FIRST ORBIT AND LANDING ON A COMET
followed 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko through perihelion this year, it observed heightened activity closer than ever before. The Open University’s Colin Pillinger was a major driving force behind this ambitious mission but he tragically never got to see its success having passed away in May last year, just months before Rosetta entered 67P’s orbit. This year a new analysis on what has been termed ‘Saturn on steroids’ was published. Exoplanet J1047b has a ring system nearly 120 million km across, dwarfing that of Saturn. This is now the largest ring system we are aware of and it probably has a mass of around one Earth. The new results also show 37 rings as well as gaps which hint at the existence of plenty of satellites. Whether or not this will prove to be the largest planetary ring system remains to be seen, as J1047b could be a brown dwarf star rather than a large gas giant.
The exoplanet’s giant ring could hold as much
mass as our world It looks like the jury is no longer out on active volcanism on Venus. More than 20 years after Magellan plunged into the Venusian atmosphere, ESA’s Venus Express met the same fate. But its last manoeuvre bestowed some critical observations of a region known as the Ganiki Chasma rift zone, showing transient hot spots, one of which was estimated at around 1km2 in size. At 830ºC, it is much hotter than the average surface temperature. Whether or not Venus is currently volcanically active has been a hot topic for decades, and in some cases the debate has split the planetary science community. If JAXA’s Akatsuki spacecraft fails to reach Venus orbit on its second attempt in December 2015, we will have to wait until at least 2017-2018 for the next mission to be launched to Earth’s evil twin, by the Indian Space Resource Organisation.