It was afternoon in California when the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft ended its CRS-8 (Cargo Resupply Service 8) mission for NASA splashing down without problems in the Pacific Ocean about 420 km (about 260 miles) off the coast of California. The Dragon left the International Space Station a few hours before, when in California it was morning.
Yesterday, NASA held a press conference to announce that 1,284 exoplanets have been verified among the candidates discovered using its Kepler space telescope. It’s by far the largest number of planets added to the already long list of the known ones. An article on this discovery has just been published in “The Astrophysical Journal”.
NASA’s MESSENGER mission has published the first complete topographical map of the planet Mercury. To be precise, it’s a Digital Elevation Model (DEM), a representation of the elevation distribution of territory, or of another surface, in digital format. It’s the product of the processing of data collected by the MESSENGER space probe during its mission ended just over a year ago.
SpaceX announced plans to send its first commercial mission to the planet Mars as early as 2018. In Elon Musk’s company’s plans, the journey will be carried out automatically by the Red Dragon spacecraft, a variant of the Dragon 2. The Red Dragon will be launched atop a Falcon Heavy rocket, the version of SpaceX rocket with two additional boosters. NASA will provide technical support but will not fund the mission.
NASA released new photos of various craters on the dwarf planet Ceres taken from its Dawn space probe, currently in its lowest orbit at an altitude of 385 kilometers (240 miles). From there, Dawn is making the most detailed mapping of Ceres and is providing really interesting details of craters that had already attracted the attention of scientists such as Haulani and Oxo.
