Constellations
Constellations
523 articles in this category.
Constellations
In 1966, Soviet chief designer Sergei Korolev died on an operating table in Moscow at the age of 59, and two days later the newspaper Pravda printed his name and face for the first time — until that obituary, the man who launched Sputnik and put Gagarin in orbit was known publicly only as the Chief Designer
Constellations
Near the Milky Way’s core, NASA’s Chandra spotted an X-ray blob too bright to easily explain — over ten times brighter than massive young star clusters — and astronomers think it may be the still-expanding wreckage of a supernova that exploded around 300 AD.
Constellations
In 1979, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and photographed an active volcano erupting on Io, the first time volcanic activity had ever been observed on a world other than Earth, spotted by a navigation engineer checking the probe's position
Constellations
In May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, but only after a four-hour hold on the launch pad left him with a full bladder and no collection device, until he finally told the launch team he would have to go inside his sealed pressure suit, briefly short-circuiting his medical sensors
Constellations
When SpaceX described a million AI data-center satellites, each first-generation craft stretched wider than a Boeing 747, and astronomers saw the same problem Rubin Observatory was built to hate: bright moving hardware crossing the faintest parts of the sky
Constellations
Australia's Independent Commission Against Corruption can compel testimony that would be inadmissible in any criminal court — a power no American investigator possesses
Constellations
The James Webb Space Telescope may have seen the chemical fingerprint of a molecule linked to marine life on Earth in the atmosphere of K2-18b, 124 light-years away. But the signal is still tentative: it could be dimethyl sulfide, a related sulfur compound, or something else entirely, and scientists have not yet ruled out non-biological explanations.
Constellations
When SpaceX filed the paperwork for the largest IPO in history in May 2026, the prospectus that retail investors could download ran past 300 pages, while the unredacted version sat in a classified vault inside the SEC's Washington headquarters, readable by perhaps a dozen people with the right security clearances
Constellations
Mars can produce dust storms so vast they swallow the planet. In 2018, one of them turned day into darkness for NASA’s solar-powered Opportunity rover, cutting off the sunlight that had sustained it through more than 14 years on Mars.
Constellations
In 1946, a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried Clyde Holliday’s 35-millimetre DeVry motion-picture camera above the Kármán line and returned the first photographs of Earth from space on film recovered after the rocket crashed in the New Mexico desert
Constellations
On June 9, 2026, NASA named Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano as pilot of Artemis 3, making him the first European ever assigned to an Artemis crew — and within hours ESA's director general framed the seat not as a courtesy but as the opening move in a negotiation to put a European on the surface of the Moon
Constellations
Apollo astronauts trying to sleep on the way to the Moon kept seeing flashes and streaks in the dark, and the cause turned out to be cosmic rays from deep space passing straight through their eyes.
Constellations
The Apollo astronauts who carried lunar dust back into the cabin kept making the same strange report — fresh Moon dust smelled like spent gunpowder — yet the smell never survived the trip home, and more than fifty years later no one has fully explained what they were breathing in up there.
Constellations
In 2017, the first confirmed visitor from another star system tumbled through the solar system on a path that should have been simple to read, then accelerated slightly as it left without showing the coma or tail of an active comet — a gap that let Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb argue it might be alien technology, a claim most astronomers reject but one that has never quite gone away.
Constellations