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ExoMars parachute testing continues

Parker Solar Probe's WISPR instrument saw the solar wind streaming past during the spacecraft's first solar encounter in November 2018.

Pictured are the four candidate sample collection sites on asteroid Bennu selected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. Site Nightingale (top left) is located in Bennu’s northern hemisphere. Sites Kingfisher (top right) and Osprey (bottom left) are located in Bennu’s equatorial region. Site Sandpiper (bottom right) is located in Bennu’s southern hemisphere. In December, one of these sites will be chosen for the mission’s touchdown event.

Hubble Catches 2 Galaxies at Play.

Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed what may be the most distant shrouded black hole, which may have existed only 850 million years after the Big Bang, or approximately half a billion years earlier than the previous record-holder. The small, central region marked with a red cross in the main image—from the optical PanSTARRS survey— contains the quasar PSO167-13, which was first discovered with PanSTARRS. The left inset contains X-rays detected with Chandra from this region, with PSO167-13 in the middle. The right inset shows the same field of view as seen by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) of radio dishes in Chile. The bright source is the quasar and a faint, nearby companion galaxy appears in the lower left.

The ECOSTRESS image shows plant stress in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica (in red on inset map) a few months after the onset of a major Central American drought. Red indicates high stress, yellow is moderate stress, greens/blues are low stress. Light gray is cloud.

Jupiter.

Galaxy NGC 5866 lies 44 million light-years from Earth and has a diameter of roughly 60,000 light-years - a little more than half the diameter of our own Milky Way galaxy. From our viewpoint, NGC 5866 is oriented almost exactly edge-on, yielding most of its structural features invisible.

ALMA has made the most precise measurements of cold gas swirling around a supermassive black hole -- the cosmic behemoth at the center of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 3258. The multi-color ellipse reflects the motion of the gas orbiting the black hole, with blue indicating motion toward us and red motion away from us. The inset box represents how the orbital velocity changes with distance from the black hole. The material was found to rotate faster the closer in the astronomers observed to the black hole, enabling them to accurately calculate its mass: a whopping 2.25 billion times the mass of our Sun.

Earth’s magnetic bubble, called the magnetosphere, is illustrated in blue. The magnetosphere provides natural protection against space radiation, deflecting most charged solar particles from Earth.