Mars Rover

by Danielle Smith-Llera

Published 1 August 2017
Weighing as much as a small car, a rover named Curiosity rolls quietly around Mars. Scientific instruments pack its body and cluster at the end of a mechanical arm. An arrangement of lenses and instruments tops its mast, like a face. To the many NASA workers involved in Curiosity s mission on Mars, the rover is not simply a robot, but an astronaut bravely exploring an alien place. Curiosity s instruments collect data and its cameras take images of the Mars landscape, including self-portraits, in vivid color and detail. As it roams and explores, Curiosity will help find the answers to such age-old questions as has there ever been life on Mars? Could there be one day?

Double Helix

by Danielle Smith-Llera

Published 1 August 2017
To the untrained eye, Photo 51 was simply a grainy black and white image of dark marks scattered in a rough cross shape. But to the eye of a trained scientist, it was a clear portrait of a DNA fiber taken with X-rays. And to young scientists James Watson and Francis Crick, it confirmed their guess of deoxyribonucleic acid s structure. In 1953 the pair was racing toward solving the mystery of DNA s structure before other scientists could beat them to it. They and others believed that finding the simple structure of the DNA molecule would answer a great mystery how do organisms live, grow, develop, and survive, generation after generation? Photo 51 and subsequent models based on the photo would prove to be the key to unlocking the secret of life.

Fukushima Disaster

by Danielle Smith-Llera

Published 1 January 2018



Trash Vortex

by Danielle Smith-Llera

Published 1 January 2018

Hubble Deep Field

by Don Nardo

Published 15 September 2017
A series of photos taken from space more than 20 years ago revealed thousands of unknown galaxies in a tiny patch of "empty" space. Called the Hubble Deep Field, the amazing image is made up of hundreds of photos combined into one. It was taken over the course of 10 days from the Hubble Space Telescope and has prompted astronomers and other scientists to speculate about universe's size, shape, and age. How long ago did the first galaxies appear? Have they always looked like they do today, or have their shapes evolved over time? And will they, along with the universe itself, go on expanding forever? The Hubble Deep Field has helped to answer some of these questions.

Can a photograph change the world? The answer is yes! Captured Science History explores how a single moment captured by a camera can influence science and change the course of scientific history-or world history, for that matter. Combining science, history, photography, and media literacy, this series looks at some of the most influential scientific breakthroughs and details how and why they came about.

Finding the Titanic

by Burgan, Michael

Published 15 September 2017