NASA

The Cygnus "Roger Chaffee" cargo spacecraft blasting off atop an Antares rocket (Photo NASA/Bill Ingalls)

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A few hours ago Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft blasted off atop an Antares rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), part of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) on Wallops Island. After about nine minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage went en route to its destination. This is its 11th official mission, called NG-11 but also CRS NG-11, to transport supplies to the International Space Station for NASA, the second for Northrop Grumman Corporation after completing the acquisition of Orbital ATK.

The first Earth-sized exoplanet identified thanks to the TESS space telescope

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports the discovery of two exoplanets in the orange star HD 21749’s system, one of which is the first Earth-sized identified thanks to NASA’s TESS space telescope and the other a Mini-Neptune. A team of researchers led by Diana Dragomir already submitted a first version of the article on the exoplanet HD 21749b, the Mini-Neptune also referred to as TOI 186.01, mentioning as candidate TOI 186.02 the rocky exoplanet now referred to as HD 21749c in the new version of the article in which it’s considered confirmed.

The Mars Rover Curiosity analyzed clay minerals in Aberlady on Mars

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NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity drilled a clay area, called a clay-bearing unit by the mission scientists, of ​​Mount Sharp on Mars that was nicknamed Aberlady to take samples for analysis. The rock turned out to be quite friable so only the normal rotation of the drill was used, without the percussion system used on other occasions to drill much harder rocks. Clay is associated with water so the hope is that the results of the analysis will help to reconstruct the history of Mars with new information on the remote era in which there was a lake in the area.

An independent confirmation of a methane peak on Mars

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An article published in the journal “Nature Geoscience” reports an independent confirmation of the detection of a methane peak on the planet Mars, east of Gale Crater, where NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity is operating and detected the presence of methane. However, a team of researchers led by Marco Giuranna of the Italian National Astrophysics Institute in Rome used measurements of ESA’s Mars Express space probe’s PFS instrument to find methane. Independent detections carried out in orbit and on the ground with very different instruments are crucial in this research because methane can be produced by biological processes but also by geological processes.

A giant molecular cloud in which massive stars are forming studied with the SOFIA flying telescope

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The SOFIA flying telescope was used to study a giant molecular cloud that is a star-forming area cataloged as W51 in order to analyze the newly formed or still forming stars within it. The researchers combined the observations made with SOFIA with those made over time with NASA’s Spitzer and Herschel space telescopes to obtain more complete information on those stars. There was a particular interest in the massive stars and one of them seems really huge, with a mass estimated at about 100 times the Sun’s. If that estimate is confirmed by follow-up observations it’s one of the most massive stars in formation in the Milky Way.