Science Writing

In late 2013, I wrote this short (293-word) article about the spacecraft Voyager 1 becoming the first man-made object to leave our Solar System. The This piece places the accomplishment in the context of Voyager winning a race against its predecessors, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. I consulted the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's 2012 study on an effect called "The Pioneer Anomaly," which explained what forces were acting on the Pioneer probes as they traveled deeper into space.

In late 2013, I wrote about the NASA spacecraft New Horizons making its final journey to the dwarf planet Pluto. I focused on how its instruments can be used to prove that Pluto is, in fact, not a planet, despite protestations from the public and the scientific community. Here, I wrote for an interested, but not attentive audience. I wrote this article as if it would appear in Popular Science or some other scientifically-oriented magazine. This gives interested readers a chance to learn about complex system, the spacecraft, and how its instruments can be used to finally prove that Pluto is not a planet.