Tag: space

  • Space Is Cool

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    Brendan Barry
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    Well we made it to Friday. One of my longtime goals is to see the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights. My plan for the winter of 2020 was to travel to Norway, maybe visit a friend, and then head north to Tromsø and take in the Polar Night and, fingers crossed, catch the show. Then…

  • Life Aboard the International Space Station

    Life Aboard the International Space Station

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    Brendan Barry
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    This weekend I read a neat little article from the BBC about astronauts’ lives aboard the International Space Station (ISS). This comes on the heels of two NASA astronauts being left on the station due to some uncertainty about their Boeing spacecraft’s safety. The article featured a number of annotated photographs and illustrations, but this…

  • James Webb

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    Brendan Barry
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    It’s cool. In the darkness of space. We made it to the end of the week, a big week for space news. So with that, enjoy this illustration from xkcd about the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • L2 Halo for JWST

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    Brendan Barry
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    Yesterday I received a question about where the new James Webb Space Telescope is located. Is it in orbit of the Earth, like Hubble? Is it out in deep space? The answer is no, not really. Now I spent this morning trying to illustrate the answer to that question myself. However, it’s taking me too…

  • Black Holes and Revelations: Remastered

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    Brendan Barry
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    Two years ago I posted about how the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration managed to take the first photograph of a black hole, in particular a supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy, one of those galaxies far, far away that we see at a long time ago. This morning, the same group…

  • Keeping Things in Scale

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    Brendan Barry
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    Another week of amazing, happy, awesome news. So let’s keep it all in perspective with this graphic from xkcd. We all made it to Friday, so enjoy your weekend, everyone. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • Sunshield

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    Brendan Barry
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    Happy Friday, everyone. At the beginning of the week, we looked at the launch and deployment of the new James Webb telescope. If you recall, one of the key elements of the satellite’s design is its sunshield. As the name says, it shields the satellite from the sun, thus keeping the equipment super cold, which…

  • Space: The Final Frontier

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    Brendan Barry
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    We’re back after a nice holiday break. And one of the most fascinating things to happen was the successful—and seemingly easy, more on that in a bit—launch of the James Webb space telescope. The James Webb was developed by NASA with contributions from both the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA).…

  • Threats from Little Bodies Inside and Outside

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    Brendan Barry
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    Of course the inside threat are those little bodies of coronavirus causing Covid-19. We cover them a lot here. But there are also threats from little bodies outside, way outside. Like asteroids impacting us. And that was the news yesterday when NASA announced improved data from a mission to the asteroid Bennu allowed it to…

  • A Visual History of the International Space Station

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    Brendan Barry
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    When I was in high school, the United States would regularly spend space shuttles into orbit to help build this new thing: the International Space Station (ISS). In the aftermath of the Cold War, the nations of the world joined together to commit to building an orbital space station. There was of course a time…