2016

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The Japanese space agency JAXA announced the impossibility to restore at least part of its Hitomi space telescope’s functions. After the interruption of the contacts, in the course of April JAXA started an investigation in order to restore Hitomi’s functions although the damages assessed didn’t leave much hope. The attempts were expected to go on for months, instead the situation turned out to be so bad that they were forced to declare the loss of the satellite.

SpaceX Red Dragon spacecraft on Mars' surface (Image courtesy SpaceX. All rights reserved)

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SpaceX announced plans to send its first commercial mission to the planet Mars as early as 2018. In Elon Musk’s company’s plans, the journey will be carried out automatically by the Red Dragon spacecraft, a variant of the Dragon 2. The Red Dragon will be launched atop a Falcon Heavy rocket, the version of SpaceX rocket with two additional boosters. NASA will provide technical support but will not fund the mission.

The dwarf planet Makemake seen by the Hubble Space Telescope with its moon indicated by the arrow (Image NASA, ESA, and A. Parker and M. Buie (SwRI))

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The Hubble Space Telescope has identified a moon of the dwarf planet Makemake. For the moment it was simply designated S/2015 (136472) and nicknamed MK2 and it’s a small moon with an estimated diameter of about 160 kilometers (about 100 miles). The discovery came from observations made in April 2015 using the Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument.

The Sentinel-1B satellite blasting off atop a Soyuz-STA rocket (Photo ESA–Manuel Pedoussaut)

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A few hours ago, the Sentinel-1B satellite, part of the Copernicus / GMES, was launched from the Kourou spaceport, in French Guiana, on a Soyuz-STA/Fregat-M rocket. After about 25 minutes, the satellite regularly separated from the rocket’s last stage and started sending signals. Along with it some nanosatellites of the CubeSat type and the Microscope microsatellite of the French space agency CNES were launched.

The center of the Milky Way seen by the Herschel Space Telescope (ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project. Acknowledgement: G. Li Causi, IAPS/INAF, Italy)

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” presents maps and a catalog of compact sources obtained thanks to a project called Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey (Hi-GAL). The observations made during the ESA Herschel Space Telescope’s mission were used to create maps of the complete Plan Galactic in the far infrared with a level of completeness never seen before.