Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Where We Are, and Where We're Heading
Wonder is a primary human instinct, perhaps the most fundamental that we possess. Nothing inspires wonder more than the broad tapestry of the night sky: the ornamentation of the stars in our Galaxy, planets dancing among them, and the web of galaxies beyond. From our perch on the earth, our eyes can only reveal a tiny, blurry sliver of the Universe, even with the aid of the most powerful telescopes on earth. Earth's atmosphere blocks most of the most interesting portions of electromagnetic radiation produced by the most extreme objects in the Universe. A true understanding the wonders of the Universe thus requires robotic instruments flying high above earth's obscuring atmosphere. The graphic above represents a history of NASA astrophysics space missions since 1990, starting with the great observatories: the Hubble Space Telescope, which provides astonishingly clear view of the optical and ultraviolet cosmos and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, providing astonishingly clear views of the X-ray Universe at higher energies. XMM-Newton, Swift, the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, and NICER, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, all probe various aspects of the X-ray and Gamma-ray sky, revealing details of some of the most powerful cosmic explosions since the Big Bang, and the mysteries of the strong gravity around black holes and neutron stars. Other missions, like TESS, have used ultra-precise measurement of starlight, only available from space, to discover planetary systems (and perhaps other civilizations?) around other stars in the Milky Way. The lastest NASA astrophysics flagship, JWST, orbiting 2 million miles from earth, is making deep-space observations that are re-writing our understanding of how the early Universe evolved. Each discovery raises more questions. Exciting technological advances mean that new missions in development, from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to tiny, economical but powerful cubesats, will provide answers to these questions, and raise new ones, in the never-ending discovery of our wondrous Universe.
Published: May 19, 2025
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Page Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran
Last modified Tuesday, 27-May-2025 11:08:10 EDT