Space News (November 2020)

Steph P. Bianchini November 1, 2020 2 Comments

Halloween offered us with a fantastic full moon –quite a rare view, to be sure. As a matter of fact, it was, as space.com called it “a truly special confluence of spookiness; a Halloween full moon visible for most time zones on Earth hasn’t happened since 1944, according to the Farmers’ Almanac. It won’t happen again until 2039. But wait, there’s more: the Oct. 31 full moon also happens to be a “blue moon,” a designation for the second full moon to occur in a single calendar month. Blue moons are relatively rare as well, occurring on average just once every 2.5 years or so. We last saw one in March 2018. The next one is in August 2023.” Impressive, isn’t it? I really hope you managed to get a glimpse of it! I made good use of the sight.

Since we’re there, here you have some suggestions for November’s night sky watch.

From the Moon, let’s hop on to Mars, where AIs now help the researchers with the Martian cartography. As NASA explains, “typically, scientists spend hours each day studying images captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), looking for changing surface phenomena like dust devils, avalanches, and shifting dunes. In the orbiter’s 14 years at Mars, scientists have relied on MRO data to find over 1,000 new craters,” more than often the result of meteor impacts. With this new tool devised, the idea is that it could offer a more complete picture of how often meteors strike Mars, revealing small impacts in areas where they haven’t been discovered before (read the whole story here).

By the way, if you were wondering what to visit once we will eventually be able to do some Martian tourism, you may want to check again this great article about the best features of the Martian surface. Personally, I’d love to hike around Olympus Mons.