A little while ago NASA’s Mars 2020 mission blasted off atop an Atlas V 541 rocket from Cape Canaveral. Almost 58 minutes after launch, the spacecraft regularly separated from the rocket’s last stage went en route to the planet Mars, where is scheduled to enter its orbit in February 2021. There, the Mars Rover Perseverance and the Ingenuity helicopter will land on the red planet.
ESA and NASA have published images captured by the Solar Orbiter space probe during its first Sun flyby. In this case, flying by means at a distance of about 77 million kilometers (48 million miles). During that maneuver, all its instruments were active after they were tested and commissioned despite the problems resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic with the difficulties for mission engineers and scientists. Among the first images, there are the ones of the so-called campfires, eruptions that are small by solar standards but are larger than many Earth nations.
An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the discovery of two brown dwarfs thanks to the help of citizen scientists who participated in the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 program. Cataloged as WISEA J041451.67-585456.7 and WISEA J181006.18-101000.5, those are two objects with masses that fall within the range typical of brown dwarfs but with other characteristics more similar to those of gas giant planets. They could be the first extreme T-type subdwarfs, and resemble ancient exoplanets, with very little iron, having an estimated age of around 10 billion years. Their characteristics make them useful to better understand exoplanets.
Two articles published in the journal “Icarus” report as many studies on Jezero Crater on Mars. Two teams of researchers used data collected by ESA’s Mars Express space probe to reconstruct various parts of the history of Jezero Crater which, with its approximately 49 kilometers in diameter, in the past used to host a lake. It dried out long ago, but left traces such as clay materials that only form in the presence of water. The diversity of minerals is also due to an ancient volcanic activity that affected the entire region. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, with the Mars Rover Perseverance, will land in Jezero Crater, if all goes well, in February 2021 to also look for possible traces of life, present or past.
An article published in “The Astronomical Journal” reports a study on the characteristics of the orbit of the exoplanet KELT-9b, an ultra-hot Jupiter very close to its star. A team of researchers led by John Ahlers of the Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used data collected by NASA’s TESS space telescope to create a model of the interaction between star and exoplanet that allowed to understand better the peculiar characteristics of the star and the extreme ones of KELT-9b. For example, it turned out that the star spins so fast that its poles are flattened making them hotter, and the exoplanet orbits around those poles with the consequence that it has two summers when it passes over them while it has two winters when it passes over the star’s equator.
