NASA

The First Untethered Spacewalk

The First Untethered Spacewalk On 20 February 1984, astronaut Hoot Gibson peered out of Challenger at something rare and sensational. He grabbed a camera, took a light meter reading three times, checked the focus four times, and snapped one of the starkest, most indelible images in the history of photography.Bruce McCandless II floated 300 feet away, blanketed […]

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Ginny

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,

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Taters, the Space Laser Cat

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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Bennu & OSIRIS-REx

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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DART

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

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