The Big Space Exploration Thread

[Trelawny]

Originally Posted by Iluminat

Perhaps humans in the future wouldn't need "terraformation" as much as we would

ya maybe. I heared today they found some extrasolar planet that looks like our planet. So there is no point "making' an earth like planet when there could be plenty of them out there.

[VelesHomais]

I don't think that our survival will depend on terraforming plane, but more inhabitable worlds will certainly be in demand for a number of reasons. Although, by year 2200 or 2300 we'll all be partially or fully robotic and highly modified biologically (whatever will remain biological, that is) that we'll probably be able to adopt to a different world by doing a more or less simple upgrade. But still, I can see us being augmented so much that we'll survive on Titan, for instance, but never on Mercury and Co.

[Saigoneseguy]

A modified body might physically cope with extraterrestrial elements but how about our mental health? How would we live in a world without sunshine with a certain spectrum as filtered through Earth's atmosphere that we had evolved to accustom to for millions of year? Imagine living in an alien environment without birds and trees, how it is gonna affect us psychologically for 10 years? And for several generations under such conditions, our whole "humanly" psyche might radically transform.

[VelesHomais]

I agree, it's problematic to say the least. I wouldn't want to permanently live on a world that looks depressing which would usually mean that it's not terraformed. But some percentage of people wouldn't mind living in a totally foreign world and in a few generations they'll become pretty alien to the rest of the human race. Though, by that time, I don't know what a human race will mean.

The point in history is within our grasp when evolution will become artificial and controlled through genetics. That alone will mean that our species will go through an immediate change as profound as the last 300,000 years of evolution were. Now, add robotics and integrated artificial intelligence to it, and I'm not sure the result could be classified as human.

[Trelawny]

I think terraforming Mars and Venus is good enough, screw those other moons in our solar system.We don't need to fill up the entire solar system, but have humans spread across many other solar system. The best extrasolar system we need to get to is Gilese 581 systems.

[VelesHomais]

Japan plans $2 billion robot moon base by 2020





We got starry-eyed last month about Japanese plans to send humanoid robots to the moon, but now we're, well, over the moon to see that the Japanese want to build a whole robot base on the heavenly body by 2020.


A Japanese government panel has produced a draft paper outlining how humanoid rover robots will begin surveying the moon by 2015, according to a report by the prime minister's office.

As part of the $2.2 billion project, the droids will begin construction of an unmanned base near the south pole of the moon that will be powered by solar panels, according to the panel chaired by Waseda University President Katsuhiko Shirai.

Weighing about 660 pounds, the droids will roll on treads and operate within a 60-mile radius of the base. They'll be equipped with solar panels, seismographs to investigate the moon's inner structure, high-def cameras, and arms to gather rock samples, which will be returned to Earth via rocket.

Japan believes a moon base is essential for exploration of the solar system, but its financial straits have pushed back lunar colonization to 2020.

Japan's Kaguya lunar probe has sent back stunning high-def images of the moon in recent years, including a panorama of the Earth rising from lunar orbit. Such postcards will look so much cooler if they include a few little bots waving to us Earthlings.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20006075-1.html

[Trelawny]

nice. but i was hoping people.

[VelesHomais]

Only NASA is capable of establishing a manned moon base by 2020, but Obama killed that program. Robots is still pretty cool, we'll be watching almost live feeds from the Moon over the Internet.

[siamu maharaj]

Originally Posted by Trelawny

nice. but i was hoping people.

We're talking Japan here, they don't have any people left to send to the moon.

[bob rulz]

That article about the "5 most likely places for life" is missing Venus and Jupiter - both of these planets have certain points in the atmosphere that are quite similar in pressure and temperature to those in Earth's atmosphere and contain relatively complex chemicals. Venus's atmosphere is exposed to the solar wind, but Jupiter's is protected by a very strong magnetic field.

