The farewell flight of Europe's workhorse Ariane 5 rocket, scheduled for Tuesday, has been postponed for 24 hours due to bad weather, operator Arianespace said.

The 117th and final flight of an Ariane 5 rocket, after 27 years of launches, had been due to take off between 2130 and 2305 GMT from Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.

"Due to unfavorable winds at high altitude above the Guiana Space Centre, Arianespace decided not to start the final phase of the launch preparation operations," the French firm said.

The nearest launch window was now between 2200 and 2305 GMT on Wednesday "if weather conditions are favorable", it added.

The final flight of an Ariane, whose launches have punctuated life in Kourou for nearly three decades, was originally scheduled for June 16.

It was postponed the day before because of problems with pyrotechnical lines in the rocket's booster. The lines have since been replaced.

The final payload on an Ariane 5 is a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite.

The arrival in 1996 of the Ariane 5, which was able to carry a far bigger load than its predecessor Ariane 4, allowed Europe to establish itself in the communication satellite market.

NASA's Parker Solar Probe accomplished a milestone on June 27, 2023—its 16th orbit of the sun. This included a close approach to the sun (known as perihelion) on June 22, 2023, where the spacecraft came within 5.3 million miles of the solar surface while moving at 364,610 miles per hour. The spacecraft emerged from the solar flyby healthy and operating normally.

On Aug. 21, 2023, Parker Solar Probe will swing past Venus for its sixth flyby of the planet. To prepare for a smooth course, the mission team at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) applied a small trajectory correction maneuver on June 7, 2023, the first course correction since March 2022.

This flyby will be the sixth of seven planned flybys of Venus during Parker's primary mission. Parker uses Venus's gravity to tighten its orbit around the sun and set up a future perihelion at just 4.5 million miles from the sun's surface.

On June 25, 2023, a crew of four volunteers entered a simulated Martian habitat, from which they will not emerge for over a year. Their mission: to learn more about the logistics—and the human psychology—of living long-term on another planet, without ever leaving the ground.

The mission is called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) and is the first of three planned simulations between now and 2026, each of which will teach scientists progressively more about what it takes for long-duration human spaceflight to succeed.

CHAPEA is based at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The habitat, called Mars Dune Alpha, is a 1,700 square-foot 3D-printed living space, in which the crew will live, work, exercise, sleep, and perform experiments.

Through the magic of virtual reality, the mission will also involve extra vehicular activities (EVAs), in which crew members will briefly leave their habitat to enter an adjacent enclosure complete with red sand.