A few hours ago the astronauts Kate Rubins and Takuya Onishi and the cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft, landed without problems in Kazakhstan. The three of them spent almost four months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on July 8, 2016 as part of Expedition 48.
An article to be published in “The Astrophysical Journal” describes an investigation into the glowing gas clouds around distant quasars. An international team of astronomers led by a group at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich, Switzerland, used the MUSE instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to look at very distant galaxies that are active, of the type called quasar, and discovered that the gas halos that surround them are more common than expected.
Photos taken by ESA’s Mars Express space probe show the Colles Nili region on planet Mars. It’s very ancient geological feature that mark the boundaries between the northern lowlands and the southern highlands with the remains of ancient glaciers around them. They show signs of glaciations that occurred on Mars during the last few hundred million years.
An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” describes the creation of a map of neutral atomic hydrogen in the Milky Way. An international team of scientists put together data collected by two of the largest steerable radio telescopes in the world, the 100-m Max-Planck radio telescope in Effelsberg, Germany and the 64-m CSIRO radio telescope in Parkes, Australia.
The Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft, launched on October 17, has just reached the International Space Station and was captured by Canadarm2 robotic arm. Astronaut Takuya Onishi, assisted by his colleague Kate Rubins, began the slow maneuver to move the Cygnus until it docked with the Station Harmony node after about two hours.
