A few hours ago the Soyuz MS-14 spacecraft landed without problems in Kazakhstan. A few hours earlier it departed the International Space Station, where it arrived on August 27. The return to Earth ends a test mission that was carried out without cosmonauts aboard a spacecraft generally used for transporting human beings. In this case, the Skybot F-850 robot, nicknamed Fedor, was on board.
The Indian Chandrayaan 2 mission’s Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover, launched on 22 July, attempted a Moon landing but something went wrong and the contact was lost at an altitude of about 2.1 kilometers. The Indian space agency ISRO’s engineers are analyzing the data collected, but probably there was some problem during the braking phase with loss of attitude and subsequent crash of the vehicles.
An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” reports the discovery of a new method to form the organic compounds of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) group in space. A team of researchers at the Berkeley National Laboratory found what in jargon is called a pathway to get to the formation of PAHs such as naphthalene from simpler molecules. These compounds are important in the formation of amino acids, the building blocks of large biological molecules.
An article being published in the journal “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” reports the discovery of three super-Earths in the system of the red dwarf star GJ 1061. A team of astronomers from the Red Dots collaboration made this discovery during the 2018 observation campaign thanks to a series of spectroscopic detections obtained over three months using the radial velocity method. The masses of these exoplanets are a bit higher than the Earth’s and the outermost is in its system’s habitable zone, where it receives an amount of energy from its star close to what the Earth receives from the Sun.
An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports a research on variations in the gravitational field of the planet Saturn due to internal vibrations. Yanqin Wu of the University of Toronto and Yoram Lithwick of Northwestern University used data collected by the Cassini space probe during its ring flybys to study the phenomenon, concluding that Saturn’s vibrations were caused by past impacts that made the planet sort of ring like a bell.
