Posts in Category: Astronomy
Browse our latest explorations of space and science - from orbital mechanics to propulsion systems, we investigate the successes, the failures, and the questions that drive discovery forward.
Posted on 13th Jun 2025
Titan is an interesting place. It's the largest moon of Saturn, bigger than our Moon and bigger even than the planet Mercury. It's also the only place besides Earth in the solar system with a dense atmosphere and standing bodies of liquid on its surface. Yes, Titan has rivers, lakes, and seas which...
Posted on 30th May 2025
In the outer solar system, beyond all the planets, there’s a lot of stuff. Small rocky and icy objects orbit the sun at enormous distances. But strangely there’s a group of these objects that seem to be clustered together. Now, the use of the word 'clustered' might imply that these objects are close...
Posted on 7th Feb 2025
Psyche is the mission to the asteroid 16 Psyche – a piece of space rock that is supposedly worth $100k quadrillion. Or, depending which media report you read today, it might be a billion quadrillion dollars, or even a trillion quadrillion dollars. At this point these numbers don’t even mean anyth...
Posted on 11th Dec 2024
Nuke Mars. You’ve probably heard about this, or maybe you have the t-shirt. The idea is simple. Mars has a cold, thin atmosphere that doesn’t support liquid water on its surface. You might think this is a non-problem not looking for a solution, but there is a segment of society intent on moving to M...
Posted on 16th Feb 2024
Osiris-Rex travelled around 6-billion km to get to asteroid Bennu, pick up some samples, and get them back to Earth. Now, you won’t often see people more excited by dirt, but this is dirt from another planet – which as a consequence of being other-worldly is rather rare on Earth. And it might jus...
Posted on 9th Jun 2023
For the last few years, astronomers have been watching an explosion take place in real time in the distant universe. Called AT2021lwx (or ZTF20abrbeie), it has been massively energetic, pumping out around 100 times as much energy as the sun will emit in its entire lifetime. We usually think of cos...
Posted on 5th May 2023
The hybrid solar eclipse in Exmouth a couple of weeks ago was a pretty rare event, but to the surprise of no-one it was predicted with more-or-less perfect accuracy ('cause, science). But it wasn’t always that way – actually, it was only a few hundred years ago that Halley (the comet guy) made the f...
Posted on 25th Nov 2022
The post office got a bad rap during COVID, but I’m not sure too many people want their mail delivered by rocket. Regardless, it seemed like a good idea to Heinrich von Kleist who was going to use fixed artillery batteries to fire letter-filled shells to speed up delivery of the mail. This was in th...
Posted on 24th Nov 2022
In case you’ve been living under a rock lately and missed the big announcement, Australia recently committed to ‘never conduct destructive, direct-ascent anti-satellite missile testing’. Why would we do that? Well, for starters New Zealand have already committed and we don’t want to look like we a...
Being almost the holidays, this might be a good time to talk about space tourism. Let’s…
DART is the mission based on the Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon. You know, the…
If you have a comment, a question, or just want to connect, you can get a hold of me here.