British actor Kenny Baker, whose long career as a circus performer and comedian took a sharp right turn when he first stepped into the “costume” of R2-D2 in 1977’s Star Wars, dies at the age of 81 due to complications from a respiratory ailment he had suffered for several years. Even though the continuing march of technology meant that Artoo was increasingly played on screen by real remote-control robots, Baker did at least some work inside the droid costume in all seven Star Wars movies that had been released at the time of his death, one of a very few performers to span all three trilogies. He had also appeared in Time Bandits, Flash Gordon, and The Elephant Man, among other TV and film appearances.
Streaming service Amazon Prime Video premieres the 
NASA’s Juno spacecraft completes its first orbit of giant planet Jupiter with an orbit-shaping manever that takes it as close to Jupiter’s cloudtops as 2,600 miles – less than the width of the continental United States – at a speed of over 100,000 miles per hour. Juno obtains the first close-up views of the north and south poles of the planet, revealing a roiling hotbed of storm activity unlike the poles of relatively quiet Saturn. In addition to photos, Juno scans the planet in the infrared and ultraviolet portions of the spectrum. This is scheduled to be Juno’s closest flyby of its entire mission.
Actor and writer Gene Wilder, whose uncanny comic timing made him the star of numerous Mel Brooks comedies as well as the unnerving lead in 1971’s movie adaptation Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory, dies at the age of 83 from complications related to Alzheimer’s Disease. He was a regular part of Brooks’ all-star ensemble, starring in such movies as The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, and co-starred in numerous comedies with Saddles co-star Richard Pryor, including Stir Crazy, Bustin’ Loose, Silver Streak, and See No Evil, Hear No Evil.
With mere weeks left before the European Space Agency’s Rosetta space probe is shut down, the spacecraft’s gradually decreasing orbit allows it to see more fine detail on the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which is now outbound near the orbit of Jupiter. Rosetta’s surface survey finally reveals the fate of the short-lived Philae lander: as ESA engineers suspected in 2014, it came to rest on its side in a crevasse, preventing its batteries from recharging via its solar panels. Originally aimed at the Agilkia region on the larger of Comet 67P’s two “lobes”, Philae’s harpoon anchoring system failed to fire, leaving the lander to bounce helplessly into a ravine on the smaller lobe of the comet, in the Abydos region. It only relayed its surface findings to Rosetta for three days in late 2014. Rosetta would soon join Philae on the surface, with a surface impact scheduled for September 30, 2016.
NASA launches the unmanned OSIRIS-REx (Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer) spacecraft, bound for the asteroid Bennu, a target it won’t reach for two years. Once at Bennu, OSIRIS-REx is intended to orbit the asteroid and then drop down close enough to gather surface samples for return to Earth in a small sample container capable of surviving re-entry through the atmosphere. The samples from Bennu, an asteroid considered a hazard for Earth in the future, will not arrive until September 2023.
China launches its second space station, Tiangong-2, into orbit, ahead of a Shenzhou flight scheduled to carry the station’s first crew in October. Weighing over nine tons, Tiangong-2 is larger than its 
Composer Leonard J. Paul releases his 
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Cable channel Disney XD premieres the 
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Cable channel Disney XD airs the 
Attempting to build a TV franchise onto the 1973 hit movie Westworld (and ignoring a previous attempted TV revival in 1980), HBO premieres the 
The CW airs the 47th episode of The Flash, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ superhero starring Grant Gustin. This is the series’ third season premiere.
The 93rd episode of Arrow, a modern-day reboot of DC Comics’ Green Arrow superhero starring Stephen Amell, airs on the CW. Chad L. Coleman (The Expanse, The Orville) guest stars in the fifth season premiere.
Commercial spaceflight operator Blue Origin, owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, launches its sixth New Shepard flight. To conduct a live test of survivability of the launch abort system, the capsule is commanded to blast free of its booster at Max-Q (the moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure on the combined vehicle). The uncrewed (but human-rated) capsule survives the simulated emergency separation and lands safely, but surprisingly, the single-stage suborbital booster also recovers from the stress of the abort test and lands safely near Blue Origin’s Texas launch facility. This is the fifth and final flight for the second New Shepard reusable capsule, as well as the fifth and final flight for the second New Shepard reusable booster. Flight tests will resume in late 2017 with a new booster and capsule.
The 
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Cable channel Disney XD airs the 
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Warner Bros. releases the direct-to-video animated movie 
The CW airs the 17th episode of Legends Of Tomorrow, starring Arthur Darvill, Brandon Routh, Caity Lotz and Victor Garber. Stephen Amell (Arrow) guest stars in the second season premiere.
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Cable channel Disney XD airs the 
HBO premieres the 
China’s Shenzhou 11 mission is launched, the country’s sixth crewed flight, with a two-man crew consisting of Jing Haipeng (veteran of the Shenzhou 7 and Shenzhou 9 missions) and rookie taikonaut Chen Dong. The vehicle’s destination is the 
The second uprated Soyuz MS vehicle is launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome. The crew of Soyuz MS-02 are International Space Station Expedition 49 crew members Sergey Ryzhikov, Andrei Borisenko, and Shane Kimbrough; these three will become the Expedition 50 crew in November, and will return to Earth in February 2017 aboard the same vehicle.