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"It was a big and happy surprise, to both me and the whole planetary science community,” describes Dr Lori Glaze, Director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA. “I think many in our field recognised it was well past time for NASA to return to Venus, but to see both the Venus Discovery concepts selected together was pretty amazing.”
Two weeks before Hayabusa2 was due to return to Earth, Caitlin Caruana feared it would all go wrong. Caruana is part of the Australian Space Agency’s (ASA) international engagement team and for the last six months of 2020, she was dedicating nearly all her time to ensuring that JAXA would be able to collect their spacecraft’s sample return capsule when it landed in Australia on December 6, 2020.
The third brightest star in the night sky is Alpha Centauri. It is our closest stellar neighbour, the fictional birth system of the Transformers, Small Furry Creatures and Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters… and now our closest exoplanet.
Selection of recent science articles:
We have not discovered life on K2-18b.
We have not even discovered water on K2-18b.
All we can say is that the planet does not… not… have an ocean.
The SLIM mission is about the launch and head to the Moon! But how is SLIM different from previous lunar landers, and what does the mission plan to achieve?
On March 20, the extraterrestrial curation team pulled off the protective overalls that guard against any Earthly contamination entering the laboratory, and joined leaders of the mission and initial analysis teams in the ISAS Communication Hall. It has been just over two years since the Hayabusa2 spacecraft returned a sample from asteroid Ryugu to Earth. The teams were together to present a summary of the findings to date.
"It’s been 42 years. I had to make sure it was 42, because that’s the answer!"
The JUpiter ICy moon Explorer (JUICE) is set to embark on an eight year journey to the icy moons of our Solar System’s largest planet. While the moons have been previously observed by Jupiter explorers such as NASA’s Galileo, this is the first time a dedicated mission will visit the moons with an instrument suite targeted at their exploration. JUICE is an ESA-led mission, with strong involvement from Japan in both the instrument development and science teams.
It is said that you cannot recapture the childhood magic of Christmas. But any astronomer watching the skies on December 25 in 2021 will beg to differ. Because the most powerful space telescope ever constructed was about to launch. Our researchers take us through the first year of Webb.
Despite both radar and optical observations from Earth, asteroid Phaethon was proving elusive. "Phaethon’s orbit is special compared to other near-Earth asteroids,” explains Yoshida Fumi at the Planetary Exploration Research Center, Chiba Institute of Technology, and the University of Occupational and Environmental Heath, Japan. “There’s never a chance to observe Phaethon from Earth with a solar phase angle of zero degrees.”
In early September of 2022, Scientists around the world were anxiously pondering one important question: if it became necessary... if the future of life on our planet was at stake... could we save the Earth? It was time to find out.
PUBLICATION:
COSMOS | MANY WORLDS | SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN | BLOG | NATURE | NAUTILUS | HOW IT WORKS | SPACE.COM | PHYSICS WORLD | THE CONVERSATION
In-person conferences actually suit bugger all nobody, and academia needs to become as invested in realising the potential of virtual experiences for scientific progress as we are in developing the next generation of instruments. (A look at going virtual beyond the in-person experience.)