Space News: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Landed Rocket Booster and Crew Capsule, Jupiter’s New Moons + 2 More Hot News of the Week
While Elon Musk keeps promising and doing nothing in the result, Jeff Bezos makes us one step closer to space. Nexter.org prepared a new dose of space news and latest discoveries for you.
12 previously undiscovered Jupiter moons
The International Astronomical Union has discovered 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter, bringing the total to 79. Jupiter’s new moons, which were identified by a team of astronomers at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC.
“Jupiter just happened to be in the sky near the search fields where we were looking for extremely distant Solar System objects, so we were serendipitously able to look for new moons around Jupiter while at the same time looking for planets at the fringes of our Solar System,” Scott Sheppard, who led the team, said.
One of the moons may destroy the others by the collision, “This is an unstable situation,” Sheppard said. “Head-on collisions would quickly break apart and grind the objects down to dust.”
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin success
Rocket company Blue Origin led by Jeff Bezos launched a reusable rocket into space and successfully landed the rocket booster and the crew capsule. Blue Origin conducted this experiment to make sure that nothing will happen to the real people in the crew capsule.
You can watch the footage of the entire launch, beginning with the rocket take off and with the capsule returning to the desert, above.
Source: Blue Origin
The capsule parachuted down after reaching 7,000 feet of altitude. It got back to the ground at 16 mph without any problems, which is a great success both for Blue Origin and all space scientists.
Neptune sharp and blue
Source: ESO/P. WEILBACHER (AIP)
European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) based in Chile used a laser tomography to capture the images of Neptune. The telescope’s Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument works with the GALACSI adaptive optics module in order to correct the image and get amazing, clear, sharp pics in a result.
For instance, you can see below what Neptune looks like through the telescope with and without adaptive optics.
Source: ESO/P. WEILBACHER (AIP)
ESO says these images are sharper than those taken of Neptune with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Close-ups of Saturn’s Titan
Six infrared images of Titan, Saturn’s moon, have been captured by Cassini, which, after 13 years of exploration (launched on October 15, 1997), sadly burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017.
“With the seams now gone, this new collection of images is by far the best representation of how the globe of Titan might appear to the casual observer if it weren’t for the moon’s hazy atmosphere, and it likely will not be superseded for some time to come,” says NASA.
Source: NASA/JPL-CALTECH/UNIVERSITY OF NANTES/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
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