Blind Date – Rosetta closes in

Recently the Rosetta spacecraft sent back some rather disturbing images of its target, the almost impossible to pronounce, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Instead of the nice “potato shape” that was expected, the Open University’s Dr Andrew Morse describes the comet as looking more like a rubber duck. The European Space Agency has released an animation of the…

The meteorite that vanished

Everyone likes a good mystery story. Something that remains unexplained and perhaps also inexplicable. Even the most sceptical of us surely must admit that tales about the Mary Celeste, Roswell incident, or good old Nessie hold a deep fascination. In fact we often don’t want to know the truth behind such stories. A little bit…

You Cannot be Serious

At the recent European Lunar Symposium in London there was a formal presentation of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM). The NASA engineer who gave the talk stressed that ARM is currently at a relatively early planning stage, so might of course never come to anything. The idea it seems is to “capture” a small near-Earth…

European Lunar Science

Way back when I had a job at the Natural History Museum, London studying Calcium Aluminium-rich Inclusions (CAIs), in various types of meteorites. The oldest dated Solar System materials, CAIs are fascinating objects and it was exciting work. My boss back then was Robert Hutchison, an inspirational scientist, who is greatly missed by all who…