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.

The end of Sumbandilasat

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As South Africans, many of us don’t even know that we have a space program, so we’re especially proud of our locally built satellites.  The most recent was Sumbandilasat, an Earth Observation micro-satellite operated jointly by the CSIR, the University of Stellenbosch and SunSat (A local company which designs and builds satellites).Sumbandilasat was launched in September 2009, on a Soyuz-2 launch vehicle from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and was built to a budget using off-the-shelf components wherever possible.  Although this approach … Continue reading →

Hayabusa: The Sequel

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If you’ve been reading Urban Astronomer from the beginning, you’ll know that I was a big fan of the Japanese Space Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa mission.  Naturally, I’m thrilled to hear that JAXA have recently announced Hayabusa 2, which will hopefully perform a little better than the first attempt. Hayabusa (meaning ‘Falcon’) was a robotic spacecraft equipped with an explosive harpoon and cutting-edge ion propulsion engines, sent out to collect samples from the asteroid Itokawa and bring them home.  Unfortunately, the … Continue reading →

Citizen Science – Moon Mappers

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For the past week, whenever I’ve had a few spare minutes to kill, I’ve logged into my Moon Mappers account and done my bit for lunar science.  A Cosmoquest project, the goal is to map out every single crater on the moon from imagery returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and find unusual structures that require study.  There are an enormous number of craters, however, so volunteers can choose between one of two sub-projects.  In the first, where I’m … Continue reading →

Who are we?

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Urban Astronomer I have been a keen amateur astronomer for as long as I can remember. When I was a small child, my parents would borrow library books on astronomy and my grandparents would arrange for members of the local astronomical society to come and visit me. When I started High School, my uncle gave me my first telescope, and as the years passed he loaned me a series of more powerful instruments which I treasured and used for many … Continue reading →

2011 among hottest years on record

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NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies have just released their annual Surface Temperature Analysis report, in which they release their findings on average global temperatures for the previous year.  You can read the report here, but the gist of it is that 2011 was the ninth warmest year since accurate global measurements began in 1880.  That puts nine of the ten hottest years in recorded history in the 21st century, and all ten in the past 13 years.  The warmest … Continue reading →