Our relentless pursuit of scientific improvement and innovation has led our best scientists and experts to worlds we only imagined seeing before. This is all the more visible with the recently-building trend of humans pushing further and further where we can go out into space, way beyond Earth’s embrace.
All this, of course, wouldn’t be possible without the steps we took, each time pushing further what we can achieve if we truly put our best minds to the task. To help take you down memory lane, here are some of science’s biggest momentous achievements of the past few months:
Ingenuity Takes Flight
NASA’s famous Perseverance rover brought with it a flying friend: a helicopter drone called “Ingenuity” that’s designed as the very first manmade aircraft designed for another planet. It’s perhaps worth remembering that Mars’ atmosphere is several times less dense compared to Earth’s, meaning any aircraft designed to fly through the Martian atmosphere must achieve flight with much less air surrounding it. Yet, despite all this, they managed to do it anyway.
Scientists Just Dug Out the Deepest Ocean Hole Ever
Sometimes we don’t actually have to look far out into the night sky to see something vastly unexplored—perhaps we have to look outwards to the nearest coast instead. The ocean’s deepest depths are perhaps most famous for being so unreachable given the immense pressures needed to traverse it. Simply boring a hole through the ocean floor, however, takes a different skillset—and a couple of experts aboard a research vessel managed to do it late last year.
Virgin Galactic’s First Fully-Crewed Flight and the Boundary of Space
Virgin Galactic was among the first out the proverbial door when it comes to commercial space travel. What they’ve done, however, also triggered several discussions amongst enthusiasts about what it means to truly reach space. Where does our atmosphere end, and where does space begin?
Blue Origin’s “New Shepard” Makes History
Just as Virgin Galactic sent their representatives out to the edge of space or so they say, Blue Origin takes them up to the challenge and sends their own contingency on a short trip to space and back. The stakes for this particular trip, however, are far more than what’s seen on the surface.
How to Detect Gravitational Waves (With a Bit of Luck)
Now, arguably, this news is a bit older than the rest on this list; it’s a lot to take in, scientifically speaking. However, let that not distract you from the fact that this entire project to peer into a corner of the universe that had been left unnoticed up until that point—that and the fact that, a century after Einstein’s death, we’re still doing the homework that he left for us.
