Space Features of the Week (18 June)

Here’s the usual summary of interesting space news of the week – with some stunning images from our Solar Systems.

Have you ever wondered how stargazing from Jupiter would possibly be? Here’s the answer.

This photo is a first from inside Jupiter’s ring, taken by NASA’s Juno probe with its star-tracking navigation camera during its initial data-collecting dive over Jupiter’s poles on Aug. 27, 2016. “What you’re looking at here is a ring of dust that’s 40,000 miles -64,000 kilometres- away from Juno and stars that are hundreds of light-years away, all in the same picture. […] Heaven looks the same to us from Jupiter.” (Heidi Becker, Juno’s radiation-monitoring investigation lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California).

The photo also shows part of the constellation Orion, including the bright star Betelgeuse and the three stars that make up Orion’s belt.

Read the whole story here.

But Jupiter is not the only one offering amazing imagery. Mars, too. Revealing dynamic, previously invisible behaviour, MAVEN probe was able to show the ultraviolet glow from the Martian atmosphere in unprecedented detail.

Nightside images showed ultraviolet “nightglow” emission from nitric oxide. Nightglow is a common planetary phenomenon in which the sky faintly glows even in the complete absence of eternal light.”

But the marvels don’t stop here. MAVEN has also identified two new types of aurora, termed “diffuse” and “proton” aurora. Unlike how we think of most aurorae on Earth, these aurorae are unrelated to either a global or local magnetic field. NASA’s blog

NASA’s blog discusses all these discovers here.

Juno, Maven. And what about New Horizons? After the historical Pluto flyby, the probe is now targeting the next far object, 2014 MU69. “The New Horizons spacecraft is scheduled to fly by 2014 MU69 on Jan. 1, 2019, and taking observations during the occultation allowed the scientists to scan the area for hazards that could damage the spacecraft, according to a statement from NASA.”
For more, have a look at this article.

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