https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/saturn-plunge-nears-for-cassini-spacecraft

The spacecraft is expected to lose radio contact with Earth within about one to two minutes after beginning its descent into Saturn's upper atmosphere.
But on the way down, before contact is lost, eight of Cassini's 12 science instruments will be operating. In particular, the spacecraft‘s ion and neutral
mass spectrometer (INMS), which will be directly sampling the atmosphere's composition, potentially returning insights into the giant planet's formation
and evolution. On the day before the plunge, other Cassini instruments will make detailed, high-resolution observations of Saturn's auroras, temperature,
and the vortices at the planet's poles. Cassini's imaging camera will be off during this final descent, having taken a last look at the Saturn system
the previous day (Sept. 14).

Cassini: A Saturn Odyssey
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHaaIX-iSqM

První JPL telkon začíná s mírným zpožděním (technické potíže):

NASA JPL Live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4fwyphQqhI

https://www.nasa.gov/...nasa-team-passes-major-technological-milestone-for-characterizing-exoplanets

NASA researchers say they have passed a major milestone in their quest to mature more powerful tools for directly detecting and analyzing the atmospheres
of giant planets outside the solar system — one of the observational goals of NASA’s proposed Wide-Field Infrared Space Telescope, also known as WFIRST.

In tests conducted at the High-Contrast Imaging Testbed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, in Pasadena, California — one of the world’s most
advanced testbeds of its kind — researchers created what they call a region of very deep contrast between a simulated star and its planet. They also
demonstrated the ability to detect and analyze the planet’s faint light over a relatively large portion of the visible to near-infrared wavelength band.

An instrument developed by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland — the Prototype Imaging Spectrograph for Coronagraphic
Exoplanet Studies, or PISCES — played an important role in the demonstration, showing that it could separate light of one or more Jupiter-sized exoplanets
by their wavelength (color) and record the data at every position around a star.

10 Most Bizarre Planets You've Probably Never Heard Of - Listverse
http://listverse.com/2017/08/28/10-most-bizarre-planets-youve-probably-never-heard-of/

U of T astrophysicists convert moons and rings of Saturn into music - Arts & Science News
http://news.artsci.utoronto.ca/all-news/saturn-sounds/

After centuries of looking with awe and wonder at the beauty of Saturn and its rings,
we can now listen to them, thanks to the efforts of astrophysicists at the University of Toronto.

“To celebrate the Grand Finale of NASA’s Cassini mission next month, we converted Saturn’s moons
and rings into two pieces of music,” says astrophysicist Matt Russo, a postdoctoral researcher at
the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T.

SATURN Sounds Part 1: Moons And Rings Translated Into Music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGnuDE7sINI

VIRGO: Likely transiting exocomets detected by Kepler
What’s that coming over the disk? | astrobites
https://astrobites.org/2017/08/24/whats-that-coming-over-the-disk/

During visual inspection, the light curve of KIC 3542116, a F2-type star, was found to have three asymmetric,
transit-like features with easy-to-spot depths of 0.1% over a period of 1 day. Further inspection revealed
three dips of a similar shape hidden within the Kepler data that was hidden by stellar variability.
The resulting data is shown below in figures 3 and 4.

PLATO as it is: A legacy mission for Galactic archaeology - Miglio - 2017 - Astronomische Nachrichten - Wiley Online Library
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asna.201713385/full

New Computational Model of Chemical Building Blocks May Help Explain the Origins of Life
http://www.stonybrook.edu/...model-of-chemical-building-blocks-may-help-explain-the-origins-of-life/

Scientists have yet to understand and explain how life’s informational molecules – proteins and DNA and RNA – arose from simpler chemicals
when life on earth emerged some four billion years ago. Now a research team from the Stony Brook University Laufer Center for Physical and
Quantitative Biology and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory believe they have the answer. They developed a computational model
explaining how certain molecules fold and bind together to grow longer and more complex, leading from simple chemicals to primitive biological
molecules. The findings are reported early online in PNAS.

