Rise from the ashes

Abstract

Human hands have stretched far into the cosmos during our half-century of exploring the final frontier. Men and women have circled hundreds of kilometres above the protective gaseous veil of Earth’s atmosphere and a handful of men have ventured further and left their footprints on the flat plains and undulating hills of our closest celestial neighbour, the Moon. Someday, our direct presence will expand to Mars and other more exotic places. For now, though, efforts to develop the capacity to transport us beyond low-Earth orbit remain in their infancy. Still, many space machines crafted by human hands have been sent deep into the Solar System … and several of those were delivered, personally, by human crews. In June 2009, one such machine fell silent after two decades exploring the polar regions of the Sun. The joint US-European Ulysses mission, now defunct, continues to orbit our parent star, completing a full circuit every six years or so, and its legacy stands testament to the ingenuity of the scientists, engineers, visionaries and thinkers who laboured to put it there. From its launch in October 1990 to the end of its life, Ulysses pushed the boundaries of knowledge about our Sun and fundamentally altered our understanding of how it functions.