The American Museum of Natural History‘s new exhibit, Beyond Planet Earth, which opened last Saturday through August 12, 2012, provides a window through the past and an optimistic glimpse at the future of space exploration. As I moved through the historical portion at a press preview last Tuesday, Russian spacecraft pinged, and news reports captured…
It’s the end of an era. The rover team has decided to leave Spirit where she is. Other than getting the solar panels in better position to catch sunlight, the rover will become a stationary science center. This morning, the NY Times had a story that didn’t sound particularly optimistic. But this afternoon, the rover…
Back to my favorite space topic– the Spirit rover. I’m fascinated by the meticulous science and engineering effort going into an obvious obstacle: a robot stuck in the sand. The only problem? The robot and the sand are millions of miles away. So far, even though it’s been 8 months, Spirit’s still stuck. But scientists…
I love big, beautiful Hubble pictures, and these most recent ones are no exception. When I was working on the new astronomy exhibits at Griffith Observatory a few years ago, I marveled that I got paid to dig up spectacular images like this one. In a time where basic science rarely makes the local evening…
Though hydrogen is the smallest atom and is perched at the top left of the periodic table, hydrogen in nature exists as two atoms hooked together. Hydrogen hit the news this weekend as a leak led NASA to scrub the Space Shuttle Endeavor launch: Hydrogen is as clean as chemical fuels get: burning it produces…
The rovers are still my favorite NASA mission, for reasons I’ve already written about. Even if the rovers quit tomorrow, the rover science team of Steve Squyres of Cornell and company would still have decades of data to comb through and analyze. Last Friday, they published more of the Opportunity data in the journal Science…
The repair of the Hubble telescope has been big NASA news, but I’m impressed with the way it’s been covered in the Twitterverse through spacewalk updates, astronaut tweets in orbit, and general chatter. NASA has always had a great website and tends to go the extra mile to communicate what’s going on with the public.…