When Thomas Romney Robinson, director of the Armagh Observatory, invented the cup anemometer in 1846, little did he know that one day his invention would be recording the alien breeze on the surface of another world. Fast forward 130 years: On 20 October 1975, a small capsule detached from the Read more…
50 years ago, humankind took its first steps on the moon, and the world celebrated. However, 47 years ago, the last human walked on the moon, and we have not been back since. Until now. The new programme that will take humans back to the moon is called Artemis, who Read more…
Those of you going out late in the day for an evening stroll or just enjoying the spring smells in your garden may have noticed a bright white beacon of light shining high in the west after sunset. This is Venus, the closest planet to the Earth and the brightest Read more…
Those of you who have been on this planet for longer than a few decades may recall the early days of the space age, when rocket launches were far from commonplace and each probe launched promised to do something fundamentally new: the first satellite to orbit the Earth, the first Read more…
Next week, all being well a Falcon 9 rocket will take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida carrying a very special payload: a spacecraft built by a Tel Aviv-based company aiming to be the first privately-funded mission to land on the Moon. The launch follows an announcement, about a year Read more…
Article written by: Heather Alexander, Education officer At the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium we have been having a look at all the things that are going to happen throughout the year and trying to select some of the events that we are most looking forward to. Needless to say this Read more…
The rapidly-approaching 2019 will let us mark a half-century since human beings took the first steps on a body other than the Earth, namely our own Moon. But, come the New Year, lunar exploration is likely to make the headlines for one other reason: a number of robotic spacecraft built by three different nations will attempt to repeat the feat accomplished by the Apollo programme and land on the Moon’s surface.
Some seven months ago, a NASA spacecraft called InSight was launched atop an Atlas 5 rocket and headed to Mars (Figure 1). If all goes well, the spacecraft will land on the Martian surface at around 8pm UK time this Monday 26th November and begin its science investigation. InSight is a fixed lander (see Figure 2 below), a much simpler affair than the Curiosity rover that arrived in 2012 and continues its trek across the floor of Gale crater to this day. Mobility, is however, not required for the specific aim of the mission.
Astronomers now know many hundreds of planets orbiting other stars in our Galaxy. These show an incredible amount of diversity in their basic properties such as size and temperature with no two planets being quite the same. But the Earth is still unique among planets within or outside our solar system in its ability to support life
July 20 1969 saw, arguably, the most famous event in all of human history when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon and left his footprints there – a mark still indelibly framed in the lunar dust today, some 49 years later. It may seem almost as incredible that it is indeed nearly half a century ago that this epochal event occurred, one that united all of humanity for a short while, as we stared at that yellow orb in our night skies to know that one of our species was walking on it surface.