Open the image below (4000×2250 pixels), then zoom in to find the small, bright, bluish-white object. Congratulations: you’ve just spotted NASA’s Perseverance rover from Mars orbit! If you look carefully, you can even pick out the rover’s tracks!
Did you know there’s a NASA website where you can spell out your name using Landsat Earth images? Well, now you do.
The late 1980s and early 1990s were pivotal years in history. The Soviet Union was in turmoil, and the end of this vast union of republics, established in 1917, seemed inevitable. Then, in 1991, the once unthinkable happened: the greatest…
This might be one of the best photos of the Space Shuttle in history (in my opinion, the best) – even if it’s not the best, it’s definitely one of the most interesting: On November 15, 1995, Russian cosmonaut Sergei…
Artist and designer Josh Worth created an interactive website called “If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel: A Tediously Accurate Map of the Solar System,” which I mentioned in this post. On Josh Worth’s amazing website, the scale is so…
When it comes to space exploration, the science fiction of the mid-20th century was a bit overly enthusiastic. According to the science fiction novels and films of the classic era, the 1990s and 2000s were supposed to be a time…
In his poem “Strontium-90,” the great Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet says: “We are in a race with ourselves, my dear. Either we will take life to the dead stars, or death will descend upon our world.” Do you think that…
A great short science fiction film, Others Will Follow, created and directed by Andrew Finch and published on Vimeo, tells the story of the first crewed mission to Mars. After a tragic accident causes the spacecraft to break apart, the…
In our daily lives, we usually don’t realize how strong gravity is unless we’re doing something that works against it, such as climbing a hill on a bicycle, going up stairs, or lifting a heavy object. But think about this:…
What if we could build a spaceship capable of leaving the solar system at the speed of light? How long would it take to reach interstellar space? Despite being small compared to our galaxy, let alone the entire universe, our…
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest and most massive of the Solar System’s moons. It has a mean radius of 2,634.1±0.3 km (about 1,636 miles, or 0.413 Earths). For comparison, our Moon‘s radius is 1,737.1 km (1,079 miles). Have you…
If you’ve watched the very good science fiction series The Expanse, you will see that the concept of “g” is frequently mentioned. The accelerations/decelerations and maneuvers of spacecraft are always given in units of “g”. This is also true in…