In a press conference held yesterday, ESA announced the choice of the primary site on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko where the lander Philae will land, according to the plans on November 11. Among the five sites that were selected as candidates, the one selected was indicated by the letter J and was voted unanimously. As a backup site the one that was indicated by the letter C was selected.
Just over two years after landing on Mars, the Mars Rover Curiosity has reached Mount Sharp, a mountain in the center of Gale Crater where the Rover landed. This is the first target to be achieved in the Curiosity mission but it took a long time to get there because of the limited speed of the rover and the many stops made to carry out scientific research. The management of the mission has recently drawn criticism from NASA’s Planetary Senior Review.
NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity mission control team announced that the rover’s computer flash memory will be formatted. This decision was taken after a series of computer resets that have been occurring with increasing frequency. Every time Opportunity has fully returned to work but those events cause loss of time and interfere with its mission activities so it was deemed necessary to try a permanent solution.
Two satellites of the Galileo project were launched into orbit yesterday, when it was afternoon in Europe, from the spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, using a Soyuz ST-B rocket with a Fregat upper stage. The two satellites are part of the system alternative to GPS made by the European Union. It took nearly four hours before they separated from the Fregat stage and entered into orbit. Initially it seemed that everything went fine but after a few hours anomalies were detected in the satellites orbits with consequences yet to be assessed.
A group of scientists who analyzed the samples returned to Earth in 2006 by NASA’s Stardust space probe may have found some particles of interstellar dust. The research, published in the journal “Science”, and other articles that will appear in the journal “Meteoritics & Planetary Science” concern the analyzes of the samples brought back by Stardust at the end of its primary mission, after the encounter with the comet Wild 2 during which it collected several grains of dust. The probe may have brought something more than expected.
