Tag archives: space
Now that it’s spring and we’re starting to travel again, our local deserts have become popular nearby attractions. Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and the Mojave Desert are at their best this time of year and you might even catch some wildflowers if they got enough rain. At NASA, in addition to enjoying seasonal wildflowers, we […]
The Westmont Observatory opens its doors to the public Friday, April 15, beginning at 7 pm and lasting several hours. Face coverings will be required at the event. Westmont hosts a free, public viewing on the third Friday of every month. Along with the college’s powerful Keck Telescope, members of the Santa Barbara Astronomical Unit […]
After soaring into the heavens last week aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket from a spaceport in Van Horn, Texas, the former CEO of California Closets and Party America reached an altitude of 350,000 feet, or about 66 miles, above our planet, flying above the Kármán line, which is defined as the boundary between Earth’s […]
Montecito resident Marty Allen, often described as an “angel investor,” is going to Heaven! The former CEO of Party America and the California Closet Company is flying on Amazon tycoon Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin’s upcoming NS-20 flight on March 23 along with Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson, 28. The mission, the fourth human flight […]
The Westmont Observatory opens to the public Friday, March 18, beginning at 7 pm and lasting several hours. Face coverings will be required at the event. Due to the pandemic, this is the first time in two years the observatory has been open to the public. Westmont hosts a free, public viewing on the third […]
“Blasting off” is an expression which, only in recent years, has come to have a very special meaning. We are no longer talking about fireworks or even firearms, but about sending live human beings into what were once called “The Heavens” (as if there were more than one Heaven) but have now been relegated to […]
On my first geological field trip as a new geology major at Caltech, I was amazed as we drove out into the Mojave Desert on Interstate 15 when my professor, who was driving, would point through the window at a distant rock outcropping and say: “There’s a Miocene (five to 20 million years of age) […]
Late the other night my friend Joan called from the Cachuma Lake campground and asked excitedly what the string of lights was that had just tracked across their sky. Was it a UFO? Luckily, I had heard about Elon Musk’s latest launch of about 60 small satellites as part of Starlink, a satellite-based internet. I […]
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”— TS Eliot After surveying our solar system, as well as thousands of others beyond our own, we can now look back at our home planet with a new perspective, that […]
We are deeply dismayed to learn that Das Williams is seeking an appointment to the California Coastal Commission for the Central Coast. A controversial supervisor synonymous with Santa Barbara’s much-contested cannabis ordinance, Williams was barely able to retain his position in 2020 (even with the political and financial muscle of the cannabis industry). Indeed, there […]
Twenty years ago, there would have been nothing to write about under this topic. There were no known planets circling stars beyond our own. But in 2009 a revolution happened with NASA’s launch of the Kepler telescope. Within a few years, Kepler had found so many planets that scientists realized that there were more planets […]
Uranus and Neptune, the twin ice giants of the solar system, are so far out there that they’ve only been visited once by Voyager 2 in 1986 and 1989. They’re so far away that light from the Sun takes two-and-a half hours to reach Uranus and over four hours to touch Neptune. For those reasons, […]
30 June 2004, 7:30 pm. The VIP room at JPL is quiet as we all watch a thin line trace horizontally across the big screen at the front of the room. It’s the radio signal from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft as it speeds toward Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) after seven years in transit. JPL invites some […]
March 9, 1979 and Voyager 1 had just left the Jupiter system en route to its rendezvous with Saturn. Linda Morabito, the cognizant engineer for the navigation team, noticed something odd about one of the images of Jupiter’s moon Io: There was a ghost image protruding from the side of the moon. She was using […]
On July 20, 1976, seven years to the day after humans first walked on the moon, a bunch of us new employees of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory trooped over to Caltech’s Beckman auditorium (the one that looks like a circus tent) to see the first landing of a spacecraft on another planet. Viking 1 was […]
I was already in the Science Team room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the second cycle of radar images of the surface of Venus were beamed down in May of 1991. I waited impatiently for the five-inch print roll to start spooling out. The first cycle had gone well and most of Venus’s surface […]
As a kid I was always picking up rocks and wondering at the diversity of them all. Where did they come from? And family camping trips gave me a sampling of the varied landscapes of California and the West. When I found out I could combine my love of the outdoors with the study of […]
The crew capsule aboard the Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket that NASA successfully blasted into space last weekend achieved an amazing milestone. This incredible event was the remarkable result of the public-private sector partnership between NASA and SpaceX that sent astronauts directly from the U.S. to the International Space Station for the first time in nine […]
Congratulations to Zelda Prune and her business partner Jonathan Brandan, who have opened the doors to their new home and garden showroom, Space, at 4856 Carpinteria Avenue in Carpinteria. Stop by for some socially distant shopping, mint lemonade, and “safe” nibbles this Friday, Saturday, or Sunday (August 28-30) from 11 am to 6 pm. Vintage […]
Does humanity have a destiny “in the stars”? What motivates figures such as billionaires Elon Musk and Yuri Milner? How important have science fiction authors and filmmakers been in stirring enthusiasm for actual space exploration and settlement? Is there a coherent motivating philosophy and ethic behind the spacefaring dream? These are among the questions addressed […]
