THE LAST TRANSMISSIONStories from the Edge of ScienceCOLLECTION / SIGNALS FROM THE EDGE
Spacecraft, planetary discoveries, and the machines we send into places we cannot follow.
ORIGINAL FIELD NOTES
A few grains from Phobos could test how the moon formed and whether impacts delivered fragments of Mars to its surface. MMX must first turn that possibility into a carefully documented sample.
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Before a spacecraft without a return system carried Laika into orbit, one of the doctors brought her home. Her story asks what care means when the people offering comfort also accept the decision that places a life beyond their help.
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Sunlit ridges and deeply shadowed crater floors make the lunar south pole scientifically valuable and operationally difficult. Evidence for ice is a starting point, rather than a proven inventory of usable fuel.
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McGetchin crater is 222 meters across, yet orbital image comparisons found localized surface disturbances about 140 kilometers away. The visible hole, thermal cold spot and distant optical changes measure different consequences of one impact.
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Voyager 1 can still probe plasma and magnetic fields beyond the heliopause, but keeping the spacecraft alive requires choices about which measurements survive. Mission longevity and the remaining science inventory are separate outcomes.
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Stars that resemble the Sun carry chemical and age clues to the Milky Way's past. Their pattern supports a migration story, but it cannot draw the Sun's exact route through the galaxy.
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The orbiter reached Jupiter in 2016 to look beneath its clouds. Years beyond its original science plan, it is still returning measurements of a planet and moons that refuse simple descriptions.
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Energy is made in the Sun's core, but its path through dense interior plasma is nothing like the final eight-minute flight from the solar surface to Earth.
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Mars preserves ancient clues in rock and ice, while present-day processes continue to alter the evidence we hope to read.
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Juno's gravity measurements favor a broad, mixed interior over the tidy central core once drawn in textbooks. Even Jupiter's familiar outline has needed a measurement.
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Cassini's evidence for an ocean beneath Enceladus made an uncontrolled future encounter harder to accept. Its final dive into Saturn was part of the scientific duty to protect what it had revealed.
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After Parker Solar Probe's closest solar encounter, a beacon confirmed the craft had survived. The detailed science required a later data return, and its namesake was no longer here to receive it.
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OSIRIS-REx brought asteroid material into a controlled laboratory, where researchers found molecules used by life. The sample's documented journey is what makes those detections powerful, and chemistry still stops short of biology.
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Voyager 1's science signal depends on a shrinking power budget and a working radio link. The Golden Record is a physical object, meant to remain after the spacecraft can no longer answer.
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An impact probability is updated as additional observations refine an orbit. Planetary defense depends on finding an object early, sharing uncertainty, and buying time for a response.
Enter the investigation28 TRANSMISSIONS
MMX will investigate how Phobos formed and whether its dust contains fragments ejected from Mars. Follow the mission, the sample-return plan, and the limits of the evidence.
Before her one-way flight, a doctor brought her home to play with his children. That small kindness leaves us with a harder question about what it means to care.
Two space powers are racing toward a crater where the Sun has barely touched the ground for billions of years. What lies in the darkness could determine humanity's future on the Moon.
In the spring of 2024, something struck the Moon hard enough to leave an impact crater. When scientists finally discovered the impact, they found that its effects reached astonishing distances.
Nearly 49 years after leaving Earth, Voyager 1 is discovering that interstellar space is anything but empty.
Clyde Tombaugh discovered a world he would never see up close. Follow the people who carried his discovery to Pluto aboard New Horizons, with the documentary and its illustrated companion article.
Gliese 710 will pass through our distant comet reservoir in roughly 1.3 million years. Earlier stellar visitors suggest the Solar System has never been as isolated as it feels.
The spacecraft was destroyed in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017. Now scientists are finding richer organic chemistry in samples it collected from an alien ocean years before it died.
The prettiest giant in the night sky powers a self-reinforcing system of gravity, metallic hydrogen, volcanic plasma, radiation, and storms that destroy everything.
A glacier that renews itself, mountains that may float, and possible ice volcanoes reveal a world that has kept changing in the cold.
Thousands of stars that resemble our Sun are raising an unsettling possibility: the history of life may depend on a journey through the galaxy that we are only beginning to reconstruct.
Juno survived a place capable of destroying spacecraft electronics, discovered that Jupiter does not have the kind of core we thought a planet should have, and then kept flying.
The energy warming your skin has a hidden history inside a star, where its journey outward can take longer than the entire span of recorded civilization.
The strangest thing about Mars may not be what is buried beneath its surface.
Juno found that Jupiter’s center is less like a buried stone and more like a question without a clean edge. Then a leading explanation for how it got that way ran into trouble.
SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY / APPLIED HERE
Explore all twelve principlesA successful launch or encounter makes observations possible. Calibration, coverage, and data analysis determine what those observations can establish. Follow the mission record into its measurements before treating a milestone or a striking image as the answer to its scientific question.
Ask yourself What comparison or calibration helps rule out an instrumental or background effect?
FROM THE VISUAL ARCHIVE
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