This week in space from Fraser Cain | | NASA's Kepler Observatory is one of the most successful planet hunting missions ever built, finding thousands of planets on its own. And this is despite the setbacks it got a few years ago when its reaction wheels broke down, which it uses to orient itself. Quick thinking engineers were able to use small amounts of thruster propellant to keep the spacecraft re-oriented, but it looks like even that is running out.
At some point in the next few months, engineers with NASA are going to finally shut this planet hunting telescope down for good, ending its contributions to the discoveries of planets orbiting other stars.
But don't worry, there are several other instruments in the works. James Webb, of course, will launch next year (assuming it doesn't get further delayed). And NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is scheduled to pick up where Kepler left off in April, 2018. Although it's a bit of a different mission than Kepler, it'll exhaustively find the nearby extrasolar planets which are lined up with the Solar System and can be discovered.
And the European Space Agency made the big announcement this week that they're going to be launching Ariel, the Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large Survey mission in 2028. This will have the ability to directly image the atmospheres of extrasolar planets, helping astronomers understand the variety of worlds out there.
It'll be sad to see Kepler go, but it's exciting to see what's coming next.
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today
As always, if you have comments or questions, or suggestions on how I can improve this newsletter, please don't hesitate to reply this email or send me an email at frasercain@gmail.com. | | 
Even though it's been around since the beginning of the Solar System, the dwarf planet Ceres is still evolving and changing. NASA's Dawn spacecraft showed that ice on the wall of Juling Crater increased over the course of just a few months. And they found other examples of the asteroid ongoing activity.
Have you seen all the stories about what Stephen Hawking's final paper was all about? The end of the Universe? The search for multiverses? The search for God? Actually, he was interested in some of the outcomes of the Eternal Inflation model of the early Universe, at a time when the expansion of the Universe was proceeding at an exponential rate. Ethan Siegel is an astrophysicist, he's read the final paper, and he'll help you understand what it was all about.
At last week's interview, Elon Musk gave an update on the state of development for the BFR (the Big Falcon Rocket). If all goes well, we should see hop tests in 2019, and the first flights to orbit by 2020.
Traditional rocket engines need about 100,000 separate parts. But a new startup called Relativity Space thinks they could do the same thing with a fraction of the parts using 3D printing. The team comes from engineers who worked at SpaceX and Blue Origin, and recently signed a deal with NASA to use one of their test complexes in Mississippi.
Not sure what you're looking at? It's the La Cueva de Los Verdes lava tube system in Lazarote, Spain. Geologists were able to scan the interior of the cave system, and this technology could be applied to lava tubes like this on other worlds - the home of future colonies. 
In this week's questions show, I explain why I never get to the point, if we'll ever reach interstellar space, and how we'd get down below the ice sheet on Europa.
This image shows a close-up view of Jupiter captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft. As a mentioned a couple of weeks back, this was another example of a collaboration between citizen scientists processing the data from NASA.
Uh oh, sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. Astronomers have been studying the planets orbiting the red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 and have discovered that they probably have too much water. Like, the planets could be 50% water, which would mean they're not the kind of rocky habitable planets we were hoping to find out there the Universe.
Have you ever wondered how those amazing pictures of space are gathered? Which are photographs, which are illustrations, and which are total fakes?
Have you heard Russian President Putin's announcement that their scientists have a nuclear-powered cruise missile that could fly anywhere on Earth avoiding radar? Unfortunately, the Russians (and even the Americans) have been working on these kinds of ideas for decades, and it's certainly possible. This is a great article from Ars Technica, very long and very detailed.
Astronomers have traced the movements of hundreds of comets and asteroids in the Solar System and determined that they were pushed around in their orbits by a star that got close to the Solar System about 70,000 years ago. Could this have been a cause for various impacts on Earth?
Nothing to really say, but check out this beautiful photograph of the Tithonium Chasma on Mars, a region inside the massive Valles Marineris canyon system
Step aside dark matter and dark energy, there's a new mystery in the cosmos: fast radio bursts. And now astronomers have used the Parkes Telescope in Australia to find the brightest bursts ever seen. Maybe this will give some new clues? Other Interesting Space Stuff
Amazing Astrophotography
I think this is one of the most creative photographs of a lunar eclipse I've ever seen. It clearly shows the size and shape of the Earth's shadow as the Moon passes through it. Great work from Zheng Zhi in Beijing, China @lifelens.
We feature a different astrophotographer every day on our Instagram page. Want to do a takeover? Use the hashtag #universetoday and I'll check out your photos. | | | |
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