Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2017 i National Geographic Magazine

HOW SMALL? Each particle is about 300 microns wide, roughly the width of a human hair. To capture tiny details, Larsen and colleague Jan Kihle shoot with varied focal lengths, taking one photo per micron. Software combines the images. A Norwegian jazz musician and citizen scientist, Jon Larsen has figured out how to do something the experts thought was impossible—find specks of cosmic dust, called micrometeorites, amid the detritus of human habitation. Scientists look for these particles, which rain down constantly on Earth, in Antarctica and other pristine locations, but Larsen thought there should be a way to collect them in more populated places. Some micrometeorites are real stardust—flecks from exploded stars. Others are likely created when asteroids collide and comets vaporize. Larsen learned to identify the unique features that…

GO FURTHER Read Carl Sagan’s “Mars: A New World to Explore” in the December 1967 issue of National Geographic by visiting archive.national geographic.com. ‘ LET’ S HAVE [THE MARTIAN] FIND HIS WAY IN THE DAYTIME BY HIS LITTLE RED TENDRILS AND AT NIGHT HE WILL DIG A HOLE.’ CARL SAGAN IN A LETTER TO HIS EDITOR, 1967 Carl Sagan spent his childhood immersed in Mars. The future scientist, an avid reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s science fiction, would pass evenings lying in vacant lots, looking up at the sky and “thinking myself to that twinkling red place.” He fantasized about Martians, their bodies a kaleidoscope of color— Burroughs’s Mars had two more primary colors than Earth—with removable heads but decidedly human forms. “I didn’t realize then the chauvinism of making…

“ The weather is absolutely perfect,” announced an NBC broadcaster from an uninhabited Pacific atoll on June 8, 1937. Minutes later the moon blocked the sun—beginning what reports called the longest total eclipse in 1,238 years. Isolated Canton Island was the best place to observe the eclipse’s sevenminute arc across the sky, and a National Geographic–U.S. Navy expedition had hauled 22,000 pounds of equipment from Washington, D.C., to Honolulu and then 1,900 miles into the Pacific Ocean to be there. The 13-person team of scientists and photographers marked their mission’s success with a large concrete monument embedded with two American flags. Nearby, a scientific expedition sponsored by Britain displayed the Union Jack. The friendly rivalry soon became a diplomatic issue. Canton had no shade or permanent drinking water, but it…

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMIVITALE From afar, the cries of a baby elephant in distress seem almost human. Drawn by the sounds, young Samburu warriors, long spears in hand, thread their way toward a wide riverbed, where they find the victim. The calf is half-submerged in sand and water, trapped in one of the hand-dug wells that dot the valley. Only its narrow back can be seen—and its trunk, waving back and forth like a cobra. As recently as a year ago, the men likely would have dragged the elephant out before it could pollute the water and would have left it to die. But this day they do something different: Using a cell phone, ubiquitous even in remotest Kenya, they send a message to Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, about six…

Insofar as we esteem the creations that last—Homer’s Odyssey, the bridge still standing, enduring love—let us now praise the twin Voyager space probes, launched 40 years ago and currently departing the solar system to drift forever among the stars. Each about the size and weight of a subcompact automobile, the Voyagers epitomize 1970s high tech. Their computers are weaker than those in today’s digital watches, their analog TV cameras more primitive than the ones that shot Laverne & Shirley. But they made history at every planet they reconnoitered— confirming, as Voyager chief scientist Ed Stone put it, that “nature is much more inventive than our imaginations. Jupiter, which looks serene through a telescope, was shown by Voyager to have hundreds of raging hurricanes, a glowing aurora at the north pole,…

NASA has embarked on many successful missions—from rocketing astronauts to the moon to launching the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space. But it hasn’t yet sent a mission to the sun. The deterrent? Our nearest star’s searing heat. The surface of the sun is 10,000°F, but its outer atmosphere—the corona—soars to some 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit. “This temperature inversion is a big mystery that no one has been able to explain,” says Nicola Fox, project scientist for the Parker Solar Probe, the NASA mission that aims to finally get close to the sun. The mission is made possible now by a shield constructed from a carbon-carbon composite, which will keep the probe’s instruments safe in the 70-degree range. Launching as early as July 31, 2018, the probe will make 24…

