4th time lucky?

This week was the third time I have had to cancel a trip to Italy! Covid-19, ugh. My heart and thoughts to everyone who is struggling. Let’s all sing from the windows and clap from the doors! Stay safe. Stai al sicuro.

Mapping the Milky Way’s Magnetic Field in 3D April 25, 2024
We are all very familiar with the concept of the Earth’s magnetic field. It turns out that most objects in space have magnetic fields but it’s quite tricky to measure them. Astronomers have developed an ingenious way to measure the magnetic field of the Milky Way using polarised light from interstellar dust grains that align […]
Mark Thompson
NASA’s New Solar Sail Has Launched and Deployed April 25, 2024
Solar Sails are an enigmatic and majestic way to travel across the gulf of space. Drawing an analogy to the sail ships of the past, they are one of the most efficient ways of propelling craft in space. On Tuesday a RocketLab Electron rocket launched NASA’s new Advanced Composite Solar Sail System. It aims to […]
Mark Thompson
Here’s Why We Should Put a Gravitational Wave Observatory on the Moon April 25, 2024
Scientists detected the first long-predicted gravitational wave in 2015, and since then, researchers have been hungering for better detectors. But the Earth is warm and seismically noisy, and that will always limit the effectiveness of Earth-based detectors. Is the Moon the right place for a new gravitational wave observatory? It might be. Sending telescopes into […]
Evan Gough
TESS Finds its First Rogue Planet April 24, 2024
Well over 5,000 planets have been found orbiting other star systems. One of the satellites hunting for them is TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Astronomers using TESS think they are made a rather surprising discovery; their first free-floating – or rogue – planet. The planet was discovered using gravitational microlensing where the planet passed […]
Mark Thompson
There are Four Ways to Build with Regolith on the Moon April 24, 2024
Over the last few years I have been renovating my home. Building on Earth seems to be a fairly well understood process, after all we have many different materials to chose from. But what about future lunar explorers. As we head closer toward a permanent lunar base, astronauts will have very limited cargo carrying capability […]
Mark Thompson