2024

Super Heavy 11 and Starship 29 after blasting off (Image courtesy SpaceX)

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SpaceX conducted a new flight test of its Super Heavy rocket and Starship prototypes, launched from its base in Boca Chica, Texas. This is the fourth test involving the entire system of Elon Musk’s company which is supposed to revolutionize space travel with an unprecedented transport capacity and being totally reusable. In this case, however, they are prototypes with the Super Heavy identified as Booster 11 and the Starship identified as Starship 29 or Ship29 or simply S29. Each test leads to new changes to the vehicles’ systems and this happened after the third test conducted on March 14, 2024, as well. The vehicles still don’t meet the safety requirements needed to conduct controlled landings, so plans continue to call for the test to end with the splashdown of both vehicles.

The CST-100 Starliner Calypso spacecraft blasting off atop an Atlas V rocket (Image NASA)

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A little while ago, Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner Calypso spacecraft blasted off atop a ULA Atlas V rocket from the Cape Canaveral base on its Boe-CFT (Boeing Crew Flight Test) mission. After about fifteen minutes, it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and soon it will start the maneuvers it needs to enter orbit and begin tracking the International Space Station.

Animation of the lander and ascent module of the Chang'e-6 mission (Image courtesy Xinhua/Jin Liwang)

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It was early morning in China when the lander and ascent module of the Chinese Chang’e-6 mission successfully completed their Moon landing maneuvers in the South Pole-Aitken basin area. The various modules that make up Chang’e-6 were launched on May 3 and reached lunar orbit in recent days. At that point, a series of maneuvers began to make the orbit circular, the modules that were supposed to land on the Moon separated and everything went well. In that area, direct communications with Earth are impossible, so contact was maintained using the Queqiao-2 satellite as a relay.

The JADES-Gs-z14-0 and JADES-Gs-z14-1 galaxies as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope, also zoomed in the insets

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An article still in its peer-reviewed phase available in preview on the ArXiv server reports the identification of the primordial galaxies JADES-GS-z14-0 and JADES-GS-z14-1, which might be the most distant galaxies discovered so far. A team of researchers used observations conducted with the James Webb Space Telescope as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program to identify hundreds of candidate galaxies dating back to the first 650 million years of universe life. If the estimates made are confirmed, we see JADES-GS-z14-0 as it was about 290 million years after the Big Bang and therefore it would be the oldest known.

The Earth and artistic concepts showing the exoplanet Gliese 12 b in possible versions ranging from no atmosphere to a very thick atmosphere like that of Venus

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Two articles, one published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” and one in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters”, report independent confirmations of the discovery of the exoplanet Gliese 12 b, which has a size very close to the Earth’s but orbits a red dwarf that has a mass and size that are around a quarter of the Sun’s. Two teams of researchers used observations conducted by NASA’s TESS space telescope and confirmations obtained with other instruments to verify the existence of Gliese 12 b. The available information doesn’t reveal if it has an atmosphere but several factors make it a good candidate for a follow-up search with the James Webb Space Telescope.