For more than two years, NASA's Deep Space Atomic Clock has been pushing the timekeeping frontiers in space. On Sept. 18, 2021, its mission came to a successful end.

The instrument is hosted on General Atomics' Orbital Test Bed spacecraft that was launched aboard the Department of Defense Space Test Program 2 mission June 25, 2019. Its goal: to test the feasibility of using an onboard atomic clock to improve spacecraft navigation in deep space.

Currently, spacecraft rely on ground-based atomic clocks. To measure a spacecraft's trajectory as it travels beyond the Moon, navigators use these timekeepers to precisely track when those signals are sent and received. Because navigators know that radio signals travel at the speed of light (about 186,000 miles per second, or 300,000 kilometers per second), they can use these time measurements to calculate the spacecraft's exact distance, speed, and direction of travel.

Not all who wander are lost—but sometimes their cell phone reception is. That might change soon if a plan to project basic cell phone coverage to all parts of the globe comes to fruition. Lynk has already proven it can use a typical smartphone to bound a standard SMS text message off a low-earth-orbiting satellite, and they don't plan to stop there.

Formerly known as Ubiquitilink, Lynk was founded a few years ago by Nanoracks founder Charles Miller and his partners but came out of "stealth mode" as a start-up in 2019. In 2020 they then used a satellite to send an SMS message from a typical smartphone, without requiring the fancy GPS locators and antennas needed by other, specially made satellite phones.

The company continued its success recently by demonstrating a "two-way" link this week using a newly launched satellite, its fifth, called "Shannon." They've also proved it over multiple phones in numerous areas, including the UK, America, and the Bahamas.

Eventually, two-way communication means that the signal could eventually be used for voice calls rather than just sending messages in emergencies.

Measuring a magnetic field isn't so hard if you're inside of it. Measuring a magnetic field remotely—whether from across a room, across a country, or 93 million miles away—is an entirely different story. But that's exactly what a team of NASA scientists and international collaborators aim to do with the CLASP2.1 mission: measure the magnetic field in a critical slice of the sun's atmosphere called the chromosphere.

CLASP2.1, short for Chromospheric Layer Spectropolarimeter 2.1, will make these measurements from a NASA sounding rocket. Sounding rockets are small rockets that carry instruments into space for five to ten minutes before falling back down to Earth. The launch window for the CLASP2.1 sounding rocket mission opens at 11:30 a.m. MT on Oct. 5, 2021, at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The upcoming flight will be the CLASP instrument's third trip to space.