Interviewing a spacecraft isn’t something one does every day. It certainly wasn’t an option back in the late 1970s, when Voyager 1 and 2 set off on a mission like no other before or since: to visit some…
At 3.31pm today (AEST) the NASA control room in Pasadena, California erupted after people heard these three simple words: “touchdown signal detected”. This diminutive sentence signalled that the Curiosity…
The Mars Science Laboratory, otherwise known as the Curiosity rover, has safely landed on the red planet. While NASA engineers can now breath a sigh of relief, for a small army of people, the work on Mars…
Social media is the new frontier for space exploration, shaping an age of innovative public participation in space missions. While online communities are a-Twitter about NBC’s poor Olympic coverage, there’s…
Last week, scientists using one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Cameras announced the discovery of a small moon orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto - the fifth satellite discovered in orbit around…
How many times have you read a headline about our impending doom due to a “Deep Impact”-style annihilation? In a way it’s not surprising – we have an insatiable appetite for disaster stories, a hunger…
Private space venture company Mars One announced earlier this month that it intends to send people on a one-way colonisation mission to Mars in 2023, largely funded by sales of the mission’s media rights…
Last week the world stopped to watch as the black disc of Venus inched its way across the face of the sun. But beyond the transits that capture our attention roughly twice per century, Venus has always…
The building blocks of life have been discovered on Mars … in Martian meteorites that fell to Earth. Let me rephrase that: according to a paper by published in Science Express on Friday, meteorites from…
Late tomorrow evening (AEST), all going well, a Falcon 9 rocket will lift-off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A few days after launch the craft will rendezvous in low-Earth orbit with the International Space…
NASA is currently poring over more than 6,000 applications for the next intake in its astronaut program - from which nine to 15 candidates will be successful. And while the Space Shuttle program is a thing…
Over the past few months, NASA’s Kepler mission has repeatedly made headlines with announcements of new and unusual planetary systems around other stars. To name a few, we’ve had the most densely packed…
In its newly released budget request to Congress, the Obama Administration is seeking to reduce NASA’s funding by US$59m to US$17.7 billion – a reduction of just 0.03%, not that you would know that from…
By the time the Apollo Program ended in 1972 it had cost NASA roughly US$170 billion dollars (in today’s terms). It was seen as a waste of money by some, but almost 40 years since the launch of Apollo…
Last December’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union featured three of the world’s leading climate scientists: James Hansen (NASA’s chief climate scientist), Elco Rohling (National Oceanography Centre…