In late October 1975, a heavily shielded spacecraft, the Soviet Union’s Venera 9, parachuted into the atmosphere of Venus. Then, having landed, it did something extraordinary: it beamed back the first images ever captured from the surface of another planet. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech The pictures of its baking hot terrain marked a huge leap forward in our understanding of our nearest …
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On Sept. 11, 2022, engineers at a flight control center in Turin, Italy, sent a radio signal into deep space. Its destination was NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft flying toward an asteroid more than 5 million miles away. The message prompted the spacecraft to execute a series of pre-programmed commands that caused a small, shoebox-sized satellite contributed by the …
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Photo: Artisan Entertainment/Everett Collection Steven Soderbergh loves a close-up, and he met his ideal subject in Terence Stamp, who died Sunday at 87. “You wouldn’t think a close-up of somebody thinking would have the power that it does because, in theory, it’s static,” Soderbergh told me in a 2023 interview. “But yes, one of my favorite things to do is …
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On Sept. 11, 2022, engineers at a flight control center in Turin, Italy, sent a radio signal into deep space. Its destination was NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft flying toward an asteroid more than 5 million miles away. The message prompted the spacecraft to execute a series of pre-programmed commands that caused a small, shoebox-sized satellite contributed by the …
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