One of the key questions in planetary science is whether the early climate of Mars was warm enough for liquid water – and hence extraterrestrial life – to exist. The layered rocks, thought...
Read article: Martian sedimentary rocks suggest a watery past
ESA’s director general Antonio Rodotà appointed the committee in March 2000. Carl Bildt, former Swedish Prime Minister and UN Envoy to the Balkans, Jean Peyrelevade, President of Crédi...
Read article: Space to play a starring role in Europe’s future
Almost 40 years later, as the International Space Station takes shape, history is repeating itself. Of course, the space station has never been a scientific mission – its main purpose has always...
Read article: Not the right stuff
Space station commander Bill Shepherd (US), Soyuz commander Yuri Gidzenko and flight engineer Sergei Krikalev have trained for four years in both Russia and the US in preparation for the expedition, w...
Read article: No space like home
Southwood received his PhD from Imperial College, London, in 1966 and was appointed as lecturer in the physics department in 1971, where he rose to become head of department in 1984. He studied the pr...
The Bepi-Colombo mission will begin its trip to Mercury, the solar system’s innermost planet, in 2009. The spacecraft is expected to solve some long-standing puzzles about Mercury and provide in...
Read article: ESA space missions: the next generation
Many planets have been discovered outside our solar system, but they are usually detected by observing the wobble of the parent star induced by the gravitational pull of the orbiting planet. Zapatero ...
Read article: ‘Floating planets’ challenge theorists
The Hubble constant, which is the rate at which the velocity of a galaxy increases with distance, is one of the most fundamental constants in cosmology. Astronomers can only obtain an accurate value f...
A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder will present evidence for what it believes is the youngest massive star cluster ever detected in the Milky Way. It contains about 100 type-O stars, th...
Read article: New planets and star birth in Manchester
The origin of gamma-ray bursts is one of the biggest unsolved problems in astrophysics. Some 3000 of these short-lived bursts of intense gamma-rays have been detected in the last three decades, but it...
