In 2016, NASA launched an $800 million spacecraft called the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security Regolith Explorer (or “OSIRIS-Rex” if you’re into the whole brevity thing). In September 2023, OSIRIS-Rex completed a 4-billion-mile journey to the ancient asteroid Bennu and back and dropped off 4.29 ounces (121.6 grams) of samples from 63,000 miles above the Earth. And if you think that’s cool, Mashable has more.
It’s almost eight billion light years away, ten times brighter than anything in the galaxy, and it’s lasted for three years. AT2021lwx could be the largest explosion ever detected by astronomers, and it happened when the universe was just six billion years old. CNN has more numbers.
Throughout February, we celebrate Black History Month, and with that in mind, we want to honor Katherine Johnson, an American mathematician and NASA engineer whose calculations of orbital mechanics led to the success of the earliest U.S. crewed spaceflights.
In case you missed it, after a seven-month journey through the cold, dark reaches of space and a dramatic descent, NASA's Perseverance rover landed on the surface of Mars last week to begin its mission of searching for fossilized microbial life forms. Mashable has the historic and harrowing story.
