The German space agency DLR has published new photographs of Mawrth Vallis, a large valley on Mars where there are traces of the ancient presence of liquid water. It’s not a surprise because for years scientists have known the presence of phyllosilicates, clay minerals that can only exist where there was water. A view created using a mosaic of nine imagine taken by ESA’s Mars Express space probe’s HRSC instrument shows Mawrth Vallis in all its glory.
An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a research on two exoplanets of the TRAPPIST-1 system. A group of researchers led by Julien de Wit of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts used the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes to better examine two of the three exoplanets whose discovery was announced in May 2016.
The radio telescope MeerKAT has been activated and the first images of the observations have been released. MeerKAT’s sensitivity was immediately demonstrated because in the observed area 70 galaxies were known but over 1300 have been detected. It’s a great achievement for one of the precursors of the SKA project, the next-generation radio telescope whose activation is scheduled for 2020.
A little while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft was captured by the robotic arm Canadarm2 on the International Space Station. Jeff Williams, assisted by his colleague Kate Rubins, managed the operation then started moving the Dragon to the berthing point at the Harmony module. The cargo spacecraft blasted off last Monday.