Moon's Shadow Races Across the Clouds! Astonishing Solar Eclipse Time Lapse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13rVSwWIocE

Astronomers let gaseous disks tilt and shrink in virtual wind tunnel - Radboud University
http://www.ru.nl/english/news-agenda/news/vm/imapp/astrophysics/2017/gaseous-disks-wind-tunnel/

A team of Dutch astronomers, led by Thomas Wijnen from Radboud University, has managed to tilt and shrink gaseous disks, in which planets form,
in a virtual wind tunnel. The research helps in finding an explanation for the tilted planetary orbits in our own solar system, for example.
Wijnen and his colleagues publish their findings in two articles in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Tilting of a protoplanetary disc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsEFHAoGBg0

Sandia National Laboratories: News Releases : Black hole models contradicted by hands-on tests at Sandia’s Z machine
https://share-ng.sandia.gov/news/resources/news_releases/black_hole/#.WaRlmTOg9hE

A long-standing but unproven assumption about the X-ray spectra of black holes in space has been
contradicted by hands-on experiments performed at Sandia National Laboratories’ Z machine.

Z, the most energetic laboratory X-ray source on Earth, can duplicate the X-rays surrounding black
holes that otherwise can be watched only from a great distance and then theorized about.

“Of course, emission directly from black holes cannot be observed,” said Sandia researcher and lead
author Guillaume Loisel, lead author for a paper on the experimental results, published in August
in Physical Review Letters. “We see emission from surrounding matter just before it is consumed by
the black hole. This surrounding matter is forced into the shape of a disk, called an accretion disk.”

The results suggest revisions are needed to models previously used to interpret emissions from matter
just before it is consumed by black holes, and also the related rate of growth of mass within the black
holes. A black hole is a region of outer space from which no material and no radiation (that is, X-rays,
visible light, and so on) can escape because the gravitational field of the black hole is so intense.

Astronomy and Space News - Astro Watch: Proposed Astrophysics Mission to Conduct the First Infrared Spectral Survey of the Entire Sky
http://www.astrowatch.net/2017/08/proposed-astrophysics-mission-to.html

NASA has recently chosen six proposed astrophysics mission for concept studies. Among them is the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe,
Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer, or SPHEREx, which aims to unlock the mysteries of the universe by performing the first all-sky spectral survey.

If selected for construction and launch, the survey provided by the SPHEREx spacecraft could provide crucial insights into the origin and evolution of
galaxies, and could help scientists explore whether planets around other stars could harbor life.

“SPHEREx will produce the first infrared spectral survey of the entire sky. This survey will have broad applications in astronomy, providing rich spectra
of galaxies, quasars, stars, clusters and our Galaxy. Following the wide usage of previous all-sky surveys like the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS)
and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), SPHEREx will have a lasting value for the astronomy community,” James Bock, Principal Investigator of
SPHEREx at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), told Astrowatch.net.

VLA Reveals Distant Galaxy’s Magnetic Field – National Radio Astronomy Observatory
https://public.nrao.edu/news/vla-reveals-magnetic-field/

With the help of a gigantic cosmic lens, astronomers have measured the magnetic field of a galaxy nearly five billion light-years away.
The achievement is giving them important new clues about a problem at the frontiers of cosmology — the nature and origin of the magnetic
fields that play an important role in how galaxies develop over time.

The scientists used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to study a star-forming galaxy that lies
directly between a more-distant quasar and Earth. The galaxy’s gravity serves as a giant lens, splitting the quasar’s image into two
separate images as seen from Earth. Importantly, the radio waves coming from this quasar, nearly 8 billion light-years away, are
preferentially aligned, or polarized.

“The polarization of the waves coming from the background quasar, combined with the fact that the waves producing the two lensed images
traveled through different parts of the intervening galaxy, allowed us to learn some important facts about the galaxy’s magnetic field,”
said Sui Ann Mao, Minerva Research Group Leader for the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.

VIRGO: dik ;-)