The Big Space Exploration Thread

[Ulpia-Serdica]

Reull Vallis, the river-like structure in these images, is believed to have formed when running water flowed in the distant martian past, cutting a steep-sided channel through the Promethei Terra Highlands before running on towards the floor of the vast Hellas basin.

This sinuous structure, which stretches for almost 1500 km across the martian landscape, is flanked by numerous tributaries, one of which can be clearly seen cutting in to the main valley towards the upper (north) side.

[trekie]

[COLOR="Blue"]Nearby star is almost as old as the Universe[/COLOR]

Precise measurement reveals perhaps the most ancient known star.
Ron Cowen
10 January 2013

Long Beach, California




Astronomers have discovered a Methuselah of stars — a denizen of the Solar System's neighbourhood that is at least 13.2 billion years old and formed shortly after the Big Bang.

“We believe this star is the oldest known in the Universe with a well determined age,” says Howard Bond, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who announced the finding on 10 January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California1.

The venerable star, dubbed HD 140283, lies at a comparatively short distance of 190 light years from the Solar System and has been studied by astronomers for more than a century. Researchers have long known that the object consists almost entirely of hydrogen and helium — a hallmark of having formed early in the history of the Universe, before successive generations of stars had a chance to forge heavier elements. But no one knew exactly how old it was.
Old timer

Determining the star’s age required several steps. First, Bond and his team made a new and more accurate determination of the star’s distance from the Solar System, using 11 sets of observations recorded between 2003 and 2011 using the Hubble Space Telescope’s Fine Guidance Sensors, which measure the position of target stars relative to reference stars. The astronomers also measured the brightness of the star as it appears in the sky, and were then able to calculate its intrinsic luminosity.

The team then exploited the fact that HD 140283 is in a phase of its life cycle in which it is exhausting the hydrogen at its core. In this phase, the star's slowly dimming luminosity is a highly sensitive indicator of its age, says Bond. His team calculates that the star is 13.9 billion years old, give or take 700 million years. Taking into account that experimental error, the age does not conflict with the age of the Universe, 13.77 billion years.

The star's age is therefore at least 13.2 billion years — which was the estimated age of another known Methuselah2 — and possibly older. Its age is known with considerably better confidence than that of the previous Methuselah, says Bond.
Early start

The discovery places constraints on early star formation, says Volker Bromm, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin. The very first generation of stars coalesced from primordial gas, which did not contain appreciable amounts of elements heavier than helium, he notes. That means that as old as HD 140283 is, its chemical composition — which includes a low but non-zero abundance of heavy elements — shows that the star must have formed after the first stellar generation.

Conditions for making the second generation of stars, then, “must have been in place very early”, says Bromm. The very first stars are usually thought to have coalesced a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, he notes. Massive and short lived, they died after only a few million years — exploding in supernovae that heated surrounding gas and seeded it with heavier elements.

But before the second generation of stars could form, that gas had to cool down. The early age of the second-generation star HD 140283 hints that the cooling time, or delay, between the first and second generations might have been extremely short, perhaps only a few tens of million years, says Bromm.

[trekie]

What Will First Photos of Black Holes Look Like?





A giant black hole is thought to lurk at the center of the Milky Way, but it has never been directly seen. Now astronomers have predicted what the first pictures of this black hole will look like when taken with technology soon to be available.

In particular, researchers have found that pictures of a black hole ― or, more precisely, the boundaries around them ― will take a crescent form, rather than the blobby shape that is often predicted.

By modeling what these pictures will look like, scientists say they are preparing to interpret the photos that will become available from telescopes currently under construction.

"No one has been able to image a black hole," said University of California, Berkeley student Ayman Bin Kamruddin, who presented a poster on the research last week in Long Beach, Calif., at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society. "So far it's been impossible because they're too small in the sky. Right now we're just getting some details about the structure, but we don't have an image yet."

Black holes themselves are invisible, of course, as not even light can escape their gravitational clutches. However, the boundary of a black hole — the point of no return called the event horizon — should be visible from the radiation emitted by matter falling into the black hole.

"A black hole's immediate surroundings have a lot of really interesting physics going on, and they emit light," Kamruddin said. "Technically speaking, we aren't exactly seeing the black hole, but we are effectively resolving the event horizon."

A new project called the Event Horizon Telescope combines the resolving power of numerous antennas from a worldwide network of radio telescopes to sight objects that otherwise would be too tiny to make out.

"The Event Horizon Telescope is the first to resolve spatial scales comparable to the size of the event horizon of a black hole," said Kamruddin's collaborator, University of California, Berkeley astronomer Jason Dexter. "I don't think it's crazy to think we might get an image in the next five years."

The Event Horizon Telescope already has been gathering some preliminary measurements of the object called Sagittarius A* (pronounced "Sagittarius A-star") at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Kamruddin and Dexter have matched this data to various physical models and found that they best fit images that are crescent-shaped, rather than the blob shapes called "asymmetric Gaussians" that had been previously used in models.



