A few hours ago NASA’s OSIRIS-REx blasted off atop an Atlas 5 411 rocket from Cape Canaveral. After nearly 55 minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s Centaur last stage, after a few more minutes it deployed its solar panels and started communicating with the mission control center. At that point it started its journey to the asteroid 101955 Bennu to collect a sample and take it back to Earth.
A few hours ago the astronaut Jeff Williams and the cosmonauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin returned to Earth on the Soyuz TMA-20M spacecraft, landed without problems in Kazakhstan. The three of them spent about five and a half months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on March 18, 2016 as part of Expedition 47.
NASA published the first results of the Jupiter flyby the Juno space probe performed on August 27, 2016. In about six hours, Juno reached a distance of 4.200 kilometers (2,500 miles) from the planet and above all passed above both north and south poles. The result is a series of images of the aurora at infrareds with many detail never seen before.
There are six articles published in the journal “Science” that describe as many research on the dwarf planet Ceres. Using data collected by NASA’s Dawn space probe, various international groups of researchers examined a number of aspects of the geological activity that existed up to the recent past and even a temporary atmosphere.
Two articles published in the journal “Astronomy and Astrophysics” describe the latest updates regarding the analysis of the data collected by ESA’s Planck Surveyor space probe between 2009 and 2013. The latest results show that the first stars started forming about 700 million years after the Big Bang, about 150 million years later than earlier analyzes indicated.
