A few hours ago the Soyuz-01 MS spacecraft, launched a little more than two days ago from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, has reached the International Space Station carrying three new crewmembers. Kate Rubins of NASA, Anatoly Ivanishin of Roscosmos and Takuya Onishi of JAXA now complete the Expedition 48 crew.
An article published in the journal “Science” describes the discovery of the exoplanet HD 131399Ab, the first ever found in a system with three suns. A team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona used the SPHERE instrument mounted on ESO’s VLT to obtain a direct image of HD 131399Ab and its system’s three stars. Scientists thought that such an orbit was unstable but this case seems to contradict that idea.
A few hours ago the Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying Kate Rubins, Anatoly Ivanishin and Takuya Onishi to transport them to the International Space Station. Unlike the usual fast path that takes six hours, it began a two-day trip that will allow to test the new version of its on-board systems.
NASA has confirmed that the Juno space probe successfully entered the planet Jupiter’s orbit. In the last hours it conducted a series of maneuvers to reach the correct trajectory and speed to be captured by Jupiter’s gravity. In this period, Juno’s radio signals take about 48 minutes to reach Earth but in the end came the confirmation that the probe is in orbit and its solar panels are properly pointed toward the Sun.
At the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting being held in Nottingham new images of the planet Jupiter were presented, obtained with the infrared VISIR instrument installed on ESO’s VLT. They will help better understand Jupiter’s atmosphere on the occasion of the arrival of NASA’s Juno space probe, scheduled for July 4, 2016.
