An ocean of water has been found underneath the icy crust of Enceladus, Saturn’s sixth largest moon, according to observations of the Cassini spacecraft published in Science today. This result has come…
- Senior Instrument Scientist, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation
Finding liquid water on a celestial body within the solar system is exciting. The only thing that is probably more exciting is finding an ocean full of it. Today such news comes via Cassini, which has…
To my dismay I read this article while trying to enjoy my Saturday coffee. Once again the jewel in the crown of Australian science infrastructure is fighting for survival. This is a fabulous facility which…
Clays and geysers! All we need is a regular flight and Europa will become a spa destination to rival Iceland. It’s been an exciting week for me at the annual American Geophysical Union conference in San…
Following India’s maiden Mars probe launch earlier in the month, last week saw the successful launch of the Martian Atmospheres and Volatiles Evolution mission, or MAVEN for short. With the second spacecraft…
Don’t you just love election time? I’ll not say too much about it in this post. I’m sure like me you are all saturated with rhetoric, promises, facts checked and not checked. I’d like to bring some calm…
In my line of business, diamonds come under the heading “consumables”. Even the hardest thing known to mankind is sometimes no match for high-pressure science. Luckily since being in Australia (and since…
In space no one can hear you scream, but you may get a bit wet. In particular, if you were thinking of journeying to take in the sights of Saturn, it would be a good idea to pack an umbrella. This is suggested…
With this picture, clays just became the new sexy science, in mineralogical terms at least (well having said that if you’re into mud wrestling then I suppose clays have long been sexy). Here is the long-sought…
This was my week. Head buried in grant writing looks up “Oh, the Pope has resigned.” Goes back to writing, looks up a few days later “Oh dear, it seems that everyone has been eating horse.” Goes back to…
I was sat in the garden over the weekend looking up at the cloudless blue sky and noticed what looked like a bright star moving steadily across the sky. My first thought was that I had spotted the International…
It’s now my second summer in Australia. The first wasn’t too bad but this year the frequency of days in the high-30s is a little too high for this English girl. Today’s going to hit 39°C in Melbourne…
It’s been a short but productive life for the two satellites that made up the NASA’s latest successful moon mission. Named Ebb and Flow both were each about the size of a washing machine and have been…
The Curiosity rover has landed on Mars, driven around, started its scientific mission and, as of 4am today (AEDT), started reporting integrated science results. In a news conference at the American Geophysical…
Whenever I’m telling students or people at conferences about Mercury, I always describe it as the “heavy metal” planet. Many things on this closest planet to the sun are extreme, from its 88-Earth-day…
It has been a terrible couple of weeks with renewed conflict between Palestinian and Israeli factions. A fragile cease fire is holding (so far), but has come too late for those who lost their lives in…
About a week or so ago the Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, literally swallowed some dust. Scooped from the soil about the rover, its robotic arm manoeuvred to a hole and tipped the dust into the belly…
After the success of the audacious Entry Descent and Landing (EDL) in delivering the Curiosity rover to Mars, the space engineers of this world are no doubt looking for the next challenge. How about something…
Scientists are biased towards recruiting and encouraging men over women into the profession, according to an article published last week in the journal PNAS. In the study, 127 science academics across…
A study last week suggested that there could be up to 400 billion metric tonnes of methane under the Antarctic ice sheet. The concern this study flagged up was the effect on the climate such a large amount…
There’s a rock on the surface of Mars that now has a very strange life story. N165’s life started out normally enough. Like the basalt rocks on Earth it would have erupted molten, and solidified when exposed…
The Mars Science Laboratory, otherwise known as the Curiosity rover, has safely landed on the red planet. While NASA engineers can now breath a sigh of relief, for a small army of people, the work on Mars…
‘The Dish’ is one of my favourite movies of all time, telling the story of the Australian and American crew who operated the dish to pick up the television pictures from the first moon landing. I was thinking…
You’ve really got to wonder when even Hollywoodgossip.com is questioning whether the latest European Union campaign to attract girls towards a science career is a spoof. The video being referred to was…
Admit it, you probably think about soil very little? What about the soil on the moon? Well it’s a shame because, as I’ve come to realise in the last few days, moon soil is pretty nifty. For one thing it…
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