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...
September 2017
Binary stars and their extraordinary lives
... will join the astrophysics group at the University of Surrey. Dr Orsola De Marco holds a professorship at Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia, where she works on observations and simulations of interacting binary stars. She completed her PhD...
September 2017
Science searches for cosmic company
... FAST 500 m radio telescope in China and the Square Kilometre Array being built in South Africa and Australia, will increase our sensitivity to signals. In addition, the unremitting march of digital technology has allowed more of the...
October 2017
The sci-fi noir world of Blade Runner
... Crombrugghe is an aerospace engineer, born and raised in Belgium. After his doctoral degree at the University of Queensland, in Australia, he held various private sector positions and is now project and business development manager at Antwerp Space...
November 2017
Managing air and space traffic from orbit
... more than 100 aircraft during the first pass over the British Isles, East Asia and Australia. These results showed the potential for future space-based traffic surveillance without any links to ground...
