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.
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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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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Aaron Gronstal’s talk, "The Effect of Impacts on the Deep Subsurface Biosphere of Earth: Preliminary Results from the 2005 ICDP-USGS Chesapeake Bay Impact Structure Drilling Project", was presented during a session devoted to subsurface microbes on Earth and their potential for survival on other ...
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The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) have awarded PSSRI (Principal Investigator Professor J.C. Zarnecki) further one-year grants for the developments of two instruments for the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission. The awards are £505,290 for the Ultraviolet and Visible Spectrometer ...
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Members of PSSRI are pleased with the favourable outcome of the renewal of their STFC rolling grant – “From Atoms to Planets”. The new grant award of £5.52M (funded at 80% FEC) starts 1st April 2008 and runs for 3 years, with a further 2 years of roll-off. The funding supports up to 9 ...
The STS-122 shuttle flight launched on Thursday 7th February 2008 will place the European Space Agency’s Columbus Laboratory on the International Space Station. Riding along with Columbus is the European Technology Exposure Facility (EuTEF). This is a materials and space environment external payload facility ...
European Space Agency’s Columbus Laboratory
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Dr. Karen Olsson and Prof. Charles Cockell saw the successful launch of rock samples from Beer in Devon into Earth orbit last week on board the space shuttle Atlantis. Eight pieces of the cliffs from the small seaside village were launched into orbit as part of the ESA EXPOSE experiment. The experiment seeks to study ...
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Dr Simon Green and Dr Richard Greenwood will be talking to Sir Patrick Moore about "Cosmic Debris" in the latest edition of the BBC programme The Sky at Night. In the BBC programme, to be broadcast on Monday 7th January (BBC One 01:05 ; BBC Four 19:30) and Tuesday 8th January (BBC Four 03:40), Sir Patrick ...
Between the 10th and 14th of December student teams from across the member states of ESA (European Space Agency) sent representatives to ESTEC (European Space and Technology Centre, Noordwijk) to take part in the Phase A Review of the European Student Moon Orbiter (ESMO) which is to be launched within 2011. ESMO is to ...
PSSRI comet experts Monica Grady and Simon Green appeared in the BBC documentary “A Comet’s Tale” broadcast on BBC4 on the 25th of November. Comets are of fundamental importance in understanding the origin of the Solar System and have been the subject of PSSRI space and laboratory studies for many ...
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