Voyager 1, now in interstellar space, sent back a final present a few years ago: a “family portrait” of the solar system, showing a shrunken sun and several tiny flecks of light–the planets. One of those flecks, a tiny blue dot, is the Earth. The past 20-some years has seen an explosion in planetary knowledge …
Tag: space exploration
The Saga of NEAR
Monday, a plucky little spacecraft called NEAR, for “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous,” is going to attempt to make space exploration history. Back in February of 1996, the 805-kilogram spacecraft, a short, stubby cylinder with four solar panels forming a cross shape at one end, was launched to rendezvous and orbit the asteroid Eros, whose orbit …
Space stations, once more with feeling
In his 1984 State of the Union Address, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced that the U.S. would build a space station, a permanently inhabited base in orbit. It’s a safe bet that Reagan would have been shocked and disbelieving had you told him that it would be 14 years before the first component …
Extraterrestrials
On the television program The X-Files, FBI agent Fox Mulder is always searching for proof of extraterrestrials, mostly by exploring old warehouses with his trusty flashlight and cell phone. But as an article by Ron Cowen in the November 1 issue of Science News points out, the real search for non-terrestrial life is taking place in university and …
John Glenn’s return to space
At 9:47 a.m. on February 20, 1962, John Glenn, 41, a U.S. Marine test pilot, strapped into the tiny Mercury space capsule known as Friendship 7, hurtled into space atop an Atlas rocket. In the ensuing four hours and 56 minutes he circled the Earth three times, then splashed down in the Atlantic ocean, 880 …
Crickets in space
One of my favorite sketches on the original Muppet Show as “Pigs in Space,” in which the intrepid crew of the starship Swine Trek faced danger, excitement and bad writing while exploring the final frontier. As far as I know, no real pigs have yet flown into space, but many other animals have made the …
Adapting to space
In the movies, spaceships have artificial gravity, because it’s a heck of a lot easier to film that way. Real-life astronauts aren’t so lucky. The men and women who inhabit the Mir space station spend months in weightlessness. Sure, it’s a lot of fun–flying around, leaving objects hanging in mid-air–but inside those cosmonauts’ and …
Sputnik
This Saturday marks the 40 anniversary of one of the most pivotal events in 20th century science: the launch by the late Soviet Union of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. Nowadays, of course, we take satellites for granted: we see photographs taken by satellites every evening on the news, we watch television signals …
Mir
I’m very much a child of the Space Age. I was born the year after Sputnik became the first man-made object to orbit the Earth, celebrated my 10th birthday on the very day that humans first set foot on the Moon, and turned 17 on the day that the first Viking lander set down on …
The Hubble Space Telescope
If you’re an astronomer, “Twinkle, twinkle little star” isn’t a cute bed-time song for children, it’s a nightly nightmare. Stars twinkle (and daytime skies are blue) because we live at the bottom of a thick soup of atmosphere that distorts our view of the heavens. Ever since Galileo, this has played havoc with observations of …
Space stations revisited
Forget cosmic radiation, the solar flares, meteorites, re-entry: the real danger facing space exploration today is red ink. As governments drown in it, some space projects have had more narrow escapes than Luke Skywalker. Consider International Space Station Alpha. A space station is a permanent inhabited base in orbit. People have been talking about …
Apollo 11’s 25th anniversary
On July 20 we marked the 25th anniversary of an historic event: my 10th birthday. As it happens, on the same day we marked the 25th anniversary of the landing of men on the moon–the best birthday present any 10-year-old ever had. President John F. Kennedy told Congress on May 25, 1961, that the United …
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