Erik Owomoyela

Tag Archive: NASA

Our solar system is huge

In 1990, Voyager 1 used its camera for the last time and took a panoramic photo of the solar system, including that famous photo of the Earth as a tiny, pale blue dot caught in a sunbeam. (Or, technically, a lens flare.) At the time, the probe was about six billion kilometers away, or 40 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.

Now, after covering another 12 billion kilometers, it may have become the first human-made object to leave the solar system in early September. And despite moving faster (on average) than any other object we’ve ever built, it took 35 years to get that far.

I was born almost four years after Voyager 1’s flyby of Saturn, when its primary mission ended, so I spent my childhood assuming it was long gone already. The fact that it’s still racking up milestones well into my adulthood is a pretty good example of how hard it is to comprehend the scale of the universe we live in.

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October 9, 2012 Space, Storytelling, Read more >

Dragon stares down Congress?

I spent way too much time trying to come up with a clever dragon title. Even spent a couple seconds thinking about Photoshopping a screenshot from this week’s Game of Thrones. You know, the one with the dragons?

Anyway.

While I was busy not seeing the transit of Venus, apparently Congress was actually seeing the light coming to its senses, sort of, when it comes to the space program. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-VA and the chairman of the House committee that oversees NASA’s budget, has reached a truce over Commercial Crew development program, in which he stops trying to gut the program and NASA agrees to do a bunch of stuff it was probably going to do anyway. The fact that it comes a week after one of the Commercial Crew contractors, SpaceX, successfully sent a spaceship (the Dragon) to resupply the International Space Station, probably isn’t a coincidence.

I’ll take good space news where I can get it, and this seems kind of overdue. Commercial Crew was such an obvious idea that I never really got why it was controversial in the first place. (more…)

June 6, 2012 Space, Read more >