NASA has confirmed that the Juno space probe successfully entered the planet Jupiter’s orbit. In the last hours it conducted a series of maneuvers to reach the correct trajectory and speed to be captured by Jupiter’s gravity. In this period, Juno’s radio signals take about 48 minutes to reach Earth but in the end came the confirmation that the probe is in orbit and its solar panels are properly pointed toward the Sun.
At the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting being held in Nottingham new images of the planet Jupiter were presented, obtained with the infrared VISIR instrument installed on ESO’s VLT. They will help better understand Jupiter’s atmosphere on the occasion of the arrival of NASA’s Juno space probe, scheduled for July 4, 2016.
An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a new research on the famous white spots in the dwarf planet Ceres’ Occator Crater. According to a team led by Maria Cristina De Sanctis, INAF – IAPS, the most abundant mineral is sodium carbonate. It’s a surprising result because that’s a salt that on Earth is abundant in hydrothermal sources and this raises the possibility of the presence of liquid water in Ceres underground.
An article published in the journal “Earth and Planetary Science Letters” describes a research on the possible link between the primordial bombardment of meteorites on Earth and the emergence of life forms. According to a team of researchers directed by Simone Marchi of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, USA, the meteorites that struck Earth during its first billion years of life created a greenhouse effect sufficient to maintain the water in its liquid state, allowing the emergence of life.
An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (PNAS) describes the unexpected discovery of a mineral called tridymite by the Mars Rover Curiosity in Gale Crater on Mars. The analysis of a sample from a rock called Buckskin revealed the presence of tridymite, which on Earth forms as a result of much more intense volcanic activity than that assumed esisted in the past on Mars.
