Author Archives: John F. Lindner

The Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft has successfully entered and exited a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) about Moon. DRO is a stable and easily accessible orbit requiring a low [latex]\Delta V[/latex] velocity change. In DRO, Earth‘s non-negligible gr… Continue reading →

I stayed up late last night and early this morning to watch the successful uncrewed launch of Artemis 1. In Greek tradition, Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo, and the Artemis program hopes to return humans — including the … Continue re… Continue reading →

When Crew 5 rocketed to orbit last week aboard the SpaceX Dragon “Endurance” bound for the International Space Station, I was curious to see their zero-gravity indicator. A tradition SpaceX crews have adopted from Russian cosmonauts, the ze… Continue reading →

The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program, but we do. I just watched live the first kinetic-impact asteroid-redirection test as NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft collided with the asteroid-moon Dimorphos of the asteroid Did… Continue reading →

Last month I drove across the United States coast-to-coast back-and-and forth diagonally, 8000 miles through 18 states, as in the animation below. Amazing was driving through the Great Plains of the North American flatland with uninterrupted 360° horiz… Continue reading →

Nearly a quarter century in the making, I was tremendously relieved and excited last week by the release of the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. I remember the difficulty in realizing the Hubble Space Telescope and am now … Conti… Continue reading →

In Alfonso Cuarón‘s Oscar-winning 2013 movie GRAVITY, actress Sandra Bullock‘s Dr. Ryan Stone makes an emergency entrance into an abruptly abandoned International Space Station. This month, European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristofor… Continue reading →

Not only can suns stand still in the sky, from some exoplanets their motion can appear to reverse! Wooster physics-math double majors Xinchen (Ariel) Xie ’21 and Hwan (Michelle) Bae ’19 and I just published an article elucidating these appa… Continue reading →

While grocery shopping, I normally just glance at the newspapers in the newsstand. However, this morning, I was excited to see “above the fold” of the Wall Street Journal a large reproduction of the first image of the supermassive black hol… Continue reading →

Slide rules were widely used in engineering, science, and mathematics until the early 1970s, including during the Gemini and Apollo space programs. Although rendered largely obsolete by the advent of inexpensive electronic calculators, their descendant… Continue reading →