New jobs and investment for Australia’s growing space industry are promised with the backing of the new space agency. It’s hoped that all states and territories will benefit from a national approach.
Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Astronomers are gathering an exponentially greater amount of data every day – so much that it will take years to uncover all the hidden signals buried in the archives.
When NASA first started planning the Kepler mission, no one knew if the universe held any planets outside our solar system. Thousands of exoplanets later, the search enters a new phase as Kepler retires.
A couple thousand satellites are orbiting Earth right now. Under the right conditions, your naked eye can spot these human-made objects in the night sky.
China’s Tiangong-1 space station is hurtling around Earth out of control and about to come crashing down. It’s just one of thousands of pieces of space junk left orbiting our planet.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy could propel two fully loaded city buses more than 50 times the height of Mount Everest at 32 times the cruising speed of a Boeing 747.
There are plenty of astronomical things to watch out for this year beyond this week’s lunar eclipse, including new Moon landings and a space station falling back to Earth.
Dust can be instructive. The analysis of those collected around the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko provided new information on the history of the solar system.
In the early 20th century a Russian scientist – regarded as the father of rocketry – made some novel predictions on where we would be in space in the 21st century. So how accurate was he?
The precious metal is literally extra-terrestrial, produced in the heart of the stars. How and under what conditions? Scientists know more thanks to a double astrophysical observation.