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
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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
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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.
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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!
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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.
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In this outstanding work my PhD student Matthew Shaw has explored ways to process the Moon’s surface (known as regolith) into its valuable metals and oxygen using concentrated sunlight. This technique, known as pyrolysis, can liberate these resources for use by NASA’s program Artemis and their return to the Moon in a framework called In Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU).
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A wonderful new paper by my student Adam Batten. Mysterious explosions occur across the sky from distant galaxies, visible only with radio telescopes, known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs). There illuminate the intervening material as they travel to our telescopes, allowing us to probe that otherwise hard to image Cosmic Web. But how do we know what that should look like? Simulations like EAGLE predict that distribution and in this beautiful work by Adam we can therefore shine simulated FRBs through this to create predictions for the dispersion measure. This then is directly tested by the telescopes.
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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
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This paper was a delight to write, with two young scientists (Jamie Heredge and Jay Archer) undertaking an incredible amount of work to generate muon events passing through a model-plastic scintillator and demonstrating that AI can recover the potential intersection of that event better than an analytic model.
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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!
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The final paper from Shanti Krishnan’s extraordinary PhD! This work is focused on a general purpose slow control system to remotely monitor experiments with a range of sensors, in a cost-effective but still entirely reconfigurable setup that scales as your experiment does. Amazing work and one that will support others in their research efforts we hope, as the designs are all provided for further use!
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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.
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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.
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The latest CREDO paper is out, demonstrating that the signals we detect using your smartphone really are from cosmic rays. The way we can tell is that there is are many more cosmic rays hitting you (and your phone’s CCD!) from directly above relative to the horizon. This is a cosine squared dependency, and with some very clever modelling the team showed we could recover such a profile (as well as measuring the thickness of the CCD in the phones used in the study too which is neat!)
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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.
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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.
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The wider CREDO team in this paper took a step forward in complexity by connecting up four CosmicWatch detectors together and confirm that this low-cost commodity based detector can see extensive air showers as the cosmic rays cause a spread out cascade of particles by the time they reach the Earth’s surface. This work shows just how cost-effective it can be for even schools let alone universities to explore this region of ultra-high energy particle physics!
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My colleague A/Prof Edward ‘Ned’ Taylor did a spectacular job in this monster paper teasing out the connection between properties of the galaxy and its mass… the end result? The dark matter halo mass is more tightly linked to the galaxy’s structure than either the past or current star formation. That means that the stars that make up the galaxies structure are not as relevant as the size of the dark matter halo around it - which traditionally is assumed to play a minor, if any, role in that structure. A wonderful and counterintuitive result, congrats Ned!
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Another amazing electronics paper from my PhD student Shanti Krishnan accepted for publication in the Journal of Instrumentation, focussed on a novel (and very cheap!) way to improve SiPM sensors.
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Over a decade ago I first came to Australia (Perth to be specific!) to work on the incredible CSIRO constructed Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope, and in particular the WALLABY / DINGO survey, that would scan the sky in radio and advance our knowledge in so many areas - how many? Well this exhaustive review article just accepted in ApSS can tell you!
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