NASA’s New Horizons space probe sent photographs of the area around the dwarf planet Pluto’s north pole taken during the extraordinary July 14, 2015 flyby. The images reveal a series of canyons long and wide in the polar area that at its bottom is about 1,200 km (750 miles) wide. It’s part of the region informally called Lowell Regio after the astronomer Percival Lowell, the founder of the observatory where Pluto was discovered.
The analysis of the photographs of Charon, the largest of Pluto’s moons, suggests that once it had an underground ocean that at some point froze causing the expansion of its surface layer. That event could explain the presence of a very long fracture on its surface, a kind of huge scar that devastates its equator.
NASA announced the approval of a new astrophysics mission based on a space telescope called WFIRST (Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope). It’s a next-generation Instrument for a long-term project since it will be probably launched around the middle of next decade. It will have a mirror as large as Hubble’s but a field of view a hundred times wider to investigate even better on the secrets of the universe.
A little while ago the Japanese Astro-H space telescope was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center on a H-IIA rocket. After about fifteen minutes it regularly separated from the rocket’s last stage. It will reach the low-Earth orbit, where it will be positioned at an altitude of about 575 kilometers (about 357 miles).
NASA has published a photograph taken by the Cassini space probe that frames Tethys, one of Saturn’s moons, in front of the planet’s rings. They have such a relative position Tethys seems to float between two sets of rings but it’s just an optical effect. The result is a particularly striking image even by the standards of a mission that has been offering stunning portraits of the planet Saturn, its rings and its moons.
