Browsing: NASA

In 1977, Ann Druyan recorded an hour of her brainwaves and heartbeat two days after she and Carl Sagan agreed to marry, and NASA pressed the compressed minute onto Voyager’s Golden Record as a private love signal now more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth

Saving Tips June 4, 2026

On June 3, 1977, Ann Druyan sat for an hour-long recording session in New York while instruments captured the electrical…

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio signal from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it, meaning every command is really an instruction for where the probe will be by tomorrow

Saving Tips May 31, 2026

Voyager 1 is currently drifting through interstellar space at roughly 38,000 miles per hour, more than 15 billion miles from…

NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code in a 1970s-era programming language that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore, and the handful of engineers who do are now in their 80s.

Saving Tips May 30, 2026

The popular version of the story sounds almost too perfect: NASA is still flying the Voyager spacecraft with code written…

Scott Kelly spent a year in orbit while his identical twin brother stayed on Earth, and when he came home NASA discovered his gene expression had changed in ways that didn’t fully reverse

Saving Tips May 28, 2026

In March 2015, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly launched to the International Space Station for a 340-day stay, the longest single…

On 15 September 2017, NASA engineers deliberately steered the Cassini spacecraft into Saturn’s atmosphere at 70,000 miles per hour, not because the mission had failed but because they were terrified of where it might fall if they left it in orbit.

Saving Tips May 27, 2026

On 15 September 2017, Cassini stopped talking. The spacecraft had spent its final minutes plunging into Saturn’s upper atmosphere at…

In 2022, NASA engineers in Pasadena watched a new image come down from Perseverance and saw a small heap of broken rocks resting on the Martian surface in a pattern that looked almost intentional, and the explanation they eventually offered involved a vanished river that has not flowed in three billion years.

Saving Tips May 26, 2026

Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021, in a basin that scientists believe held a lake roughly 3.5…