#17 Let's take a look at the Moon - part 1

Houston-based aerospace company Intuitive Machines produced the first private mission to land on the moon. The Odysseus lander is just 300 km from the lunar south pole, investigating water ice and demonstrating the capabilities of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program (CLPS).

But space is difficult and not many projects go perfectly first time. Is Odysseus ok? Let’s find out!

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So we pollute the upper atmosphere with rocket exhaust, is it worth the benefits of communications satellites and GPS? What about space junk? the garbage of earth orbit. Or mining asteroids? who owns the asteroids, can should they be able to sell the minerals asteroids provide?
These are questions that would never have been asked before space travel became as regular as it has today. Let's take a look at this new way of thinking about our responsibilities in space.

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Apollo 8 orbited the Moon in December 1968, seven months before the first moon landing. Even though Apollo 8 never landed on the Moon, it did produce one of the most iconic photographs of the Apollo program, the Earthrise photograph. Astronaut Bill Anders snapped a colour picture of the Earth rising over the lunar horizon as the capsule orbited the Moon.
But what makes this picture so iconic? And why did we nearly miss out on it. Let's dive in!

Check out the Earthrise photograph

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In the news lately, you might have seen reports that the rings of Saturn are going to disappear from view. What could make that happen? And will they come back? Let’s check out what’s going on with the most spectacular feature in our solar system. 

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Photographing the night sky is a completely different technique to photographing almost anything else. There's hardly any light, the objects are tiny and they move! It's really difficult. We've all given it a go and been disappointed, but how do they get the incredible pictures we see on the internet and on TV, and how can normal spacefans like us take a night sky picture?

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India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, with the Vikram lander and Pragyan rover have landed in the south polar region of the moon. Some craters in this region are permanently shaded from the blazing sun and can have water ice at the base of these lunar craters. 

India became only the fourth nation to successfully soft-land a spacecraft on the moon, and the first to successfully land a spacecraft in the moon’s south pole region. It’s an incredible story!

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Cosmic Coffee Time’s resident space rock expert and NASA mission scientist Greg Brennecka is back again to preview the return to Earth of NASA’s incredible OSIRIS-REx mission. OSIRIS-REx is coming to the end of an epic seven year journey to collect a rock and soil sample from asteroid Bennu. Greg is a mission scientist on OSIRIS-REx and will be doing analysis on the Bennu sample in his own lab. It’s breathtakingly rare to get a pristine sample from an asteroid in another part of the solar system, and Greg shares with us the plans for this sample and what this 60 gram sample of asteroid could teach us. 

• If you want to learn more about rocks from space, check out Greg's book 'Impact' at Harper Collins here

 
 
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Around 80% of the human made objects in orbit are mission left overs. Some of it is real junk, but some of it has an incredible story to tell. What relics from the early space age are held in safe storage in orbit? How does the accumulation of space junk affect mission planning, and how are we going to keep space safer from impacts in the future? You’ll never guess how we rediscovered some space hardware from an early moon mission!

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Around the 21st of June every year is the June solstice. We might know that it’s the longest or shortest day of the year – depending on which hemisphere you’re in, but why does that happen? And we know of the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, but how does the solstice define them? Same with the Arctic and Antarctic circles. Does it fall on the same date each year? Well almost, but it does take some clever human manipulation of the calendar to keep it that way.

 
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Ask an eastern Australian about the Southern Aurora, and they might think you’re talking about the old overnight express train between Sydney and Melbourne. But! The train was named after the spectacular light show in the southern sky. The Aurora Australis to use the phenomenon’s correct name, and its northern equivalent the Aurora Borealis or Northern lights have a fascinating astronomical cause. And the nature of the Aurora remained a mystery until the 20th century, despite being documented for thousands of years. Let’s take a look!
 
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