Constellations
Constellations
523 articles in this category.
Constellations
Two radio astronomers spent months trying to eliminate a faint hiss in their antenna, even scrubbing out pigeon droppings, before realising the noise they couldn’t get rid of was the afterglow of the early universe — the cosmic microwave background left behind by the Big Bang.
Constellations
In 1998 ground controllers lost contact with the Sun-watching SOHO spacecraft and feared it might be gone for good, until the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico pinged the silent, slowly tumbling craft — beginning a months-long effort to coax it back to life.
Constellations
The Milky Way's central black hole is almost silent today, but a collision with the Large Magellanic Cloud could feed it enough gas to wake it up — roughly two billion years from now
Constellations
For decades two spacecraft drifting out of the solar system were being nudged off course by a force no one could explain — until physicists traced it to the faint heat radiating from the probes themselves.
Constellations
A 36-year sweep of orbital debris has found the solar threshold where Earth’s upper atmosphere starts pulling space junk down faster, just as mega-constellations crowd low orbit
Constellations
In 1995, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft sent a probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere that kept transmitting for just 58 minutes as it fell, returning the first direct readings from inside the giant planet before rising heat and pressure silenced it for good
Constellations
A meteorite that fell near the Australian town of Murchison in 1969 was found to contain grains of stardust up to around 7 billion years old — the oldest solid material ever identified on Earth, formed long before the Sun or planets existed.
Constellations
Olympus Mons on Mars is a volcano more than two and a half times the height of Everest, but its slopes rise so gradually over hundreds of kilometres that a person standing on it might not realize they were on the tallest volcano in the solar system at all.
Constellations
In 1990, after years of lobbying by Carl Sagan, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward home from about 6 billion kilometres away and photographed Earth as a pale blue speck smaller than a single pixel — an image NASA had repeatedly resisted because it offered little scientific value, but that became one of the most famous photographs ever taken.
Constellations
Voyager 1 is now so far from Earth that a signal traveling at the speed of light takes more than 22 hours to reach it — so when engineers send a command, they can wait nearly two days to know whether the spacecraft responded
Constellations
The Voyager Golden Record carries greetings in 55 languages — a deliberate attempt to send a small sample of human voices into deep space long after the spacecraft fell silent.
Constellations
Before he climbed the ladder for the last time, the final astronaut to walk on the Moon knelt and traced his daughter's initials into the lunar dust with one finger — three letters that, with no wind or rain to disturb them, may sit there undisturbed for fifty thousand years.
Constellations
A NASA satellite launched in 1976 carries a Carl Sagan–designed plaque sealed inside its core, mapping Earth's continents 268 million years ago, at launch, and 8.4 million years from now — and that last date is no accident, because it's roughly when the satellite is expected to fall back to Earth and finally be opened.
Constellations
Atomic oxygen in low Earth orbit slowly eats spacecraft surfaces, and the ISS survives because engineers learned to coat, test, and replace the materials most vulnerable to it
Constellations