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From Apollo’s 20-Watt Radio to Modern Milliwatt Signals: The Evolution of Space Communication
The Apollo Moon missions of the late 1960s relied on a 20-watt S-band transmitter to send voice, telemetry, and even television from the Moon to Earth. In stark contrast, many modern communication systems – from tiny CubeSat spacecraft to Internet-of-Things devices – can make do with transmit powers thousands of times lower, sometimes mere milliwatts…
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Sending Your Name to Space: A Cosmic Journey of Connection
Imagine your name orbiting the Moon or resting on the surface of Mars. NASA has turned this fanciful idea into reality through its “Send Your Name to Space” campaigns. By simply signing up online, people around the world can join NASA missions symbolically – their names encoded on microchips or memory cards that hitch a…
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Comet 3I/ATLAS: Interstellar Visitor, Not Alien Invader
An Interstellar Comet Crashes the Party Comet 3I/ATLAS is the third known object from beyond our solar system ever observed passing through it . Discovered on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Chile, this celestial interloper was immediately recognized as interstellar from the extreme, open-ended shape of its orbit. In plain terms,…
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Reading a Rock for Ghosts: On Defining “Life” and Inferring It from Mars
NASA’s news release reports that Perseverance cored a mudstone in Jezero Crater whose chemistry and textures may record potential biosignatures—not proof of life, but suggestive clues. What follows are my thoughts about why, if we struggle to define “life” at all, the attempt to infer past life from such clues is far more complex—and why…
