Growth of conventions shows geeks have always wanted to meet up IRL

Taking a break from their screens to meet up in real life. quakecon, CC BY

One of the largest LAN party videogame conventions, Quakecon returns for its 19th meet since 1996, with more than 9,000 people attending to “frag” each other playing the renowned first person shooter. Recently, an estimated 130,000 fans attended Comicon in San Diego. For the month of October 2015 alone, there are 22 conventions worldwide, and this excludes commercial conventions.

Observers of fan conventions often express surprise that people who met online might want to meet IRL – “in real life”, or in person. This is often and entirely incorrectly held true of gamers, particularly, who are conceived of being unsociable, solitary creatures. This perception has been compounded by the #gamergate controversy, in which many prominent members of the gaming community were harassed – most notably women developers, journalists and commentators. This might suggest that gamers are a closed, antagonistic and predominantly male-centred group. Fortunately, the reverse is often true.

Such socialisation and fan meet-ups have a long history – the first Worldcon was held in 1939. Charities exist for sending fans with limited means or those from under-represented groups to conventions around the world. There are even conventions for convention runners (but only if you are a Secret Master of Fandom. Behind the images of convention-goers dressed as cheerful-looking anime, television or film characters is an established community.

Conventions, the industry and fans.

There are two broad types of fan convention. The commercially run enterprise is run with profit in mind – these events tend to be large, well-publicised events such as San Diego Comicon, GenCon and PAX. Subsidiary events often attract industry professionals, while large conventions are often used as a springboard to release new work or products.

For example, Comicon is now where companies like LucasArts showcase forthcoming work: this year they treated 6,000 fans to a free outdoor concert, new reveals about the forthcoming Star Wars film, and guest star appearances from the cast. Similarly, E3, GDC and Gamescom bring together industry professionals, journalists and fans for a weekend of new games announcements, publicity and promotions. They are cheerful and noisy events, known for huge queues, freebies and panels featuring guest speakers and celebrities. The gender split of attendees at Comicon was equal this year at 49% each (the remaining 2% made up of non-binary attendees).

It’s all about the fans

Fan-run conventions such as Worldcon, which hosts the science fiction Oscars each year in the form of the Hugo Awards, are no less riotous, but on a rather different scale. Worldcon is typical of these conventions in that it is entirely run by volunteers. Unusually, the location of Worldcon changes each year, as voted for by attendees, so teams bid in advance to host subsequent events and run lengthy election campaigns.

Fan-run conventions focus more on showcasing a mixture of authors, creative experts and fans, with often extensive programmes where attendees can see everything from authors playing and recommending their favourite boardgames, to discussions on diversity and representation in fan fiction, to readings and signings by people at the top of their field. The lower attendance figures allow for a more intimate setting where guests, speakers and fans can mingle.

Conventions of all shapes and forms are an increasingly important element of fandom – after all, getting together with several thousand like-minded people with the added incentive of parties, meets, talks and discussions by respected and creative people seems like a recipe for enjoyment.

For gaming events such as Quakecon, it’s also the opportunity to play and compete against people who attendees may have known for years, but never met in person. Mainstream sports fans will also recognise the value of watching those at the very top of their game play competitively.

Competitive gaming is a big part of gaming conventions, with big cash prizes. viagallery, CC BY

Online and Real Worlds Collide

The amount of convention-goers continues to grow as fans reach out to each other worldwide. This is partly driven by a feeling of deep reciprocity among fans: that attending is “giving back" to the community. And it’s for this same reason that ructions like #gamergate and others are so alarming for the community in question.

The Hugos are currently the subject of huge controversy after two groups of right-wing authors managed to influence the nominations by releasing a recommended reading list, and having supporters block vote for these authors. Destablising such niche and esoteric groups causes great alarm, as fans realise that despite their shared experiences and interests, their cultural values and perceptions of the world may differ wildly.

