Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft, launched last Tuesday, January 30, has just reached the International Space Station and was captured by the Canadarm2 robotic arm. Astronaut Loral O’Hara, assisted by his colleague Jasmin Moghbeli, will soon begin the slow maneuver to move the Cygnus until it docks with the Station’s Unity module after about two hours.
A few hours ago, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft blasted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center on its NG-20 or CRS NG-20 mission. After about 15 minutes, it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and set on its course. This is the first of at least three resupply missions to the International Space Station with various payloads launched using the Falcon 9 rocket while waiting for the new version of Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket to be ready.
The images of 19 spiral galaxies captured by the James Webb Space Telescope have been released as part of the PHANGS (Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS) project. These are galaxies up to 65 million light-years away that we see face-on, and this allows to better observe the stars inside them, an optimal situation for a project focused on star formation processes. Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) instruments were employed to cover the near and mid-infrared resulting in many new details.
An image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope shows LEDA 60847, a group of interacting galaxies. The largest galaxy has an active galactic nucleus (AGN) with a supermassive black hole surrounded by materials that are heated to the point of generating the electromagnetic emissions behind its luminosity. This galaxy is interacting with its neighbors and in a very long time, they will form a single larger galaxy.
An image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope shows a part of the star-forming region cataloged as N79 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite dwarf galaxies. It’s considered a sort of younger version of the Tarantula Nebula but astronomers believe that its star formation has been twice as efficient over the last 500,000 years. The Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) was used to capture never-before-seen mid-infrared details of N79 that will be invaluable in improving our understanding of star formation processes.
