The Dragon space cargo ship starting its CRS-17 mission blasting off atop a Falcon 9 rocket (Image NASA TV)

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A little while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft blasted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in its CRS-17 (Cargo Resupply Service 17) mission, also referred to as SPX-17. After just over ten minutes it separated successfully from the rocket’s last stage and went en route. This is the 17th mission for the Dragon spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station with various cargoes and then return to Earth, again with various cargoes.

Thousands of images from the Hubble Space Telescope provide a wide view of the universe and its history

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A mosaic of images created by combining 7,500 images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope offers a portrait of a part of the universe containing 265,000 galaxies up to 13.3 billion light years away, which means that we see the most distant of them as they were about 500 million years after the Big Bang. The result was named the Hubble Legacy Field and also combines observations taken from various deep field campaigns of the past years at wavelengths ranging from ultraviolets to near infrareds. It also shows the universe that evolves over time.

The OCO satellite blasting off atop a Taurus XL rocket (Photo NASA)

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NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP) announced the conclusions of a long investigation into the failure in the launch of its OCO and Glory satellites in 2009 and 2011. In both cases, the fairing on top of the rockets that protected the satellites didn’t separate and the extra weight caused the the satellites to fall down. The investigations revealed falsifications by the contractor Sapa Profiles, Inc. (SPI) that provided defective materials with false certifications. The investigation involved the US Department of Justice.

The black hole V404 Cygni swings like a spinning top

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An article published in the journal “Nature” reports the observation of a jet of materials emitted by the black hole V404 Cygni which changed orientation in no more than a few hours. A team led by James Miller-Jones of the Curtin University node of the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), Australia, used the Very Long Baseline Array radio telescopes to study the area around the black hole during one of its periodic bursts of considerable intensity. This made it possible to observe for the first time jets of materials changing orientation in a few hours or even minutes.

The position of quasars varies over time

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An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports evidence that the position of quasars is not fixed. A team of astrophysicists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology combined global observations of 40 quasars between 1994 and 2016 for this study. Based on the fact that the apparent positions of quasars change according to the frequency of the radiation used to observe them, the researchers wanted to verify if that effect could vary over time. Quasars are used as cosmic reference points, knowing their exact location can increase their reliability.