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When we first landed on the Moon in 1969, humankind collectively marvelled at the ingenuity of our species. We had explored the surface of our own planet and had now successfully set foot on another world as well – no problem was insurmountable for us. While we’d landed uncrewed craft on the Moon before that, and had already sent probes to Venus and Mars, it was arguably the Moon landing that energised us to continue exploring the cosmos, so we could unlock the secrets of the Universe and perhaps even life itself. We set our sights further afield than the Moon, with missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and beyond. But we also started building space stations that would allow us to explore the effects of space while remaining in comfortable…

Thanks largely to Pink Floyd’s 1973 album, astronomers regularly contend with talk of the ‘dark side of the Moon’. There isn’t one. At least there’s no permanently dark side of the Moon. It is true that we only ever see the front of the Moon and not the back due to an effect called tidal locking. Over time the Earth’s gravity slowed the Moon’s rotation on its axis until it matched the time it takes to orbit us (both 27.3 days). So the Moon is rotating, we just never see the other side. The Moon is always half lit up and half not (day and night, just like on Earth). Where this sunlight falls depends on the Moon’s position around the Earth. When between us and the Sun, the back…

THE MISSION LAUNCH DATE: 26 July–13 August 2020 LAUNCH SITE: Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on a Russian Proton-M launcher LANDING DATE: March 2021 LANDING SITE: Oxia Planum, Mars MISSION DURATION: 7 months on the surface MISSION PURPOSE: To explore an ancient environment that was once water-rich and that could have been colonised by primitive life…

Look out for an episode of The Planets, titled The Godfather: Jupiter, available now on iPlayer. In classical mythology, the god Jupiter surrounded himself in clouds to keep his antics hidden from view. Only his wife, Juno, could see through the veil to his true nature. And so it is with the NASA spacecraft of the same name. The secrets of the formation of the whole Solar System lie below Jupiter’s all-encompassing clouds, just waiting to be discovered. Theories about our Solar System formation all begin with the collapse of a giant cloud of gas and dust, otherwise known as a nebula, the majority of which formed the Sun. Like the Sun, Jupiter is mostly hydrogen and helium, so it too must have formed early on, capturing most of the…

For 40 years, the twin Voyager spacecraft have sailed through our Solar System, pushing humanity’s knowledge of the cosmos ever outward. Launched in 1977, the probes took advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune), flying past Jupiter in 1979, before travelling onto Saturn in the early 1980s. Voyager 1 took a detour for a closer look at the rings, but this swung its orbit northwards out of the plane of the planets. Voyager 2 carried on alone, flying past Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989, marking the end of Voyager’s planetary mission. But it also marked the start of Voyager’s next phase, the interstellar mission to investigate the outer regions of the Sun’s heliosphere. “The heliosphere is the bubble created by the…

Sol mates FLORIDA, USA In the early hours of 6 February, Solar Orbiter will set off from Cape Canaveral in Florida to begin its journey to the Sun. This joint NASA and ESA mission will unravel some of the mysteries of the Sun, taking high-resolution photos of its polar regions for the very first time. Data gathered by the probe will help us understand how our star creates and controls the heliosphere – a giant bubble of plasma that surrounds our Solar System – as well as investigating coronal mass ejections and solar winds. During the mission, this spacecraft will be exposed to sunlight 13 times more powerful than we feel on Earth. To protect the inside of the probe from the intense heat and radiation, Solar Orbiter’s instruments are…

Listen to former NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan talking about her research into Venus in this episode of The Life Scientific bit.ly/LS_ellenstofan We have a toxic twin. Venus is the closest planet to Earth, both in size and often in distance, yet the surface conditions couldn’t be more different. One planet is home to abundant life; the other is hellishly hot, choked by an atmosphere of carbon dioxide that creates a surface pressure equivalent to being almost one kilometre underwater on Earth. However, things weren’t always this way. Once upon a time, Venus might have had a similar climate to Earth, complete with water oceans and plate tectonics. Finding out what went wrong with Venus is the question behind a fresh surge in missions to explore the planet. It’s an…

ALMA PEEK INTO THE PAST ATACAMA LARGE MILLIMETER/SUBMILLIMETER ARRAY (ALMA) Chajnantor plateau, Atacama Desert, Chile The Atacama Desert in Chile is an astronomer’s paradise. Thanks to its high altitude, cold nights, scant precipitation and lack of pollution, it boasts some of the clearest night skies on the planet. That’s why the European Southern Observatory (ESO) – an astronomical research organisation of 16 countries – worked with Chile to set up powerful ground-based telescopes in the desert, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Beginning observations in 2011, the high-tech telescope consists of 66 precise antennas that can be arranged in different ways to give a variable zoom, capturing sharper detail than the Hubble Space Telescope. ALMA studies light with wavelengths of around a millimetre, originating from the Universe’s coldest objects…

In 1990, Voyager 1 was 6.4 billion kilometres from home. Earth was already less than a pixel in size on Voyager 1’s camera. Soon it wouldn’t be visible at all. Planetary science crusader Carl Sagan suggested the spacecraft take one last snap of home. The image, taken on 14 February, shows our planet as a single dot in the centre of an orange beam created by light scattering inside the camera. While the image has little scientific interest, its true value is best summed up by Sagan himself in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot. “Look again at that dot. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives… On a mote…

