Author: Jonathan O’Callaghan

Don’t you hate it when you go on holiday and need to bring a variety of plugs with you? The same, it turns out, is true in space, with spacecraft and satellites often using different connectors to transfer power, data and other services. An international team of researchers has been exploring whether one common interface […]

Satellites waste energy in space. Some radio waves spill beyond their intended targets, while some of the sunlight reaching a spacecraft falls outside the range that conventional solar panels can effectively capture. Researchers from seven European countries are working together to see if some of that lost energy can be recovered. The initiative, called POWERSAT […]

If you have ever seen the Milky Way in the night sky, you probably noticed that it looks cloudy. That is because towards the centre of our galaxy, and of most galaxies, there are vast amounts of dust that make it hard to see what is going on. That means a big swathe of the […]

For decades, we have been littering space with decommissioned satellites and rocket parts orbiting our planet. Now this space debris poses a growing threat to the satellites and spacecraft we rely on. But researchers believe some of this debris could be turned into a valuable resource. According to the European Space Agency, more than 2 700 dead […]

In 2019, a strange event was observed in the depths of space. Called GW190521, the event sent out gravitational waves – invisible ripples in the universe – that were picked up on Earth. These waves appeared to mark the moment when two massive black holes, dozens of times the mass of our Sun, collided and […]