On May 5, NASA launched two, tiny, briefcase-sized satellites (called cubesats) to Mars, but at least one of them still has an eye for Earth. One of the Mars Cube One (MarCO) cubesats, nicknamed Wall-E, snapped a photo of Earth from more than half a million miles away.
Earth appears as a pale blue speck, and to its left is an even fainter speck: our moon.
NASA scientists weren’t doing this for sport, but to see if the cubesat’s antenna had unfolded — and worked.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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