[Updated Feb. 19 to reflect Perseverance and Ingenuity’s successful landing] Mars became a fair bit busier this month, with no less than three missions—each from a different country—having arrived at the red planet over the past few weeks. The UAE’s Al-Amal and China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft entered orbit earlier in February, and NASA’s Mars 2020read more
Pioneering NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson died on February 24, 2020, at the age of 101. Johnson’s calculations were critical in ensuring the success of the early Mercury and Apollo spaceflight missions. Along with fellow mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, Johnson was the subject of the 2016 book Hidden Figures, documenting the contributionsread more
Hot on the heels of a recent development in South Africa in the search for clues supporting the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, more evidence that a major asteroid impact occurred nearly 13 millennia ago has been unearthed in South Carolina. Studying core samples taken from White Pond, near Elgin, SC,read more
Although the planet Jupiter might be in the process of losing its famous Great Red Spot, it has recently gained a new feature that is baffling researchers, in the form of a large dark hole in its cloud tops that astronomers are calling ‘The Abyss’. Revealed during the Juno spaceread more