We will use the term Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 interchangeably as most folks still use either terms. Business centers provide a lot of free services that reduce the responsibilities that you might have if you leased permanent office space. “I have friends who work at different agencies and they’ve had a bit more of an iron fist approach,” says Robertson. Roberts set a precedent for future female supervisors who made it their job to hire women, often taking a chance on young women right out of college. Even if there’s only one-half of 1 percent chance of life evolving technologically savvy populations, that would mean there should be 500,000 other civilizations in our galaxy alone. Convective zone: The outermost ring of the sun, comprising 30 percent of its radius. Radiative zone: The section immediately surrounding the core, comprising 45 percent of its radius. In fact, let’s say only one-half of 1 percent of suitable orbs feature some kind of life form – that’s still 100 million planets! Transit timing variations indicate that two or more planets belong to the same planetary system. Red light, on the other hand, travels more directly through the atmosphere.

After all, when the Columbia Command Module splashed into the Pacific Ocean, no safeguards were in place to capture a pesky microbe that might have somehow survived re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. If they did, he reasoned, they inevitably would have colonized the galaxy by now. In the 1960s, an American astronomer named Frank Drake came up with an equation that would help us calculate how many alien civilizations there might be in our galaxy. The plane was named for Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell. Another less benign scenario is that we’re nothing more than a holographic simulation, or possibly a game designed by an alien super-intelligence who is currently roaring with laughter at our foibles, or has long since grown bored and walked away, leaving the simulation running. The controllers on the ground also use music to play jokes on the astronauts – for the mission that fixed the Hubble Space Telescope, they packed in the visual puns, culminating in “I Can See For Miles” by The Who. ­All of the major features of the sun can be explained by the nuclear reactions that produce its energy, by the sun’s magnetic fields resulting from the movements of the gas and by its immense gravity.

Cassini’s development came with at least two major challenges to proceeding. Let’s look at the parts of our nearest star, find out how it makes light and heat and explore its major features. One of the best-known explanations for the notable absence of aliens in these parts is something known as the “great filter.” The thought is that there might be some inevitable phenomenon baked into the cosmos that prevents life forms from developing to the point where they can communicate or travel across interstellar distances. “The Sun is the only star we can examine this closely,” said Nicola Fox, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. How does the sun emit energy? All of our energy needs would solved. One idea, thought up in the 1800s by Charles Darwin, suggests that life might have started in a “warm little pond” of chemicals that received energy from lightning. With a billion extra years to play with, you would think they could’ve harnessed those galactic levels of energy to facilitate interstellar travel. The crew offer assistance and take pictures and video footage of your experience as you float, somersault, fly and bounce through the play area. An international crew of seven people live and work while traveling at a speed of five miles per second, orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes.

If all goes as planned, the bus-sized satellite will spend the next six years circling the globe every 99 minutes from a position 438 miles above the ground. For the first billion years of its existence life was content to take the form of super-simple prokaryote cells. Turning gloomy again, it could also be next to impossible for life to occur, in which case we’re just an outrageous fluke, a blue-green miracle lost in a vast, otherwise lifeless universe. So, again, where are they? Therefore, spacecraft are equipped with footholds and hand restraints to help astronauts work in microgravity. The agency also involves students in NASA missions to help them get excited about learning. Because kidney tissue can’t be grown in the lab, the treatment of kidney disease often involves replacing the whole organ with a transplant. If you believe the whole staring-at-the-sun-makes-you-go-blind thing (which is actually true), you’re probably not doing a whole lot of sun-gazing. How a robot beat the “I am not a robot” captcha.