Constellations
Constellations
561 articles in this category.
Constellations
When the FAA proposed letting commercial rocket licenses bypass specified requirements under 13 federal laws, it paired a 1984 waiver power with a Supreme Court ruling about an 88-mile Utah oil railway, carrying a regulatory argument from rail tracks to launchpads
Constellations
How does a spacecraft with less computing power than a modern car key still send back science from beyond the Sun's reach, almost 50 years after launch?
Constellations
The ISS toilet costs $23 million and separates urine into a centrifuge that recycles 98% of it back into drinking water — a closed-loop system that took NASA 40 years to perfect
Constellations
Japan is quietly building a 100-satellite sovereign eye in the sky, and the sensor that makes it actually useful is coming from a Finnish startup nobody in Tokyo had heard of five years ago
Constellations
In 2026, engineers at ESA’s test centre in the Netherlands sealed Plato inside the Maxwell chamber and ran every one of its 26 cameras and subsystems at once to find out whether the spacecraft could survive its own electronics screaming at each other
Constellations
Voyager 1 has no engine running. The 38,000-mile-per-hour speed it has held since its Saturn flyby in 1980 is borrowed momentum from planets it grazed more than four decades ago, and that free ride carries it to one light-day from Earth this November
Constellations
A planet orbiting twin suns was directly photographed in 2025, hugging its two stars six times closer than any other world ever found in a binary system — a real version of Tatooine that should not, according to current theory, be able to exist there
Constellations
In July 2026, a Falcon 9 carried 21 more satellites into polar orbit for the Pentagon's Golden Dome mesh network, a constellation designed to be too numerous to destroy, yet the laser links meant to weave those satellites into a single battle network are still switched off in orbit, months behind schedule
Constellations
The North Star is not the brightest star in the sky — not even close: Polaris ranks around 48th, far outshone by Sirius and dozens of others; what makes it special is only that it sits almost over the North Pole
Constellations
Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson spent months at Bell Labs in New Jersey convinced the faint hiss in their antenna was a fault — pigeons, droppings, loose rivets, all ruled out — before a Princeton physicist told them it was the oldest light in the universe, the afterglow of the Big Bang.
Constellations
By mid-2026 a single company, SpaceX, had more than 10,000 Starlink satellites circling the Earth — roughly two of every three active satellites in orbit now belong to one man's network
Constellations
In July 1969, weeks before Apollo 11 launched, a NASA engineer named Jack Garman handwrote a list of every alarm code the Apollo Guidance Computer could throw and placed it under the plexiglass on his console — and when Margaret Hamilton's software triggered a 1202 alarm during the lunar descent with roughly 1,800 metres to go, that scrap of paper kept Mission Control from aborting the landing.
Constellations
When Italian and German researchers modeled a square-meter array of 1,482 neodymium magnets, the simulation showed roughly a fifth of incoming low-energy solar protons being deflected — suggesting a potential way for deep-space crews to reduce some of the mass they currently carry for radiation shielding.
Constellations
Nearly a millennium ago sky-watchers recorded a new star so bright it was visible in daylight for weeks, and Hubble has now traced how far its remnant, the Crab Nebula, has expanded since — a thousand-year-old explosion still visibly unfolding
Constellations