The past ten years have seen an explosion of small-lift rocket companies. Ranging from 30 to 100 feet tall, these liquid-propellant rockets aim to launch up to two tons of payload — equivalent to the weight of a large car — into orbit. Instead of focusing on humans and large space telescopes, they’re launching smaller […]
A new space race is underway, and it’s explosive Read More »
Just before midnight in late July 2013, onlookers began lining the side of an interstate right outside of Chicago — many pulling out their smartphones to film. They watched as the flashing police lights leading the procession silently illuminated the suburb. The sea of reds and blues slowly faded into a sweeping gold. Following the
Late afternoon on Sunday, June 13, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center received an unlucky but increasingly familiar message: The Hubble Space Telescope entered safe mode. The telescope’s primary computer halted, likely because of degrading hardware. NASA’s inability to send astronauts on a servicing mission, due to the Space Shuttle’s retirement, severely limited the Goddard team’s
As Hubble falters, astrophysicists find hope in the telescope’s successor Read More »
By the mid-twentieth century, quantum mechanics was the most contentious debate in physics, with its revolutionary descriptions of the interaction of particles in terms of probability, uncertainty, and discrete values. Albert Einstein infamously disagreed with one of its defining principles that reasoned the shorter the duration of a measurement on a particle, the less precisely
How precisely can we keep time? Physicists near the universe’s fundamental limit Read More »
Elon Musk walks out to applause for his September 2015 interview on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” After exchanging pleasantries, Colbert asks Musk about his fascination with our closest solar neighbor: “You sincerely think that we should go to Mars…Why do we want to go to Mars? It’s uninhabitable.” “It is a fixer-upper of
Terraforming Mars: The hard science & bizarre culture surrounding the sci-fi concept Read More »
Amid the late-night bustle of an Irish bar in Boston, Northeastern professor Dr. Samuel Scarpino focuses on the glow of a laptop screen with a visiting colleague from Oxford. It is mid-February of 2020, and the two are writing the first manuscript for a paper about a disease outbreak in Wuhan, China. They publish the
In 2014, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading voice on the matter, released its latest assessment report, delivering stunning predictions of the potential consequences of human-driven climate change in the 21st century. At the same time that the U.N. panel in Geneva prepared the report for release, an international team
Over the summer, two independent collaborations of solar physicists published breakthrough papers within months of each other, furthering our understanding of the mechanics of solar flares and how to predict them. With just four years until peak activity in the sun’s 11-year solar cycle, the ability to predict potentially dangerous solar flares is more crucial