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…
All going well, Baumgartner will become the first person to break the speed of sound in free-fall.
AAP Image/Red Bull
UPDATE: After adverse weather conditions delayed earlier launch attempts, Felix Baumgartner has finally made his historic skydive. Red Bull Stratos reports that Baumgartner climbed to an altitude of over…
When Curiosity lands on Mars next Monday, expect the social media buzz to be out of this world.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
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…
Asteroid impacts make for impressive images and movies, but how realistic is the threat?
NASA
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…
There’ll be a human colony on the red planet by 2023 if Mars One has its way.
Mars One
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…
The 8km-high volcano, Maat Mons, is only one of the reasons to head back to Venus.
NASA/JPL
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…
We’re a long way off finding little green men, but we might find evidence of life on Mars within a year.
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…
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stands in front of a Falcon 9 rocket at SpaceX’s launch site in Florida.
SpaceX
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…
Where there’s mineral wealth, people always follow.
MGM
As history has repeatedly shown, where there are valuable minerals to be unearthed, adventurous humans will arrive in droves – even if it means battling extreme conditions and risking life and limb. So…
There will be a future mining boom, as heralded in recent media stories. But this mining will take place in a location even more hostile than the Australian Outback – space. More specifically, the ore…
Russia is no stranger to ambitious space exploration – and has produced several notable firsts.
Maxim Shipenkov/ EPA
For decades, the Soviet Union was a major player in the exploration of space, famously locking horns with the US in the “Space Race” – a competition for orbital supremacy and solar system exploration throughout…
A team of Australian and European astronomers has discovered a highly unusual galaxy in the shape of an emerald-cut diamond roughly 70 million light years away. The astronomers - from Australia, Germany…
There’s all kinds of rubbish in orbit, and it can cause serious damage.
James Vallejo
In mid-February, the Swiss Space Centre announced a plan to start removing space debris from orbit. Their proposal involved using a satellite, called CleanSpace One, to approach, grapple and then “de-orbit…
Does the US suffer from its desire to go it alone in space?
NASA
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…
Nearly 8,000 objects have been identified for possible collision with Earth.
Pat Dalton...
In the past six months, it seems something has fallen from the sky every second minute. In September, the UARS satellite re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere, causing a media frenzy. In October, the German…
Space exploration is one of the few science-rich human endeavours that captivates both expert and layperson alike. There is a mystery – a romanticism – associated with space research and technology that…
What’s so special about the latest big discovery by NASA’s Kepler?
NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech
On Monday, to much fanfare, astronomers working with the Kepler space observatory (which was launched in March 2009) announced their first discovery of a planet orbiting within the “habitable zone” of…