Venus wasn’t always the forgotten planet
In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Union and the United States launched a number of spacecraft to Venus that greatly increased our understanding of Earth’s twin.
In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Union and the United States launched a number of spacecraft to Venus that greatly increased our understanding of Earth’s twin.
Supernovae cause the biggest explosions in the universe, often out shining their host galaxies. There’s plenty of flavours of supernova and they aren’t all just big stars blowing up.
Our Sun has had a few outbursts that have knocked out power grids and telegraph networks as well as disrupted satellite communications. These are nothing compared to what stars similar to our Sun have been observed doing.
Magnetars are a fascinating type of object that are really mind boggling. These incredibly powerful star remnants are worth giving a closer look.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the second batch of data collected by the Gaia satellite revealing the positions of around 1.7 billion stars.
103 years ago today, New Zealand and Australian troops landed at Gallipoli in World War 1. We have a look at what the night sky may have looked like in the early hours before the landings on 25th April 1915.
TESS was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX on 18 April. The satellite will survey the whole sky to look for exoplanets that transit their stars.
This short video will show you how to easily find the Sombrero Galaxy
We visited the Mars Yard at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in Sydney a few weeks ago and had a great time at this fantastic facility that is doing very important work.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is set for launch on 31 July to begin it’s journey to the Sun’s corona to help us understand more about the solar wind and why the corona is so hot.
The Chinese Tiangong-1 space station is predicted to conduct an uncontrolled re-entry sometime during 1 April 2018, NZ time.
Asteroid mining is seen as a lucrative source of income and, on the surface, it appears to be a way of accessing almost limitless resources. It’s not that simple though, it’s difficult, expensive and at the edge of our technological ability. But it won’t be that way forever.
The US has two options for getting to Mars within the next decade and a half with the ambitious plans from SpaceX and the more risk adverse plans of NASA. Both Russia and China also have some plans for Mars and have design work underway to build large rockets to support missions to Mars and to the Moon.
NASA’s plans to get to Mars are a bit slower than Elon Musk’s. They have many more steps and have plans to achieve some quite impressive things such as space station orbiting the Moon and capturing an asteroid.
SpaceX is well advanced in it’s plans to build a huge rocket to take humans to Mars and they plan to do this by 2024. This article has a closer look at the Big Falcon Rocket to see what’s so special about it.
(And we can do something about it.)
Life needs CHNOPS, the six essential elements Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, and Sulphur. Curiosity found them on ancient Mars, but a new study shows Earth was born without them. Only a lucky impact with Theia made our world habitable. In contrast, Venus never stood a chance. Meet the three planetary siblings and discover why only Earth became a cradle for life.
Mars’s mantle contains ancient fragments up to 4km wide from its formation—preserved like geological fossils from the planet’s violent early history.
Cosmic rays are hitting the atmosphere constantly. One of the products of the collisions is muons, and we can detect muons on the surface of the Earth to learn about the cosmic rays.
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