Vishay Singh

Author Vishay Singh

[Editor’s note: So, it turns out that there are actually two species of goblin spider named after David Attenborough! I already written about one, Prethopalpus attenboroughi, but I’ve just stumbled across another. It’s cool, and also a weird coincidence — though, to be fair, the papers describing the species do share a coauthor. Big David Attenborough fan, I guess. In any case, it’s cringe-y enough when you’re the new guy in the office and someone already has ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

Holding the current bottle of peanuts in the MSA. Teitel. Next to the Deep Space Network’s main control room at JPL is the aptly named Mission Supply Area. It’s an area used for major mission events like launches, landings, and orbit insertion burns, and if you go there on a tour someone will offer you peanuts. It’s tradition, a tradition that gained a lot of popularity when the world watched engineers eating peanuts during Curiosity’s 2012 landing on Mars. There’s ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

In the 1970s, the original version of the Voyager mission was supposed to include a Pluto flyby–and Alan Stern worked through many failed attempts to launch a Pluto mission in the decades since. (Graphic: Jason Davis/The Planetary Society) On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft swept past Pluto, returning eye-popping images of the dwarf planet and its huge (relatively speaking) moon, Charon. At the time, the best existing images of Pluto showed nothing more than an enigmatic blur. ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

A bright tangle of magnetic field lines has appeared on its surface. But otherwise the Sun is singularly serene. What’s going on? View of the Sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory The other day, NASA posted this closeup view of the Sun under the headline: “Tangled Up in Blue.” The reference to the Bob Dylan tune aside, I found the video particularly intriguing. That’s because the Sun’s surface, as imaged here by the Solar Dynami ...read more