Next week will see the first science releases from Herschel at a big ESA press and science event in Madrid. There will be lots of exciting new science results and some stunning new images to look at. We’ll do our best to cover things here, but also...

Some excellent news to report – the HIFI instrument on Herschel (the high resolution spectrometer) has been successfully switched on after lying dormant for 4 months, after suffering an unwanted voltage peak in the electronic system of HIFI, which in...

While data has only just started to flow from Herschel, since these space missions take more than a decade to build, we’re already working on the next steps. These are all being done in the context of the ESA ‘Cosmic Visions’ programme. There was an...

I forgot to mention this at the time, but the second part of the BBC’s radio show about Herschel was broadcast on Wednesday. You can still get it on the BBC iPlayer. I’m listening to it right now and it’s pretty good – but then several of us are...

One of my other guises, apart from astrophysicist and blog editor, is as a starving science fiction writer. I’ve only just started to sell stories commercially, but I reached a big step this week with my first ever story to be published in one of the...