Science News Roundup: Dutch teenager on space flight said Bezos never ordered from Amazon; “Grandfather” of the modern crocodile, 150 million years old, fossil discovered in Chile and more

Below is a summary of the latest scientific news.

Dutch teenager on space flight said Bezos had never ordered from Amazon

The Dutch teenager, who became the youngest space traveler this week, surprised billionaire Jeff Bezos on the flight by telling him he had never ordered anything from Amazon.com.

Oliver Daemen, an 18-year-old physics student, accompanied Bezos, his brother Mark Bezos and the 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk – the oldest person in space – on a 10-minute journey beyond the earth’s atmosphere.

“Grandfather” of the modern crocodile, 150 million years old, discovered fossil in Chile

A 150-million-year-old fossilized skeleton discovered in the mountains of southern Chile has been identified as the ancestor of the modern crocodile, the Argentine Science Museum said on Friday. The species, named Burkesuchus Mallingrandensis, was found in 2014 by Argentine and Chilean researchers in an Andean fossil deposit near the Patagonian town of Mallin Grande. It has since been analyzed at the Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences (MACN) in Buenos Aires.

Former Virgin Galactic CEO Goes Into Space – CNBC

Former CEO of Virgin Galactic Holdings, George Whitesides, will go into space on the aerospace company’s next test room flight, CNBC reported on Friday. Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic, flew into space earlier this month and hit Amazon.com Inc’s Jeff Bezos to the last limit. Branson announced the news of Whitesides on July 11th during a party in New Mexico following his own space flight, the report said.

SpaceX receives NASA launch contract for a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa

Elon Musk’s private rocket company SpaceX received a $ 178 million contract for launch services for NASA’s first mission to focus on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and whether it could host living conditions, the space agency announced on Friday. The Europa Clipper mission is scheduled for October 2024 on a Falcon Heavy rocket owned by Musk’s company Space Exploration Technologies Corp. will be blown up by NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA said in a statement posted online.

Moon formation region around the planet in another solar system

Scientists have for the first time discovered a lunar-forming region around a planet outside our solar system – a Jupiter-like world surrounded by a disk of gas and dust so large that it could produce three moons as large as the one, the orbiting the earth. Researchers used the ALMA observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert to discover the disk of swirling material that is gathering around one of two newborn planets orbiting a young star called PDS 70, which is relatively close to 370 light years from the Earth is located. A light year is the distance light travels in one year, about 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

Marsquakes reveal the anatomy of the interior of the red planet

Seismic waves from quakes discovered by NASA’s InSight robotic lander have helped scientists decipher the anatomy of Mars, including making initial estimates of the size of its large liquid metal core, the thickness of its crust, and the texture of its mantle. The results released on Thursday shed light on the previously poorly understood internal structure of Earth’s smaller neighbor and provided some surprises as well as confirmation that the center of the red planet has melted.

(This story was not edited by Devdiscourse staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)