This week in space from Fraser Cain | | Well, what else can I say. This was an amazing week for exoplanetary research with the launch of NASA's TESS mission. It was originally supposed to launch on Monday, and then after a two-day delay, it blasted off on Wednesday afternoon on a Falcon 9 rocket. (Interesting side note, the booster stage landed again, becoming the 24th successful SpaceX booster landing).
NASA gave a bunch of updates, that the solar arrays had deployed, and now the spacecraft is on its way for an encounter with the Moon that'll put it into its final science orbit, bringing it close to the Earth ever 13.7 days.
Over the next two years, TESS will map out 85 percent of the sky, searching for planets around the brightest stars in the sky.
And I look forward to filling you in on the amazing discoveries it makes. If you want to see a deep dive from an exoplanetary scientist, you should watch this week's Weekly Space Hangout. Dr. Kimberly Cartier lets us know why she's so excited about this mission.
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today
P.S. I'm going to be doing a live QA on YouTube with Isaac Arthur on Monday at 5pm PDT. If you want to join us live, go here and set yourself a reminder.
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. | | 
The European Southern Observatory just released a stunning collection of disks around other stars captured by its SPHERE instrument. It's mind-bending to think there are little baby planets forming in these circumstellar disks.
We're now entering the final days for NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. It's running out of fuel and already crippled by the loss of its reaction wheels. In just a few months NASA will shut it down for good. That is sad, but don't worry, NASA's next planet hunting spacecraft, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Telescope is ready to take over where Kepler left off.
There aren't a lot of great photos of the Martian moon Deimos, so this photo is really special. It was captured by NASA's Viking 2 Orbiter, and Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla cleaned it up to create this composite image. In this blog post, Emily explains the process she used.
In a recent tweet, Elon Musk said that SpaceX would try and decelerate an upper stage booster using an inflatable balloon, and land it on a bouncy castle. This probably wasn't a joke, since retrieving upper stage rockets is a serious plan for SpaceX. We look into what he could have been talking about.
Got millions of extra dollars and want to have the experience of a lifetime? In the next few years you might be able to fly to a luxury hotel in low Earth orbit called Aurora Station, and for only $9.5 million you can spend 12 days orbiting around the Earth.
In this blog post, Ethan Siegel from Starts With a Bang talks about the features of dark matter and dark energy that astronomers wish everyone knew about. To save time from all the misconceptions.
Humans have made their mark all across the Earth. But were we the first industrial species? Would we be able to find something that evolved to an industrial era millions or even billions of years ago? What kind of evidence could we find in the geological record?
If you're interested in what's happening with NASA's Space Launch System, you really need to read this excellent article from Eric Berger at Ars Technica. It talks about how NASA might be sending humans into deep space, and what it's going to take to get there.
Ethan Siegel from Starts with a Bang has a great article about how scientists working with Kepler do the seemingly impossible, pulling data out of just a few pixels to confirm the existence of planets around stars like Trappist-1.
In the early Solar System there were probably many more planets and planetoids that smashed into one another, leaving us with the planets we see today. How can we know what came before? By finding diamonds in meteorites that formed inside those worlds, long ago.
Every few minutes another pair of black holes collide into each other somewhere across the Universe. And now astronomers from Monash University think it should be possible listen in on this background hum of the Universe in gravitational waves.
You're looking at the galaxy cluster PLCK G308.3-20.2. Boring name I know, but it's absolutely filled with galaxies. One of Hubble's jobs will be to scout for targets for the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. It's looking for huge galaxy clusters that'll help James Webb reveal the Universe during the age of reionization.
As the miniaturization of space hardware continues, we're entering an era where there can be tiny cubesats to do almost anything that used to require a bigger satellite. Space Fab is working on a space telescope that you'll be able to control with an app on your phone.
NASA is getting ready to launch its next mission to the Red Planet: Mars InSight. Check out this detailed article about how the mission is going to work, and how it'll be the first mission to look at Mars' geophysical properties since Viking 2.
The US rocket industry is actually very reliant on a variety of Russian-built rocket engines. This is a big surprise for such a national security issue. There are options, like the Blue Origin BE-4 which has been tested for longer and longer durations. Bobak Ferdowsi writes this op-ed piece for Popular Mechanics.
You think getting to space is hard here on Earth? Imagine if you lived on a super-earth, or lived on a world orbiting a red dwarf star? It turns out those planets have interesting challenges that would actually make it extremely difficult to have a spaceflight program. Other Interesting Space Stuff
Amazing Astrophotography
Here's a great photo of the PAC-MAN Nebula captured by Holger Meissner (@astrohobbit_holgermeissner). Whenever I see this nebula, it always makes me wonder what people called it before the video game?
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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