It’s comforting to regard fandom as one large, happy, geeky family, but the growing care and attention given by conference runners to their Codes of Conduct also speaks of a group very much aware of the need to make no assumptions about others, and to provide clear guidelines for behaviour within the convention. While conventions continue to grow and provide exciting places for fans to meet and share experiences, it’s unwise to regard them are utopian spaces.

The CMB: how an accidental discovery became the key to understanding the universe

Lucky find. NASA/wikimedia

Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan had only just gone electric, mankind had yet to take its great leap and many people thought the Big Bang was something that happened when you burst a Big Balloon.

But in July 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson made a discovery that would cement our understanding of how the universe came into being. Their detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation left over from the birth of the universe, provided the strongest possible evidence that the universe expanded from an initial violent explosion, known as The Big Bang. Today, the CMB is still one of the most important signals that helps us understand the cosmos.

The light from the Big Bang, which happened almost 14 billion years ago, has been travelling through the universe ever since, allowing us to detect this “afterglow” on Earth. At the time it was discovered, there were two competing theories for the origin of the universe. One was the Big Bang theory and the other was “the Steady State theory”, which stated that the universe has existed forever.

Since its initial discovery, astronomers have used the CMB to learn a great deal about the universe, such as its origins, its age, its composition, its rate of expansion and even its future.

Serendipitous finding

Penzias and Wilson were working with a very sensitive radio telescope at Bell Labs in New Jersey, looking for something completely different – neutral hydrogen – when they happened to stumble upon a strange signal from their telescope.

In order to detect such a faint signal, they needed to make sure they knew the source of every part of the signal their telescope was detecting. As such, they had to account for a number of peculiar things, such as badly insulated wires and even pigeon droppings in the horn of the antenna.

Wilson (foreground) with Penzias in front of the Bell Labs horn radio antenna. wikimedia

There was one part of the signal, however, that they could not eliminate. It was there day and night, throughout the year, and appeared wherever they were pointing their antenna. They were completely perplexed as to what it was, until Penzias ran into Bernard Burke, a radio astronomer working at the Department for Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington DC, on an aeroplane who urged him to phone Bob Dicke at Princeton University.

Dicke and his team were actually looking for the CMB, as their theoretical models suggested that a young, hot, dense universe would produce such radiation. They were months away from making their own measurements but Penzias and Wilson got there first. Dicke came off the phone to Penzias and said to his colleagues: “Boys, we’ve been scooped.”

Their discovery was published in the July issue of the Astrophysical Journal with one of the most understated titles in the history of physics: “A measurement of excess antenna temperature at 4080 Mc/s”. But hidden behind these words was one of the most important discoveries in the history of science – the first direct evidence that the universe had begun with the Big Bang.

It turns out the CMB had already been predicted in 1948 by a team led by Russian theoretician George Gamow. Dicke was unaware of this work when he published in 1965, so when the paper appeared, Gamow wrote to Dicke pointing out his team’s earlier work, and from that point on the two teams have been jointly credited with the prediction. In 1978, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery of the CMB; neither Dicke nor Gamow got anything.

Deciphering the CMB

Over the past 50 years, astronomers have gone on to examine the CMB in more and more detail. In the early 1970s theoreticians such as Jim Peebles at Princeton and Rashid Sunyaev and Yakov Zel’dovich in Russia realised that there should be structure in the CMB, called “anisotropies”, and that these could be used to determine important parameters about the universe including its overall density, its age, and its future fate. However, the predicted structure would be manifested as tiny temperature variations, which were impossible to detect from ground-based telescopes.

In 1989 NASA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), which confirmed previous measurements of the CMB to exquisite accuracy in 1990. In 1992, it saw the anisotropies for the first time – a result hailed by COBE scientist George Smoot as “like seeing the fingerprints of God”. However, COBE was not sensitive enough to determine the geometry of the universe, which is related to its fate via Einstein’s theory of gravity.

