Constellations
Constellations
523 articles in this category.
Constellations
Titan’s atmosphere is thicker than Earth’s, its rivers and lakes are made of methane and ethane, and NASA is sending a nuclear-powered drone there because on Saturn’s largest moon, flying may be easier than driving.
Constellations
Enceladus is a tiny moon of Saturn that sprays water vapor and ice grains into space from an ocean hidden beneath its icy crust — meaning a spacecraft can sample material from an alien sea without ever landing.
Constellations
Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice less than a minute after launch, and the mission kept going only because a flight controller recognised an obscure telemetry failure pattern and told the crew to flip a switch almost nobody else in the room understood
Constellations
JPL's management contract is suddenly up for grabs for the first time since the 1930s, and NASA's own language shows why this is more than a routine procurement fight
Constellations
Australia keeps being described as a junior AUKUS partner — but the radar in its outback and the port in its northwest are quietly rewriting who controls orbital traffic
Constellations
Researchers simulated 30 million routes to the Moon and found a hidden detour through L1 that saves fuel and keeps spacecraft talking to Earth the whole way
Constellations
The fuel-saving lunar trajectory that looks like the long way round could solve one of crewed Moon travel’s most awkward problems — losing contact behind the far side
Constellations
The Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the Moon that scientists still bounce lasers off 57 years later, and the round-trip measurement is precise enough to track the Moon drifting away from Earth at the speed your fingernails grow
Constellations
NASA deliberately crashed Galileo into Jupiter in 2003 to protect Europa, after the spacecraft found signs of the ocean it could one day contaminate
Constellations
The Cassini spacecraft was deliberately flown into Saturn in 2017 because NASA refused to risk contaminating Enceladus, and in its final 90 seconds its thrusters fought the atmosphere so it could keep sending data home
Constellations
A Colorado startup just raised $30 million on a quiet bet that astronauts won't actually be the ones building the moon's first permanent base — robots will get there first
Constellations
The Voyager Golden Record carries a small sample of uranium on its cover, placed there so that whoever finds it can measure the decay and work out how long it has been drifting — a built-in clock for a message engineered to last around a billion years.
Constellations
Voyager 2 photographed Neptune in light so dim that some exposures lasted seconds or even minutes, while the spacecraft was racing past the planet. To stop the images smearing, engineers programmed the spacecraft itself to compensate for the motion, turning the whole probe into its own image-stabilisation system.
Constellations
The Huygens probe descended by parachute to the surface of Titan in 2005, through an orange haze colder than minus 170 degrees Celsius, and more than a billion kilometres from home it remains the only spacecraft humanity has ever landed anywhere in the outer solar system
Constellations