European Space Agency

yeah okay so you were doing it here on uh on earth and then tell me about space ops and how this company got launched

Yes, so we were, European Space Agency approached the, what is now the South and Regional Development Agency back in 2004 and they had a, let's call it a cargo truck on the way to the International Space Station and went past the back of Bluff and about 180 kilometres up and that was where a critical manoeuvre took place and they needed a ground station basically just south of Invercargill and they So they were a bit surprised that there's someone in Southland who actually knew about this stuff and could help them out.

And so we supported those launches.

There were five of them in the end.

So there's stuff that's completely civilian.

A lot of university stuff is obviously peaceful purposes.

To show you how complicated it is, the European Space Agency, who we have a lot to do with, in their charter says it's for the peaceful purpose of the space.

And that's in their charter, and all the countries in the European Space Agency sign up to that.

getting those rocks back is a complicated process.

NASA is looking at sending a whole team of robots to get these samples and bring them back to Earth on a European Space Agency orbiter.

But until that happens, we won't know for sure if there was ancient life on Mars.

But we do know that back in this Hesperian period, Mars was still rocking active volcanoes, only not for long.

But...

Europe's next ice satellite has passed a round of factory tests, the European Space Agency reported in late October.

It's called CRYSTAL, short for Copernicus Polar Ice and Snow Topography Altimeter.

They didn't even, they didn't use the, okay, so they turned the P into an R.

that there just wasn't for me in the early 90s.

The European Space Agency provides all kinds of opportunities for students to get involved, including in-person summer schools, like the Gravity Summer School that I teach on for Elgra and ESA Academy, but there are loads of others.

You can get on that pipeline very early in your career and have much more opportunities going through than I ever did.

So we do need to talk microgravity.

So that was really great.

So I really loved that.

Really interesting updates in the program from long standing projects as well, which I thought was great development of ESA funded programs.

We had colleagues from ESA to come and give us some taste of what opportunities might be on the horizon.

So MMX is primarily a Japanese-led mission.

So the rover, the little rover Idafix that's going to land on Phobos, And some of the instruments are led by ESA scientists from European Space Agency.

But most of the spacecraft and instruments are led by JAXA, Japanese Space Agency, and who also just run the mission and also launched it.

So the origin of two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, is unresolved.

John Williams, VK4 JJW, introduces us.

Australian officials have made a bid to the European Space Agency, hoping to secure a spot on the crew for Catherine Benel Pegg for a 2028 mission to the ISS.

The proposal on behalf of the space systems engineer has been called a cost-prohibitive one for the Australian government and has spurred private fundraising activity.

The Australian Space Agency's Director of Space Technology completed her basic astronaut training with the ESA in 2024.

So this has been quite a recent research finding, actually, that we've discovered with some of the recent missions to comets.

So in particular, the European Space Agency sent the Rosetta mission to go and land on the surface of a comet back in 2014 now.

And they discovered that there was actually glycine, which is an amino acid within the comet.

So we know there's basically these complex carbon molecules within them.

Seemed like a good guy, or at least made powerful works.

And European Space Agency reveals new data indicating that the universe is 13.82 billion years old.

I don't understand how they could come to that specific of a number, and yet here we are.

The top five movies are Identity Thief, Jack the Giant Slayer, we're going to talk about number three, The Call, and then Oz the Great and Powerful.