Cosmic Coffee Time with Andrew Prestage

Send us Fan Mail NASA has announced the four astronauts who will fly Artemis III, the first crew assigned to test the lunar landing hardware in Earth orbit. They’ll test the rendezvous, docking and spacecraft systems that future lunar landings will depend on. In this episode, we take a closer look at the newly announced crew, why these astronauts were chosen, what Artemis III will actually accompl...

Send us Fan Mail 66 million years ago, an asteroid smashed into Earth and caused a mass extinction, including nearly all of the dinosaurs. What would we do if another extinction level asteroid was heading to Earth? The good news is we’re monitoring the skies to identify them early. And there are some incredible strategies for managing high risk objects, and we look at a dramatic test from 2022. Fo...

Send us Fan Mail Particle physicist and author Dr. Sarah Alam Malik stops by for an expansive conversation about astronomy, the history of scientific discovery, and our endless fascination with the night sky. In her new book, A Brief History of the Universe, And Our Place in It , Dr. Sarah explores how our understanding of the cosmos has evolved from ancient observers tracking the stars, through t...

Send us Fan Mail Artemis 2 was was a breathtaking moment for us all. We were mesmerised by the four astronauts and the images they sent back to Earth. But so much lies ahead, and that’s the really exciting part.  Artemis 3 will orbit the Earth and try out some of the equipment and manoeuvres that we just can’t test on Earth. Artemis 4 will be truly amazing. That’s the mission that’s going to take...

Send us Fan Mail Chris Stockdale is an award winning astronomer in the Gippsland area of Australia. His contribution to NASA's exoplanet research earned him the Berenice and Arthur Page Medal from the Astronomical Society of Australia. And he's an amateur.  Chris uses an observatory in his own backyard to monitor candidate stars from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TES...

Send us Fan Mail We instinctively think of planets as rocky or gaseous bodies orbiting a star like our sun, with sunrise, sunset, heating and maybe even seasons. But what if a planet didn't orbit a light source? What if it just floated through space vaguely orbiting the centre of the galaxy, but tugged this way and that way by nearby stars and stellar systems. These are rogue planets. No sunr...

Send us Fan Mail Most people have looked to the skies and wondered if the universe has a boundary, or maybe it goes on for ever. The universe might be finite, with and end somewhere. Or, it might be infinite, with an infinite amount of space and matter. Both of thos throw up some mind bending questions, and maybe even real life duplicates of ourselves. Problem is, we would never be able to observe...

Send us Fan Mail The launch window for Artemis II opens on 6 February 2026. Humans will fly a test mission, swinging around the far side of the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. There won’t be a landing, but just like Apollo 8 tested systems in the lunar vicinity before Apollo 11, Artemis II will test the modern systems under the same conditions the landing missions. There will be a...

Send us Fan Mail The Moon has a history longer than any of the features on Earth, but it isn’t as old as Earth. The Giant Impact hypothesis says that a Mars sized protoplanet collided with earth Billions of years ago and threw out enough of earth’s mantle to make the Moon. It’s an incredible story, and it might just have been the luckiest thing that ever happened for us. Without the Moon, life as...

Send us Fan Mail As the year winds down, let’s take a look at what the night sky has on offer in December 2025. The highlight has to be the Geminid Meteor Shower. Over a couple of nights this month, Earth crashes through the debris trail of asteroid 3200 Phaethon, producing a spectacular meteor shower. There’s a Supermoon in close proximity to the Pleiades star cluster, and we say goodbye to an in...

Send us Fan Mail We’ve detected many exoplanets and exoplanetary stems, they orbit stars in other parts of the galaxy. These planets form the same way our planetary did, they coalesce from a protoplanetary disc of gas and dust. Scientists have recently found a useful kind of substance - heavy water in one of these protoplanetary discs, and it’s told us a lot about how water might end up in planeta...

Send us Fan Mail A billion light years away, a billion years ago, two black holes spiralled toward each other and collided, we detected its gravitational waves in January 2025. We’ve detected many of these before, but this one was different. It was such a strong, clear signal that we could test laws of physics that had been proposed many decades earlier. It even put Einstein to the test. Follow Co...

