March 2015
Congested, contested, and invested: of space debris, risky launches and private initiative
...While voluntary, the guidelines have begun to get some traction. In a 2014 report to UNCOPUOS, Canada and Germany presented a detailed study of country-by-country progress in debris mitigation, especially debris created through launch activities. ESA...
June 2015
The day Philae landed: how a rough touchdown still made history at the Rosetta Mission
... heating phase into a stressful day of failure investigation. Together with the operations team at ESA’s ESOC in Darmstadt, Germany, we concluded that commanding the lander to switch-off and on again was the only effective solution. Fortunately...
June 2015
Beagle 2: discovering the lost Mars lander
... taken by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) were initially analysed by Michael Croon of Trier, Germany, a former member of ESA’s Mars Express operations team at European Space Operations Centre (ESOC). He and others have...
March 2016
Time for European visionary goals
This April marked the 55th anniversary of the first human spaceflight into Earth orbit. Those formative decades in the middle of the 20th century saw Europe, still recovering from its recent shattering military past, building its industrial strength...
August 2016
Our changing world and the mounting risk of a calamitous solar storm
... now shifted down to Siberia and continues to head South. Modelling carried out by the Max Planck Institute in Germany in 2015 suggests that during this shift the shielding provided by the Van Allen belts will essentially...
August 2016
Exploring the problems of criminal justice in space
... against an Italian astronaut in a module that was registered to Russia, then German criminal law would be engaged and Germany would have responsibility for criminal jurisdiction. Article 22 (2) then provides for the level of offence that will...
