Latest Bob Lin Stories

In 1959, only two years after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and ignited the space race, the University of California, Berkeley, created a laboratory devoted to space science that has grown to be one of the most active academic space research labs in the country.Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) has provided instruments for 75 satellites, two dozen rockets, nearly 200 balloon flights and numerous ground-based experiments. Eight of the...

Picture this: A cup of coffee, steaming and black. Add a dollop of milk and gently stir. Eddies of cream go swirling around the cup. Magnify that image a million times and you've got a Lunar Swirl. Lunar swirls are strange markings on the Moon that resemble the cream in your coffee -- on a much larger scale. They seem to be curly-cues of pale moondust, twisting and turning across the lunar surface for dozens of miles. Each swirl is utterly flat and protected by a magnetic field. What are...