June 2023

A part of the galaxy NGC 5068 as seen by the James Webb Space Telescope (Image ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-JWST Team)

0

An image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows the core and part of a spiral arm of the galaxy NGC 5068. Two instruments, MIRI and NIRCam, were used to examine this barred spiral galaxy, and the various infrared filters allowed to detect an enormous amount of detail among dusty structures and star-forming areas where there are newborn stars still surrounded by shells of gas and dust.

About 20 million light-years from Earth, the galaxy NGC 5068 belongs to the most common class in the universe, spiral galaxies. The presence of a star formation extending from the core in a shape resembling a bar places it in the subclass of the barred spiral galaxies, which probably make up about two-thirds of their class.

The Dragon 2 cargo spacecraft docked with the International Space Station in its CRS-28 mission (Image NASA TV)

0

A little while ago, SpaceX’s Dragon 2 spacecraft docked with the International Space Station’s Harmony module completing the first part of its CRS-28 mission. Astronaut Woody Hoburg monitored the operation assisted by his fellow astronaut Frank Rubio, but the cargo spacecraft, which blasted off when it was Monday morning in the USA, completed the maneuvers automatically without any problem.

The Dragon 2 spacecraft starts its CRS-28 mission blasting off atop a Falcon 9 rocket (Image NASA TV)

0

A little while ago, the SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft blasted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in its CRS-28 (Cargo Resupply Service 28) mission, also referred to as SPX-28. After almost exactly 12 minutes it separated successfully from the rocket’s last stage and went en route. This is the 28th mission for the Dragon/Dragon 2 spacecraft to resupply the International Space Station with various cargoes and then return to Earth, again with various cargoes.

The Shenzhou 15 capsule after its landing (Photo courtesy Xinhua/Li Zhipeng)

0

A few hours ago, the three Chinese taikonauts of the Shenzhou 15 mission returned to Earth after spending a little more than six months on the Chinese space station Tiangong. The three taikonauts Fei Junlong, Deng Qingming, and Zhang Lu had left the station a few hours earlier to land at a site called Dongfeng in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. A procedure that significantly reduces the time to return to Earth already tested in the past worked again and is becoming routine.

An artist's impression of the exoplanet WASP-18b and the spectrum of thermal emissions detected by the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRISS instrument at wavelengths between 0.85 and 2.8 microns

0

An article published in the journal “Nature” reports the results of an examination of the exoplanet WASP-18b. A team of researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to map the temperatures on the surface of this ultra-hot Jupiter very close to its star. The temperature variations are around 1,000° Kelvin between the hottest area always facing its star and the border area between day and night. Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) also found traces of water vapor that other instruments had missed.