The Apollo 13 mission is etched in history as one of NASA’s most daring and harrowing space voyages. Launched on April 11, 1970, with the ambitious goal of landing astronauts James A. Lovell Jr., John L. Swigert Jr., and Fred W. Haise Jr. on the moon, the mission took an unexpected turn that captured the … Read more
On October 19th, 2017, astronomers with the Pan-STARRS survey detected an interstellar object (ISO) passing through our Solar System for the first time. The object, known as 1I/2017 U1 Oumuamua, stimulated significant scientific debate and is still controversial today. One thing that all could agree on was that the detection of this object indicated that ISOs regularly enter … Read more
Millions of people will be able to don protective glasses and view a spectacular total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, starting around 1 pm CT. If this sounds familiar, it’s because in 2017, a 70-mile-wide band of the US saw a total solar eclipse, while many other areas saw a partial eclipse. People drove across states and … Read more
If signs of life really do exist on Mars, there’s a chance the Perseverance rover has already rolled over them. Underground radar images suggest it is searching in the perfect spot for fossilized microbial life. As the robotic explorer, nicknamed Percy, wheels across a three-billion-year-old landscape, its instruments have confirmed that at least one Martian … Read more
In the early days of telescopic astronomy, you could only focus on one small region of the sky at a time. Careful observations had to be done by hand, and so much of the breakthrough work centered around a particular object in the sky. A nebula or galaxy, quasar or pulsar. But over the years we’ve … Read more