February 2018

The Jura rock (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

NASA has published photographs of star-shaped and swallowtail rock formations discovered by the Mars Rover Curiosity during the exploration of the area of Gale Crater on Mars called Vera Rubin Ridge. This ridge is offering interesting research cues, in this case gypsum crystals similar to those found in lakes that dried up on Earth, for example in Scotland. This is another clue of the fact that in Gale Crater in ancient times there was a lake.

False-color photo of 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85 (Image NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

NASA has published some photos taken by its New Horizons space probe’s LORRI instrument in December 2017. During the course of its journey that will lead to the object called 2014 MU69’s flyby, New Horizons took photos that beat the record that belonged to Voyager 1 for the farthest photo ever taken from Earth capturing images of the open stellar cluster called Wishing Well and two Kuiper Belt Objects called 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85.

The Falcon Heavy rocketb blasting off (Photo SpaceX)

It was yesterday afternoon in Florida when SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral on its maiden flight. What was announced as the most powerful rocket in activity launched its owner Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster car with a dummy in a space suit nicknamed Starman to insert it into an orbit around the Sun between the Earth’s and Mars’.

The two side boosters, both already used in 2016 in previous missions, were the first to separate and then begin the maneuvers that led them to landing on the platforms set up for that task at Cape Canaveral. After a few seconds the second stage also separated from the core booster, which instead attempted to land on the autonomous spaceport drone ship “Of course I still love you”.

Artist's concept of TRAPPIST-1's planets with the Earth (Image ESO/M. Kornmesser)

Two articles, one published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” and one in the journal “Nature Astronomy”, describe two researches on the TRAPPIST-1 system’s rocky planets. Various telescopes, both space and ground-based, allowed to gather more information on those 7 exoplanets and to improve the measurements of their characteristics. An important result is the estimate of their density, which suggests that some of them are composed up to 5% of water. Spectroscopic detections suggest that at least 3 of them have a compact atmosphere that could allow liquid water to exist on their surface.