6 million people. But if Musk wants to enter the Indian market, Starlink’s high pricing could be a concern.

Mobile data in India is among the cheapest globally, and Ambani’s Jio once gave data for free on its mobile plans. And yet, at least 40% of the country’s more than 1.4 billion people still don’t have access to the internet. Cheap satellite broadband is needed to bridge this gap, particularly in India’s vast remote and mountainous areas.

Musk’s Tesla has also been waiting to get into India, which is one of the world’s largest automobile markets, but has faced hurdles due to high import duties on vehicles brought into the country.

Also, India’s electric vehicle market is still nascent and made up a little more than 2% of total car sales last year. But the government wants to change that and increase the electric vehicle share to 30% by 2030.

India also recently unveiled a new policy that extends concessional tariffs on fully imported electric vehicles made by foreign carmakers who commit to starting local manufacturing.