A few hours ago the astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba and the cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin returned to Earth on the Soyuz MS-06 spacecraft, that landed without problems in Kazakhstan. The three of them spent a bit more than 5 months on the International Space Station, where they arrived on September 13, 2017 as part of Expedition 53.
NASA has published new photos taken by its venerable Mars Rover Opportunity, which after 14 Earth years and 5,000 Sols – Martian days – continues its scientific mission on the planet Mars. In the ancient valley called Perseverance Valley it found a soil with a texture that resembles certain very particular rock strips on some mountain slopes on the Earth. These formations can be created by cycles of freezing and thawing of moist soil or wind, downhill transport or other processes.
NASA has published photographs of star-shaped and swallowtail rock formations discovered by the Mars Rover Curiosity during the exploration of the area of Gale Crater on Mars called Vera Rubin Ridge. This ridge is offering interesting research cues, in this case gypsum crystals similar to those found in lakes that dried up on Earth, for example in Scotland. This is another clue of the fact that in Gale Crater in ancient times there was a lake.
NASA has published some photos taken by its New Horizons space probe’s LORRI instrument in December 2017. During the course of its journey that will lead to the object called 2014 MU69’s flyby, New Horizons took photos that beat the record that belonged to Voyager 1 for the farthest photo ever taken from Earth capturing images of the open stellar cluster called Wishing Well and two Kuiper Belt Objects called 2012 HZ84 and 2012 HE85.
A little while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft ended its CRS-13 (Cargo Resupply Service 13) mission for NASA splashing down smoothly in the Pacific Ocean a little more than 420 kilometers (about 326 miles) off the coast of California. The Dragon left the International Space Station a few hours before.
