A few hours ago the Soyuz-01 MS spacecraft, launched a little more than two days ago from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, has reached the International Space Station carrying three new crewmembers. Kate Rubins of NASA, Anatoly Ivanishin of Roscosmos and Takuya Onishi of JAXA now complete the Expedition 48 crew.
A few hours ago the Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying Kate Rubins, Anatoly Ivanishin and Takuya Onishi to transport them to the International Space Station. Unlike the usual fast path that takes six hours, it began a two-day trip that will allow to test the new version of its on-board systems.
NASA has confirmed that the Juno space probe successfully entered the planet Jupiter’s orbit. In the last hours it conducted a series of maneuvers to reach the correct trajectory and speed to be captured by Jupiter’s gravity. In this period, Juno’s radio signals take about 48 minutes to reach Earth but in the end came the confirmation that the probe is in orbit and its solar panels are properly pointed toward the Sun.
An article published in the journal “Nature” describes a new research on the famous white spots in the dwarf planet Ceres’ Occator Crater. According to a team led by Maria Cristina De Sanctis, INAF – IAPS, the most abundant mineral is sodium carbonate. It’s a surprising result because that’s a salt that on Earth is abundant in hydrothermal sources and this raises the possibility of the presence of liquid water in Ceres underground.
An article published in the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (PNAS) describes the unexpected discovery of a mineral called tridymite by the Mars Rover Curiosity in Gale Crater on Mars. The analysis of a sample from a rock called Buckskin revealed the presence of tridymite, which on Earth forms as a result of much more intense volcanic activity than that assumed esisted in the past on Mars.
