On the way to the place called Glenelg, the Mars Rover Curiosity stopped to study a small pyramid-shaped rock. Over the last week, the Mars Rover Curiosity has also worked to its astronomical mission taking pictures with its Mast Camera (Mastcam) of the two moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos, as they passed in front of the Sun.
On August 30, the GRAIL (Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory) twin spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, started their extended mission to map the Moon’s gravity with even greater precision. About three months after finishing their primary mission and being placed in a state of hibernation to survive a lunar eclipse, the instruments of the two spacecraft were reactivated and they were moved to a lower orbit.
When in the U.S.A. it was night, the two twin spacecraft Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) had a successful lift-off on an Atlas V rocket. The twin RBSP spacecraft have the task to study the van Allen radiation belts, two rings – one internal and one external – of electrically charged particles created by the Earth’s magnetic field around the equator.
