An apology...

Mon, 07/26/2010 - 11:00 — Ben Gilliland

...bear with me and forgive my laziness... please!

Visitors to CosmOnline might have noticed how lazy I have been of late. There have been no short and pithy bits of space-based (or indeed anything-based) news, no videos or bright and colourful graphics - even my weekly Cosm pages from the Metro are failing to make it on the website!

So what's my excuse? Well, it all comes down to that relentless demon that we human-folk call 'time'. In short, I don't have enough of it at the moment. Between doing my regular job as Graphics editor at the Metro newspaper; researching, writing and designing my Cosm spread; the odd bit of teaching here and there and trying to be a good father at the weekends... that demonic clock-grinder leaves my time allowance in a woeful state of deficit.

Our competition has been judged!

Mon, 07/26/2010 - 14:12 — Ben Gilliland

And the winners are...

The Grand Prize winners of the UK OurSpace competition were announced on Friday 23 July at the Farnborough Airshow’s Space Zone.

Special guests at the event included European Space Agency astronaut Jean-François Clervoy and the popular space blogger, CosmOnline's Ben Gilliland (that's me).

Earlier in the year, British-born astronaut Richard Garriott announced the launch of OurSpace - a UK wide competition that challenged students to "dream up their own amazing space adventure, a flight of imagination about their own space to reach prizes that are out of this world."

The Grand prize in the over 13 catagory of a trip to the USA was awarded to Mala Mawkin, 15, Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls, for her video Future Space Travel

The finalists and Grand Prize winners were judged by a panel of space, education and media experts, along with Richard Garriott himself. As well as a trip to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and Johnson Space Centre in Texas with the ISSET, the galaxy of cool prizes included visits to the House of Commons in December 2010, tickets to the National Space Centre, World Space Week invitations to Intech, and signed goodies from Richard Garriott and Lucy Hawking, daughter of physicist Professor Stephen Hawking.

Extreme sports... in space!!

Mon, 07/12/2010 - 10:50 — Ben Gilliland

How adrenaline junkies turned space in to a dive

Back in the year 2010, mankind was on the brink of a space travel revolution. The first private suborbital flights were just a couple of years away, the first private space flight lay just beyond 2015 and the first space hotel was stepping out from the drawing board and into reality.
Of course, the first private space trips were the reserve of the very wealthy but, by the mid 2020s, the trips cost little more than a conventional family holiday. As ever, with affordability it didn’t take long for the adrenaline junkies to stake their claim on space. By the end of 2029, thousands of tourists had tried the new sport of space scuba and a few daredevils were experimenting with space dives all the way back to Earth.
We take a look back at how these space-sports took hold.

Dark matter gets an even bigger question mark

Tue, 06/22/2010 - 11:56 — Ben Gilliland

Has Jupiter been leading science astray?

In 1998 astronomers had a bit of a shock when it was revealed that our universe was not behaving as it ought. They had believed that since the Big Bang hurled our universe into existence, its expansion must, inevitably, have been gradually slowing down. It came as no small surprise then when it was revealed that its expansion was actually accelerating and that we seem to be missing some 96 per cent of its matter.

To explain this curiosity, cosmologists summoned up a mysterious, invisible and undetectable force, called ‘dark energy’, and a barely detectable, invisible material called ‘dark matter’ (see next page). And everyone lived happily ever after (except for those who disagreed and thought it was all just imaginary bunkum). Until now.

Nasa's Mars Rovers pass another milestone

Tue, 06/22/2010 - 11:20 — Ben Gilliland

Meanwhile the Brits ready the next generation

They were built to last just 90 days and expected to travel little more than a kilometre, so after surviving more than 2,300 days and covering over 20km, there is no doubt Nasa’s Mars Exploration Rovers have been a success.

Earlier this month, the Opportunity rover surpassed the endurance record of Nasa’s iconic Viking 1 Martian lander, which managed to stay working for an impressive six years, 166 days.

Sadly, Opportunity gained the honour on a technicality as its twin, Spirit, which landed first, became bogged down in a Martian sand trap in 2009 and ceased communicating on March 22 this year.

There is some doubt as to whether Spirit has survived the harsh Martian winter. Usually, in the run-up to winter, the rovers are moved to a position that enables them to soak up as much sunlight as possible and recharge their batteries. But, with Spirit stuck solid, the fear is that the craft has starved to death.

Put a little sting into your summer

Tue, 06/22/2010 - 10:34 — Ben Gilliland

How to become a hymenoptera connoisseur

So the weather looks pretty promising for the weekend (if you like it hot and sunny, of course) and a few bold souls are even predicting that it will be a warmer than average summer. One thing more assured than a warm summer is the annual invasion of those yellow-striped lager louts of the countryside, those ultimate picnic crashers – wasps.

You might even be lucky enough to be stung by one – on average everyone is stung twice in their lifetime. But what do you do once the urge to hop around swearing and cursing passes you by?