At this very moment, NASA’s Fermi space telescope is up in the sky, zooming around Earth, and doing space stuff like sidestepping Soviet space junk and spotting mysterious galactic soap bubbles. For its (roughly) five-year anniversary, NASA put out a little montage of the ‘scopes stellar achievements so far, and the list is impressive.
By staring at the gamma rays coursing through our galaxy, Fermi has already confirmed some of Einstein’s predictions about the nature of space and time, calculated the total amount of light produced by all stars ever, and is creeping ever closer to discovering the true nature of dark matter. It’s a serious science machine.
Keep on truckin’, Fermi. Hope the next five are just as great.