HARRISON SCHMITT

NASA's Orion capsule is on its way home from the moon to wrap up a three-week test flight.

A space capsule is hurtling toward the moon for the first time in 50 years.

NASA's new moon rocket makes its debut next week in a high-stakes test flight before astronauts get on top.

(Nicholas Kamm/Pool via AP)WASHINGTON – Arizona Democrat and former astronaut Mark Kelly was sworn into the Senate on Wednesday, narrowing Republican control of the chamber and underscoring his state's shift from red to blue. Kelly, 56, defeated GOP Sen. Martha McSally in last month's election, making her one of only three incumbents to lose. Kelly's Arizona colleague, Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, held the Bible on which he took his oath. In what was one of the country's most expensive Senate races, Kelly raised $89 million. That was second only to the $108 million collected by defeated South Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Jaime Harrison, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Now, the geologist and professor is studying an extensive landslide on Mars, almost 250 miles wide, that formed about 400 million years ago. Schmitt and fellow NASA astronaut Eugene Cernan were the last men to walk on the moon with the Apollo 17 mission. "Flow initiation and mechanisms on the Moon may be very different from Mars; however, comparisons often help geologists to understand comparable features." In the case of the Martian landslide, they believed that a rapid landslide may have occurred due to layers of unstable and fragmented rock beneath the surface. "The impact redistribution of materials in the lunar environment has modified features that ultimately may be found to resemble those documented in the Martian landslide study," Schmitt said.