NASA’s ICESat-2 spacecraft will measure the height of Earth’s melting ice. (Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)
Since 2003, NASA has been monitoring the height of Earth’s ice with lasers. This undertaking began with a satellite — the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) — which ran through 2009. Operation IceBridge has used planes to monitor specific vulnerable ice sheets in the years since. Now, the project continues with ICESat-2, which launch ...read more
A computer-generated Opportunity explores Burns Cliff on Mars.(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell)
Since June 10, the 14-year-old Opportunity rover has been silent, presumably sleeping as thick dust clouds blocked the Sun from its solar cells. But now, that sky is clearing, and NASA is implementing a listening plan for the rover through January 2019.
Without power, the rover has likely experienced several faults. Among them, its mission clock may have stopped recording time accurately. To counte ...read more
Space Force, Trump’s proposed sixth military branch that would be responsible for all defence activity in space, has been met with mixed reviews, to say the least. But keen-eyed space fans will recognize that this is neither the first time America has proposed a military space program nor is it the case that space is free of military activity. So let’s look at the long history of military activity in space.
[embedded content]
For anyone outside the US, the five existin ...read more
An Aldabra giant tortoise. (Credit: Ivan Hlobej/shutterstock)
Turtles survived the massive extinction event that took out the dinosaurs more than 60 million years ago. But climate change, habitat loss and exploitation from the commercial pet industry have now decimated global turtle populations.
Of the 356 turtle species scientists know about today, more than half are endangered or have already gone extinct. As their numbers continue to decline, scientists say their loss will alter ecosystems ...read more
Cosmology is the story of the fundamental particles, forces, and energies that shape and govern our universe. And that story is one of rhythm and motion. (Credit: Paul M. Sutter/Youtube)
For millennia, cosmological and religious systems of thought were intertwined—and usually indistinguishable. European artwork of, say, the arrangements of planets and stars often went hand-in-hand with theological guides, and not a little bit of moralizing. But then Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
