A little while ago, the HTV-X1 spacecraft was captured by the International Space Station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm, operated by astronaut Kimiya Yui. The Japanese space cargo ship, which blasted off when it was Sunday in Japan, carries a huge amount of supplies and experiments. After its capture, they started the slow moving of the HTV-X1 to its berthing location on the Harmony module, where it will be safely installed.
A few hours ago, the HTV-X1 spacecraft blasted off atop a H3-24W rocket from the Tanegashima space center in Japan for a resupply mission to the International Space Station. A little more than 14 minutes after the launch, the cargo spacecraft separated regularly from the rocket’s last stage, entered its preliminary orbit, and deployed its solar panels and navigation antennas. It’s the new Japanese cargo spacecraft HTV-X’s maiden launch.
On October 18, the 4-meter Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope (4MOST), mounted on ESO’s VISTA telescope in Chile, saw its so-called first light in its initial observation tests. With its system made of 2,436 optical fibers, 4MOST can capture light from a field of view with a diameter of up to 2.5 degrees, which in practice translates to an area equivalent to 16 times the size of the full Moon. The light is directed into three spectrographs that divide it into color components in the visible light range, providing individual spectra. This will enable a cosmological survey encompassing 25 million objects in the first five years of its operation.
It was the afternoon in the USA when SpaceX conducted a new flight test of its Super Heavy rocket and Starship prototypes, launched from its base in Boca Chica, Texas. This is the 11th test involving the entire system of Elon Musk’s company, which is supposed to revolutionize space travel with an unprecedented transport capacity and being totally reusable. They are advanced prototypes with the Super Heavy identified as Booster 15, at its second flight, and the Starship Block 2 identified as Starship 38 or Ship38 or simply S38.
An article published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports the discovery of three odd radio circles, including a pair cataloged as RAD J131346.9+500320. The discovery was made by examining data collected during the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey (LoTSS) thanks to the collaboration of citizen scientists in the RAD@home program. A team of researchers examined these objects, and in particular, what appears to be a pair of intersecting rings, concluding that they’re the most distant discovered so far and that their emissions are the most powerful detected from these still poorly-known cosmic objects.