CMB based on COBE data. NASA

Just a decade later, the balloon-borne telescope BOOMERANG was the first to measure the universe’s geometry from the CMB, followed by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropies Probe (WMAP) satellite. In fact, WMAP confirmed BOOMERANG’s findings with more accuracy and determined the universe’s age, composition, and future. Europe’s Planck satellite has confirmed WMAP’s findings with even more accuracy, and has been measuring the polarisation of the CMB’s light by matter in the more recent universe.

In March 2014 there was huge excitement when the BICEP2 team announced that their South Pole-based telescope had found the first ever evidence for “cosmic inflation”, the idea that the universe expanded very rapidly in the first fraction of a second. However, by the autumn of 2014 this announcement had been found to have been flawed. The signal they had detected was more likely due to dust in our galaxy which they had failed to properly subtract from their signal.

Discoveries ahead

The quest is still on for the signs of cosmic inflation in the CMB, with researchers tackling extreme conditions at the South Pole and high in the Atacama Desert in Chile to search for the tell-tale signals. CMB research has reached maturity and we have entered an era of making precision measurements to find specific predictions of the Big Bang theory, with the evidence for gravitational waves, and hence for cosmic inflation, being one of the most important.

In the 50 years since its first discovery, it is no exaggeration to say that we have learnt more about the properties of the universe by studying the CMB than we have from any other single type of observation. Its first discovery in July 1965 is truly one of the landmarks of 20th century science.

How we showed 'sleeping on it' really is the best way to solve a problem

Shutterstock

Have you ever struggled to finish a level of Candy Crush or complete a Sudoku puzzle in the evening but breezed through it the following morning? The reason may please anyone who’s been told they spend too much time in bed asleep.

We tend to think of sleep as a period of recuperation, giving us enough down-time to enable our muscles and thought processes to operate effectively. However, sleep can also have an active function. As far back as Aristotle, the fact that we dream has suggested to people that sleep could enhance the mind’s self-communication. And, more recently, there’s been a surge of research into the consequences of sleep as an active process, rather than just a rest.

We now know that sleep has profound implications for lots of human tasks. Sleep improves our memory, and enables us to consolidate new information with the knowledge we already have. Sleep also changes the quality of our stored information. We are more likely to adjust our memories slightly so that they fit better with our previous experiences after sleeping. And we are more likely to avoid misleading background information in making decisions and judgements.

But sleep also has a positive effect on problem solving. It’s common to feel you can gain inspiration for something overnight. You may have even woken up in the middle of the night with the solution to a problem, whether it be trivial or life-changing. These intuitions turn out to be absolutely correct.

My colleagues and I conducted a study in which we gave volunteers a set of problems comprising three words. The task was to discover another word that related to all three: for example: cake, Swiss and cottage (the answer is at the bottom of the article). Half the problems were easy, and half were hard.

One (“sleep”) group of volunteers first saw the problems in the evening and then tried to solve them again the next morning. Another (“wake”) group saw the problems in the morning then reattempted them in the evening. We also included extra groups that just did the problems in the morning or the evening, to make sure any sleep effects weren’t due just to time of day. For the easy problems, the wake group solved the problems slightly more effectively. For the hard problems, the sleep group improved substantially in their discovery of the answer.

Bright ideas. Shutterstock

Such word problems are only very simple, but can sleep also improve problem solving for more complicated problems, and is this just due to improved memory? A key skill in good decision-making and problem-solving is the ability to adapt the solution for one problem to another related problem.

Here’s a simple example. Solving the problem 8 + 4 = ? requires a similar strategy to solving the problems 5 + 3 = ? and 2 + 7 = ?. Once people realise the connection, it generally seems very obvious. (Consider how difficult it is to not see the similarity between these additions once we’ve learned how to do them.) And yet people are notoriously poor at applying these analogous solutions.

