It was 21.58 UTC when the Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft, which blasted off last Thursday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, has reached the International Space Station carrying three new crewmembers. Peggy Whitson of NASA, Oleg Novitskiy of Roscosmos and Thomas Pesquet of ESA now complete the Expedition 50 crew.
It was night in Kazakhstan when the Soyuz MS-03 spacecraft blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying Peggy Whitson, Oleg Novitskiy and Thomas Pesquet to ransport them to the International Space Station. It’s the third new version Soyuz spacecraft and was launched once again in the route that will take two days instead of the six-hourt fast path to keep on testing the new on-board systems.
An article published in “Astrophysical Journal” describes the study of a brown dwarf that orbits a K-type star that was possible thanks to a gravitational microlensing event. An international team of astronomers used NASA’s Swift and Spitzer space telescopes to take advantage of that event, cataloged as OGLE-2015-BLG-1319, at a distance from its star that at which few of those objects were found, hence the name brown dwarf desert.
Two articles published in the journal “Science” provide new information about the birth of Mare Orientale, a big impact basin on the Moon. Researchers used data collected by NASA’s GRAIL mission to reconstruct the formation of Mare Orientale, helping to better understand how impact craters with concentric circular structures form.
The Orbital ATK Cygnus spacecraft, launched on October 17, has just reached the International Space Station and was captured by Canadarm2 robotic arm. Astronaut Takuya Onishi, assisted by his colleague Kate Rubins, began the slow maneuver to move the Cygnus until it docked with the Station Harmony node after about two hours.