STRIKING GOLD PROTODUNE, FRENCH-SWISS BORDER DETECTING: NEUTRINOS Bathed in yellow light to avoid overstimulating its sensors, this neutrino detector is the size of a three-storey house. Neutrinos are abundant – trillions pass through you every second – but they hardly interact with matter, making them tough to detect. When in operation, ProtoDUNE is filled with 800 tonnes of liquid argon. Sometimes, a neutrino makes a direct hit on an argon nucleus, producing a trail of charged particles detected by grids of wires around the detector. This prototype is being tested at CERN’s headquarters, but DUNE (Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment) will be sited 1.5km underground in the disused Homestake gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. With four detectors, DUNE will pick up neutrinos generated by a particle accelerator 1,300km away at…

1. ACCRETION DISK The part of the black hole that gives away its location. Here, stars, gas and any other material nearby spiral towards the hole at blistering speeds, producing enormous amounts of electromagnetic radiation that we can detect here on Earth. The objects sucked into the black hole become more frantic and crowded as they near the event horizon. Some are dragged beyond this point into the hole itself, while others are blasted outwards to create a jet. 2. RELATIVISTIC JETS Pop culture suggests that nothing escapes a black hole, but that’s not quite true. Astronomers have observed jets of particles streaming out of black holes so long and fierce that they break out from their galaxy. To borrow an analogy from Konstantinos Gourgouliatos, a theoretical physicist at the…

VENUS AVERAGE DISTANCE FROM SUN: 108,200,000KM RADIUS: 6,052KM MASS: 4.87 × 1024KG AVERAGE SURFACE TEMPERATURE: 462°C PROPORTION OF CARBON DIOXIDE IN ATMOSPHERE: 96.5 PER CENT SURFACE PRESSURE: 92 BAR EARTH AVERAGE DISTANCE FROM SUN: 149,600,000KM RADIUS: 6,371KM MASS: 5.97 × 1024KG AVERAGE SURFACE TEMPERATURE: 14°C PROPORTION OF CARBON DIOXIDE IN ATMOSPHERE: 0.04 PER CENT SURFACE PRESSURE: 1.01 BAR SHUKRAYAAN-1 POSSIBLE LAUNCH DATE: 2023 SPACE AGENCY: ISRO (INDIA) AIM OF MISSION: ORBITER TO STUDY THE SURFACE AND ATMOSPHERE OF VENUS, POTENTIALLY INCLUDING RADAR, A PLASMA WAVE DETECTOR AND A CLOUD MONITORING CAMERA. VERITAS POSSIBLE LAUNCH DATE: 2021 SPACE AGENCY: NASA AIM OF MISSION: ORBITER TO CAPTURE GLOBAL, HIGH-RESOLUTION MAPS OF TOPOGRAPHY AND ROCK TYPE ON THE PLANET’S SURFACE. DAVINCI POSSIBLE LAUNCH DATE: 2021 SPACE AGENCY: NASA AIM OF MISSION: DESCENT PROBE…

Listen to an episode of In Our Time about asteroids bit.ly/melvyn_bragg OSERIS-REx. Hayabusa2. Make a note of these two names: you're going to be hearing a lot about them over the coming months. These spacecraft - one operated by NASA and the other by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA-have each been orbiting round their own target asteroid. They promise to teach us a great deal about the origins of the Solar System, how we might deflect an asteroid on a collision course with the Earth, and even the molecular origins of earthly life Both NASA's OSIRIS-REx and JAXA's Hayabusa2 are sample-return mission, which involves not only touching gently onto their asteroid's surface to collect a scoop of its ancient material, but then returning it safely back to eagerly waiting…

Look up at the night sky and find the famous three stars of Orion’s Belt. Then extend the line between them up and to the right towards the constellation of Taurus, The Bull. Halfway between them sits a small patch of otherwise unremarkable sky that could well be home to one of the most famous finds in astronomical history – a ninth planet orbiting the Sun. It isn’t every day a new planet is discovered in the Solar System. In fact, by one measure, it has only happened twice before in all of human history with Uranus (1781) and Neptune (1846). All the other planets have been known since antiquity and were never really ‘discovered’. Objects such as Ceres (the largest asteroid) and Pluto were once deemed part of the…

Listen to an episode of In Our Time on exoplanets bit.ly/distantplanets In January 1992, two radio astronomers announced a discovery that would change our view of the Universe forever. Aleksander Wolszczan had been scanning the skies to study a type of spinning star known as a pulsar, but something was blocking his view. Curiosity piqued, Wolszczan eventually discovered the root of the interference: two planets in orbit around the star. Fellow radio astronomer Dale Frail verified the data, and the pair made their incredible announcement to the world: they had discovered the first ever known extra solar planets – or ‘exoplanets’. The existence of exoplanets – planets orbiting stars other than our Sun – had long been theorised, but now there was definitive proof. For the first time, humanity could…

Wednesday 10 April 2019 was an epoch-making moment in the history of science. At six simultaneous press conferences worldwide, an international team of astronomers unveiled the first ever image of a black hole. “It was one of the most exciting days of my life,” says Feryal Özel of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who heads the modelling team. “For me, it’s the culmination of nearly two decades of work.” In fact, the team observed two black holes: Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole in our own Milky Way weighing 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun, and a cousin in the galaxy M87, which is about 1,000 times bigger. The first image revealed is of the supermassive black hole at the heart of M87. Sagittarius A*, because it’s…

Karl Schwarzschild was a professor of astronomy at Berlin Observatory who, on the outbreak of WWI, volunteered for the German army. He did not have to: he had a good job and was 40 years old. But he was Jewish, anti-Semitism was on the rise in Germany, and he wanted to prove that he was just as German as everyone else. Schwarzschild ran a weather station in Belgium, calculated shell trajectories with an artillery battery in France and, at the end of 1915, found himself on the Eastern Front. There, he developed blisters in his mouth. They spread over the whole of his body and he was sent to a field hospital, where he was diagnosed with Pemphigas vulgaris, a rare autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the…