02 August 2017
First iodine fuelled thrusters pass critical design tests
... Launch System; Morehead State University’s Lunar IceCube and Arizona State University’s LunaH-Map missions. “The BIT-3 is critical technology that will allow small spacecraft and CubeSats to acquire high quality scientific results on interplanetary...
May 2020
Space astronomy at the limits of technology
...your way up to senior programme manager. Can you tell us a bit more about your early work on space telescopes? My first job at...trust us to perform it to their requirements. Tell us a bit more about Hubble and the new processes you developed. The ‘warm...
September 2023
Getting a grip on space sustainability and space debris
... well as different organisations across the world. We’re actively working to define what those might be and to identify the bits the UK Space Agency wants to lead on. Does space sustainability include Earth’s atmosphere? Thinking about the potential...
09 July 2015
Discovery of a five-star solar system in Ursa Major highlights mystery of proto-stellar disk fragmentation
Do five suns in the sky sound like a bit too much? Not as far as a rare star...understanding of space, other systems – came to be, there is still a fair bit of mystery surrounding the workings of proto-stellar disks and the complex processes that occur...
04 November 2015
KIC 8462852 mystery: blocked by ‘alien megastructure’ … or something more banal?
A dramatically dimming star in Cygnus is giving astronomers a bit of a headache. Amateur astronomers working at the Planet Hunters project that ... involve an “alien megastructure or not” – we are finding out about them with quite a bit of a delay.
March 2016
Rosetta – Starting from Scratch
... vicinity of a planet, and uses its gravity field for a further acceleration in its heliocentric orbit - thereby stealing a bit of the planet’s orbital energy. This makes the journey very long but at the end the spacecraft...
