The InSight lander seen by the TGO (Image ESA/Roscosmos/CaSSIS, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)

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ESA has published a series of photos taken by its TGO space probe’s CaSSIS camera, part of the ExoMars mission run together with the Russian space agency Roscosmos. CaSSIS found NASA’s InSight lander on the surface of Mars along with its heat shield, the back shell that protected it during the descent and its parachute. In the course of its mission, CaSSIS also captured extraordinary images of various areas of the red planet showing the great potential to help researchers in their studies.

83 quasars discovered in the early universe

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5 articles published in the journals “The Astrophysical Journal Letters”, “The Astrophysical Journal” (here and here), “The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series” (paiwalled, available here) and “Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan” describe various aspects of the discovery of 83 new quasars dating back to about 13 billion years ago, studied together with 17 other quasars from that era that were already known. A team of researchers led by Yoshiki Matsuoka, now at the Japanese Ehime University, used the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), an instrument mounted on the Subaru Telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) in Hawaii. Those quasars are powered by supermassive black holes and their study will help perfect our cosmological models.

A plan by NASA to bring astronauts back to the Moon in 2028 and to Mars in the following decade

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At a press conference, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine announced the new version of the agency’s plans to bring astronauts back to the Moon and build the Lunar Gateway over the next decade as steps to bring astronauts to Mars during the 2030s. Jim Bridenstine referred to the NASA budget for 2020, which at $21 billion sees an increase granted also to push ahead with these new plans.

Artist's concept of Kepler-62f, an exoplanet orbiting a K-class star (Image NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/Tim Pyle)

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An article published in the “Astrophysical Journal Letters” offers considerations on the possible advantages in the search for biosignatures such as the presence of oxygen and methane on exoplanets orbiting a K-class star, a bit smaller than the Sun. Giada Arney of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center tried to find out what those biosignatures and therefore the signs of the presence of life forms on an exoplanet in that kind of system could look like creating a series of computer simulations to understand where to look for traces of oxygen and methane.