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Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
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In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, is one of the most Earth-like worlds in the Solar System. It is the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere and the only world besides Earth known to have stable bodies of liquid on its surface. Its atmosphere consists primarily of nitrogen and contains methane, which cycles through clouds, rainfall, rivers, lakes, and seas. Titan's atmosphere and surface contain complex organic compounds of interest to planetary chemistry and prebiotic research. Beneath its icy crust, Titan is thought to have a subsurface ocean containing liquid water and ammonia. Exploration of Titan began with NASA's Pioneer 11 encounter with the Saturn system in 1979, followed by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 flybys in 1980 and 1981. These missions confirmed Titan's dense atmosphere while Voyager 1 showed that a thick haze obscures the surface. The Cassini–Huygens mission conducted the most extensive exploration of Titan to date, with Cassini making 127 close flybys between 2004 and 2017. Its radar and infrared instruments mapped the surface and investigated Titan's atmosphere, climate, organic chemistry, and interior, revealing a dynamic world with a methane weather cycle and a subsurface ocean. The Huygens probe, operated by the European Space Agency, became the first spacecraft to land on Titan in 2005 and remains the only spacecraft to have done so, returning the first direct measurements and images of its surface. It is also the most distant spacecraft to have landed on a planetary body. Future exploration is planned with NASA's Dragonfly mission, a rotorcraft lander scheduled for launch in 2028 and arrival in 2034. Dragonfly will demonstrate the first powered, fully controlled atmospheric flight on a natural satellite while studying Titan's geology, atmosphere, and organic chemistry at multiple locations, including environments that may preserve evidence of prebiotic chemical processes. It will investigate how the building blocks of life form and search for possible biosignatures or chemical evidence of habitability.
Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program, to study the outer Solar System and the interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere. It was launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2. It communicates through the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth. Real-time distance and velocity data are provided by NASA and JPL. At a distance of 172.52 AU (25.8 billion km; 16.0 billion mi) as of October 2026, it is the most distant human-made object from Earth. Voyager 1 is projected to reach a distance of one light day from Earth on November 18, 2026. The probe made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn's largest moon, Titan. NASA had a choice of either conducting a Pluto or Titan flyby. Exploration of Titan took priority because it was known to have a substantial atmosphere. Voyager 1 studied the weather, magnetic fields, and rings of the two gas giants and was the first probe to provide detailed images of their moons. As part of the Voyager program and like its sister craft Voyager 2, the spacecraft's extended mission is to locate and study the regions and boundaries of the outer heliosphere and to begin exploring the interstellar medium. Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012, making it the first spacecraft to do so. Two years later, Voyager 1 began experiencing a third wave of coronal mass ejections from the Sun that continued to at least December 15, 2014, further confirming that the probe is in interstellar space. In 2017, the Voyager team successfully fired the spacecraft's trajectory correction maneuver (TCM) thrusters for the first time since 1980, enabling the mission to be extended by two to three years. Voyager 1 experienced successful revivals of several thrusters in 2018, 2019, and 2025. Voyager 1's extended mission is expected to continue to return scientific data for several more years. Its radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) may supply enough electric power to return engineering data until 2036. As of 2026, only two instruments are operational, the Plasma Wave Subsystem and magnetometer.
Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) was a joint NASA–ESA proposal for an exploration of Saturn and its moons Titan and Enceladus, where many complex phenomena were revealed by Cassini. TSSM was proposed to launch in 2020, following which it would have gotten gravity assists from Earth and Venus, and arrived at the Saturn system in 2029. The 4-year prime mission would include a two-year Saturn tour, a 2-month Titan aero-sampling phase, and a 20-month Titan orbit phase. In 2009, a mission to Jupiter and its moons was given priority over Titan Saturn System Mission, although TSSM will continue to be assessed for possible development and launch.
Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) is a proposed design for a lander for Saturn's moon Titan. TiME is a relatively low-cost, outer-planet mission designed to measure the organic constituents on Titan and would have performed the first nautical exploration of an extraterrestrial sea, analyze its nature and, possibly, observe its shoreline. As a Discovery-class mission it was designed to be cost-capped at US$425 million, not counting launch vehicle funding. It was proposed to NASA in 2009 by Proxemy Research as a scout-like pioneering mission, originally as part of NASA's Discovery Program. The TiME mission design reached the finalist stage during that Discovery mission selection, but was not selected, and despite attempts in the U.S. Senate failed to get earmark funding in 2013. A related Titan Submarine has also been proposed.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.