Exciting times in solar system exploration

Currently there are some very exciting missions going on in our solar system. And following these missions have never been easier as the projects posts news on Twitter.

The far side of the Moon

China has really made a leap into space and their latest missions are concentrated around our Moon. They currently have a microsatellite called Longjiang-2 which captured the following image of the moon's far side and Earth. Pictures of the far side of our moon are rare because of the fact that this side never faces our Earth and hence is not visible to astronomers on Earth.
But the Chinese don't stop there. They have also successfully landed a vehicle called Chang'e-4 and also rolled out a small rover Yutu-2. Because the vehicles are on the far side of the Moon, they cannot communicate directly with Earth. The radio signals are therefore first sent to a satellite and then later transmitted to Earth when the satellite is range of Earth.
Because of the extreme temperature conditions on the moon (-190C at night, 100C in daytime) the vehicles need to sleep. Up until now some science has been conducted. There has for example been observed a difference in surface temperature on the far side of the moon, compared to the near (visible from Earth) side. Exciting!
You can follow the rover by following the Twitter account @Yutu_2

Roving around on Mars

US has two active rovers on “The Red Planet”. Curiosity @MarsCuriosity which has been driving around since 2008 and is still drilling holes in the surface, looking for evidence of water. The rover is also a selfie expert who even takes good care of removing the “selfie pole” from the images before posting on social media.

In addition to this, the newly arrived rover called Insight is busy setting up scientific equipment to register mars quakes. If you follow Insight @NASAInSight on Twitter, you will almost daily get short videos of grappler arms moving stuff around on the red surface. So cool!!

One day, we also got sound recordings of the Martian winds. I know that listening to the sound of wind might seem ordinary, but hey, it’s wind on Mars!! I listened to the recording time and time again. It even sounded like ordinary wind, but it was so cool!

I encourage you to follow these missions as we are currently so lucky to experience so many concurrent gizmos (I haven’t mentioned all of them!) buzzing around and providing us with new knowledge in (almost) realtime.

Images are owned by Camras and Nasa