Originally Posted by Trelawny

Wouldn't cooling down Venus be easier than warming up Mars? Venus just needs to loosen up their atmosphere then they are good.

Venus does present some problems - for example, there is almost a complete lack of water on the planet. Mars already has abundant deposits of water ice locked in the poles.

Venus also has no magnetic field and its day is longer than its year. For it to be habitable we'd almost certainly have to install a series of orbital mirrors to orbit the planet and give a 24-hour day/night cycle so people aren't stuck with 250-day long days!

Of course, Venus is also more similar in size to Earth and therefore it would be easier for Humans to adapt to its gravity (and anyone born on Venus could adapt to Earth's gravity better as well).


Anyway, I am absolutely fanatical about space exploration - I think it's one of the most exciting things about the modern day.

I'm mostly excited for New Horizons (can't wait to see Pluto!) and Dawn (an up-close look at 2 of the 3 largest asteroids). Cassini's discoveries have been fascinating as well - it's done for Saturn what Galileo did for Jupiter. We could be seeing a bigger close-up for Jupiter's moons by the mid-2020s, and hopefully one of Neptune in the 2020s or 2030s (Uranus is lower on the priority list, it could be a long time before we see that).

Of course, most of all, I'm eagerly awaiting in-depth results from the Kepler telescope. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it found several prime life-bearing candidate worlds!

Also, the James Webb Space Telescope is planned for launch in 2014 as an even higher-quality successor to Hubble. Just imagining a higher quality than Hubble blows my mind but the amazing thing is that it's easily achievable.

And finally, Mars is going to see a continual bombardment of interesting probes this decade, and who knows what beyond then? If we're lucky we'll see humans landing on Mars no later than 2050 (I think 2030 is awfully optimistic - 2040 to 2050 is more reasonable). I don't think it's a sure bet though given the costs and enormous logistical challenges involved.

If I'm thinking really far ahead, maybe by the time I die we'll have a probe en route to Alpha Centauri! (It's actually fairly easily achievable in a relatively short time frame if the right technologies are utilized - ion drives for example could propel a probe to 1/2 the speed of light fairly quickly and reach Alpha Centauri in 30 - or fewer - years. Of course, it would take another 4.5 years for transmissions to be received from the probe from there.)

[siamu maharaj]

Isn't Jupiter just made up of gases?

[parcdesprinces]

Yes but perhaps we could build "floating stations" in the high atmosphere of jupiter..

[mic of Orion]

Originally Posted by nezzybaby

Falcon 9 Launch set for Friday:

http://www.spacex.com/updates.php

[mic of Orion]

Newfound Alien World Resembles Those in Our Solar System


This artist's impression shows the transiting exoplanet Corot-9b, the first "normal" exoplanet that can be studied in great detail. This planet has the size of Jupiter and an orbit similar to that of Mercury. It orbits a star similar to the sun located 1500 light-years away from Earth towards the constellation of Serpens (the Snake). Like our own giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, the planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium

A newly discovered exoplanet is the first such alien world to resemble the planets in our own solar system, researchers announced Wednesday.

The planet, dubbed CoRoT-9b, was found to be about the size of Jupiter and situated at an orbit similar to Mercury, which is the innermost planet in our solar system.

While that seems close, it is much farther away than other gas giant planets found around alien stars with the exoplanet detection method used in the new study. This distance in turn means that CoRoT-9b has a more temperate climate than other gas giants — so-called "hot Jupiters" — that can experience radical temperature swings.

he research team also thinks that the planet has an interior composition similar to that of Jupiter and Saturn.

"Like our own giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, the planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium," said team member Tristan Guillot of the Côte d'Azure Observatory in Nice, France. "And it may contain up to 20 Earth masses of other elements, including water and rock at high temperatures and pressures."

The newfound planet was discovered by the French space agency CNES's CoRoT satellite, which detected the telltale light signature of the world transiting — or passing in front of — its host star from the perspective of Earth. Because it transits in front of its parent star for about eight hours, astronomers are able to learn a good deal about the planet.



