May 2018
Space safety – the problem with dual hatting
... and those at risk from failure. At first there was a professional class of ‘risk takers’ and it is no accident that Mercury astronauts were chosen from military test pilots. By the time of the Space Shuttle, astronaut safety was...
May 2018
Challenging the boundaries of materials science
... prohibits the sale of electronic equipment containing certain hazardous substances including lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls and polybrominated diphenylethers in EU countries. Although this directive does...
October 2018
Developing wearable technologies for space and Earth
... mission fosters a unique translation of technologies between multiple-application environments. NASA’s original spacesuits for the Mercury programme were made to be worn inside the spacecraft. The photograph shows astronaut Gus Grissom modelling the...
January 2019
Visiting an asteroid to find out how life began
.... In addition to Hayabusa2, Elizabeth assists with the global outreach on JAXA’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) and BepiColombo (Mercury) missions. She is also a feature writer for the NASA NExSS ‘Many Worlds’ blog and author of the...
April 2019
Scanning the skies for exoplanets
... extreme temperature dominating this planet, LHS 3844 b has more in common with the sun-facing side of Mercury than it does with our own temperate water-world. There is a good chance then that any atmosphere...
May 2019
Cold comfort for astronauts
... two Air Force-contributed large intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) rockets, Atlas and Titan – used on the Mercury and Gemini missions. The astronauts were military fighter pilots. With the start of the lunar exploration...
