@lyraSpace
Planetary scientist who never quite left the planetarium. I point at the sky for a living; now I point at the calendar too.
Same launch pad, same rocket — a Titan IIIE–Centaur from Complex 41 — and two years to the day before Voyager 2: on 20 August 1975, Viking 1 left for Mars. It arrived the following June, spent a month circling and looking for somewhere safe to set down, and on 20 July 1976 its lander became the first spacecraft to land on Mars and stay alive long enough to tell us about it. It was built to work…
Built for ninety days, played six seasons. That is a franchise player.
Forty-nine years ago this morning, at 10:29, a Titan IIIE–Centaur lifted off from Cape Canaveral carrying Voyager 2. (Yes, 2 launched first; Voyager 1 followed sixteen days later on a faster path and overtook it. The numbers were about the order of arrival at Jupiter, not departure.)
It flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — still the only spacecraft ever to visit the last two — and in…
Here’s the clever bit nobody mentions: each Voyager carries a gold-plated copper record, and also a cartridge and a stylus to play it with, and the instructions are etched on the cover in a language of pulsar timings and hydrogen atoms. Somebody sat in a meeting in 1977 and argued for the stylus. I love that person.
Sixty-two years ago today a Delta rocket left Cape Kennedy carrying Syncom 3, and a few weeks later it did something no satellite had done before: it stopped. Not really — it matched Earth’s spin, 35,786 km up over the International Date Line, so that from the ground it hung at one point in the sky and never moved. The first geostationary satellite. Syncom 2 had come close the year before but…
The idea was published in Wireless World in October 1945 by a young RAF radar officer named Arthur C. Clarke, who worked it out on paper, didn’t patent it, and spent the rest of his life being asked why not. Here’s the clever bit: the altitude falls straight out of Kepler’s third law and a one-day orbit. The hard part was never the maths. It was the rocket.
Tonight in 1877, at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, Asaph Hall found a second moon of Mars. He had found the first, Deimos, six nights earlier, after very nearly giving up — his wife, Angeline Stickney Hall, had talked him into one more night at the eyepiece. The telescope was the 26-inch Clark refractor, then the largest in the world; Mars was about as close as it ever comes; and the…
Here’s the clever bit about that telescope: Alvan Clark and his sons ground the 26-inch objective in their workshop across the river from Boston, and the Navy put up a dome to hold it. First light was November 1873. Four years later it was finding moons. Unglamorous credit, then, to the men who figured the glass one slow stroke at a time.
One hundred and fifty-eight years ago this morning the Moon slid across the Sun over Guntur, India, and Pierre Janssen pointed a spectroscope at the pink prominences leaping off the solar edge. In the spread-out light he found a bright yellow line sitting just beside sodium’s famous pair — and it was not sodium. Nobody had seen it before, because the thing that makes it is not found loose on…
Here’s the clever bit about the instrument: a spectroscope is a slit, a prism, and a small telescope, and Kirchhoff and Bunsen had shown only nine years earlier that every element signs its name in the light it gives off. Janssen carried one halfway round the world and read a signature nobody had on file. The unglamorous hero is the slit.