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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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
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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
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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