NASA’s Wide-field Infra-red Survey Explorer (WISE) has just completed it’s second mission, NEOWISE, in which it scans the Solar System for Near-Earth Objects (NEO’s) which could potentially threaten the planet.  WISE was originally launched in December 2009, to perform a full survey of the sky in four infra-red wavelengths.  In the process it discovered not only distant warm objects but also thousands of new previously unseen asteroids.  The incredible sensitivity of the infra-red detectors meant that the probe had to … Continue reading →

Powers of Ten One of the most famous and effective tools to try and explain the scale of our universe is the series of images of something (usually a picnic in a park), each taken ten times further away than the one before.  The final pictures usually shows the entire universe.  This idea has been used by Carl Sagan in Cosmos, as the opening sequence of the movie contact, in astronomy textbooks and more.  The first film version was called … Continue reading →

25 years and one day ago, when I was nine years old, my parents frantically called me to see what was happening on TV.  It was the news, and they were showing footage of the Space Shuttle Challenger exploding on its way out of the Earth’s atmosphere.  It made a lasting impression on me, and was a sight I would never forget.  Yesterday was the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, but fewer people know that the day before was the … Continue reading →