Constellations
Constellations
563 articles in this category.
Constellations
While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, Michael Collins orbited above them alone in Columbia — and for roughly 47 minutes of each orbit, when the body of the Moon itself blocked radio contact with both Earth and the lunar surface, he was a single human being with the entire Moon between himself and every other living person
Constellations
In 1982 the Soviet Union landed a probe on the surface of Venus that survived 127 minutes in heat that melts lead and pressure dense enough to crush a submarine — long enough to scan back two panoramas of flat basaltic rock under an orange-tinted sky before the heat finally ended the mission.
Constellations
A quantum flicker measured in centimeters and nanoseconds may be the hidden switch deciding whether a dying star explodes into a supernova or simply collapses in silence
Constellations
The Cassini spacecraft was deliberately flown into Saturn in 2017 because its fuel was running low and engineers refused to risk it drifting into Enceladus, a moon with a subsurface ocean, and the final 22 orbits were designed to thread a 1,500-mile gap between Saturn and its innermost ring that no spacecraft had ever attempted.
Constellations
Voyager 1's signal now takes more than 23 hours to reach Earth, and by the time NASA receives the next status check the spacecraft will already be 1.5 million kilometres further into interstellar space
Constellations
The Pioneer 10 and 11 probes carry gold plaques designed by Carl Sagan in three weeks, and the diagram of the naked woman is missing a single anatomical line that earlier sketches included, quietly erased by Sagan himself because he was sure NASA would reject anything more explicit
Constellations
The Galileo spacecraft was deliberately crashed into Jupiter in 2003 because mission planners feared a drifting probe could contaminate Europa's hidden ocean, forcing engineers to destroy the machine that revealed why Europa had to be protected
Constellations
The Soviet Venera probes are still sitting on the surface of Venus, slowly being crushed and corroded by 900-degree sulfuric acid clouds, and the photographs they sent back in 1975 remain the only images humans have ever taken from the surface of another planet other than Mars.
Constellations
The average wedding ring contains gold that is older than the Earth itself — every gold atom on the planet was forged in a neutron star collision before the solar system existed, and there is no other way to make it
Constellations
The James Webb Space Telescope is parked a million miles from Earth and runs on less power than a household kettle — and its deployment sequence had 344 single points of failure, any one of which could have ended the mission
Constellations
There is no sound in space, but NASA records the electromagnetic vibrations of planets and converts them to audio, and Saturn sounds genuinely haunting
Constellations
The ISS travels at 17,500 miles per hour, which means astronauts inside it are aging measurably slower than people on the ground, and by the time Scott Kelly returned from his year in orbit he was 5 milliseconds younger than his identical twin brother Mark.
Constellations
The Apollo astronauts left behind retroreflectors on the lunar surface that scientists still bounce lasers off today, and the round-trip time has been measured precisely enough to prove the Moon is drifting away from Earth at 3.8 centimeters per year, about the rate your fingernails grow.
Constellations
Neutron stars are so dense that a sugar-cube-sized piece would weigh as much as Mount Everest — and they spin so fast that some complete a rotation 700 times per second
Constellations