The fastest manmade object ever, NASA’s Parker Space Probe, hurtled toward our Sun at 700,000 kilometers per hour. Its mission: to learn about particle and solar wind acceleration in the Sun’s corona, its shifting outer layer of plasma. It was launched in August 2018 and had to overcome many obstacles even before takeoff—including weight, size, and preparation for radiation and acute variation in temperature. Watch the “Science …
The IMAGE spacecraft, an acronym of Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration, launched back in March 2000 to observe activity in the Earth’s magnetosphere. It ceased communication with NASA in December 2005. Entirely unexpected and sudden, after years of successful data-gathering, the disappearance was considered quite mysterious. IMAGE was believed to be damaged beyond repair and the mission ended. That is until amateur astronomer Scott Tilley …
If you need a little Monday motivation, look no further: humans have managed to collect a tiny piece of the sun, and bring it back to Earth. (So you can definitely get out of bed today.) Even more amazingly, this happened 15 years ago, when “charged particles shot out into space from the Sun’s upper atmosphere.” Usually they’d disappear into the solar system, but a …
