Tag: science
Hitting the Books: What exactly did Jodi Foster hear in ‘Contact’?
Art may imitate life but it rarely does so with realistic fidelity. As Naomi Pequette, Space Science Programs Specialist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, argues in her essay "The Sounds of Contact" as part of The Science if Sci-Fi Cinema: Essays on the Art and Principles of…
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NASA’s first lunar rover will scour the moon’s south pole for water in 2023
Once you get offworld, count water among your most valuable resources: drink it, wash in it, use it to power your spacecraft. This humble molecule is critical to space exploration and exoplanetary colonization which is why, ahead of an international effort to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon…
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$100M donation powers decade-long moonshot to create solar satellites that beam power to Earth
It sounds like a plan concocted by a supervillain, if that villain’s dastardly end was to provide cheap, clean power all over the world: launch a set of three-kilometer-wide solar arrays that beam the sun’s energy to the surface. Even the price tag seems gleaned from pop fiction: one hundred…
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Scientists spot light behind a black hole for the first time
In a short span of time, astronomers have taken us closer to black holes than ever with unprecedentedimages of the cosmic giants. Now, for the first time, scientists have seen the phenomena that takes place behind them. As part of the breakthrough, researchers witnessed and captured the light from the…
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Hitting the Books: Buck Rogers flew so that NASA astronauts could spacewalk
You've all seen the iconic picture of the US astronaut riding gracefully upon his NASA-built MODOK chair. That astronaut was Bruce McCandless II, Houston’s capsule communicator during the moon landing mission, Challenger crew member, and the driving force behind America's ability to conduct operations outside of the stuffy confines of…
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NASA’s InSight probe reveals the first detailed look at the interior of Mars
NASA's InSight lander arrived on Mars in 2018 to learn about its interior by monitoring "marsquakes," and now the project is starting to really pay off. NASA has announced that researchers have mapped the red planet's interior and discovered some big surprises and major differences with Earth. The map is…
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