Category Astronomy/Space

In the 17th century, German astronomer Johannes Kepler figured out the laws of motion that made it possible to accurately predict where our solar system’s planets would appear in the sky as they orbit the sun. But it wasn’t until decades later, when Isaac Newton formulated the universal laws of gravitation, that the underlying principles were understood.

Although they were inspired by Kepler’s laws, they went much further, and made it possible to apply the same formulas to everything from the trajectory of a cannon ball to the way the moon’s pull controls the tides on Earth—or how to launch a satellite from Earth to the surface of the moon or planets.

Today’s sophisticated artificial intelligence systems have gotten very good at making the kind...

The idea of building settlements on Mars is a popular goal of billionaires, space agencies and interplanetary enthusiasts.

But construction demands materials, and we can’t ship it all from Earth: it cost US$243 million just to send NASA’s one ton Perseverance Rover to the Red Planet.

Unless we’re building a settlement for ants, we’ll need much, much more stuff. So how do we get it there?

CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellow and Swinburne alum Dr. Deddy Nababan has been pondering this question for years. His answer lies in the Martian dirt, known as regolith.

“Sending metals to Mars from Earth might be feasible, but it’s not economical...

A giant bubble of gas and dust surrounds the red supergiant DFK 52, likely created in a powerful outburst 4,000 years ago. Astronomers are baffled at how the star survived without going supernova, and suspect a hidden companion may have played a role. This discovery could reveal clues about the final stages of massive stars.

Astronomers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered a vast and expanding bubble of gas and dust surrounding a red supergiant star – the largest structure of its kind ever seen in the Milky Way...

The ancient Japanese art of paper-folding, or origami, is already inspiring the design of the next generation of space vehicles, but now there’s a new family of origami shapes that could make them even more compact and reliable.

Larry Howell at Brigham Young University and his colleagues have developed a new class of origami structures called bloom patterns that fold up flat and unfold like flower petals. These clever folding designs could also be used for other structures in space, such as telescopes and solar arrays.

Origami-based designs are perfect for spacecraft because they can be made to fol...