An article published in the journal “Geophysical Research Letters” describes a research on chemical characteristics existing in the underground ocean of Europa, one of the planet Jupiter’s big moons. A team of scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team (JPL) compared the potential to produce hydrogen and oxygen with that of the Earth, concluding that they’re comparable.
An article published in the journal “Science” describes the first direct observation of the phenomenon called magnetic reconnection. NASA’s four MMS twin space probes allowed to obtain the best observations made so far of the interaction between the Earth and Sun’s magnetic fields. According to the researchers who analyzed the data collected, electrons trigger this phenomenon.
NASA’s MESSENGER mission has published the first complete topographical map of the planet Mercury. To be precise, it’s a Digital Elevation Model (DEM), a representation of the elevation distribution of territory, or of another surface, in digital format. It’s the product of the processing of data collected by the MESSENGER space probe during its mission ended just over a year ago.
An article published in the journal “Nature Physics” describes an analysis of the data collected by ESA’s Venus Express space probe during the final phase of its mission. After about eight years orbiting the planet Venus, in 2014 it was sent down lower and lower into the atmosphere, where it collected many new data before ending up getting destroyed. This allowed for example to discover the extraordinarily low temperatures of some atmospheric waves that have an average of about -157° Celsius (about -250° Fahrenheit).
