Blog about NASA activities
A little while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft ended its CRS-12 (Cargo Resupply Service 12) mission for NASA splashing down smoothly in the Pacific Ocean a little more than 420 kilometers (about 326 miles) off the coast of California. The Dragon left the International Space Station a few hours before.
NASA has confirmed that it has lost contact with the Cassini space probe, which until the last moment was sending information as it descended into the atmosphere of the planet Saturn and went to its destruction. It’s the end of the Cassini-Huygens mission, a collaboration between NASA, ESA and ASI (Italian Space Agency), one of the most extraordinary space missions in history.
A few hours ago the Soyuz MS-06 spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and after about six hours reached the International Space Station with the three new crew members on board Mark Vande Hei, Joe Acaba and Alexander Misurkin. The Soyuz used the fast track, now commonly used also for this spacecraft’s new version.
An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on the auroras on the planet Jupiter and on the differences with those on Earth. A team of researchers led by Barry Mauk of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory investigated data collected in particular by two instruments aboard NASA’s Juno space probe finding traces of remarkable electrical potentials. They’re aligned with Jupiter’s magnetic field, which accelerates the electrons towards the atmosphere at energies even tenths times higher than those of the Earth’s auroras.
A few hours ago the astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer and the cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-04 spacecraft, that landed without problems in Kazakhstan. Peggy Whitson spent more than 9 months on the International Space Station, where she arrived on November 19, 2016 as part of Expedition 50. Jack Fischer and Fyodor Yurchikhin spent just over 4 months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on April 20 2017 as part of Expedition 51.