PROOF | A PHOTOGRAPHER’ SJOURNAL MOSES HLONGWANE also known as The King of Kings, The Lord of Lords, Jesus In Eshowe, South Africa, Moses Hlongwane preaches to his flock during his own wedding ceremony—an event he says marks the beginning of the End of Days. Moses says that God identified him as the Messiah during a dream in 1992. At the time Moses was working as a jewelry salesman. Since then, he’s preached in Eshowe, Johannesburg, and other cities in the region. Moses has about 40 disciples. INRI (preceding pages) Near Brasília, Brazil, followers of INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews) push their messiah around on a rolling pedestal. A dozen disciples—most of them women—live full-time with the celibate 69-year-old in his walled compound,…

Zane Grey made his name writing adventure novels about the American West, but his real love wasn’t gunslinging or cowpoking; it was deep-sea fishing. He held 14 world records for catching saltwater fish, including the first billfish over 1,000 pounds landed with a rod and reel, a marlin he caught in Tahiti in 1930. But nothing compared to the shortfin makos he encountered off the coast of New Zealand in 1926. The first mako Grey got on the line was a 258-pounder, and when he reeled it to the side of the boat, “quickly I learned something about mako!” he wrote in his book Tales of the Angler’s Eldorado, New Zealand. “He put up a terrific battle, broke one gaff, soaked us through with water, and gave no end of…

Even on the starriest of nights, the human eye sees just a tiny fraction of the cosmos. So if the curve of the Big Dipper or the four points of the Southern Cross appear magnificent, consider how many more phenomena must exist out of view. That prospect is what led astronomer Natasha Hurley-Walker to a radio telescope deep in the outback of Western Australia. The telescope, called the Murchison Widefield Array, is made up of thousands of antennas that see through celestial dust and detect “radio light”—revealing colors and objects in a spectrum not visible to humans, even with the aid of optical telescopes like Hubble. Stretched across nearly four square miles of desert, the antennas— cheaper to produce and maintain than typical dishes—look like “an army of mechanical spiders,”…

By Sam Howe Verhovek Photographs by Vincent Fournier The youthful Indian engineers took their seats, a bit nervously, in a makeshift conference room inside a cavernous former car-battery warehouse in Bangalore. Arrayed in front of them were several much older men and women, many of them gray-haired luminaries of India’s robust space program. The first Asian space agency to send an orbiter to Mars, it also nearly tripled a previous world record by launching 104 satellites into orbit in a single mission this past February. The object of everyone’s attention was a small rolling device barely the size of a microwave oven. TeamIndus, India Weighing in at just under 17 pounds—but carrying the pride and hopes of a nation on its spindly frame—the Indian team’s rover, code-named ECA, undergoes testing…

Looking down at the planet from 200 miles in space, I feel as though I know the Earth in an intimate way most people don’t—the coastlines, terrains, mountains, and rivers. Some parts of the world, especially in Asia, are so blanketed by air pollution that they appear sick, in need of treatment or at least a chance to heal. The line of our atmosphere on the horizon looks as thin as a contact lens over an eye, and its fragility seems to demand our protection. One of my favorite views of Earth is of the Bahamas (above), a large archipelago with a stunning contrast from light to dark colors. The vibrant deep blue of the ocean mixes with a much brighter turquoise, swirled with something almost like gold, where the…

At 65, Moolchand, bandy-legged and white-haired, has no problem rising for his predawn hunts. In fact he revels in them. “I hide along the lane with my flashlight,” he says in a low, excited voice, gesturing down the main road of Gaji Khedi village, in India’s Madhya Pradesh state. “And I look for people walking with a lota.” A lota is a water container, traditionally made of brass but these days more often of plastic. Spied outdoors in the early morning, it all but screams that its owner is headed for a field or roadside to move his or her bowels—the water is for rinsing. “I give chase,” Moolchand continues. “I blow my whistle, and I dump out their lota. Sometimes I take it away and burn it.” Moolchand sees…