Meteorites! What’s all the fuss about? They’re just boring old lumps of rock. Black or grey, rough or smooth, a rock is a rock! Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but meteorites are no ordinary rocks. They are the oldest objects you can handle. Some contain grains that predate our Solar System and…
I think we can all agree that trains are pretty big things; they can’t just disappear without trace, surely? But that’s exactly what happened yesterday to the 10.50am service from Milton Keynes to Manchester Piccadilly. I was heading up with my colleague, Diane Johnson, to the Manchester Museum for the first full team meeting of…
Can a spacecraft be lonely? Probably not. And yet there is something very poignant about the images of Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars that were released on Friday. It seems to have landed in the right place, an amazing feat in itself. The solar panels appear to have partially opened, so it was…
On Thursday 15th January I visited Bushfield School in Milton Keynes to give three 50 minute talks to Year 5 students. I started each session off with a quick “fun” quiz about meteorites. Then gave a PowerPoint talk about space rocks that, of course, included videos of the Chelyabinsk fireball. The big event was showing small groups our outreach collection. The…
Meteorites: The Blog from the Final Frontier 