July 2015

A comparison of the Kepler-452 system with the solar system and the Kepler-186 system (Image NASA/JPL-CalTech/R. Hurt)

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NASA announced the discovery of the planet Kepler-452b made using the Kepler space telescope. It has an orbit similar to that of the Earth around a star similar to the Sun. This puts it well within the habitable zone of its star system because the star Kepler-452 is just a little bigger and brighter than the Sun so if on the planet Kepler-452b there was an atmosphere similar to the Earth’s, water could exist in liquid form.

Kjell Lindgren, Oleg Kononenko and Kimiya Yui during a press conference (Photo NASA)

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A few hours ago the Soyuz TMA-17M spacecraft blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and after almost exactly six hours reached the International Space Station carrying Kjell Lindgren, Oleg Kononenko and Kimiya Yui. The Soyuz traveled on the fast path normally used. There were a couple of little problems because one of the spacecraft’s solar panels didn’t deploy and after the arrival it took longer than expected to balance the air pressure with the Station but in the end everything went well.

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Yesterday, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced the preliminary results ove the investigation on the mishap to the Falcon 9 rocket which led to its destruction just over two minutes after its June 28, 2015 launch. The culprit appears to be a component of the hardware rocket, one of the support struts of the rocket’s second stage’s liquid oxygen tank that handled a pressure much lower than that it was certified for.

Artistic representation of the Dawn space probe over the dwarf planet Ceres (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA)

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NASA’s Dawn space probe resumed its activities moving down to an altitude of about 3.900 kilometers (about 2,400 miles) over the dwarf planet Ceres in order to proceed with the mapping operations that will provide images at unprecedented resolution. This task was supposed to start at the end of June but due to an anomaly the spacecraft entered the “safe mode” in which it stops its activities awaiting instructions.

Picture of the Sun taken by the STEREO-A space probe (Photo NASA/STEREO)

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NASA’s STEREO-A (Solar TErrestrial Relations Observatory Ahead) space probe has resumed contact with the Earth a few days ago after more than three months and on July 15 sent new photographs of the other side of the Sun from the Earth. Its EUVI (Extreme UltraViolet Imager) instrument was used to take photographs at a wavelength of 171 angstroms, invisible the human eye, then colorized in blue to allow us to appreciate them.