Category Archives: News and Updates

News about Astronomy and Space Science. Find every news item and update here, in blog format. You can get these updates sent straight to your mailbox by subscribing here, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking the link.

Competition: Your chance to name an asteroid

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 Updated: The winner of the competition was 9-year old Mike Puzio, who suggested the name “Bennu”.  Bennu is an ancient egyptian god, usually depicted as a grey heron.  Mike felt that the sample arm and solar panels of OSIRIS-REx reminded him of traditional illustrations of Bennu.   In 2016, NASA are planning to launch the OSIRIS-REx mission which will visit a near-Earth asteroid, collect samples, and bring them back to Earth.  Unfortunately for mission publicists, the asteroid has the unsexy … Continue reading →

Plate Tectonics on Mars

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  One of Earth’s distinctive features is it’s geologically dynamic nature.  Heat is distributed through the molten core and mantle via vast slow convection currents, and these steady flows have fractured the crust into continent-sized plates.  As these currents flow, they drag the plates around, in a process called Plate Tectonics.  Where plates slide against each other, tension builds in the rock which jerks free as earthquakes, and where they collide directly, mountain ranges are thrust skywards.  Without this process, … Continue reading →

Neil Armstrong

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Neil Alden Armstrong, the first human to set foot on another world, is dead. He was a remarkable man who inspired millions, yet tempered his achievements with extraordinary humility. He underwent heart surgery on 7 august, just 2 days after his 82nd birthday, and succumbed to complications earlier today. Like the footprints he left on the Moon forty three years ago, his name will live on forever.Neil was born in 1930 in the little town of Wapakoneta, Ohio. He grew … Continue reading →

What next, after Curiosity?

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The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL, or Curiosity to its friends) has only been on Mars for seventeen days, but already the next martian mission has been named:  InSight, the most recent Discovery class mission, will plant a probe six meters beneath the surface of Mars to give us our first knowledge on what happens inside Mars.  Everything we know so far has been limited to what is visible from orbit, or can be sampled on the surface.  InSight (Interior exploration … Continue reading →

Curiosity: The Landing

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What an age we live in! Sending robotic spacecraft to strange worlds is just incredible, mindblowing and amazing, yet we as a society are always so very blasé about it.  This is because our actual experience of these landings consists of a a few dry paragraphs in a government agency press release, with the data and images then appearing quietly and without drama several weeks later. Well the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL, or Curiosity to its friends) has changed all … Continue reading →