Show Notes
You'll be astounded when you listen to A/Prof Elizabeth Tasker as she takes us on an astonishingly brilliant 600million kilometre rollercoaster ride on the JAXA Hayabusa missions to collect the very first Asteroid samples and bring them back to earth for analysis, to reveal the primordial origins of our solar system. Elizabeth also gives us an update on JAXA's 2026 Mars Moons mission ~ MMX You'll marvel at this triumph of ingeniously designed and executed science and engineering! Great science stories of discovery are essentially ... great human stories.
More from Astronomy Astrophiz Podcast
What are gravitational waves, and could primordial black holes be dark matter? Astrophysicist Laura Byrne (University of Auckland) explains how the LISA space mission could detect them. Astrophiz podcast Episode 244.
Dr Ian 'Astroblog' Musgrave returns with your October 2026 Sky Guide for Australian skies, including Saturn at opposition (October 4), Mars crossing the Beehive Cluster (M44), the Orionid meteor shower, a daylight Lunar X on the 18th, and the occultation of Elnath (Beta Tauri) on October 29–30.
Is dark matter finally showing itself? In this episode of Astrophiz, Dr Sophia Gad-Nasr — particle cosmologist, science communicator, and creator of @AstropartiGirl — returns for her second appearance on the show (her first was Episode 90, back in 2019) to unpack the tantalising 2.6-sigma signal detected by the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter experiment, buried deep underground in South Dakota.
Dr Ian 'Astroblog' Musgrave returns with your essential guide to the September night sky — Venus at its greatest brilliancy (mag -4.5), the Moon's occultation of Antares, and Mercury lining up with Venus and Spica at dusk.
Trevor Barry — the Outback Astronomer — is a world-renowned planetary imager whose backyard observatory in Broken Hill, NSW, produces scientific-grade Jupiter and Saturn data used by NASA. In this episode of Astrophiz, host Brendan O'Brien travels to the outback to sit down with Trevor at his custom-built observatory.