A car-sized rotorcraft is getting ready to soar through the thick atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon. Before it’s ready to explore the possible habitability of the bizarre methane-soaked world, Dragonfly was put to the test here on Earth, flying through intense wind tunnels that simulate the alien conditions on…
In July 2022, the Webb Space Telescope detected an intense jet shooting across the equator of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The jet is traveling at about 320 miles per hour (515 kilometers per hour) and is about 25 miles (40 km) in altitude, corresponding to Jupiter’s lower stratosphere.
To all the space probes we’ve loved before: sorry! You fell into Saturn, drifted into deep space, suffocated in Martian dust—all for the greater good of science. Today, we’re memorializing the space explorers that met dramatic endings far, far from Earth.
NASA/JPL/Insider
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” President John Kennedy said famously in a 1962 speech.
