Marianne Dyson's Science Snacks Blog
Because your brain deserves a treat!
Marianne Dyson, December 2018
Considering that we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Apollo, and that NASA has contracted with Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines to provide new lander vehicles, I thought you all might enjoy this article I wrote that was originally published in Ad Astra in 2013.
Every year at space conference parties, enthusiasts have pondered the question: If we flew an Apollo mission to the Moon with today
Marianne Dyson, November 2018
No spacecraft has ever landed on the lunar far side. The only human-made object on the far side currently is NASA
Marianne Dyson, October 2018
Recently NASA announced the first woman, Holly Ridings, to be selected as Chief of the Flight Director
Marianne Dyson, July 2018
At the end of July, Mars will be its brightest in 15 years because it will be only 35.8 million miles (57.6 million kilometers) away. Since no one has ever been to Mars, how do we know this distance so precisely?
Triangles! If the length of one side and two angles of a triangle are known, the length of the other sides can be calculated. Way back in 1673, Giovanni Cassini (1625-1712) used this knowledge of triangles to estimate the distance to Mars. This method is called parallax. [Ref: A Teacher
Marianne Dyson, June 2018
Apollo 12 Astronaut and Artist Alan Bean who died on May 26, 2018, kindly granted an interview to
Marianne Dyson May, 2018
Many people mistakenly think that there is no gravity in space, and thus all that
April 2018
My husband almost hung up on a call from the International Space Station. Because no one immediately responded to his hello, he assumed it was just another junk call with a built-in delay before some recorded sales pitch kicked in. Just as he was about to hang up, astronaut TJ Creamer said,
March 2018
Pioneering female astronomer Vera Rubin (1928-2016), who proved the existence of dark matter with her observations of the Andromeda Galaxy, told me that observing the stars out the window by standing on her bed as a child was what inspired her choice of career. I exclaimed,