Cosmic Coffee Time with Andrew Prestage
It's cosmology in a cup! - Cosmic Coffee Time is bite sized podcasts making sense of space, astronomy, life, and the universe, best enjoyed with a coffee. A down to earth look at what's up there, and it's just for you spacefans. Grab a coffee and see where in the universe we go this time. Follow on Twitter @CosmicCoffTime
Episodes
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 we know it might never have existed.
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 interstellar traveller in 3I/ATLAS.
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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 planetary systems.
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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.
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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. They all began with the spirit of coope...
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.
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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 with germinating seeds in shoebox sized &...
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 mission never reached Venus, Kosmos 48...
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 one day - it’s kinda going to move in!
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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.
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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 program - the lunar roving vehicles th...
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 practicing the skills needed for lunar...
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 the Mercury astronauts and what was the ...
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 with a time capsule that would remain se...
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 weightlessness. There were primates, dogs, m...
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 telescope, but we’ll know it’s there! and a...
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 already docked at the space station couldn’...
NASA's Curiosity rover touched down on Mars in August 2012, and it's been exploring the Red Planet all that time. There have been some amazing discoveries and it's travelled over 30km but it has just made the most scientifically significant discovery of its 12 year career, and did it simply by running over a rock! One of Curiosity's wheels crushed a rock. It had looked just like any other orange ma...
As I write this, just a couple of days have passed since the Chang'e 6 sample return capsule touched down with its historic payload. The first sample of rock and soil from the far side of the moon touched down on Earth. This has the potential to unlock some of the secrets from the side of the moon that we never see from Earth, why is the lunar crust thicker? Why are there fewer 'seas' on the far side? A...
In September 2023, Greg Brennecka stopped by to preview the return to Earth of the OSIRI-REx asteroid Bennu sample return capsule. The sample landed safely and the mission scientists like Greg Brennecka have started their analysis. Some of our toughest questions are being answered by the data already. How old is Bennu? Is there organic material? Where was the asteroid formed? Is Bennu different from what we expected? ...
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