The latest telemetry from the frontiers of science...
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 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 22nd Nov 2024
We recently heard that a Russian satellite called Luch-2 ("Luch" meaning ray in Russian) had a close approach with another satellite while in geostationary orbit. Geostationary orbits are inhabited by our navigation, communication, and meteorological satellites. The suspicion? That Luch-2 was ea...
Posted on 12th Apr 2024
The Boeing Starliner has a new launch date: May 1. If you were wondering – yes it has been delayed again. But now there's hope that it might finally go ahead. The two increasingly brave astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, have named their spacecraft Calypso after Jacques Cousteau’s rese...
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 9th Dec 2022
Being almost the holidays, this might be a good time to talk about space tourism. Let’s ignore the advertising of well-known rocket launch companies and the hyperventilating of overly enthusiastic journalists for a moment and imagine that we have actually entered “the era of space tourism” (CBS, R...
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...
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…
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