Astronews Recent Space Discoveries (Secret Of The Shadows Of The Moon, Encounter With Venus & More)

Astronews Recent Space Discoveries (Secret Of The Shadows Of The Moon, Encounter With Venus & More)

5 New Russian Module knocks International Space Station out of position!
Do you remember the story of the Russian module Nauka, exhumed after years of neglect and launched towards the Space Station on July 21 last? Well, after a few mishaps he finally made it to his destination, but at the time of docking, he made a big trouble.
Following its launch, it reportedly encountered some propulsion problems that Russian controllers were able to resolve ahead of its planned docking with ISS

4 Preparing for a double close encounter with Venus
Heavy traffic is expected from the parts of Venus in the coming hours: the probes BepiColombo and Solar Orbiter will fly over the planet at a very short distance from each other.
The probes Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo are going to fly over Venus only 33 hours apart.

3 Bad News. Those underground lakes on Mars are probably just frozen clay
Ok, if you were planning an ice-fishing trip to the Martian south pole and its sub-surface lakes, please, just be patient for a moment.
In a research published earlier this month in Geophysical Research Letters, it seems that the Martian lakes may be nothing more than smectite, that is, a kind of clay.

2 Shadows on the Moon could be hiding water, even in the daytime
« If water were available on the Moon in the form of frost in sunlit regions, future explorers could use it as a resource for fuel and drinking water. But first, we need to understand how the exosphere and the lunar surface interact. » This was stated by Björn Davidsson and Sona Hosseini, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a new study published in the British journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

1 NASA Chooses Falcon Heavy Over SLS to Launch Europa Clipper, Saving About $2 Billion
The bureaucracy of government control is slowly fading away in space exploration, at least in the US. A series of delays, cost overruns, and imposed requirements have finally started taking its toll on the Space Launch System (SLS), the next generation NASA rocket system.