satellite

A drop detaches from a faucet nozzle, and a thin filament trails behind it. At the last instant, the filament breaks not in one place but in two—and between them, a tiny sphere, a satellite droplet, hangs suspended. This "debris" of secondary droplets clogs printheads, ruins microchips, and throws off the accuracy of drug dosing.

Among the hundreds of moons in the Solar System, Nereid dances the most desperate dance: diving toward Neptune as close as 1.4 million kilometers, then soaring away to 9.7 million — all within less than an Earth year. An eccentricity of 0.75 — the brand of a captured wanderer.

A wafer-thin film of organic molecules was grown on a silicon substrate. In this film, as if on a sheet of graph paper, tiny "pens"—artificial atoms — were laid out with the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope.

Around distant icy bodies the size of a city, circling beyond Neptune, rings of dust and ice have been found. Small moons often whirl nearby. Mathematical analysis shows that a moon's gravity rocks the ring like a swing, making it tilt.

A comet hurtling through space is a mountain of ice and dust that carries itself across the Solar System. If you mount small engines on such a mountain, it becomes a ship with its own fuel: gas from the interior can be vented through nozzles to change course.

The Comet Interceptor mission launches without a target. The spacecraft freezes at a point of space equilibrium, like a fighter jet on combat standby: engine warmed up, but takeoff only on alert.

Every few hours, narrow beams of radio waves leave the Mojave Desert, near Madrid, and near Canberra, heading into the sky. This is NASA's Deep Space Network: three antenna complexes that keep in touch with spacecraft across the solar system.