In recent days, NASA’s space probe Dawn approached the dwarf planet Ceres and took a number close-up pictures of its surface. The latest images published by NASA were taken navigation purposes but start showing details of the geological elements, in particular the many craters of varying sizes. They make Ceres look like the Moon and show a story full of impacts.
NASA announced the nine instruments selected for the space probe that will explore Europa, a large Jupiter’s moon. The interest in a mission of this type has grown over the years, since the Galileo space probe found evidence of the existence of Europa’s subsurface ocean. The new mission will try to determine whether that ocean contains life forms.
An article published in the journal “Astrophysical Journal” describes the discovery of the brightest galaxy of the universe made using data from NASA’s space telescope WISE. Known as WISE J224607.57-052635.0, it emits light equivalent to that of over 300 trillion suns. It belongs to the ELIRG (Extremely Luminous Infrared Galaxy) class recently identified thanks to WISE.
A little while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft ended its CRS-6 (Cargo Resupply Service 6) mission for NASA splashing down without problems in the Pacific Ocean a little more than 200 km (a little more than 150 miles) off the coast of California. The Dragon left the International Space Station a few hours earlier.
The schedule for the International Space Station crew rotation has been officially changed. Following the mishap with the Russian spacecraft Progress M-27M it was decided to postpone the launch of the next three members so the three ones of the Expedition 42/43 – Samantha Cristoforetti, Terry Virts and Anton Shkaplerov – will remain on the Station at least until the beginning of June.
