Physics and Astronomy

At 19.44 hours GMT on 2nd January NASA’s space probe, STARDUST, successfully flew through Comet Wild 2, collecting interstellar particles and dust on its way. One of the instruments on board, the Dust Flux Monitor Instrument (DFMI), has been built by a team which include space scientists from the Open University.

Since its launch in February 1999, STARDUST has covered 3.2 billion km (2.3 billion miles). It is the first mission designed to bring samples back from a known comet. The study of c

A traveling robotic geologist from NASA has landed on Mars and returned stunning images of the area around its landing site in Gusev Crater.

Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully sent a radio signal after the spacecraft had bounced and rolled for several minutes following its initial impact at 11:35 p.m. EST (8:35 p.m. Pacific Standard Time) on January 3.

“This is a big night for NASA,” said NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe. “We’re back. I am very, very proud of this

Until now, astronomers have been nearly blind when looking back in time to survey an era when most stars in the Universe were expected to have formed. This critical cosmological blind-spot has been removed by a team, including a UK scientist, using the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North Telescope, showing that many galaxies in the young Universe are not behaving as expected some 8-11 billion years ago.

The surprise: these galaxies appear to be more fully formed and mature than expected at th

This morning, at 09:00 CET, the first European mission to Mars registered another operational success. The Mars Express flight control team at ESOC prepared and executed another critical manoeuvre, bringing the spacecraft from an equatorial orbit into a polar orbit around Mars.

All commands were transmitted to Mars Express via ESA’s new Deep Space Station in New Norcia, Australia. This morning, the main engine of Mars Express was fired for four minutes to turn the spacecraft into a new

The fate of Beagle 2 remains uncertain this morning after the giant radio telescope at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire, UK, failed in its first attempt to detect any signal from the spacecraft.

Scientists were hopeful that the 250 ft (76 m) Lovell Telescope, recently fitted with a highly sensitive receiver, would be able to pick up the outgoing call from the Mars lander between 19.00 GMT and midnight last night. An attempt to listen out for Beagle’s call home by the Westerbork telescope array in th

Physicists from the University of Liège in Belgium have succeeded in creating antibubbles (the exact opposite of bubbles) in one of Belgium’s most famous exports – beer – demonstrating what British real-ale drinkers have claimed for a long time: that Belgian beer actually is a lot like dish-water!

Research to be published today in the New Journal of Physics (NJP) reveals for the first time how antibubbles form and move through a liquid. Antibubbles are the exact opposite of bubbles and move