AWESOME ASTRONOMY

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The Discussion: This month’s Awesome Astronomy comes from the magnificent Cosmic Con event at the Manchester Airport Hilton. While looking forward to speaking with the stars of Meteorite Men and four astronauts, Paul recalls a fun June letting the public try on a genuine Russian Sokol suit at a multitude of astronomy outreach events, while Ralph’s been experimenting with ways to take deep sky images in heavily light polluted skies.

The Walkaround: No news, 5 minute concept or Q&A this month but you won’t be disappointed as we tour Cosmic Con. The plethora of fascinating meteorites brought by Geoff Notkin and Steve Arnold from the Meteorite Men and space rocks from the British and Irish Meteorite Society gives Paul an opportunity to explain what a treasure trove of science and history meteorites are. Ralph’s in seventh heaven perusing The Space Collective’s NASA memorabilia – a signed Buzz Aldrin action man anyone?

The Interviews: A whole host of interviews this month as we talk to astronauts, space agency workers, meteorite enthusiasts & organisations hoping to save humanity from extinction.

Jane MacArthur – STEM ambassador and PhD student of Martian meteorites and comet samples, explaining the variety of space rocks and what they can tell us about the early solar system.

Martin Goff – member of the British and Irish Meteorite Society, talking about incidents of impacts from Chelyabinsk to the unfortunate Cow Killer meteorite

Andrea Boyd – European Space Agency’s Astronaut Centre, exploring ESA’s new astronaut intake, British astronaut Tim Peake, life on orbit and an offer to try the joy that is Italian designed space food!

Cristina Stanilescu – Project presenter for the Emergency Asteroid Defence Project, telling us about ways to prevent city obliterating asteroids from hitting Earth before they get here.

Don Thomas – Space Shuttle veteran of STS-65, STS-70, STS-83 & STS-94 revealing his experiences of riding rockets and the woodpecker that delayed a launch!

Kathryn Thornton – Space Shuttle veteran of STS-33, STS 49, STS-61 & STS-73, telling us about fixing the Hubble Space Telescope and the possible rosy future for Hubble.

Jack Lousma – Veteran of Skylab 3 & STS-3, reliving tales of America’s first space station and test flying the space shuttle.

Al Worden – Veteran of Apollo 15, one of only 24 people to orbit the moon, tells us about how to get to the moon & back and flying in perpetual freefall.

So, a huge thanks to Richard and Yolande, the organisers of Cosmic Con for inviting us to record from their wonderful astronomy-laden event. We hope you enjoyed the atmosphere even if you couldn’t make it this year. And we hope to see you there next year.

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The Discussion: A cloudy but fun-filled AstroCamp dominates the discussions this month with glimpses of the planets and a hurried Messier Marathon in between gaps between the clouds. Nick Howes’ talk inspires reflections on the threat of asteroids and comets and how amateur astrophotographers can contribute to science.

The News: This month we take a look at NASA’s new draft 2015 Technologies Roadmap and discuss the advances in robotics, space propulsion, power transfer and nanotechnology that NASA hope to seed. Next up is some research from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that suggests the discolouration on Europa’s surface might be irradiated salt from the moon’s subsurface ocean. Finally, we take a look at the discovery, using ESO’s VLT, that globular clusters in the Centaurus A galaxy are far heavier than they should be – perhaps harbouring vast amounts of dark matter.

The 5 Minute Concept: Just a hundred years after Newton’s notion of Universal Gravitation, John Mitchell proposed an idea so futuristic that it was barely even noticed until Einstein showed the universe has space-time geometry. Then, in 1972, the predictions of Newton, Einstein and Mitchell were revealed as the mind-bending reality of black holes.

The Interview: This month we welcome back Dr Joe Liske from the European Southern Observatory to talk about the New Technologies Telescope that tested new ways to build ever larger telescopes and paved the way for the monster observatories we see today.

Q&A: Listeners’ questions via email, Facebook & Twitter take us on a journey into the astronomy issues that have always plagued our understanding or stretched our credulity. This month Ralph & Paul answer:

• If there is life elsewhere in the solar system, where do you think it is most likely to be?Louisa Martin, Brisbane Australia, via email.