Humans have lived in Space. And so have fruit flies, mice, monkeys, chimpanzees, guinea pigs, rabbits, frogs, reptiles, and a variety of plants. Now we can add a new life form to this list: Flowers. The first ever space flower was revealed recently, and it’s a yellow Zinnia. Scott Kelly has been aboard the International space Station (ISS) for over 300 days. It’s not an easy job, being away from loved ones, nature, and the rest of humanity, locked up with at most five other humans in a tin can that experiences a sunrise every 45 minutes. It messes with...
I remember being so happy back in mid-2015 when I heard that ESA made contact with the Philae lander. The little lander that could was thought to be lost to the cold of space, not receiving enough sunlight to power itself. But when the comet approached the Sun, the sunlight became intense enough to wake it back up and allow it to move some of the data it captured. But now, as the comet 67P has moved further from the Sun in its orbit, the likelihood that Philae will ever communicate again is slim. When the landing originally happened, the little...
On July 4th, for about an hour and twenty minutes, my heart stopped. This was the amount of time that New Horizons was quiet. No contact, no data, nothing but the lonely black of space. In this time, the craft did what it was programmed to do. It transferred control to its backup computer, which told the main computer to enter safe mode and suspend all non-essential functions. Then the backup computer attempted to re-establish contact with Earth, 5 Billion Kilometres away. Contact has been re-established with the craft and its backup computer has been transmitting telemetry data back to mission...
