Space Exploration

1. Recent
Developments in
Space Exploration
and Travels

2. Water in
Enceladus
An artist’s rendering of
possible hydrothermal
activity on and under the
seafloor of Enceladus’
subsurface ocean, based
on recently published
results from NASA’s Cassini
mission.

3. For years, Jupiter’s icy
moon Europa has intrigued
many as to whether life
could exist beneath its
surface, but now with this
discovery of hydrothermal
activity on Enceladus, NASA
said the implications of this
find offer ‘unprecedented
scientific possibilities’.
Hydrothermal activity is a common
occurrence in our own oceans, where
seawater infiltrates and reacts with
the planet’s rocky crust and
emerges as a heated, mineral-laden
solution.

4. Water
on Mars
The dark streaks observed on
Hale’s crater show signs of water.
Image via NASA Jet Propulsion
Laboratory/ University of Arizona.

5. The liquid water was discovered
to be running down the ridges
of canyons and crater walls
during the planet’s summer
months, with it having left
visible streaks down their
slopes.However, the actual origin
of the water remains a mystery,
with some suggestions being
that it is originating from vast
underground salty aquifers,
Martian ice or even condensation
from the planet’s thin
atmosphere.

6. Earth 2.0

7. In July, NASA
discovered a new
planet with strikingly
similar features to
our own. It was
dubbed, rather
unimaginatively, Earth
2.0, and its discovery
sent everyone’s
imaginations wild.
Kepler-452b

8. Kepler-452b, as the planet has
been labelled by the agency, is in
a solar system very similar to
our own and is the right
distance from its star to
potentially be habitable. The
planet is 6bn years old, 60pc
larger than Earth and receives
10pc more energy from its star,
which is 1.5bn years older and
20pc brighter than our sun,
though has the same
temperature.
“Today they announced the discovery of an
exoplanet that as far as we can tell is a
pretty close cousin of Earth,” said John
Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA’s
Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
“It’s the closest so far.”

9. New Discovered
Planet

10. A school student interning at
NASA helped to discover a planet
with two stars, the agency
announced. In 2019, Wolf Cukier
joined NASA’s Goddard Space
Flight Center in Maryland as a
summer intern, and helped to
discover a planet, now named TOI
1338 b, on his third day at the
agency.

11. The newly discovered planet, TOI
1338 b, is around 6.9 times larger
than Earth. One of its stars is
about 10pc larger than our sun,
while the other star is cooler,
dimmer and only one-third the
sun’s mass. The planet lies in a
system 1,300 light years away
from the Earth in the
constellation Pictor.
TOI 1338 b