A few hours ago the Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and after about six hours reached the International Space Station with the three new crew members Paolo Nespoli, Randy Bresnik and Sergey Ryazanski on board. The Soyuz used the fast track, used again after the introduction of this spacecraft’s new version.
ESA has published images of the area of the planet Mars known as Libya Montes taken by its Mars Express space probe. It’s a mountain range near the Martian equator and is one of the oldest in Mars, altered by volcanic processes and impacts but also by processes associated with the existence of rivers. In the pictures it’s possible to identify various channels and valleys, traces of the ancient water streams.
ESA has released new images of a crater with a diameter of about 70 kilometers in the region of the planet Mars called Margaritifer Terra. This is a composite of two images captured by the Mars Express Space space probe’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) instrument almost exactly 10 years away in March 2007 and February 2017. The crater and the surrounding area show yet again evidence of the presence of liquid water in Mars’ distant past.
A little while ago the astronaut Thomas Pesquet and the cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft, that landed without problems in Kazakhstan. The two of them spent more than six months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on November 20, 2016 as part of Expedition 50.
NASA started publishing the first photos taken by the Cassini space probe after its descent into the gap between the planet Saturn and its rings. These are the closest photos taken during a risky maneuver for Cassini, performed only because within a few months it will end its mission so it was decided that it’s worth taking risks to collect close-range data.
