NASA

The Ingenuity helicopter's shadow (Photo NASA/JPL-Caltech)

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Yesterday, the Ingenuity helicopter conducted its first flight on planet Mars. The duration was only 40 seconds and it reached an altitude of just over 3 meters but it was important to lift off the ground this drone built to test the technologies needed to fly a vehicle in the Martian atmosphere, which is very thin. The flight was autonomous, pre-scheduled, and initiated by a command launched from Earth. The images, along with telemetry data, were transmitted to the Mars Rover Perseverance mission control center.

Kate Rubins, Sergey Ryzhikov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, and the crew that assisted them after their landing (Photo NASA/Bill Ingalls)

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A few hours ago, astronaut Kate Rubins and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft, that landed in Kazakhstan. The three of them spent a bit more than 6 months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on October 20, 2020, as part of Expedition 63. After landing, they were assisted by a skeleton crew with the precautions needed to avoid the risk of Covid-19 infection.

The supernova remnants Cassiopeia A (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA)

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NASA has released an image of the supernova remnants Cassiopeia A, or simply Cas A, captured by the WISE space telescope at infrareds. There’s no historical record of that supernova even though its light reached Earth around 1667 A.D., probably because a large amount of dust between it and the Earth greatly dimmed its brightness. Its various emissions made it possible to study it with different instruments over the last few decades. WISE detected the echoes of the light burst that are generating ripples outwards from the star that exploded.

The Cygnus Katherine Johnson cargo spacecraft captured by the Canadarm2 robotic arm (Image NASA TV)

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Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft, launched last Saturday, February 20, has just reached the International Space Station and was captured by the Canadarm2 robotic arm. Astronaut Soichi Noguchi, assisted by his colleague Michael Hopkins, will soon begin the slow maneuver to move the Cygnus until it docks with the Station’s Unity module after about two hours.