A little while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft was captured by the robotic arm Canadarm2 on the International Space Station. Thomas Pesquet, assisted by his colleague Shane Kimbrough, managed the operation then started moving the Dragon to the berthing point at the Harmony module. The cargo spacecraft blasted off last Sunday.
NASA held a press conference to communicate new discoveries in the research on the TRAPPIST-1 star system. These results have also been described in an article published in the journal “Nature”. Using data collected by NASA’s Spitzer Telescope, a team of researchers led by Michaël Gillon of the STAR Institute confirmed the existence of 7 planets in this system, all rocky. Potentially, at least in some region of all those planets there could be liquid water.
A few hours ago the Progress MS-5 spacecraft blasted off atop a Soyuz U rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. After about nine minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and was placed on it route. The cargo spacecraft began its resupply mission to the International Space Station also called Progress 66.
The ALMA radio telescope was used for the first time to measure the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich Effect aiming it at the RX J1347.5-1145 galaxy cluster, located about 5 billion light years from Earth. This effect is due to the photons from the cosmic microwave background radiation that interact with high-energy electrons because of their temperature. Those measurements are useful to obtain information on the location and distribution of dense galactic clusters such as the one studied in this case.
An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” describes a research about the possible formation of large moons following the collision of two planets. Megan Bruk Syal and Amy Barr of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory conducted a series of simulations to understand what factors influence the birth of big moons. This study offers new hope in the search for exomoons orbiting exoplanets studied with NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
