Space Highlights - March 16, 2017

March 16, 2017

SpaceX plans to launch the EchoStar 23 communications satellite from the Kennedy Space Center later this week.
http://www.space.com/36084-spacex-2nd-satellite-launch-try-thursday-webcast.html


SpaceX has been awarded a contract, beating out United Launch Alliance to launch a U.S. Air Force Global Positioning satellite into orbit.  This is the second such U.S. Air Force contract awarded to SpaceX.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/03/15/spacex-scores-another-win-in-push-for-military-satellite-launches.html


Poor weather has delayed the launch of a Japanese radar intelligence satellite.  The launch was expected to take place this week aboard a Japanese H-2 rocket, to be launched from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/03/14/poor-weather-forecast-delays-japanese-spy-satellite-launch/


NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided new, close-up images of Saturn's small moon, Pan which displays a band of debris collected from Saturn's rings.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/2017/20170309-cassini-drops-amazing-images.html
http://earthsky.org/space/cassini-shows-strange-saturn-moon-pan


The Cassini spacecraft has successfully detected the heat pattern from the sub-surfaced ocean on Saturn's moon Enceladus.
https://www.rt.com/viral/380743-nasa-cassini-heat-ocean-enceladus/


A new documentary on NASA's Curiosity rover was recently released, documenting the spacecraft's first four years on Mars.
http://www.space.com/35992-curiosity-documentary-details-mars-science.html


NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been tracking multiple, massive dust storms on the surface of Mars.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170312103637.htm


A French-Canadian team of researchers have released initial findings from studies of a free-floating exoplanet, some 117 light years away.  The object, with 4 to 7 times the mass of Jupiter, is too small to be a brown dwarf (sub-stellar mass objects that are large enough to briefly ignite deuterium fusion nuclear reactions), but is large enough to emit enough heat energy to be detected by infrared telescopes.
http://www.universetoday.com/134325/strange-loner-planet-gets-astronomers-attention/

A recent study of distant galaxies suggests that dark matter played a smaller role in the early universe - which would appear to indicate that dark matter took longer to coalesce around galaxies than ordinary matter did.
http://earthsky.org/space/dark-matter-less-influential-early-universe