Space: The New Frontier

Astronauts and Cosmonauts train and study for years to work and live aboard the International Space Station. With this wealth of experience and insight behind them what do they think when they return to Earth?

Our atmosphere is an unbelievably complex machine that protects us from the vacuum of space, shelters us from harmful radiation and allows us and the biosphere to breath; we need to learn much more about it so we can better it.

The next 12 months will see an intense rise in flight tests, demonstration launches and high priority flights. Some are on time others are not. We check the flight status of some of this new hardware and these new capabilities.

For over 50 years we have bombarded Mars with our probes and landers. Spying from orbit to map terrain, finding her strengths and weaknesses. The time nearing for the full scale invasion of the planet, when humans walk on Mars and claim it for their own.

The Amazing Cassini spacecraft and its sibling lander, Huygens, have now concluded their scientific studies, bringing back years of data. Now, Juno piercing the cloak of Jupiter and her distant relative New Horizons at the edge of the solar system.

Soviet Luna 3 was the first to use gravity to change course to photograph the dark side of the Moon. NASA Mariner 10 used the technique to swing by Venus to target Mercury. The gravity sling shot maneuver has become a standard for space navigation.

We have been observing Earth for 40 years now, in the last 20 we have focus with intensity on the planet with new technologies and capabilities, we have accumulated a mass of data that is now revealing a complex and ever changing living planet.

Space is vast, yet it is full of collisions. Gas and dust electrostatically flock together, and gravity takes over coalescing grains into rocks. Those rocks become boulders, then asteroids colliding again and again, striking planets and each other.

Gravity keeps us on the ground and the planets in their orbits, yet we only notice it when it's not there. In space we cheat gravity; falling just as fast but missing the ground. Now this fundamental universal force is slowly giving up its secrets.

The interface between Earth and space is the Ionosphere, a region of rarified gas and charged particles. It is very important for radio communications, radar, satellite signals and global positioning. Yet we know so little about it.