Experimental Musings

As they say, all good things must come to an end. Well, there’s no better example for astronomers than NASA’s declaration that the Opportunity rover mission has come to a close. 

Over time, we’ve used science to answer some pretty big questions. Today we continue to learn more and more about life with cutting edge technology and new discoveries, but some of those big questions still remain.

On Tuesday, October 30, NASA announced that the Kepler space telescope had run out of fuel and would be retired. The mission’s story dates back 35 years, even before we knew for sure that planets existed around other stars (now called exoplanets).

Where were you on June 18, 1983? Perhaps it doesn’t stick out as a pivotal moment for you, but the activities that day changed the course of history by expanding the perception of what females could and couldn’t do in the universe.

It took awhile for technology to catch up with astronomers’ speculations, but in the mid-1990s we were finally able to detect evidence of planets orbiting other stars.