Great martian meteorites!!

I love meteorites. I love the idea of being able to hold a piece of another world in your hand, feel its weight, see the way it reflects light as you turn it round and round in front of your eyes. I love looking at them and thinking about how long they drifted silently through [...]

Waving goodbye to Mars..?

Although I’m obviously hoping to hang on until my hundredth birthday in January 2065, chances are I will probably die around the year 2045. I’ll be pretty happy with that; I’ll be 80, which is – as we say here in Blighty – a “good innings” – and it will mean I’ll hopefully, if I can [...]

Celebrating a new view of Tranquility Base

Oh come on, you can’t be surprised. The gorgeous pic LRO took of the Apollo 11 landing site recently inspired a new astropoem, which you can find below (click on the image to bring up a larger one you can actually, you know, read) or go direct to the full resolution version here…

ExoMars postponed. Again.

If robots can become celebrities, then NASA’s twin Mars Exploration Rovers, “Spirit” and “Opportunity”, are A Listers, at least in the scientific world. Beloved by professional planetary scientists and armchair astronauts alike, Spirit and ‘Oppy’  (I wonder if Spirit gets jealous her name can’t be abbreviated to a nickname? Doesn’t seem fair somehow…) have been [...]

Timing is everything…

As the great man said… “I love it when a plan comes together…!” As you’ve probably heard, earlier this month Something hit Jupiter. We don’t know what… yet… but it was probably either an asteroid or a comet. Not a huge one, nothing on a scale with the “Dinosaur Killer” that wiped out T Rex [...]

I HATE you, DigitAl!!

Oh brave new world… My part of the UK “went digital” today. That means that the analogue TV signals here have been switched off, and unless you can access the digital channels via a “digi box” or have satellite TV, or own a ouija board, if you try and tune in to all the “old stations” all you get [...]

Mars beckons..?

In the rosy afterglow of the Apollo 40th anniversary celebrations, one word, one idea, one dream seems to be on everyone’s lips and in everyone’s minds: Mars.  Until this week the phrase  “manned mission to Mars” was whispered fearfully, in corners, like the names “Voldemort” or “Candyman”. But now astronauts, scientists and writers are almost [...]

One giant leap – for Google…

If you’re a user of “Google Earth” – the application from Google that lets you explore an online, high-resolution map of Earth – you’ve probably used it to explore the surface of Mars, too, and maybe even used it to have a look around the night sky as well. It’s a brilliant, useful and very [...]

Wow… I’m on ALSJ!

I know NASA’s kept it quiet, and I’ve hardly mentioned it at all, but today is the 40th anniversary of the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon. No, really, it is! … so I’m unbelievably chuffed, and proud, that on this very special day, when Apollo is everywhere, the prestigious “Apollo Lunar Surface Journal” [...]

Apollo revisited…

I bet many of you were expecting a breathless “Wow! Look at these!” post from me moments after the LRO images of the Apollo landing sites were revealed on Friday, eh? Well, it was a crazy day – what with work, then a funeral, and then an Outreach talk here in Kendal that night (which went [...]