An Opportunity operations team member’s reaction to a new documentary about an old friend. January 2004: I was in my sophomore year of college, studying astronomy at the University of Washington. The Sojourner rover had me hooked on the Red Planet from the day it landed in the summer of…

While this year may have sucked pretty hard on Earth, some pretty cool stuff happened in (and/or near) space in 2021. And while robots and rockets tend to steal the show, all of those bits of technology were designed, built, and operated by humans! …

With the “billionaire space race” taking center stage in the media over the past few months, we’ve lost sight of why so many people are passionate about space. This morning, Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin launched four people into space, including Star Trek’s own Captain Kirk, William Shatner*. While…

Nervous Mars scientists around the world watched with bated breath as the behemoth Curiosity rover began its descent toward the surface of the Red Planet, known as the “Seven Minutes of Terror.” We’d never sent something this size to land on Mars. We’d never used anything like the Skycrane to…

Graduate school is hard. Not going to sugar coat that. But it can also be a truly amazing and unique time in your life, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be miserable on top of being difficult. Here are some things you can do and think about before you even…

The following is an excerpt from For All Humankind: The Untold Stories of How the Moon Landing Inspired the World by Tanya Harrison and Danny Bednar. The small wooden bookshelf in Matias’ room housed a collection of science fiction classics, including Jules Verne, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. Contained within…

The Space Race might have been America versus the Soviets, but how was the race viewed by the rest of the world? On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on a celestial body beyond Earth while Command Module Pilot…

For years, I’ve been quite frank and open on social media (mainly Twitter) about a lot of aspects of my life and professional career as a scientist: How having a physical disability has impacted things, my experiences with harassment that nearly drove me out of the field, making the shift…

The tiny 4-pound (1.8 kg) helicopter that hitched a ride to Mars with NASA’s Perseverance rover just got a mission upgrade. Initially planned as a “technology demonstration” to prove whether or not powered flight…