The European Space Agency, Directorate of Human Spaceflight and Operations, is planning a lunar lander mission in 2018 as part of its programme for future human exploration of the Earth’s moon. The lunar lander mission to the south pole proposes to carry a Lunar Volatiles Resource Analysis Package (L-VRAP) ...
NASA has shortlisted an investigation from The Open University to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, for a future key planetary mission.NASA has selected three science investigations from which it will pick one potential 2016 mission. One of the planetary missions selected to pursue preliminary design studies is the ...
PSSRI member Simon Green attended the Stardust NExT encounter campaign at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on February 14th for the first ever re-visit of a comet.Stardust, launched in 1999, has already proved a spectacular success, completing its prime mission to collect dust particles ejected from comet Wild 2 ...
The 7, 8 and 9 October saw the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences celebrate 25 and 40 years respectively of science at The Open University. The celebrations comprised a two-day conference with talks by former PhD students and research staff and an ...
PSSRI's Professor Charles Cockell talks to us about his widely reported research on the microbes from an English seaside village sent into space, he says "The fishing village of Beer may not seem like an extreme environment, but the surfaces of the cliffs there are exposed to desiccation, solar radiation, ...
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have embarked on a joint programme to study the chemical composition of the atmosphere of Mars from 2016. They have just announced the providers of five scientific instruments for the first mission, including a consortium in which The Open University has a major role.The ...
The Department of Earth Sciences at The Open University has been in existence for forty years this year, and it is over 25 years since the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute (PSSRI, originally the PSU then PSRI) joined us in the 1980s. The Open University celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, but we ...
Lord Drayson, Minister for Science and Innovation, has invited John Zarnecki, Professor of Space Science, to be a member of the Space Leadership Council. The leadership council is associated with the new UK Space Agency, announced last week, which will take over responsibility for government and the key budgets for ...
PSSRI Professors John Zarnecki and Colin Pillinger had the honour of meeting Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to step onto the Moon, together with Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, the mission known as the "successful failure" and Eugene Cernan, the last man on the Moon with Apollo 17, he ...
PSSRI Senior Lecturer Simon Green, PDRA Stephen Wolters and postgraduate student Ben Rozitis are part of a UK team that has been awarded over 80 nights on two telescopes at the European Southern Observatory to investigate the changing spin of asteroids.The Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect is a ...
Dr Diane Johnson has co-authored a paper published online this week in Nature which for the first time describes the identification of the colours on the feathers of dinosaurs and bird species from the early cretaceous.The research found that the theropod dinosaur Sinosauropteryx had simple bristles – precursors ...
On the night of Monday 4th January 2010, the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) reached the milestone of having observed more than 400,000 stellar spectra (400,039 to be exact) since 2003, making it one of the largest astronomical spectroscopic surveys ever. RAVE is measuring radial (line-of-sight) velocities and ...
PhD students Ben Rozitis and Naomi Murdoch with Thomas de Lophem, studying physics, became weightless for the very first time.Their parabolic flight experiment contained over one million small glass beads and is designed to investigate how granular material moves on the surface of an asteroid.A typical km-sized ...
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To mark the 40th anniversary of the first Apollo landing. New Scientist is inviting its readers to suggest what Neil Armstrong should have said when he made that one small step for man. The best entry will win a rare piece of lunar meteorite. It takes a battery of tests to tell if a meteorite really comes from the ...
PSSRI's position as one of the world's leading centres for planetary science and space research has been reaffirmed by the 2008 UK RAE results.PSSRI were part of the cross-disciplinary submission made by CEPSAR that saw 70% of its research activity fall into the highest categories (4* and 3*) of world ...
One hundred and two core boxes containing over 400 m of core from the Bolytsh impact crater in the Ukraine have arrived in Aberdeen as part of the NERC funded project into the environmental effects that resulted from this 65 million year old impact crater. CEPSAR scientists Jon Watson, Simon Kelley and Iain Gilmour ...
Ben Rozitis has recently returned from a ten week trip to NASA Ames Research Centre, California, where he participated in the 2008 Small Spacecraft Summer Study on Near Earth Objects. This compliments his Ph.D. studies at PSSRI, in which he has already produced a thermo-physical asteroid model. Ben is involved with ...
Some PSSRI staff who are also members of the Royal Astronomical Society shall attend, on Sunday 3rd August, the annual RAS picnic in Greenwich.For a reminder, on Friday 1st August, a partial eclipse of the Sun will occur over the UK.
PSSRI's Dr Ian Franchi will be using the new Diamond synchrotron source to analyse samples of a comet returned by the NASA Stardust mission.Along with colleagues from the University of Leicester (including ex-PSSRI member Dr John Bridges) the team will be performing synchrotron X-ray fluorescence analyses of ...
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The Director of NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California, Dr Pete Worden, visited PSSRI on Thursday 22 May to discuss research areas of common interest. These included hypervelocity impacts, analysis of extraterrestrial material, lunar research and astrobiology. (CEPSAR and NASA Ames have hypervelocity impact ...
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