For My Next Trick, I Will Make the Rings of Saturn Disappear Follow this plan and you can become a celestial magician. The next time you’re at a party filled with astronomical aficionados – what gala isn’t filled with these types of people? – you can wave a wand, proclaim “abracadabra,” and pull off a …
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Ring of Fire If you’ve followed this project for a while, you know we’re big fans of eclipses. Lunar, solar, partial, full: we love them all. The United States is currently in the midst of a glittering age of eclipses. In 2017, many across the country glimpsed the “Great American Eclipse,” a full solar eclipse. Under seven years later …
Bennu & OSIRIS-REx As humans, we’re engrossed by the physics and metaphysics of beginnings. How did the universe arise? If we banged into reality in a big way, what existed beforehand? Did a creator create or did we spontaneously congeal? The answers to these cosmological questions might be beyond the grasp of beings designed to …
Super Blue Moon Earlier this year, we investigated the many flavors of the moon. Despite the fact that we only see one face of our satellite, we are treated to a plethora of different visuals. We have all the phases, with their crescents, humps (“gibbous moon”), fulls, and quarters. Every once in a while, we’re treated …
We’re Going to Probe Uranus We know Uranus is a crazy place. We know Uranus is extremely tilted, featuring an obliquity of almost 100 degrees in relation to the Sun. We know Uranus is stinky, a cesspool of rotten-egg aromas. In all likelihood, Uranus even rains diamonds. For these reasons and many more, Uranus is a place like …
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 …