20 September 2018
TESS finds its first exoplanet – a super-Earth 60 light years away
... Capricornus to Pictor. This swath of the sky’s southern hemisphere includes more than a dozen stars (aside from Pi Mensae) that astronomers already know have transiting planets based on previous studies from ground observatories. “In a sea of stars...
April 2019
Scanning the skies for exoplanets
...of the rest TESS’s first reported discovery was of Pi Mensae c, a planet twice the size of Earth that orbited its yellow ... so far - but unlike its smaller and speedy companion, Pi Mensae b ambles around its central star in just under 6 years. ...
October 2024
Cinema and extraterrestrial archaeology
... to imagine Martian civilisations. The film Mission to Mars refers to the ‘Face of Mars’, a Martian relief called ‘Cydonia Mensae’ that was photographed by the orbiter Viking I on 25 July 1976. In the film, the ‘Face’ is a sanctuary containing the...
01 April 2019
First independent confirmation of methane on Mars
... for this burst is along a fault line in the bed rock which lies between a region known as Aeolis Mensae on one side and the Medusae Fossae Formation on the other. Under this area lies shallow layers...
