A combined use of the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes allowed to conduct a study of dark matter and the results were described in an article published in the journal “Science”. Currently we have no instruments to directly detect dark matter so scientists have to study it indirectly through its effects, in this case on 72 galaxy clusters to study their behavior.
A few hours ago the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and after almost exactly six hours reached the International Space Station carrying astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Mikhail Kornienko. The Soyuz traveled on the fast path normally used.
Generally, the members of the International Space Station crew spend about six months in space, this time there there’s a change because a very special mission lasting one year is starting. Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko will spend a year on the Station to make a series of more in-depth studies on human beings reactions to life in the microgravity of space.
NASA has announced new details on the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which over the next decade aims to test new technologies for use in future manned missions in deep space. However, this mission will be accomplished by a spacecraft that will reach an asteroid, will pick up a boulder and will carry it up to the Moon to place it in a stable orbit. There, astronauts will be able to go to study it to prepare for deep space missions.
NASA has confirmed that the Mars Rover Opportunity’s flash memory has been successfully reformatted so that it doesn’t use a corrupted memory bank. The agency also announced that yesterday Opportunity completed the marathon traveling for 42.195 kilometers (26.219 miles) on Mars. Sure, it took a bit since about two months it celebrated 11 Earth’s years on the red planet but it’s another record for this extraordinary rover.
In the journal “Science” an article was just published that discusses a research conducted by an international team of scientists who found evidence that supernovae can generate a sufficient amount of material that can later create new planets like Earth. This team, led by Ryan Lau of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, studied in particular a supernova that exploded about 10,000 years ago using a special instrument, the airborne telescope SOFIA.
