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.
NASA announced that it succeeded in restoring the Kepler space telescope after a few days it entered Emergency Mode. The mission’s engineers restored the communications during the last Sunday but the time table to resume its work is still to be determined. Communications also made it possible to start downloading telemetry and event data to determine the causes of the emergency.
A little while ago the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft was captured by the robotic arm Canadarm2 on the International Space Station. Tim Peake, assisted by his fellow astronaut Jeff Williams, managed the operation and started moving the Dragon to the berthing point at the Harmony module. The spacecraft was launched last Friday and arrived a little more than 20 minutes later than scheduled because it was slowed down by atmosphere drag but eventually the first leg of its mission was accomplished.
A few hours ago SpaceX Dragon spacecraft blasted off on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in its CRS-8 (Cargo Resupply Service) mission, also referred to as SPX-8. After about twelve minutes it successfully separated from the rocket’s last stage and went en route. This is the 8th of 12 missions that include sending the Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station with various cargoes and then return to Earth, again with various cargoes.
