by Jonathan Nally | Dec 20, 2019 | News, Planets, Space missions
Above: The aeroshell and heat shield for the Mars 2020 mission. Image courtesy Lockheed Martin. The contraption in the foreground of this image looks a bit like the Jupiter 2 spaceship from the TV series Lost in Space, but it is in fact part of the aeroshell for the...
by Jonathan Nally | Aug 13, 2019 | Astronomy, Planets
The image above shows amazing detail and colour in Jupiter’s cloud bands, as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The planet’s famous Great Red Spot (GRS) — about twice the diameter of Earth — is prominent. The giant anticyclone is nestled between two bands of...
by Jonathan Nally | Aug 5, 2019 | Astronomy, Planets, Telescopes
Queensland’s only professional research observatory for astronomy teaching and research training, the University of Southern Queensland’s Mount Kent Observatory, is playing a leading role in NASA’s new planet-finding space mission. The MINERVA-Australis facility at...
by Jonathan Nally | Feb 14, 2018 | News, Planets, Space missions
Rohit Bhartia of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission holds a slice of a meteorite scientists have determined came from Mars. One of two slices will be used for testing a laser instrument for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover while it’s still on Earth; the other slice will...
by Jonathan Nally | Feb 9, 2018 | News, Planets
Pictured: An artist’s impression of the trio of super-Earths discovered by a European team using the HARPS spectrograph on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla, Chile, after 5 years of monitoring. The three planets, having 4.2, 6.7, and 9.4 times the mass of...
by Jonathan Nally | Feb 9, 2018 | News, Planets, Space missions
Star-shaped and swallowtail-shaped tiny, dark bumps in fine-layered bright bedrock of a Martian ridge are drawing close inspection by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover. This set of shapes looks familiar to geologists who have studied gypsum crystals formed in drying lakes...