"Our analysis has provided more information on CoRoT-9b than for other exoplanets of the same type," said Didier Queloz of the Observatory of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and one of the astronomers on the team that discovered the planet.

One thing that makes CoRoT-9b such an important find is that its distance from its parent star is about 10 times larger than any other planet previously discovered with this transiting method.

It also has a low eccentricity orbit, compared to many other exoplanet gas giants discovered so far, which means that its distance from its star doesn't vary wildly like that of other exoplanets. It is that stable distance that allows CoRoT-9b's more temperate climate, researchers said.

The team that reported the discovery of the planet in the March 18 issue of the journal Nature estimates that CoRoT-9b's surface temperature is somewhere between minus 4 and 360 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 and 160 degrees Celsius), with small differences between its day and night sides.

[mic of Orion]

A sliver of the crescent Earth shines in bright blue in this ultraviolet view of the planet taken May 21, 2010 by Japan's Akatsuki probe headed for Venus

[mic of Orion]

color-changing-planets-alien-life[/SIZE]-100513.html"]Color-Changing Planets Could Hold Clues to Alien Life



A new way of comparing the color and intensity changes of light reflected off of Earth's surface to the flickers from exoplanets may help reveal the presence of oceans, continents and – possibly – life on alien worlds.

Researchers came up with a color scheme for how our uniquely life-filled, ocean-soaked planet would appear to observers tens of light-years away.

By comparing the changes in observed hues of an alien planet as it rotates to this distinct Earthly color palette, "we can infer the surface composition of the [exo]planet," said Yuka Fujii, a doctoral student at the University of Tokyo and lead author of a paper published in the May 4 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

The method might let astronomers to soon hunt for soil, snow, seas or even plant life on exoplanets that for decades will otherwise remain too faint to directly visualize.

Little light to work with



For today's most powerful telescopes, even a nearby exoplanet is nothing more than a point source of light teased out from the intense glare of its host star. Should a small, Earth-like planet be discovered around another sun, astronomers will not be able to simply look at it and pick out azure seas or verdant rain forests.

The problem: the dearth of light particles, or photons, reflected by exoplanets that then reach across trillions of miles to our telescopes.

The next generation of proposed second Earth-hunting instruments, such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder or the New Worlds Observer, will similarly struggle to resolve much more than just an exoplanetary flicker. "It is hard to obtain enough photons from distant planets for detection" of surface features such as vegetation, said Fujii.

Yet these rare rays of light carry with them telltale signatures, and astronomers have detected various gases in the atmospheres of giant exoplanets using spectroscopy. The new study suggests that enough light may be reflecting off the ground as well to be observationally valuable.

"We cannot directly identify green, blue and red spots on the surface," Fujii said. "But we can observe the total color average over the visible surface of the planet" and compare it to Earth's known values to take a stab at the world's geology or even biology.

Peering into a planetary mirror


This graphic shows the challenge facing astronomers when it comes to resolving an Earth-like exoplanet at a distance of about 30 light years. The diameter of optical telescope mirrors necessary to collect enough reflected photons from the alien world get prohibitively big fast. A newly described method that observes the color and intensity variations of light from a rotating exoplanet as it presents different ground features to an observer might offer a way for astronomers to gauge the composition of the surface. Credit: Dave Spiegel, Princeton University

Researchers used satellite data to model a baseline for "Earthshine," or the wavelengths of sunlight reflected by major surface types on Earth, including oceans (which covers 71 percent of the planet), vegetation (14 percent), soil, such as deserts (9 percent) and snow and ice (3 percent).

These types reflect different amounts of light at certain wavelengths; snow, for instance, reflects more than 80 percent of light around 0.8 microns, while oceans bounce back photons in the low single digits percentage-wise.

As Earth (or an Earth-like exoplanet) rotates, greater and lesser expanses of these surface types come into view, changing the overall complexion of light reflected out into space in a measurable way.

