Week in images: 08 - 12 November 2021

Discover our week through the lens

Video: 00:06:35

Relive the moment the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, Endurance, docked to the International Space Station with ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer and his NASA colleagues Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron on board.

Docking took place at 23:32 GMT Thursday, 11 November/00:32 CET Friday, 12 November, around 22 hours after Crew-3 was launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA.

Crew Dragon docking is autonomous. Once docked, astronauts on Endurance and aboard the Space Station conducted standard leak checks and pressurisation before the hatch between the two spacecraft was opened at 01:25 GMT/02:25

Cancún, situated in Quintana Roo on the northeast coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, is featured in this image captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.

Washington DC (SPX) Nov 11, 2021
On Dec. 18, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will launch from French Guiana to its destination almost a million miles from Earth. The telescope will give scientists unprecedented views of chemistry occurring throughout the universe. This information will provide new insights into how planetary systems form and whether life-sustaining conditions exist elsewhere in the universe, according to

Greenbelt MD (SPX) Nov 10, 2021
A team of scientists has forecast the scientific impact of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's High Latitude Wide Area Survey on critical questions in cosmology. This observation program will consist of both imaging, which reveals the locations, shapes, sizes, and colors of objects like distant galaxies, and spectroscopy, which involves measuring the intensity of light from those objects at

Tucson AZ (SPX) Nov 11, 2021
A new technique developed in part by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Nader Haghighipour has allowed astronomers to quickly detect a transiting circumbinary planet orbiting around two suns, according to a new Astronomical Journal paper on which Haghighipour is an author. Circumbinary planets are planetary bodies that rotate around two stars. Although for years, they were merely

Austin TX (SPX) Nov 10, 2021
Thousands of alien worlds are known to orbit stars beyond our solar system. And many more worlds, possibly harboring life, lie waiting to be discovered. A new astronomical instrument called NEID, the NN-explore Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler spectroscopy, has come online in 2021 to help scientists hunt for new alien worlds. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is assisting the

Beijing (XNA) Nov 11, 2021
China has released the information of the third batch of lunar samples brought back by the country's Chang'e-5 mission. Public users can log on to the website of China's Lunar and Deep Space Exploration (www.clep.org.cn) to check for the related information of the 15 new samples and submit applications for research. The Chang'e-5 probe returned to Earth on Dec. 17, 2020, retrieving a

Pasadena CA (JPL) Nov 11, 2021
Every time we collect a rock sample on Mars, Perseverance performs an hours-long set of carefully choreographed operations with its robotic arm, the coring drill, and the Adaptive Caching Assembly. One of these operations is docking: the process by which the arm aligns itself with the Bit Carousel on the front of the rover, so that the corer can drop off and pick up new drill bits. Docking

Kourou, French Guiana (ESA) Nov 11, 2021
Ariane 5 parts are coming together in the launch vehicle integration building for the launch of Webb from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana. The Ariane 5 core stage is 5.4 m diameter and 30.5 m high. On 6 November it was taken out of its shipping container and raised vertical. At launch it will contain 175 t of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants. With its Vulcain 2 engin