Thu Mar 8, 2012
Two solar flares that occurred on the sun at about 11am and 12 noon (Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Tims – AEDT) on 7 March caused a large cloud of charged particles (a coronial mass ejection) to hurtle towards Earth with expected arrival at around 4pm AEDT on Thu 8 March (update from NASA: actual arrival [...]
Fri Jan 13, 2012
The Russian space agency revised its predictions for re-entry of the Phobos-Grunt space probe to a 4 hour 21 minute window between 3.41am AEDT and 8.05am AEDT on Monday 16 January. According to media reports re-entry occurred over the Pacific early monday Morning Australian time.
Fri Sep 23, 2011
NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) returned to Earth on Saturday, (24 September) Australian time. According to NASA, the satellite fell back to Earth between 1:23pm AEST and 3:09pm AEST. The precise re-entry time is still not known but NASA believes the satellite penetrated the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.
Fri Aug 26, 2011
EMBARGO LIFTED at 4am AEST Fri 26 August Last year the Hayabusa capsule landed in Woomera, South Australia, with a sample of asteroid dust. The dust has now been analysed and the results of the preliminary investigation are being published in Science on Friday 26 August. Below two co-authors, including the only Australiant involved in the [...]
Thu Jul 7, 2011
EMBARGO LIFTED AT 5.30am AEST THU JULY 7 Australia and New Zealand are in the final stages of their bid to host a hugely ambitious new project to create a radio telescope 10,000 times more effective than the world’s current best. The radio telescope, known as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will help many projects [...]
Tue Mar 22, 2011
ONLINE BACKGROUND BRIEFING with NASA’s Dr Paul Abell – Wed 23 March at 10.30am AEDT online In April 2010, US President Obama stated that the next goal for human spaceflight would be to send humans to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025. This mission would be the first human expedition to an interplanetary body beyond the [...]
Fri Dec 3, 2010
NASA scientists have discovered a bacteria that can live and grow entirely off arsenic, raising the possibility that new forms of life might exist in the universe. It was previously thought that all forms of life on earth required six basic elements - carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulphur and phosphorus, but scientists have now discovered a [...]
Tue Nov 16, 2010
The Japanese Science and Technology Minister, Yoshiaki Takaki, has announced that dust particles found in Hayabusa capsule originated from the asteroid Itokawa. An analysis of some 1,500 particles found in the Hayabusa capsule, which landed in Woomera, South Australia in June, revealed that most of them originated from rocks on the asteroid Itokawa. It is the [...]