The Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft, launched on December 7, has just reached the International Space Station and was captured by the Canadarm2 robotic arm. Astronaut Kjell Lindgren, assisted by his colleague Scott Kelly, began the slow maneuver that will move Cygnus until it docks with the Station’s Unity node after about two hours.
A few hours ago the Orbital ATK’s Cygnus spacecraft blasted off atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral. After about twenty minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and got in route. This is its fourth official mission, Orbital-4 or simply Orb-4 as well as CRS OA-4, to transport supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.
NASA released the first very high resolution photographs showing close-ups of the dwarf planet Pluto’s surface. These are images captured by the New Horizons space probe during its extraordinary July 14, 2015 flyby. In recent months, NASA already received high-resolution photographs but these ones are part of a series of shots that was intended to capture the details of Pluto’s surface, in this case the area called Sputnik Planum.
NASA provided some new information about the first flight test for its Space Launch System (SLS) with the Orion spacecraft, called Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1). The agency did it in the occasion of the arrival to the Space Power Facility (SPF) in Sandusky, Ohio, of the test version of the Orion’s service module built by ESA known as European Service Module (ESM). This will allow NASA to begin testing the new spacecraft in its full configuration, a crucial step in the preparation of the EM-1 mission.
An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” offers an explanation to the loss of carbon in the planet Mars’ atmosphere. A team of scientists from CalTech (California Institute of Technology) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory studied the available data focusing on the problem of carbon because what remained is less than expected even taking into account the recent results on the red planet’s atmosphere loss.
