Lab Notes
Discovering Ultima Thule
Four billion miles from the Earth on New Year’s Eve, a spacecraft traveling at 32,000 miles per hour zoomed past a tiny object roughly...
Launching commercial spaceflight
Imagine boarding a brand new Boeing 747 on your way to Seattle. When you reach your destination a few hours later, after unloading the...
Juno reaches Jupiter
In Roman mythology, Jupiter is king of the gods and his wife Juno is the queen. Jupiter was known for his infidelity, so Juno...
Making the planet great again
In his 2001 book Who Owns the Sky, entrepreneur Peter Barnes suggests that any system designed to tax heat-trapping pollution must redistribute the revenue...
Pimping science news
Science journalism has been declining for years, under the same media pressures that have made local news an endangered species. Boulder County is one...
Experiencing research
Imagine if you could test-drive your anticipated career before going through all of the effort and expense of obtaining the necessary education. It’s not...
Drifting in space and time
In 1916, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicted ripples in the fabric of space known as gravitational waves. Just as accelerating electrons create...
The thundering launch of GOES-R
As the Atlas V rocket’s inferno lit up the night sky early in the evening of Nov. 19, 2016, it was as if the...
Prospecting nearby worlds
The past year has been fantastic for commercial spaceflight, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launching 18 Falcon-9 rockets in 2017. It now seems almost...
Tracking wildfire smoke
It’s already been a challenging wildfire season in Colorado, with crews currently battling four major fires around the state. Driven by an exceptionally hot...
Mining for solar storms
In his recent book Accessory to War, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson and coauthor Avis Lang document the historical relationship between science and the military,...
Living with a star
Just after Christmas 2019, a NASA spacecraft soared past Venus toward the inner solar system, and near the end of January 2020, it passed...
