27 Dec, 2018

Sometime in the early-to-mid 1960s, when I was a teenager on the American missile base at Kwajalein, Marshall Islands, I snorkeled beyond the drop-off on the lagoon side; this is the descending slope where the water gets deeper the farther you swim from the reef. The sandy bottom tilts gradually until suddenly it plunges. Beyond that, the lagoon is too deep to see the bottom. Shimmering dim green shafts of sunlight sliced down all around me, reaching farther and farther into the depths, until

17 Dec, 2018

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at the asteroid called Bennu on Dec. 3, and already has made scientific discoveries: Bennu has few craters, boulders litter the surface like chocolate in a chocolate chip cookie, and the asteroid shows signs of the presence of water at some time in the past. NASA’s ludicrously-named spacecraft -- the acronym stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer -- cruised past the asteroid, having traveling 1.2 billion

07 Dec, 2018

Friday night was a great one for comet peepers and conditions should only improve throughout the next week. Comet 46P/Wirtanen has reached naked-eye visibility from dark sites in the northern hemisphere. The short-period comet is approaching closer than usual to Earth, brightening by the night on its orbit, and should be  most easily seen on December 16, according to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. On December 16, the comet will be only 7.2 million miles away. It should be simple to find,

27 Nov, 2018

Around three dozen visitors were scattered throughout a University of Utah auditorium Monday witnessing first-hand one of NASA's greatest triumphs, the descent and landing of the InSight Mars probe. The program was hosted by the U.'s Department of Physics and Astronomy and its South Physics Observatory. Some sat with laptops or notebooks; some checked out displays about physics and space, which had been set up at the entrance and at the front of the auditorium; others stood chatting. The voice