According to noted exobiologist Hugo Chavez, life on Mars was destroyed by capitalism.
Category Archives: Space Science
I Wish Congress Wouldn’t Make NASA Waste So Much Money
So they could afford to do things more like this.
It’s always a little unnerving to me to see them fly through the ring plane. It makes you realize that as striking they are in appearance, the mass density is very slight, and there’s plenty of open space in there. Not that they couldn’t have had a collision, but they haven’t.
OK, I know, even if they weren’t being forced to waste money, they’d still have trouble getting more funding for more planetary missions.
Detecting Extra-Solar Planets With Suborbital Flight
Brad Cheetham of U of CO is giving a talk on seeing extra-solar planets using suborbital vehicles and star shades. Kepler and Hubble find planets by inference from star wobbles, but they’re proposing to actually shield the star with a shade to allow planets to be actually be seen. Showing a simulation of what earth would look like from deep space with the sun shielded. Allows planets to be viewed even if we’re not in their orbital plane. Also allow spectroscopy to detect habitability (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen in the atmosphere). Flagship mission would use a telescope with a star shade at ES-L2. Critical technologies — precise orbit/attitude control, precision edges/deployment, opaque membranes, etc. Need preliminary observations prior to selection of flagship mission targets. Need to work with them suborbitally over next three years, including some astronomy good enough to publish. Suborbital can prove out technology very cost effectively, allowing design iteration and refinement. Need a couple hundred million for the ultimate mission but this can provide an affordable way of technology advancement until funding is found. Have a proposal in using Masten Xaero with a starshade that flies over a ground-based telescope. Trajectory has to be accurate to ten centimeters. Can start as low as one kilometer and go higher as techniques improve. Ultimately hope to image an earth-sized planet in the habitable zone at Alpha Centauri (binary system) using suborbital. Holding alignment major technical challenge, using GBORN receiver (cigarette-sized, one or two watts) for augmented GPS solution using cell towers, etc. for high precision. Think it has potential to map Alpha Centauri and Tau Ceti systems within three years, with ability to map more distant stars in next decade as technology goes into orbit.
The Misnamed Blog Carnival
The latest Carnival of Space is up.
For anyone interested, I’ve never participated in this, primarily because in my experience, they’re not really carnivals of space — they’re carnivals of space science, a subject in which I have little more interest in than other kinds, except to the degree that it provides knowledge of how to develop and settle it. This is a specific instance of a more general irk — when many people learn that I’m an expert on space policy and technology, or I do a radio interview, they assume that I’m both an expert on and interested in space science and astronomy and (even more annoyingly) UFOs. It’s the same kind of general public level of (lack of) knowledge that leads to phrases such as “rocket scientist.”
Jupiter Bound
Leonard David has a nice story on a vehicle that’s being built almost in his back yard. Let’s hope Webb doesn’t eat up all the funding for it.
RIP, Ralph Baldwin
Paul Spudis remembers a pioneer in lunar science.
Space As Exploration
Can someone explain to me the point of this long essay (assuming that it actually has one)? Because I seem to be missing it.
The Moon Keeps Getting Wetter
And Paul Spudis explains what it means for selenology.
Painting What Can’t Be Seen
Some thoughts on the history of space art, with some excellent examples of the prescience of many of the artists.
Mimas
…is not boring. New details on the “death star.”