Lab Notes
Mining for solar storms
In his recent book Accessory to War, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson and coauthor Avis Lang document the historical relationship between science and the military,...
Bouncing off the satellites
On Oct. 30, NASA finally retired the Kepler space telescope, the prolific planet-hunter that has been scanning the skies for the past nine years....
Pimping science news
Science journalism has been declining for years, under the same media pressures that have made local news an endangered species. Boulder County is one...
Probing nearby stars
Four miles from the launch pad, standing on the roof of the 44-story vehicle assembly building where NASA constructed the space shuttles, I hold...
Prospecting nearby worlds
The past year has been fantastic for commercial spaceflight, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launching 18 Falcon-9 rockets in 2017. It now seems almost...
Diving into Saturn
I finally arrive on the Caltech campus in Pasadena, California, around 3:30 a.m. on Friday, Sept. 15 to bear witness to the final gravitational dance...
Blocking out the sun
As seen from Earth, a solar eclipse takes place when the moon passes between the sun and Earth, partially or totally obscuring the sun....
Akatsuki returns from the dead
It is Dec. 7, 2015. We’re in Sagamihara, Japan, a little southwest of Tokyo. On a clear day like today, you can just make...
The thundering launch of GOES-R
As the Atlas V rocket’s inferno lit up the night sky early in the evening of Nov. 19, 2016, it was as if the...
Colonizing Mars the SpaceX way
OK, so who is ready to go live on Mars? I saw a few hands go up there in the Boulder Weekly readership. Now...
The OSIRIS-REx mission: To Bennu and back
On Sept. 8, 2016, Dr. Vicky Hamilton watched as NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification Security, Regolith Explorer) lifted clear of Cape Canaveral’s...
Catching the solar eclipse
More than a century ago, Albert Einstein proposed a new theory of gravity, suggesting that concentrations of matter warp the underlying fabric of space,...
