It was an honour to brief US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy and Consul General Christine Elder on the myriad industry, education, and workforce opportunities in the space sector for our two nations of Australia and the USA, as part of the AmCham Australia Space Committee. On a personal as well as professional level, this was a highlight..! You could say I was over the Moon with this meeting.
Read More
You're looking at Swinburne University of Technology's new Pro Vice Chancellor, Flagship Initiatives 🙌The PVCFI is a new role tasked with driving large and ambitious transdisciplinary research across our flagship research areas by actively engaging with external organisations (including government, industry, NGOs) to identify large-scale opportunities that require university-wide collaboration and the formation of coalitions of universities and partners.
Read More
It was a thrill to join The Project on the desk to share the news of NASA’s DART Mission making history as they successfully intercepted an asteroid demonstrating that we can deflect a potential Earth-colliding one in future through an impact with a spacecraft.
Read More
I spoke to Australian space pioneer Dr Chris Boshuizen at the Powerhouse Museum about his efforts in space… from a small country town, to co-founding Planet Labs (now the largest Earth Observing satellite fleet in history) to provide open and accessible satellite-based planet monitoring (if you have used Google Maps, you’ve used his company’s images!) and then fulfilling his lifelong dream of space travel onboard the second Blue Origin New Shepard flight in October 2021, making Chris the third Australian in space
Read More
It was an incredible honour to host the inaugural Australian Space Summit held in Sydney, bringing together inspiring industry leaders to share with colleagues nationwide the tools and strategies to break into the domestic and global supply chain. I can’t wait for next year!
Read More
The precious metals used in our smartphones were forged in dying stars and mined from the Earth at enormous cost, so we aren’t getting any more of them! Yet there are over 4 million unused or broken mobile phones gathering dust in our homes and businesses representing a huge stockpile of valuable materials and metals that can be reclaimed through recycling with MobileMuster in their Go For Zero campaign this year.
Read More
Questacon is the national science and technology centre and an absolute treat to get to spend a day visiting but the questions I was asked when there were so tough! What would you have answered?
Read More
After years of work from teams worldwide, we are finally nearing the completion of the deepest underground physics laboratory in the Southern Hemisphere all searching for dark matter!
So it was a double thrill that I could take one of Australia's biggest shows - Network 10's #TheProjectTV - on a tour of this Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory
Read More
ncreasing amounts of space debris are nearing a critical point, where unavoidable collisions will cause more debris, in a disastrous chain reaction that will make space inaccessible to us. This has been termed the Kessler Syndrome. Once the cascading collisions begin, they cannot be stopped.
As I explain in this thought piece for the The Age, Australia has an important role in this global issue as we monitor vast skies with space technologies that few others in the Southern Hemisphere have.
Image by ESA
Read More
I’m beyond thrilled to celebrate our Space Institute PhD student Matt Shaw and his incredible win at the 3MT APAC international finals. Against entries by 54 universities from around the region his work on mining the moon to provide metals for constructing moonbases (seriously how cool is his Thesis) was found the most engaging - considering you have just Three Minutes(!) to explain three years of work, his efforts to connect with the audience are nothing short of amazing
Read More
When it comes to mining the Moon, and how best to extract those critical resources, for fuelling our further exploration of the Solar System this massive review paper will be seen as a critical resource itself! Incredibly work by Matthew Shaw and Matthew Humbert, two doctoral candidates within the Extraterrestrial Resource Processing group led by Profs Geoff Brooks and Akbar Rhamdhani, at Swinburne’s Space Technology and Industry Institute.
Read More
Incredible news as one of the largest Federal Government’s Modern Manufacturing Initiative grants ($2.325M from Gov, for a total expenditure of $4.65M) is awarded to Titomic and Swinburne!
Read More
A seamlessly connected world, where information streams effortlessly across people, industry, cities, farms and satellites. In which data that originates from Earth is conveyed and used as easily as the data generated from sensors in orbit. All of which is combined to inform decisions in either domain.
This is the Internet of Space Things (IoST), and it is the natural future extension of the internet as the predominant communications and data-exchange structure of our time. We already have half a dozen devices connected to the Internet of Things for every person on Earth, producing 79 ZETA bytes of information (that’s nearly a million million 4k movies worth of data!) by 2025, the options in using this data are endless and the future is seamless.
Read More
In the next two decades we will search the skies, solar system and space for alien life with new techniques and technologies thousands of times more powerful than all of humanity's efforts to date. I toured the world speaking to experts in this search for alien life, as well as the kinds of life we might uncover, and of course a serious investigation into the claims that it may already be here(!)
My thanks to Audible for making possible this incredible journey. I hope you enjoy listening to what I discovered with Astronomical - Looking for Life Beyond Earth
Read More
I got a chance to speak to the space and spatial focussed Locate podcast about all things to do with space, the industry, my efforts and more. It was a lot of fun chatting with Alicia and Roshni, I hope you enjoy it too!
Read More
It is a pleasure to be the MobileMuster Program Ambassador and support their campaign to have Australian's send in the 5 *million* broken smartphones lying around in homes nationwide. If our campaign is a success we will have recovered nearly 10,000 tonnes of precious minerals and metals, as well as the CO2 saved equivalent to planting 50000 trees. All from us collectively sending in our broken phones!
Let's #GoForZero broken phones at home this March.
Read More
I'm beyond thrilled to announce that I have been appointed the inaugural Director of the new Space Technology and Industry Institute at Swinburne University of Technology !
I can’t wait to help companies and communities solve their problems on Earth through Space, together with my amazing Swinburne colleagues.
Read More
This is a staggering, and very surprising, announcement by the Australian Space Awards to name me the Academic of the Year! This is particularly so given the incredible and world-leading efforts of my fellow finalists in this category.
Space is a multidisciplinary domain so my individual Award is actually a team Award in reality - and one that recognises my extraordinary Swinburne colleagues (Virginia Kilborn, Bronwyn Fox, James Davern and Geoff Brooks to name but a few!) who have worked so hard to make our collective efforts deserving of this recognition, efforts that are truly out of this world.
Read More
Melbhenge is where the Sun sets at 7:57pm (get there at least 15 minutes before) at exactly 250 degrees, meaning it aligns perfectly with a mile of skyscrapers in Melbourne’s Hoddle-grid. Remember, please don’t look directly at the Sun! But viewed safely this is a truly gorgeous evening event (just enjoy J L R Reyes’s work from last year!) and finding exactly the best place to view is always important. This year it’s particularly important we move out across the city to find the best spot (tag your photo with location and #Melbhenge) as we have to ensure we keep a safe, social distance from one another. So be safe and enjoy the Sun responsibly friends.
Read More
Together with principal supervisor Prof Geoff Brooks, I co-supervise a fantastic PhD student Matt Shaw on techniques to mine the moon (or rather how to process the regolith you mine!) He gave a fantastic talk on the Moon as part of the wonderful What If? series of lectures organised by the City of Boroondara where Swinburne’s Hawthorn campus is based. Great work Matt!
Read More