Sunday Space Links

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

NASA: A team of planetary scientists from the SETI Institute, NASA, and UC Berkeley have a new hypothesis about the formation of a small Neptunian moon. The popular press is reporting this as a new moon discovery, but it was found in 2013 using Hubble observations from 2004 to 2009.

Virgin Galactic: SpaceShipTwo successfully completes another powered test flight, this time reaching an altitude of 89.9 km. This was also the first time the vehicle carried three crewmembers, which together with onboard experiments puts the total weight near that for commercial flight operations.

JAXA: The Hayabusa2 probe successfully touched down on the surface of Ryugu, conducting the planned sample-collection routine. That sample and others from the asteroid will return to Terra in 2020.

SpaceX: A reused Falcon 9 launched an Indonesian communications satellite, with an Israeli lunar probe as a secondary payload. The Beresheet spacecraft is the first privately-funded Luna mission, and will make Israel the fourth country to launch payloads to its surface if the April landing attempt proves successful.

ESA: New research using old data from the joint NASA/ESA SOHO spacecraft confirms that the tenuous outer reaches of the upper atmosphere extend past Luna's orbit.

NASA: The SpaceX passes the NASA Flight Readiness Review for the uncrewed Demo-1 test of the Dragon 2 spacecraft. The launch date holds at 2 March 2019.