June 2018
Striding through space
...co-investigator on the M-509 astronaut manoeuvring unit ‘jet-pack’ experiment which was flown in the pressurised... of my tether, Vance,” McCandless advised. A few pulses of the manoeuvring jets, and he managed to grab it off the aft end of the Shuttle....
September 2017
Telescope targets enigmatic deep space mystery
... ultra dense, rotating neutron star remnants of a supernova explosion in our Galaxy, which emit jets of radiation along their poles. As the pulsar spins, these jets of radiation cross our line-of-sight emitting a ‘blip’ similar to the workings...
June 2017
Automated or human-operated systems?
... 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 Glover. The astronaut builds a greenhouse on the red planet using all...
August 2017
Big science from small spacecraft
..., Kar-Ming Cheung, Andreas Frick and Rob Staehle. The work described here was performed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA.
June 2018
Cosmic communications and the anthropology of outer space
... engage in knowledge production that is essentially under the purview of anthropology - that is, the study of culture. Using NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) website, a curious Earth-bound human can track the two Voyager spacecraft, launched...
March 2026
Lessons learned on the way to space
... preparation and operation of a spaceflight system. My career journey took me through the Royal Air Force, flying fast jets and working as a test pilot, to the airline industry, where I was a captain on the Boeing 747 and the...
