Constellations
Constellations
562 articles in this category.
Constellations
The satellite industry is betting on multi-orbit resilience, but a San Francisco startup says the real future may be switching between LEO networks instead
Constellations
The FCC just gave Lynk and Anterix a small 900 MHz test from orbit, and it could redraw how utility networks reach remote America
Constellations
The Hubble Space Telescope's main mirror was ground to the wrong shape by 2.2 micrometers, about one-fiftieth the width of a human hair, and the error was only caught after launch because the device used to verify the mirror on the ground had itself been built wrong
Constellations
The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were found to be decelerating slightly more than gravity could explain, and for thirty years physicists wondered if Newton was wrong before realizing in 2012 that the answer was the probes' own waste heat gently pushing them backward at a billionth of Earth's gravity.
Constellations
A comet drifted alone between the stars for up to 11 billion years before entering our solar system last year — and the water inside it is unlike anything scientists have ever seen in our own
Constellations
The Mars helicopter Ingenuity completed 72 flights in an atmosphere less than one percent as dense as Earth's before rotor blade damage grounded it in 2024, and JPL had originally designed it for just five test flights, and the lessons from its overperformance are shaping NASA's next generation of Mars aircraft
Constellations
Richard Nixon's White House had a speech prepared in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became stranded on the lunar surface, and the speech written by William Safire begins "Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace," and the contingency plan had NASA ending communications with the lunar module, leaving Michael Collins as the only Apollo 11 astronaut able to return to Earth.
Constellations
Astronauts who walked on the moon reported that the dust tracked back into the lunar module smelled like spent gunpowder, and more than fifty years later scientists still cannot fully explain why, though the leading theory involves regolith that had sat undisturbed in vacuum for four billion years suddenly meeting oxygen and moisture inside the cabin for the first time.
Constellations
The Senate just installed a deputy administrator who thinks NASA's job is beating China to the moon — and the 46-43 vote tells you everything about what the agency is becoming
Constellations
In April 2019 the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the lunar surface carrying thousands of dehydrated tardigrades inside a "lunar library" — and later impact tests put the survival cutoff for tardigrades at around 900 metres per second, almost exactly Beresheet's crash speed, meaning we still don't know whether Earth life is now lying dormant on the Moon with no water to revive it.
Constellations
A European-Chinese spacecraft just launched to photograph something nobody has ever actually seen — the invisible shield that keeps the solar wind from sterilizing Earth
Constellations
The Soviet Union landed a probe on Venus in 1970 that survived only 23 minutes before being crushed, but in those 23 minutes Venera 7 became the first human-made object to transmit data from the surface of another planet, and the signal was so weak engineers nearly missed it buried in noise from a probe they thought had failed.
Constellations
The Pentagon is quietly betting Golden Dome on a consortium of commercial space firms — and the $1.2 trillion CBO number isn't even the part that should worry the White House
Constellations
Europe and China just put a telescope in orbit to photograph something nobody has ever actually seen — the invisible shield keeping the solar wind from stripping Earth bare
Constellations