In a more recent study, we asked people to solve two sets of related problems. Those who went to sleep overnight between attempting the two sets of problems fared better than those who tackled them both during the day. Intriguingly, this was not due to how well the participants felt they could remember the problems nor how closely they thought the problems related to one another. Instead, improvement was at a stage involving deep and implicit restructuring of the problem information associated with sleep.

Although they were developed thousands of years later, modern theories of the neurophysiological effects of sleep on the brain are surprisingly consistent with Aristotle’s view of the active role of sleep. A prominent current theory (as portrayed in the Disney-Pixar film Inside Out) is that sleep enables the transfer of information between the hippocampus – the part of the brain that encodes recent experiences – and the neocortex – where longer term experiences are stored. If we can effectively incorporate solutions from past problems into our thinking, we’re better equipped to tackle new problems.

This research gives us some guidance on improving our day-to-day approach to solving problems. If it is a difficult problem, set it aside overnight, and return to it the next day. Even if you’ve already made a complex decision, reappraising it briefly the next day is more likely to result in the best choice you can make. “Sleep on it” is now scientifically supported advice.

(And if you’re still wondering, the answer is “cheese”.)

Exoplanet Kepler-452b offers a glimpse into the future fate of our Earth

Mirror image? NASA

NASA has announced the discovery of the most Earth-like exoplanet to date. The new planet – named Kepler-452b – orbits a sun-like star and lies in the star’s habitable zone, an area which is neither too hot nor too cold for orbiting planets to support liquid water on the surface.

An international team of scientists, led by Jon Jenkins from NASA Ames Research Centre in California, discovered the planet alongside 11 other planets in habitable zones using a space-based telescope called Kepler. They made the discovery by by monitoring the brightness of stars. A planet transiting in front of a star will create a temporary dip in its brightness as it blocks out a little of its light.

How do we compare? NASA

The new planet, which has a 385-day orbit, is possibly a rocky body, a little larger than the Earth with a radius of 1.63 times that of the Earth and twice as much surface gravity. The G2-type star it orbits lies 1400 light years away from Earth.

The exoplanet is only 5% further away from its host star than the Earth is from our sun. Jenkins and his team think the planet has always been in the habitable zone and will remain there for another 3 billion years.

Endless probabilities as there are 4,696 planet candidates now known.

The study of exoplanets began in earnest only 20 years ago with the discovery of larger planets called “hot Jupiters” around distant stars. The latest release of data from the Kepler project has increased the number of new exoplanet candidates by 521 since 2013, meaning there are now nearly 4700 candidates. However further analysis is needed to confirm that they really are planets.

Today, nearly 2,000 planets have been confirmed. Nine planets with a radius less than twice that of Earth was found in the past 4 years’ worth of Kepler data.

The star which the planet orbits has the same temperature as our Earth, and is 20% brighter. It is also slightly larger than our sun and is 1.5 billion years older. So while Kepler-452b is the closest analogue to our Earth-Sun system yet discovered by Kepler, it may be further along in its evolution. This gives us a glimpse into the future fate of our Earth as the Sun uses up its fuel, expanding and evolving into a red giant.

These fascinating observations of a distant world offer scientists hope that many more Earth-Sun systems may be discovered in the future, helping to quantify how rare our own environment is and offering the possibility to look for signs of life far outside our own Solar System.

The authors speculate that there could have been an ancient civilisation on Kepler-452b or the moon orbiting it. This may even have moved to an outer planet that we are yet to discover to escape the the loss of water as the increasing energy from its aging sun could be warming up the surface. This may yet offer hope to those engaged in searching for technological civilisations on distant planets.

Footballing androids of RoboCup are vital players in our robotic future

Joyce van Belkom/EPA

Playing football probably isn’t the most obvious use for robots. Yet every year, scientists and engineers from all over the world gather to pit their robotic creations against each other in one of the most remarkable soccer competitions you could imagine.

