When Suzanne Dodd’s team transmitted a routine command to Voyager 2 on July 21, the unthinkable happened: They accidentally sent the wrong version, which pointed the interstellar probe’s antenna slightly away from Earth. When they next expected to receive data, they heard nothing at all. The small error almost made humanity lose its connection with […]
Read MoreWhile it would be awesome for people to be able to live in space, a “weightless” environment poses some serious challenges. Humans function best on Earth’s surface, where they are affected by a constant gravitational force. Without it, there are well-known consequences of long-term exposure to microgravity, including bone mass loss and muscle atrophy. So […]
Read MoreThere are a couple of things to notice. First, after the collision DART is moving backwards, because it bounced. Since velocity is a vector, that means that it will have a negative momentum in this one-dimensional example. Second, the kinetic energy equation deals with the square of the velocity. This means that even though DART […]
Read More“This is the first time we’ve actually attempted to move something in our solar system with the intent of preventing a [potential] natural disaster that has been part of our planet’s history from the beginning,” says Statler. The DART probe, which is short for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, has been in the works since […]
Read MoreUpdate (12:22 PM, June 27, 2022): This post has been updated to reflect that the MARSIS instrument was designed with a development environment that was based on Windows 98. What you need to know: The Mars Express spacecraft, which launched in 2003, will receive a software update to improve the data it sends back to […]
Read MoreIn 2011, Lindy Elkins-Tanton and a couple of colleagues wrote a paper exploring ideas about how tiny would-be planets called planetesimals might have formed billions of years ago, and speculated about whether their remnants might still orbit in the asteroid belt. Afterwards, officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California approached her. “Would you […]
Read MoreFor the past couple of decades, NASA has been investing in spacecraft to conduct up-close examinations of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Now it’ll likely be Uranus’ turn. On Tuesday, a team of planetary science and astrobiology researchers released a detailed new report called a decadal survey, which lays out research priorities for their […]
Read More
