August 2016
Rosetta overcomes major setback
... at night, as Rosetta was flying towards the Sun and we were using the New Norcia ground station in Australia to maintain radio contact with Earth. This posed a significant stress on the team, and at the end of the...
August 2016
Space for art
'EARTh from space’ is the theme of all of my artwork and lies at the heart of my own motivation to share the overwhelmingly impressive experience I was blessed to have while living, working and flying in space. The spaceflight experience is ...
September 2016
Moon or Mars - how logical is NASA’s next step?
... office in Luxembourg city and is advising the government there on how to pursue a future in a commercialised space environment. Similarly, Australia recently began a review of its own civil space regulation: The Space Activities act of 1998, and The...
March 2017
Planetary nebulae may hold clue in search of helium-3
... that exists now is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). The SKA is an international project that it is currently in development in Australia and South Africa, and will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope. Construction of the...
March 2017
Rosetta – outstanding climax to pioneering mission
... operations team. Waiting for a signal Two NASA Deep Space Network 70 m antennas - Goldstone in California and Canberra in Australia - were pointed to the place in the sky where Rosetta was predicted to be, waiting for the signal. I was...
June 2017
Automated or human-operated systems?
Watching the movie The Martian recently I was captured by the creativity demonstrated by two key characters - the astronaut stranded on Mars, played by Matt Damon, and the astrodynamicist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), played by Donald...