Founded in 1997 and most recently hosted by China, the annual Robocup has grown into a Mecca for roboticists, attracting thousands of participants and tens of thousands of visitors every year. It comprises several leagues in which teams of and individual robots demonstrate their ball-handling skills. Or, more accurately, the hardware and software design skills of their creators.

Tackling robotics' biggest challenges Jens Wolf/EPA

The founding goal of RoboCup was to create a fully autonomous robot soccer team that could beat the winners of the human World Cup by 2050. This raises three questions. Is this technically possible? How close are we to achieving this goal? And why on earth are scientists and engineers spending their time (and funding) on robotic football?

To answer the last question first, football demands many of the characteristics that make robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) in general challenging. It requires robots to work together and at the same time compete against other opponents. It involves dealing with a large amount of uncertainty about the environment in terms of those other robots. It also places high demands on the technology robots use to interact with the world – their ears, eyes, hands and feet – and puts them in situations where their hardware can easily fail or even break.

Taken together, these factors pose huge technical challenges and so robotic football provides an appropriate, standardised problem for testing new scientific ideas and engineering principles. If we can tackle this, we will be able to deal with many other difficult problems such as coordinating autonomous vehicles in traffic, using robots in search-and-rescue missions and even in service and industrial settings.

In fact, Robocup now includes specialised leagues such as RoboCup@Home, which is about integrating robots in everyday life at home – for example, building a robot butler. More recently the competition has included RoboCup@Work, which is about developing the factory of the future in which robots and humans work side-by-side.

Wheeled robots: great at football, not so good at mixing drinks. Shen Xiang/EPA

On the question of whether football-playing robots could ever beat the best human team in the world, it’s just worth pointing out that technology now moves incredibly fast. Sixty years ago, space travel seemed like an impossible dream. Today we are planning manned trips to Mars. Given this, I believe it is not unlikely we will be very close to achieving the original RoboCup goal by 2050.

So how are we doing? In the years since the competition’s creation we have seen a huge amount of progress. Matches in the simulation leagues (which are contested by software programs not physical robots) give the impression of watching a “real” game of football. And for several years you’ve been able to see great matches in the mid-sized wheeled robot league.

Protect your valuables, lads. Jens Wolf/EPA

I’ve also seen great computer science progress in what used to be the Sony AIBO league (between robotic dogs) but has now been replaced by the Aldebaran NAO league between a standard set of miniature humanoids that each team programs separately. But creating bespoke football-playing humanoid robots remains a great challenge because of the need to combine the mechanical hardware of a walking biped (which is very difficult compared to wheeled robotics) and the intelligence to support it.

Despite this, we have reached a stage where the competition has started tackling humanoid challenges in several leagues. And even though it remains a contest, what is truly beautiful about the robotic game is that the newly developed technologies and knowledge are openly shared by participants, boosting chances of success even further.

Online carjacking: do auto manufacturers realise dangers of networked motors?

When your car becomes a computer, you're problems just got much bigger. car by Denys Prykhodov/shutterstock.com

While computers bring great benefits they come with drawbacks too – not least, as news stories reveal every day, the insecurity of often very private data connected to the public internet. Only now that computers are appearing in practically everything, the same insecurity also applies – as demonstrated by the drive-by hack of a speeding Jeep SUV, hijacked and shut down by security researchers as it sped past at 70mph.

Vehicles are growing ever more sophisticated, with technological additions to newer models designed to increase safety, comfort and convenience while providing entertainment features and improving the car’s environmental impact. These innovations are more than just marketing ploys for manufacturers to sell their vehicles as cutting edge, they also help save money on materials and to comply with increasingly stringent safety and environmental laws.

Consider the benefits of a fully-connected vehicle: computers are never distracted, never get tired. They may be able to learn from driver behaviour and, using technologies such as active lane assist, can even correct human errors of judgement to a certain degree. Human productivity can be boosted, allowing for example a hands-free phone call while behind the wheel. Concepts such as platooning – where cars follow each other closely in a train – could help reduce congestion while allowing speedier commutes and greater fuel economy.

