SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket blasting off in its Space Test Program-2 (STP-2) mission (Photo NASA/Joel Kowsky)

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A few hours ago SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral on a mission involving the launch of various satellites in low and medium Earth orbit. The most powerful rocket in business launched satellites on behalf of NASA, the US Air Force and other entities, incuding CubeSat-class nanosatellites built by students. The mission required four burns for the Falcon Heavy rocket’s upper stage to place them in the various orbits required. The mass of the payloads to be taken into orbit was relatively small – around 3,700 kg – but the second stage needed a lot of fuel to carry out all the maneuvers required in this mission, therefore the initial thrust of the Falcon Heavy was needed.

Gale Crater (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSS)

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NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity has detected the presence of methane on Mars. The agency hasn’t officially announced the event yet but the New York Times published the information obtained. The detection happened on Wednesday, June 19, and was received by NASA the next day. On Friday, Curiosity mission’s scientists discussed the news reorganizing the weekend activities to carry out a follow-up experiment. There’s no evidence that it was produced by biological processes but methane detections on Mars are always of great interest to scientists.

Uranus and its rings seen by ALMA (Image ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO); Edward M. Molter and Imke de Pater))

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An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” reports new observations at infrareds and millimeter wavelengths of the planet Uranus and its rings. Imke de Pater and Edward Molter conducted observations with the ALMA radio telescope while Michael Roman and Leigh Fletcher conducted observations with the VLT. For the first time the temperature of the rings was measured, which turned out to be around 77 Kelvin. These observations also help to better understand the rings’ composition and the differences compared to those of the other planets.

Two Earth-sized planets discovered in the nearby Teegarden's Star system

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An article being published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the discovery of two planets with a mass close to that of the Earth around Teegarden’s Star, a tiny star about 12.5 light years from Earth and therefore one of the closest. A team of researchers led by the German University of Göttingen used the CARMENES instrument mounted on the Spanish 3.6-meter telescope of the Calar Alto Observatory, Spain, to conduct one of the recent research focused on small stars.