This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this page. Terms of utilise.

Monday forenoon saw the Falcon ix lift off on its ninth commercial resupply flight to the ISS, conveying crew supplies, a major science payload, and an international docking port for the Station. Now the sheathing has successfully docked at the ISS. "We've captured us a Dragon," reported astronaut Jeffrey Williams. "We wait forwards to the work that it brings."

tangoing with the Canadarm 2 over the Great Lakes. Image: NASA

SpaceX'southward Dragon capsule tangoing with the Canadarm ii over the Great Lakes. Image: NASA

This calendar week marks the 47th ceremony of the commencement moon landing. Do y'all know any moon landing denialists? You lot probably shouldn't punch them, but Fizz Aldrin might be forgiven for having done so. Watch it happen in this intensely gratifying video.

Aldrin isn't the only one with a uniquely informed take on why the moon landing wasn't a hoax. Southward Thou Collins is a cinematographer who explains how even though we had the applied science to actually go to the moon, we but flat didn't have the engineering to fake it.

This week too marked the 40th anniversary of the Viking probes landing on Mars. Dispatched to the Red Planet to expect for biomarkers of life, the little lander taught us "more [about Mars] in the outset five minutes of the Viking mission than in the 500 years earlier." This is the get-go prototype Viking 1 sent us:

Credit: NASA/JPL

Speaking of other planets, NASA reports that Kepler's ongoing search for exoplanets turned upward more than a hundred distant worlds in its most recent batch of results. 2 could exist habitable, fifty-fifty Earth-like. How we would e'er get at that place, of form, remains a thought experiment.

Hubble also produced one of the deepest views into infinite ever seen. Gravitational lensing made it possible for Hubble to peer deep into the centre of this cluster of very old galaxies, some 4 billion light years abroad, which formed maybe a billion years after the Big Blindside.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI)

The ESO'due south Very Big Telescope gave us a gorgeous deep zoom into the Orion Nebula, which they take available for download in 4K. You can actually encounter this nebula with the naked eye, even if you live in a city — when you await at the Orion constellation, the Orion Nebula is the centre "star" in Orion's sword. The Nebula is really a huge star nursery most 1,350 low-cal-years away.

Credit: NASA,ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

Credit: NASA,ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

More a million galaxies containing such star nurseries were mapped and juxtaposed in the largest 3D map e'er fabricated, announced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey collaboration. The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (Boss) revealed fine details about the superstructure of our universe. Galaxies are strewn throughout the cosmos in strands and superclusters, showing us a colossal splash whose shape was frozen in time when the universe cooled downward enough to finally become opaque, about 400,000 years after the Large Bang.

Looking farther and further outward, we are reminded that even though experiments similar the BOSS survey continue to make qualitative statements about dark matter and night energy, the physical search for dark matter remains frustrating and poorly constrained. The LUX detector is one of a kind, an exquisitely sensitive detector designed to pick up signs of weakly interacting massive particles during one of the rare interactions between night matter and normal matter. Only alas, this week the LUX squad reported that they had failed to detect whatever of the particles they were looking for. In their statement, they remarked that while they had eliminated "large swathes" of possible mass ranges and interactions associated with WIMPs, the WIMP model itself "remains live and viable." Now it's a matter of time: the next data on dark thing might come from CERN, or information technology might come from LUX'south successor, LUX-ZEPELIN, which volition be lxx times as sensitive, taking LUX's place hole-and-corner.