However this drive-by vehicle hack (on which there will be a presentation at Black Hat conference later this year) and others, such as the method of compromising brake systems using DAB radio signals, demonstrates the dangers of considerably networked, computerised vehicles designed without adequate protections.

More software, more problems

Precise details about how the Jeep was hacked, other than that the public IP address must be known, and that the attack relies on the uConnect mobile phone network, are yet to be revealed. While this gives the manufacturer time to provide a patch to fix the problem in this case, the vulnerabilities of mobile phone and internet network connections have been researched for years and are well-known and well-understood. If anything, this vehicle hack shouldn’t come as any great surprise; more surprising is the lack of care paid to securing these well-known angles of attack in the first place.

Exploiting software flaws remotely through an internet connection – the most likely culprit – is made possible because we prize internet and phone connectivity sufficiently that manufacturers will fit it to our vehicles. This allows access to any piece of exposed hardware that is not “air-gapped”, in other words physically separate and unconnected from the rest of the system. An attacker can pivot through the system, using one compromised component in order to compromise another, until the keys to the kingdom are acquired – in this case the critical control units capable of shutting down the engine.

Keys no longer required.

Introducing these wireless network interfaces to vehicles presents the greatest danger: the ability to control cars, or even many cars en masse, from any distance. This possibility has caused such alarm there are plans in the US (where this attack was demonstrated) to introduce new legislation to tackle the issue.

Complexity creates vulnerability

That’s not to say that network connectivity is the only issue. The presence of considerably more software in modern cars alone is a significant contributing factor to security problems. It has been estimated there is a software engineering industry average of 15-50 errors per 1,000 lines of code. The same can be said for integrating so many different systems, features and technologies – added complexity makes security testing much more difficult. These challenges, when vehicles migrate from being connected to being fully autonomous, could potentially have even broader security ramifications.

With any feature that makes something more safe, convenient or entertaining, there is potentially an equal amount of convenience for an attacker if sufficient defences haven’t been put in place. The documented incidents of vehicles stolen by hacking keyless entry systems were down to technology designed to make unlocking a car more convenient for customers. Alas, the convenience works both ways.

Achieving safety and security has always been – and will continue to be – a balancing act. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the US states that in 94% of cases the last failure leading to a crash can be attributed to the driver. In the face of such evidence, despite the security vulnerabilities that may emerge as they are deployed and used, it would be counter-intuitive to ignore technology that could potentially save lives.

What is required to prevent these emerging problems from becoming overwhelming is an engineering process that embeds security in automotive design from the outset, implemented using secure coding practices as is found in other safety-critical areas such as nuclear reactor management or air traffic control, and reinforced with robust security testing procedures.

Only then will we see the world’s car manufacturers move from the back foot to the front foot in the face of an internet-full of would-be cyber-carjackers.

After Pluto there's still plenty of the solar system left to explore

NASA/JPL-Caltech, CC BY-NC

The past couple of years have been very exciting for space exploration. We’ve watched as spacecraft made visits to Mars, comet 67P and, just last week, Pluto, which for decades marked the edge of our solar system.

Given the fervour that surrounded last week’s New Horizons mission, it’s fair to wonder whether anything could be as exciting as flying past Pluto (with perhaps the exception of discovering alien life). We have a basic understanding of our solar system – such as how moons, rings and planets interact in planetary systems, and what their atmospheres are made of. We also have theories about how the solar system was formed and has evolved. But we’re far from finishing exploring our solar system and testing these theories. Several missions over the next decade and beyond will reveal new insights into our patch of the universe.

What’s next?

