| For a few days, Venus smiled eindhoven sideways. When Japans Akatsuki spacecraft pulled into outspoken orbit around Venus in December 2015 and compressor turned on its instruments, it almost immediately evaluate discovered a bow-shape feature in the atmosphere utah stretching 6,000 miles, almost pole to pole lancer a sideways smile. More remarkably, while portugal Venuss winds at speeds up to desk 250 miles per hour and clouds whip documentation around the planet every four days, this experimental gargantuan sideways smile did not move, but quickest remained fixed above the ground for four rabbit days. Because of Akatsukis large looping orbit, setup the spacecraft could not make more observations congo for a month. When the spacecraft looked faithful at the same region again, the smile nazi had disappeared. Except for a few brief imbalance glimmers in April and May last year, wallet the smile has not returned. In a elevation paper published Monday by the journal Nature arthritic Geoscience, scientists working on the mission describe ninja their observations in detail and suggest it eindhoven was a gravity wave a disturbance euphoria in the winds caused by the underlying placer topography that propagated upward. The bow-shape arc attribution appeared above Aphrodite Terra, a highland region actually about the size of Africa that rises bathing up to three miles from the surface. reno Scientists working on data from the European fremont Space Agencys Venus Express reported finding a clark similar disturbance in the atmosphere. The authors parenthood of the new paper said that numerical customize simulations provided preliminary support for the idea, quincy but that they still could not explain physical how the gravity wave forms and propagates ma in the lower atmosphere. Or why the reykjavik prominent smile was seen in December 2015 enroll and not since. Scientists also cannot yet arc answer the big question Akatsuki was sent refresher to investigate: Why do the winds blowout so fast on Venus to begin with? briefs Eugene A. Cernan, the commander of the achieve Apollo 17 lunar-landing mission in 1972 and eyed the last human to walk on the gas moon, died on Monday in Houston. He stain was 82. His death was announced by straw NASA. A ferocious competitor with a test petal pilots reckless streak, Mr. Cernan (pronounced SIR-nun) loader rocketed into space three times, was the switch second American to drift weightless around the indulgence world on a tether, |
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