The Many Flavors of the Moon The dominant body of our solar system is, of course, the life-giving sun. And, though we can observe other stars and planets in the night sky, the second-most prominent entity is easily the moon. Today, we denote a year by the time it takes to orbit our star, but …
ʻOumuamua Our solar system is a big place. We sent the Voyager probes on a one-way trip out of the sun’s domain in 1977. It took the two crafts more than 35 years to reach the edge of the heliosphere, the point where they entered interstellar space. And they only had to travel approximately the …
The Birth of the Space Age I climbed a tall cherry tree at the back of the barn…and as I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if …
The Green Parabola If any early humans or Neanderthals had turned their gaze to the cosmos 50,000 years ago, they might have been treated to a rarity. If, however, no one happened to catch the streaking sky-body 50 millennia ago, it’s possible that today’s humans will be the first to ever spy a comet that …
X-37B Overshadowed in the past week by the launch of Artemis, NASA’s renewed moon mission, was another incredible space achievement, one cloaked in secrecy. In 1999, NASA commissioned Boeing to develop an “orbital vehicle.” Boeing designed the X-37 to be a scaled model of the Space Shuttle Orbiter. The orbiter is the part of the …
Craters of Eternal Darkness What makes night within us may leave stars. — Victor Hugo One of the oldest tropes pertains to the interplay between lightness and darkness. Without one, does the other exist? Certain ruminations liken light and dark to being two sides of the same coin. This comparison makes sense on a cosmic scale, …
DART Today, Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Liv Tyler, Ben Affleck, Robert Duval, Tea Leoni, Elijah Wood, and Morgan Freeman are proud astronauts and scientists. Twenty-four years after the summer that gifted the world with the films Armageddon and Deep Impact, astronomers have finally started the process of catching up with late-20th-century film science. Both movies deal with …
Peak of Eternal Light Today is the first full day of Autumn 2022 in the Northern Hemisphere. The fall equinox means we are currently experiencing nearly identical lengths of night and day. We have “day” and “night” because the planet spins on its axis. Earth rotates once every 24 hours with respect to the …
Eros Millions of asteroids orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter, a band known as the asteroid belt. Most of these bodies circle our star peacefully, chugging around the solar system year after year, without incident. Not all asteroids reside in the belt, however. Some of these rocks hurtle around the sun in orbits that …
Ceres [Editor’s Note: This article is the second in a series exploring real locations featured in a novel and television series, called The Expanse. In this sci-fi epic set in the 2300s, Earth and Mars have become independent “nations,” while millions of humans inhabit the asteroid belt, where they mine lucrative resources for the Inner …