It’s slightly different behind the scenes this week as I have had a request to do a write up on a specific paper, which saves me a job because it can take me as long to decide what to write on as it does to do the actual writing. Having said that this paper is… Read More So How Did Mars Get Its Moons?
I’ll be honest, I was all set to write a post about Craig Venter’s latest achievements in his endeavour to discover the absolute minimal requirements of a genome for life to still function. Then I realised that genetics is all I have written about in recent weeks, which isn’t terribly unreasonable given I’m a geneticist… Read More Vulcanism Shifted Moon’s Poles
So there was a bunch of us shooting the breeze late on Christmas Day and some interesting topics of conversation came up. There were two separate groups chatting away at different ends of the room and in the one I wasn’t in I overheard something about the moon, which piqued my interest because the moon… Read More 12 Days of Scepticism: Day 4 – Ad Ignorantium
Everybody knows that Saturn has rings. It’s pretty much the image that most of us conjure up when we think of other worlds and they are, truly, beautiful. It is little known, however, that Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune all have rings too. Whilst they are much less dense and not at all as easy to… Read More Phobos Is Running Rings Around Mars
Yesterday I wrote a post about the lunik 17 moon lander and how it was the vanguard of today’s robotic exploration of the solar system, but even though the hulking Russian craft is now into its 45th year, and has long since stopped functioning, it is still being used for science today. Admittedly it is… Read More Lasers and Lunar Landers
It has been some decades since there has been any political appetite to fund crewed space exploration. All through the 1960s the Space Race was very much on. The USSR and the US were fighting a war on every imaginable front excepting one that involved men and bullets. Very much a part of that was… Read More The Russian Rover That Led The Way
The Hubble Space Telescope had a shaky start, indeed the images that it first sent back looked as though the whole thing had been shaken into a blurry mess. It was a disaster and hugely embarrassing for NASA. It took a few years to construct a corrective mirror to be tacked on to the end… Read More The Hubble Deep Field