Send us Fan Mail In 1975, an incredible and unlikely partnership resulted in the docking of a NASA Apollo capsule and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in Earth orbit. The cold war opponents worked together to overcome not only engineering challenges, but the rivalry and suspicion of the cold war.  This cooperation led to the Shuttle-Mir program in the 90s and the present day International space station....

Send us Fan Mail Earth’s days had been getting longer since observations began. Every century, the length of the day would increase by about two milliseconds. Like… clockwork. In recent years, something strange has been happening, the days have started getting shorter as the rotation of the Earth has been speeding up. Even more strangely, we don’t really understand why. Follow Cosmic Coffee Time o...

Send us Fan Mail An Australian team of botanists and engineers are working on a project that might make or break the future of long term, long distance space occupation. They're growing plants. Not that unusual, but they're trying to grow them on the Moon. Plants produce oxygen and they are food, essential elements of living away from Earth. Let's check out the plan to experiment wi...

Send us Fan Mail Kosmos 482, was a Soviet spacecraft launched in 1972 on a mission to Venus, but a technical glitch meant it never made it past Earth orbit. Designed to withstand the hellish surface of Venus, its lander remained in space for over 50 years, but this relic of Cold War space exploration has finally returned, re-entering Earth’s atmosphere decades after its failed journey. Though the...

Send us Fan Mail No need to panic. Yet! We’ll be fine for the next 4 or 5 billion years, but Andromeda is heading our way. The Andromeda Galaxy was the first object to be identified as being outside our own galaxy, and it introduced us to extragalactic astronomy. And that’s not all. It can teach us more about dark matter and it could be home to billions of planets. It’s a very cool neighbour, but...

Send us Fan Mail Their planned 8 day visit to the International Space Station was turned on its head when NASA announced their Boeing Starliner capsule was unsafe to use. What did Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore do for those 9 months? And we check out the plan that was put together to get them home safely. Follow Cosmic Coffee Time on X for some special content       X.com/CosmicCoffTime Email us!...

Send us Fan Mail After everything learned through Mercury and Gemini culminated in the seventeen Apollo missions. The first ten were all testing and rehearsals, but the whole program, and a whole era was characterised by Apollo 11, the first time humans set foot on the moon. Along with the triumph, there was tragedy and a very near miss, and one of the most underrated aspects of NASA's space...

Send us Fan Mail Nasa had accomplished spaceflight with Project Mercury but the gap to Apollo was still huge. How do you dock two spacecraft in flight and how do crews live in a tiny spacecraft for lunar length flights. These are just a couple of the questions that NASA needed to answer. Gemini was just the project to resolve all of these issues. It was a proving ground, for learning, testing and...

Send us Fan Mail Back in the late 1950s, NASA was formed. Its first job was to put together a human crewed spaceflight program and put an astronaut into orbit - safely. This was Project Mercury. There were some uncrewed developmental flights and then six crewed flights between 1961 and 1963, this was an enormously significant step toward the Apollo moon landings just six years later. So who were t...

Send us Fan Mail Project Mercury was NASA’s first attempt at human crewed space flight. It sent Alan Shepard into space, and John Glenn into orbit, among four other landmark flights over 5 years. By 1963 it was done, and NASA was ready to launch Gemini, its next project. But being such a groundbreaking project, in 1964 NASA paid tribute to Mercury with a four metre high stainless steel monument wi...

Send us Fan Mail When Yuri Gagarin blasted into orbit in 1961 to become the first human in space, he was already 14 years behind the first animals from Earth. The fruit flies that were flew to space in 1947 were just the first of many different animals in the decade and a half before Gagarin’s orbital flight that were used to test equipment and living things’ capacity to survive and work in weight...

Send us Fan Mail Earth has a new moon! well, for about 8 weeks anyway. Asteroid 2024 PT5 has been captured by Earth’s gravity and will be in orbit until late November 2024. This is really unusual and there have only been a few confirmed mini moons in the past. Our new temporary neighbour is only about 11 metres across and won’t be visible to anyone who doesn’t have a professional large-scale teles...

Send us Fan Mail Boeing’s Starliner space capsule blasted off for its first crewed test flight in early June. Great news right? Turns out, no. After arriving at the International Space Station, some technical problems meant that it couldn’t be used to take its crew of Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Suni Williams back to Earth. The two astronauts were left with no way to get home.  The two capsules alre...