In this way, astronomers can compare exoplanetary sheens to Earth's to come up with rough estimates for a patchwork of alien seas and savannahs, should they exist.

The varying levels of light representing different land forms are somewhat like the spices and ingredients in a soup, so "it's taking the total light, or the total taste of the soup, and decomposing it into things we know about like soil in the way that a chef knows salt or basil," said Ed Turner, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University and a co-author of the paper.

A work in progress

An artist's impression of the newly discovered planetary system around Gliese 581, including the lightest exoplanet yet discovered, Gliese 581 e. The Gliese 581 planetary system now has four known planets, with masses of about 1.9 (planet e, left in the foreground), 16 (planet b, nearest to the star), 5 (planet c, center), and 7 Earth-masses (planet d, with the bluish colour). Credit: ESO/L. Calcada

For their model, the researchers assumed a twin of Earth at a distance of about 30 light-years – close by cosmic standards – and a space telescope with a two-meter mirror observing for an hour a day over two weeks.

"We assumed a fairly nearby planet, but still had to stack the data for two weeks in order to accumulate a sufficient number of photons," said Fujii.

The model relies on many oversimplifications. Clouds, for example, with their light-scattering and ground-feature-obscuring effects, are not yet part of the equation. Alan Boss, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, also pointed out that paper ignores "the problem of separating the planet's light from the star's light," perhaps the biggest hurdle in exoplanetary investigation.

Spying blue skies and the red edge


But even in its preliminary form, the color-detection method shows much promise and Turner said he was "surprised at how well it worked."

The technique could detect both an atmosphere and an ocean simultaneously based on Rayleigh scattering, the light-scattering effect that makes our sky and oceans appear blue and that would similarly tint the light from Earth-like exoplanets.

Color comparisons to Earth could also reveal the so-called red edge.

Plants on Earth have evolved to reflect sunlight in the infrared range that is not energetic enough for photosynthesis but would otherwise heat the plant up; when viewed in infrared, plain green plants are a brilliant bright red, said Turner. This signature would jump out in the stray bits of precious light collected from an exoplanet, he added.

Many astronomers think the red edge is the best shot at detecting alien life (assuming these plants are colored like earthly ones).

"Looking for evidence of the red edge is an excellent means for buttressing the case that an exo-Earth might not only be habitable, but inhabited," said Boss.

Webster Cash, an astronomy professor at the University of Colorado, said the color variation technique is "absolutely going to be useful" in the years ahead.

He pointed out that it could be paired down the road with other recognized ways to sniff out so-called biomarkers of extraterrestrial life, such as the detection of oxygen and other key gases in Earth-like exoplanetary atmospheres via spectroscopy.

For now, the Kepler spacecraft, in its ongoing hunt for habitable planets around 100,000 stars, will not be able to see the red edge or detect surface features because the instrument "has no color information – all photons are the same for Kepler," Boss said.

Though much refinement is needed for the color-based method, Turner said it could be adapted for use on future terrestrial planet finding satellites that NASA and ESA are exploring.

"I think we're really on the threshold of being able to study earthlike planets around other stars," Turner said.

And as with horseshoes and hand grenades, when it comes to scanning an exoplanet's light for signs of life, closeness counts.

"If we happen to find an Earth-like planet much closer than 30 light-years, say eight, this would be a lot easier,".

[Drunkill]

Originally Posted by siamu maharaj

Isn't Jupiter just made up of gases?

Yes, but the closer to the core the pressure turns the gasses into liquids. So the gas giants are made up of layers, perhaps solid cores at the very centre then various layers of less dense liquids then gases making up most of the atmosphere.

[chuck_nbc]

Mars is fatally flawed.. No one is going to live on it.

[Geborgenheit]

Frankly speaking big space exploration is in deep stagnation, isn't it ?

[chuck_nbc]

Very much so.