Brave new worlds NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon, CC BY

New Horizons will continue to produce new discoveries as it transmits its measurements over the next year, but the next step is a fly-by of another Kuiper Belt object beyond the orbit of Pluto. The preferred candidate is a body designated 2014 MU69 that was discovered just last year. If approval is granted later this year, a possible fly-by in 2019 could allow us to discovering more about this mysterious object and help us understand what happens at the very edge of our solar system and how it was formed.

In July 2016, NASA’s Juno mission will enter orbit around Jupiter, the first spacecraft to do so since the end of the Galileo mission in 2003. Juno will study the interior of Jupiter, looking at its composition for information that could teach us about the formation of the solar system. It will also study Jupiter’s aurora and how the planet connects with its enormous magnetosphere, the largest physical structure in the solar system.

Move over Curiosity, here comes ExoMars ESA

Europe’s ExoMars mission aims to search for signatures of life on Mars using two spacecraft. The Trace Gas Orbiter, due to launch in 2016, will study the distribution of volatile gases such as water, methane and ozone in Mars’ atmosphere, all of which could provide evidence for life. It will also act as a telecommunications relay for a rover that will be launched in 2018, which will drill two metres under the surface of the planet in search of similar biosignatures.

There’s more. The joint European-Japanese BepiColombo mission to Mercury will launch in 2017, with two spacecraft undertaking a detailed study of the planet’s interior, surface and magnetosphere. And in 2018, Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft will arrive at one of the Apollo asteroids that cross the Earth’s orbit and, after surveying it for a year, will return samples to Earth in 2020.

A long way to go for ice ESA/AOES

Further into the future, we have a big first to look forward to. In 2022, the European Space Agency (ESA) will send the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) mission on a 10-year journey to Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System. This will be the first time we have put a spacecraft in orbit around the moon of a giant planet. JUICE’s primary aim is to study whether the moons of giant planets can be viable locations for life. A NASA mission called Europa Clipper will also explore another of Jupiter’s moons, Europa, in the late 2020s/early 2030s.

Even with all of these planned missions, there are plenty of other corners of the solar system worth visiting again. Many scientists are not satisfied with simply making measurements from afar but want to get samples back from our moon, Mars and it’s moon Phobos. These so-called sample return missions still require a huge amount of technology development that will push our capabilities much further. But they are also a stepping stone to human exploration as robotic exploration allows us to test technology and reconnoitre distant hostile environments before we send humans.

Comets also continue to be a focus of attention for space scientists because there is no typical comet. “Main-belt comets”, for example, are a recently discovered class of comet which reside in the asteroid belt and may hold the keys to understanding the source of Earth’s water. The recent discovery of volcanic activity on Venus is also tempting atmospheric scientists and geologists to look again at Earth’s “evil twin”.

The outer reaches NASA/JPL

The outer solar system beyond Saturn is still very poorly explored. Uranus and Neptune have only received single fly-bys, similar to New Horizons at Pluto, with visits in in 1986 and 1989 respectively. These ice giant planets form a unique class of planet and are quite different to the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. Scientists have been arguing for a return to the ice giants for the last decade. Triton, the largest moon of Neptune is of particular interest because it is suspected to be a Kuiper Belt object that has been pulled into orbit in a similar way to the origins of Pluto. Without radically new technology, Triton is the only opportunity we have to encounter a Pluto-type object multiple times.

What’s the point?

It is part of the human condition to explore and ask questions about where we came from. Many of science’s big questions, such as: “how did our Solar System evolve?” and “is there life beyond Earth?” aren’t easy to answer without exploring the universe. One of Philae’s main science questions was to try to unravel why certain biological molecules are shaped the way they are.

These answers also come with a cost. New Horizons cost around US$700m (£450m), although this only works out at about US$2 (£1.30) for each US citizen. But this cash wasn’t just launched into space. The money for space exploration goes to the same industries that support other sectors we rely on, such as global communications, weather observations and navigation. The same scientists also educate the next generation of scientists and engineers who in turn will ask those same big questions and seek answers amongst the planets.