Vishay Singh

Author Vishay Singh

Researchers are making big strides with machines that pull moisture from the air and convert it into drinking water. ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

Spectroscopy reveals there's more to art than what meets the eye. ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

A New Year's Flyby A billion miles past Pluto, at 12:33 a.m. EST tonight on New Year’s Day, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will swoop in close to the most distant object humans will have ever visited. For just a moment, the craft will fly within 2,200 miles (3,540 km) of Ultima Thule, a primitive space rock from the Kuiper Belt far beyond Neptune. This will be over three times closer than the craft flew to Pluto, according to New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern. If New ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

As most of America’s East Coast counts down toward midnight tonight, ushering in a shiny new year, a group of NASA scientists and their attendant press will instead be counting down to a more spectacular event: the most distant flyby of a planetary object in history. After zipping past Pluto in 2015, snapping breathtaking photos and revolutionizing our understanding of the dwarf planet, the New Horizons probe has drifted farther and deeper into the solar system. Tonight, some billion mile ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

Novelists have "It was a dark and stormy night." For planetary scientists, the equivalent cliche is, "We expect to be surprised." The story of every new space mission seems to begin that way. No matter how intensely researchers study some solar-system object, no matter how they muster the best resources available on Earth, they are inevitably caught off-guard when they get to study it up close for the first time. And no matter how worn and familiar that cliche may sound, it also rings true e ...read more