Tag: space exploration
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Making Science Public blog posts 2015: An overview
This year the Making Science Public blog has been dominated by two topics: climate change and synthetic biology. One topic is on the way out, so to speak, as the climate change focused project within our research programme is coming to an end. It will continue though in a new guise, in the shape of…
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‘Serendipity carried through to perfection’ – thoughts on the Cassini mission
I am, as some of you might have noticed, an avid follower of …. not fashion but space exploration. I have ‘flown with’ Hubble, Voyager, Rosetta, Philae and New Horizons; I ‘follow’ Curiosity’s progress on Mars; and now I am entranced by some of the images that Cassini is sending back from Saturn and its…
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Pluto and pareidolia
As everybody knows by now, New Horizons has been flying past Pluto and has beamed down astonishing images. One of these shows a peach or bronze coloured planetary object with a lighter pattern on the side that I first saw as a ‘heart’. Many others did so too, including NASA (it will now name this…
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Joining the dots: Pluto, Kant and the nature of scientific knowledge
In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Immanuel Kant wrote these most beautiful words: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not need to search for them…
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Nanoscience, images and technologies of visualisation: A space odyssey
This blog post is a story about an intellectual and collaborative adventure that should be all too familiar to academics. However, opportunities for such adventures may sadly be disappearing in an era of impact driven research. It is a story of how enthusiasm, curiosity, serendipity and collaboration can lead to unexpected and joyous outcomes. At…
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Making science public: A compilation of blog posts – 2014
It is time again for my end of year blog of blog posts. Unbelievably, this is already the third time I am doing this. How time flies! Strange — so far we haven’t had a post about time! This is quite surprising, as otherwise we have had posts about more or less everything under the…
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Kissing a comet
I began writing this post this morning and I have just read that Philae has reached its landing spot Agilkia (sort of)! Touchdown happened at 1605 GMT. Congratulations!! Rocks, robots and us When I switched on the ESA live feed about the comet landing this morning, I heard one of the lead scientists say that landing…
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Agilkia and public participation in science
On 12 November 2014 the space craft Rosetta will deploy its lander Philae and Philae will try to land on the Comet 67P or Churyumov-Gerasimenko. As I have written about the Rosetta mission and Philae, I thought I had to at least try and write something very short about the landing site (formerly known as…
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Philae: Where space science meets language science
As those who care about that type of thing will know, Philae, the robotic lander on board the Rosetta spacecraft, will try to touch down on the surface of the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12. While we await the next episode in this space adventure, another episode in an adventure here on earth is unfolding…
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Rosetta and the rubber duck: How we got to know a comet
I can’t really let Rosetta pass by without a little blog post… This was brought home to me when Alasdair Taylor tweeted on 2:21 PM – 6 Aug 2014: “Sexiest, crazy bonkers, rubber duck, chaotic town, Disneyland, big roller coaster, scary ride: all terms used to describe #Rosetta”. This made me curious about how people…
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