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This is the week the Nobel Prizes are announced, and today is the day (at least in New Zealand; first place in the world to see the light, as the tourist people say) the Physics prize is announced. And this year the odds-on favourite will be LIGO and the discovery of gravitational waves.
Balloon science is an often-neglected older cousin of rocket science and NASA's primary goal with this launch is to test a better balloon
But despite being commonplace, spaceflight is still far from routine. In fact, in the six decades since the Soviet Union started the space race, just eleven nations and the European Union have achieved indigenous launch capability, sending a locally developed rocket into orbit.
On November 17 my alarm went off simultaneously with a call from Radio New Zealand asking me to do an on-air interview about the end of the world. It turned out that it wasn’t the actual end of the world that was making the news.
This week, the University of Auckland (where I work) announced it is joining the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope collaboration. So what is the LSST, what will it do, and why are we so excited about it?
