NASA

Europa with the possible water vapor plumes coming from its south pole (Image NASA/ESA/W. Sparks (STScI)/USGS Astrogeology Science Center)

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In a press conference, NASA announced that a team of astronomers led by Dr. William Sparks who observed Europa with the Hubble Space Telescope captured images of what might be plumes of water vapor and erupt from the surface of this planet moon Jupiter. They would be a confirmation of the existing subsurface activity with an ocean of liquid water, one of the best candidates to host life forms. The results of this research will be published in the “Astrophysical Journal”.

Sloping buttes and layered outcrops within the Murray Buttes (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

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NASA published a series of photographs taken by the Mars Rover Curiosity that show the landscape of the Martian area called “Murray Buttes”. Those are very high quality images captured on September 8, 2016 using the Mast Camera (MastCam) instrument, consisting of two cameras able to get among other things photographs in natural colors. The result is a breathtaking view which at the same time is very interesting from the scientific point of view because the photographed stratified rocks show traces of Mars’ geological history.

Pluto seen at visible light and at X-rays (not in scale) (Image X-ray: NASA/CXC/JHUAPL/R.McNutt et al; Optical: NASA/JHUAPL)

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Two new research are connected in different ways to emissions coming from the dwarf planet Pluto. An article published in the journal “Icarus” describes a research which, through the use of the NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, detected X-rays emissions from Pluto. Another article published in the journal “Nature” offers an explanation for the reddish color to Charon’s poles, caused by methane ripped from Pluto’s atmosphere and turned into ice by the low temperatures.

The OSIRIS-REx space probe blasting off atop an Atlas 5 rocket (Photo NASA/Kim Shiflett)

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A few hours ago NASA’s OSIRIS-REx blasted off atop an Atlas 5 411 rocket from Cape Canaveral. After nearly 55 minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s Centaur last stage, after a few more minutes it deployed its solar panels and started communicating with the mission control center. At that point it started its journey to the asteroid 101955 Bennu to collect a sample and take it back to Earth.