On August 25, 2003, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope was launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta II rocket. Its primary mission lasted 2.5 years and its success led to a series of extensions even after it ran out of the liquid helium it had on board that was used to keep some instruments at very low temperatures, which determined the end of their use.
A few hours ago the Aeolus satellite was launched on a Vega rocket from the Kourou base in French Guiana. After almost 55 minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and entered its Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 320 kilometers (about 200 miles), from where it will study winds globally.
An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” describes three specific traces of the presence of water ice on the surface of the Moon. A team led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University used data collected by the Chandrayaan-1 space probe’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper spectrometer to find traces of that ice concentrated in lunar craters at the south pole and spread in an wider area at the north pole.
An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” describes a research on the planetary nebula HuBi 1. Normally that kind of structure marks a phase of a star’s agony but in this case a team of researchers discovered an nebula that’s inside-out. Their conclusion is that the star at its center is going through a sort of rebirth process so we see it while it’s ejecting materials from its surface and creating a shock wave that excites the nebula’s materials.
An article published in the journal “Astrophysical Journal Letters” presents the first results of a pilot program to investigate at the highest possible frequencies for the ALMA radio telescope. A team of researchers used the NGC 6334I star formation region within the Cat’s Paw Nebula as a target for observations in what is called band 10 detecting glycolaldehyde and a compact bipolar outflow containing heavy water and carbon monosulfide from the protostar MM1B.
