This essay originally ran in 2011. Back then, the Hubble Space Telescope was the exemplar of non-Earth astronomical observation. Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December 2021. This anecdote, however, might be timeless. In 1984, David Soderblom was a new hire at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and one day […]
NASA
For the past two years, I have been following the voyage of OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft headed to an asteroid called Bennu. Bennu is important for at least four reasons: Local space history may recorded in its rocks, which are about as old as the formation of the solar system. It is carbon-rich and scientists think […]
Friday morning, if all goes well, NASA is launching a satellite with the name SMAP. As I write late Thursday night, it’s perched atop a Delta II rocket an hour up the California coast from Santa Barbara. It was supposed to launch this morning, but high-altitude winds got in the way. Like so many things […]
I’ve just about recovered from my trip to Darmstadt, just outside Frankfurt, which was home to mission control for the recent landing of the tiny and now ‘sleeping’ Philae lander onto the surface of Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. One of the joys of covering a European mission is the variety of accents and backgrounds involved; just as […]
On Saturday I went to the visitor’s center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, showed my driver’s license, and got a yellow paper badge to hang around my neck. The occasion: the friends and family day for MMS, the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission. MMS isn’t one of NASA’s better-known missions. When I googled […]
Last week when NASA Administrator Charles Bolden addressed the sparsely-attended Humans to Mars Summit in DC, he moved the institutional goalpost past space exploration and toward space settlement.
Astronomers irritate the hell out of me, NASA’s in particular, not the people but their press releases: never met a superlative they didn’t like, Biggest Black Hole, Farthest Quasar, Youngest Galaxy, and on and on, far into the night. The black hole’s size isn’t interesting unless it says something about how galaxies form. The quasar’s […]
CELESTE: How long this time? LE GENTIL: How long will I be gone? Three years. I swear to you, Celeste, on everything that’s holy: three years, no more. CELESTE: What if you miss it? LE GENTIL: The transit? I won’t. CELESTE: You missed the last one. Venus (the small dark dot) crosses the Sun. That […]