Constellations
Constellations
558 articles in this category.
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
There are more stars in the observable universe than grains of sand on every beach on Earth, and the visible cosmos is the small part — most of it is moving away faster than light can travel
Constellations
The most crucial atoms inside your body — the calcium in your bones, the iodine in your thyroid, the zinc in your blood — weren't just made by a single dying star, and their true cosmic history is far more complex
Constellations
If you compressed the entire history of the universe into a single year, all of recorded history would fit in the final 14 seconds — and a single human lifetime would last only 0.2 seconds
Constellations
When astronauts come home from months in orbit, recovery teams often put them in chairs before they walk, because sudden head movements can still make them feel like the ground is moving under them
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