An international team coordinated by the Broad Institute, a research center affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, announced they have completed the sequencing of the genome of a coelacanth, a fish that was thought to be extinct until 1938, when a living specimen was found.
Comet ISON is approaching the Sun and astronomers have already guarantee that the show will be amazing. In fact, thanks to its size and an orbit that will bring it very close to the Sun, in November 2013 it could be as bright as the full Moon. On April 10, the Hubble Space Telescope took some amazing new photos of this comet, which is already active despite being just slightly closer to the Sun than Jupiter.
Yesterday, when in the U.S.A. it was afternoon, the Antares rocket was successfully launched in its first test flight, referred to as A-ONE, from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. At its top there was a dummy mass that was meant to simulate the Cygnus spacecraft that is to be launched atop the rocket in its actual missions. In the previous days, the launch was postponed due to a hardware problem and bad weather.
Thanks to NASA’s Kepler space telescope it’s been discovered that the star Kepler-62, approximately 1,200 light-years from the Sun, has five planets and the star Kepler-69, approximately 2,700 light-years from the Sun, has two planets. The most interesting news is that two of Kepler-62 planets and one of Kepler-69 planets are probably of the rocky type and their orbit is within the habitable zone of those solar systems.
