Perseverance's Wheels Are Doing Their Job — Curiosity's Are Showing What That Job Actually Costs

The engineers who designed Webb's primary mirror set their performance targets conservatively. They had to. You don't get a second chance to adjust a mirror sitting at the L2 Lagra…

The assigned topic asks about Orion's heat shield ablation material selection — the trade-off between reentry temperatures and mission cost. That's a real engineering story. But th…

The original twelve holes in each of Curiosity's wheels were deliberate. Drilled at the factory, spaced precisely, they were odometry markers — a way to count rotations and track d…

The number that keeps engineers up at night isn't the 344 single-point failures Webb carried into space — though that's alarming enough. It's the temperature differential the sunsh…

The hardest moment in a lunar landing has nothing to do with the final touchdown. It happens roughly 10 kilometers up, when the lander transitions from a high-energy descent burn t…

The capsule hit the atmosphere at 24,581 miles per hour — roughly 24 times the speed of a bullet. The heat shield surface climbed to nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly half t…

Sixteen miles in 37 hours. That's what ERNEST, NASA's new rover prototype, just completed in the California desert — more than ten times the speed at which Perseverance can navigat…

The rocket made the decision before any engineer did. Webb's primary mirror spans 6.5 metres across — a gold-coated beryllium structure that needed to be the largest mirror ever de…

There's a specific kind of engineering courage required to put one engine between your crew and a fatal outcome. No backup. No second chance. One combustion chamber, one turbopump,…

The hardest part of returning from the Moon isn't the heat. It's that the thing protecting you from the heat also has to hold the spacecraft together while it's being heated. That…

The intuitive answer is wrong. When people ask why Mars rovers use wheels instead of legs, the usual response is something like "wheels are simpler" or "legs break more easily." Bo…

There's a number that stops engineers cold when they first encounter it: one kilowatt. That's roughly what the James Webb Space Telescope uses to run everything — four science inst…

There's a moment in the Artemis II commander's post-mission interview that cuts right to the engineering logic of the whole program. Reid Wiseman was asked when he knew the mission…

Liquid hydrogen is the most efficient chemical rocket propellant available. It's also, at -253°C, one of the coldest substances you'll ever try to store on a spacecraft — and the M…

A structure designed to survive launch is, almost by definition, poorly suited for landing. Launch loads are axial — the vehicle is a column under compression, and you want stiffne…

Pick your propellant, and you've just made choices about your tanks, your thermal management, your launch window flexibility, your ground support infrastructure, and your mass budg…

The six-day clock on Artemis II isn't a scheduling choice. It's a hard constraint written in tank volume. During NASA's pre-mission briefings, officials were direct about it: "thos…

Perseverance travels a few hundred meters on a good day. Not because the wheels can't spin faster — because every meter requires a conversation with Earth that takes, at minimum, e…

For most of its life on Mars, Perseverance navigated the way sailors did before GPS: dead reckoning. Take a picture, identify a rock, calculate how far you've moved. Repeat. It wor…