News Archive / Author: Laurel Kornfeld
Laurel Kornfeld is an amateur astronomer and freelance writer from Highland Park, NJ, who enjoys writing about astronomy and planetary science. She studied journalism at Douglass College, Rutgers University, and earned a Graduate Certificate of Science from Swinburne University’s Astronomy Online program. Her writings have been published online in The Atlantic, Astronomy magazine’s guest blog section, the UK Space Conference, the 2009 IAU General Assembly newspaper, The Space Reporter, and newsletters of various astronomy clubs. She is a member of the Cranford, NJ-based Amateur Astronomers, Inc. Especially interested in the outer solar system, Laurel gave a brief presentation at the 2008 Great Planet Debate held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, MD.
Articles By Laurel Kornfeld
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Damaged Arecibo Observatory collapses
December 1st, 2020The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, a world-famous 1,000-foot-wide radio telescope through which major discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics were made, collapsed on the morning of Tuesday, December 1, after one of its main cables broke on November 6. That cable’s collapse occurred three months after the telescope’s reflector dish was damaged in August […]
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Probe finds deep space is not completely dark
December 1st, 2020Now more than four billion miles away from Earth, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, acting as a distant space observatory, has found that deep space is not entirely dark.
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Arrokoth’s flattened shape could shed light on planetesimal formation process
November 15th, 2020The flattened shape of the two lobes that make up Arrokoth, the Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) visited by the New Horizons spacecraft in January 2019, may hold clues to the formation process of planetesimals and even planets.
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OSIRIS-REx capsule closed following successful Bennu sample collection
November 1st, 2020NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft collected enough soil samples of the asteroid Bennu on its first attempt that mission controllers commanded the spacecraft to close its Sample Return Capsule (SRC).
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White mountain peaks on Pluto not caused by snow
October 24th, 2020Images captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its July 2015 Pluto flyby reveal the small planet to be the only place in the solar system other than Earth to have white-capped mountains.
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Remnants of ancient subsurface ocean observed on Ceres
October 5th, 2020The bright spots in Ceres’s Occator Crater, which mystified scientists when first observed by the Dawn spacecraft in 2015, indicate the dwarf planet may harbor remnants of what was once a global subsurface ocean.
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NASA town hall shares updates on science missions
October 2nd, 2020At a community town hall which was broadcast live on September 10, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate provided updates on the agency’s many ongoing and upcoming science missions.
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OPINION: Arecibo Observatory should be rebuilt
September 7th, 2020After experiencing a series of misfortunes ranging from earthquakes to hurricanes to budget cuts, the National Science Foundation‘s (NSF) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, both a scientific and cultural icon, was seriously damaged when an auxiliary cable broke on Monday, August 10 at 2:45 am.
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Pluto’s glaciers change with its seasons
August 26th, 2020Using data returned by NASA’s New Horizons mission’s July 2015 Pluto flyby, a group of researchers discovered evidence that the dwarf planet’s glaciers expand and grow in response to seasonal changes.
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Commercial spaceflight advocate outlines revolution in the field
July 7th, 2020Bruce Pittman of NASA’s Space Portal Office, a 35-year advocate for commercial spaceflight, outlined his vision of the endeavor over the next 42 months in a June webinar run by NASA’s Night Sky Network.
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Pluto’s subsurface ocean may date back to planet’s formation
June 29th, 2020Scientists who recently studied the detailed images of Pluto’s surface returned by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015 have found evidence that the dwarf planet’s subsurface ocean may have been around since Pluto’s formation over four billion years ago.
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Perseverance mission scientist outlines rover’s instruments, mission
June 23rd, 2020One month before the scheduled launch of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, Roger Wiens, who serves as both principal investigator of its SuperCam laser instrument and as co-investigator of its SHERLOC team, discussed the mission’s science instruments and its purpose in a virtual webinar presented by the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI).
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New Horizons parallax experiment observes an alien sky
June 14th, 2020NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, now over 4.3 billion miles (6.9 billion km) from Earth, successfully imaged two nearby stars displaced from the locations in the sky where they are seen from Earth in its April stellar parallax experiment.
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SOFIA data sheds new light on endurance of Pluto’s atmosphere
June 1st, 2020Data captured by the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), an airborne observatory that studied Pluto’s atmospheric hazes just two weeks before New Horizons‘ 2015 flyby, indicates the hazes in Pluto’s atmosphere are regularly replenished.
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NASA researcher provides overview of science on the ISS
May 29th, 2020Research conducted on board the International Space Station (ISS) encompasses numerous science fields, such as biology and biotechnology, human research, the physical sciences, technological demonstrations, Earth and space science, and public education, noted Brandon Redell of NASA’s ISS Integration Office at the Johnson Space Center.
