Imagine this scenario: You are tasked with shooting an arrow and hitting a target the size of a quarter. This in itself is a pretty difficult task that requires immense accuracy. Now, the quarter-sized target that you are tasked with hitting is sitting in Times Square, New York, and you are standing in Los Angeles. This is the example that Jill Seubert uses to contextualize her job as a deep space navigator. Seubert is in charge of steering spacecraft from the moment they separate away from the launch vehicle until they reach their final destination. She has the opportunity to adjust the course of the spacecraft (the arrow in the analogy) only a couple of times along its trajectory. But in order to make the necessary adjustments, she must know the exact location of the spacecraft at any given moment in time.
All by Jaret Prothro
From Pig Poop to Power
Industrial-scale livestock farms have made meat more accessible than ever before by lowering costs and increasing availability across the United States. Obviously, producing more meat requires more animals. But one aspect that is often overlooked is the fact that more animals means more animal feces. For example, a single pig can produce up to 13 pounds of manure a day. Now consider Duplin County. The “pork mother lode for the $14 billion meatpacking goliath Smithfield Foods” houses 2.3 million hogs which are estimated to generate twice as much waste each day as the entire city of New York. With such an immense amount of waste to deal with, farms have to institute manure management infrastructure.
The Smallest Objects in the Solar System
At first glance, our solar system might appear to just consist of the eight known planets, a couple of dwarf planets, and their moons. Trying to comprehend the sheer size of some of the planets and the expansiveness that separate them can be very difficult to do. While these astronomical giants are undoubtedly the most prominent objects in our neighborhood around the sun, they are by no means the only bodies orbiting the sun. The vast spaces in between planets are actually teeming with other astronomical objects, most of which are not as massive as the other solar system titans. In fact, they are minuscule comparatively, and these miniature space objects are the focus of this article.
From Pig Poop to Power
Industrial-scale livestock farms have made meat more accessible than ever before by lowering costs and increasing availability across the United States. Obviously, producing more meat requires more animals. But one aspect that is often overlooked is the fact that more animals means more animal feces. For example, a single pig can produce up to 13 pounds of manure a day. Now consider Duplin County. The “pork mother lode for the $14 billion meatpacking goliath Smithfield Foods” houses 2.3 million hogs which are estimated to generate twice as much waste each day as the entire city of New York. With such an immense amount of waste to deal with, farms have to institute manure management infrastructure.
How a Clock is the Missing Piece to Deep Space Travel
Imagine this scenario: You are tasked with shooting an arrow and hitting a target the size of a quarter. This in itself is a pretty difficult task that requires immense accuracy. Now, the quarter-sized target that you are tasked with hitting is sitting in Times Square, New York, and you are standing in Los Angeles. This is the example that Jill Seubert uses to contextualize her job as a deep space navigator. Seubert is in charge of steering spacecraft from the moment they separate away from the launch vehicle until they reach their final destination. She has the opportunity to adjust the course of the spacecraft (the arrow in the analogy) only a couple of times along its trajectory. But in order to make the necessary adjustments, she must know the exact location of the spacecraft at any given moment in time.
Three Decades Later and NASA’s Newest Space Telescope is Almost Functional
For the past couple of months, newsfeeds have been flooded with articles and information regarding COVID-19, and more recently the nation-wide tension and protests in the U.S. following the death of George Floyd. And yet, one piece of recent news was powerful enough to unify and rally an entire nation despite such bleak times. That piece of news was of course the successful launch and docking of the SpaceX Crew Dragon to the ISS. While this event was impactful enough to break into the stream of other issues being reported on at this time, many other remarkable scientific developments have occurred over the past couple of months and gone unnoticed because of other news stories at the time. Another space related enterprise that has recently reached significant, newsworthy milestones is the James Webb Space Telescope.