The Great North American Eclipse Preview Perhaps the most anticipated natural or scientific event to occur since the advent of this project will cast shadows on Earth on 8 April 2024. Dubbed the Great North American Eclipse by many, on the afternoon of the second Monday in April, the moon will move between the sun and the […]
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Eclipse Glasses In North America, we’re on the precipice of a total solar eclipse. On 8 April 2024, a swath of the continent, from Mexico, through the heart of the United States, and a small part of Canada, will experience one of the natural world’s great expositions. In some places, for up to four minutes,
Hubble Tension Our current cosmological history begins with the Big Bang. The model suggests that if one could go back far enough in time, the discernible universe would be packed into a highly dense and hot quantum, which then exploded into the dynamo reality we experience today. First proposed by Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaître,
Odysseus Few literary characters rise to a level of timelessness in which their stories survive millennia. Still, fewer characters see their names become eponyms folded into multiple languages. One such gargantuan of the page is Homer’s Odysseus. If you’re into the Romans or the Irish, you might know him better as Ulysses. Though the champion
Hailing Frequencies Open To a child born in 1956, the Apollo missions to the moon transpired during a formative period. Teenagers across the United States watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin prance across our grey satellite, many dreaming of one day leaving their footprints on an alien world. Though the monumental achievements of the space
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Ginny On 30 July 2020, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V launch vehicle lifted off from SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral. Aboard this rocket was a payload with a special destination: Mars. After more than 29 weeks in space, on 18 February 2021, the rover named Perseverance touched down in a crater on the red planet. Nicknamed Percy,
Taters, the Space Laser Cat “Everyone loves Taters.” –Ryan Rogalin, Jet Propulsion Laboratory In our current understanding of the cosmos, nothing travels faster than light. All the incarnations of the electromagnetic spectrum move at 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum, which is approximately 186,000 miles per second or 671 million miles per hour. That’s some serious
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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
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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
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