From land to sea to space, the world’s scientists are using incredible tools to uncover our
planet’s history and tell us where we are headed.
These are the top 10 largest mega-tools of science.
Wall-e is Canada’s remote controlled seafloor crawler that gathers data on tectonic plate
movements, ocean temperatures, salinity, methane content, and sediment characteristics for
the NEPTUNE Ocean Observatory Project.
It livestreams HD footage from the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Vancouver, which
you can watch back on the project’s website.
The Very Large Array is a combination of 27 individual radio telescopes listening to the
wavelengths of the cosmos.
The individual telescopes are positioned to gather data cooperatively as if they were
one large telescope 22 miles wide.
Each antenna is attached to rail lines, allowing astronomers to configure their positions to
optimize wavelength focal points.
The VLR has made key observations of black holes and stars, discovered magnetic filaments
and traced complex gas motions at the Milky Way’s center...and even listened to the
edges of the universe.
Juno is one of the fastest objects man has ever built, traveling 134,000 miles per hour
toward Jupiter where it will enter the planet’s orbit around the 4th of July, 2016.
Once in orbit, Juno will study Jupiter’s composition, gravity and magnetic fields,
and polar magnetosphere before burning up in Jupiter’s outer atmosphere.
The Mars Curiosity Rover has been roaming around the surface of the red planet since
Aug. 2012 and has assessed that ancient Mars could have been hospitable to microbial life.
The generator behind the 2,000 lb car-sized rover produces electricity from the decay
of radioactive isotopes.
Curiosity'​s design will serve as the basis for a follow-up Mars rover mission set to
launch in the summer of 2020.
The Earthscope is like a heart monitor for the North American continent.
Boreholes dug from the earth’s surface, some a mile-and-a-half into the ground, are
spread throughout the 48 contiguous states to monitor 3.8 million square miles of seismic
activity and lava flow.
Since its inception in 2003, over 67 terabytes of data have been collected, with another
terabyte being added every six weeks.
And all of this information is available to the public on the Earthscope website.
The Spallation Neutron Source facility contains the most intense neutron beam accelerator
in the world.
Every year about 700 researchers from universities, national laboratories, and the private sector
gather to fire ions at 90% the speed of light through a maze of instruments to monitor how
these neutrons scatter.
This information that has applications in many fields, including structural biology,
biotechnology, magnetism, superconductivity, chemical and engineering materials, and nanotechnology.
The International Space Station is the largest man made object orbiting the Earth, and is
so large, you can see it with the naked eye from your back porch.
Six astronauts at a time get to call the ISS home while conducting experiments in biology,
physics, astronomy, meteorology, and space technology.
Recently, those on board grew and ate their own red romaine lettuce, the first time produce
has been produced entirely in space.
Man’s looking glass into the cosmos is the Hubble Telescope, equipped with an eight foot
mirror capable of taking extremely high-resolution pictures of galaxies millions of light years
away, like this famous image, the “Pillars of Creation.”
It’s observations have led to major breakthroughs in astrophysics, including determining the
rate of expansion of the universe.
Its scientific successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled for launch in 2018.
The National Ignition Facility uses the world’s largest and most powerful laser - capable
of reaching 100 million degrees and 100 billion times the pressure of the earth’s atmosphere
- to try and harness nuclear fusion energy.
A small, but crucial step toward this goal was made last year, when -- for the first
time -- scientists generated more energy than they put into the nuclear fuel.
And the world’s largest scientific instrument is the Large Hadron Collider that spans 17
miles, and is buried 574 feet underground along the Switzerland-France border.
Here, researchers have replicated the first millionth of a second of the Big Bang by smashing
subatomic particles called neutrinos into each other at the speed of light.
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