The crescent shape emerges from the flat doughnut, called an accretion disk, formed by matter orbiting a black hole on its way to falling in. As gas spins around the black hole, one side of the disk comes toward view on Earth, and its light becomes brighter because of a process called Doppler beaming. The other side, representing receding gas, gets dimmer because of this effect.

In the center of the crescent is a dark circle called the black hole shadow, which represents the black hole itself — an incredibly dense object where space-time is extremely twisted.

"There's really extreme bending of light happening because of general relativity and the extremely strong gravitational field," Kamruddin said.

Knowing that the crescent model best fits the data allows the researchers to discriminate between different models describing the physics around the black hole. Ultimately, the astronomers hope to use the first photos of Sagittarius A* to accurately weigh the behemoth at the center of the Milky Way.

"Just getting an image itself will be mind-blowing," Kamruddin said. "It will provide direct confirmation of the event horizon, which has been predicted, but no one's ever actually seen it. Seeing what it is like will rule out certain physics."

[trekie]

A Martian Dream: Here's What the Red Planet Would Look Like With Earth-Like Oceans and Life



Our planetary neighbor is a dusty, barren land. Here, it's re-imagined as a hospitable, wet globe, a bit like our own home.



Before





Gill made two different projections. The first was of Mars' eastern hemisphere:


And After



The second, playing with a slightly different palette, was of Mars's western hemisphere. You can see Olympus Mons on the horizon, and the Valles Marineris canyons near the image's center.





What if instead of dust and rocks, our planetary neighbor Mars were a bit more lush? What if it had oceans, an Earth-like atmosphere, and green life coating its land? These are the questions Kevin Gill, a software engineer living in New Hampshire, sought to answer with his project, A Living Mars.

Gill modeled the Mars terrain in an open-source learning program of his own creation, jDem846, and then set a sea level beneath which everything appeared flat and blue. Then, he brought that model into GIMP, where he painted features into the land based on NASA's Blue Marble: Next Generation imagery. He decided -- not all too scientifically, he admits -- which places seemed like they would be verdant, and which would be deserts. "For example," he explains, "I didn't see much green taking hold within the area of Olympus Mons and the surrounding volcanoes, both due to the volcanic activity and the proximity to the equator (thus a more tropical climate). For these desert-like areas I mostly used textures taken from the Sahara in Africa and some of Australia. Likewise, as the terrain gets higher or lower in latitude I added darker flora along with tundra and glacial ice. These northern and southern areas textures are largely taken from around northern Russia. Tropical and subtropical greens were based on the rainforests of South America and Africa."

Lastly, he brought the image back into jDem846 where he rendered it as a sphere and added clouds and tweaked the lighting. "This wasn't intended as an exhaustive scientific scenario," he writes, "as I'm sure (and expect) some of my assumptions will prove incorrect. I'm hoping at least to trigger the imagination, so please enjoy!"


Looks like home, maybe a bit, just with a foreign geography. But more than that, what the images convey is a sense of Earth's uniqueness -- a reminder that as far as we have searched, we've yet to see anything that looks even vaguely like our planet, the only place we know of where life has taken hold.

[trekie]

[trekie]

Astronomers discover two asteroid belts around Vega







The data are consistent with the star having an inner warm belt and outer cool belt separated by a gap.
By Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. —


Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the star Vega, the second-brightest star in northern night skies. The scientists used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory, in which NASA plays an important role.

The discovery of an asteroid belt-like band of debris around Vega makes the star similar to another observed star called Fomalhaut. The data are consistent with both stars having inner warm belts and outer cool belts separated by a gap. This architecture is similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our solar system.

What is maintaining the gap between the warm and cool belts around Vega and Fomalhaut? The results strongly suggest that the answer is multiple planets. Our solar system’s asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, is maintained by the gravity of the terrestrial planets and the giant planets, and the outer Kuiper belt is sculpted by the giant planets.

“Our findings echo recent results showing multiple-planet systems are common beyond our Sun,” said Kate Su from the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Vega and Fomalhaut are similar in other ways. Both are about twice the mass of our Sun and burn a hotter, bluer color in visible light. Both stars are relatively nearby at about 25 light-years away. The stars are thought to be around 400 million years old, but Vega could be closer to its 600 millionth birthday. Fomalhaut has a single candidate planet orbiting it, Fomalhaut b, which orbits at the inner edge of its cometary belt.

The Herschel and Spitzer telescopes detected infrared light emitted by warm and cold dust in discrete bands around Vega and Fomalhaut, discovering the new asteroid belt around Vega and confirming the existence of the other belts around both stars. Comets and the collisions of rocky chunks replenish the dust in these bands. The inner belts in these systems cannot be seen in visible light because the glare of their stars outshines them.

Both the inner and outer belts contain far more material than our asteroid and Kuiper belts. The reason is twofold: The star systems are far younger than ours, which has had hundreds of millions more years to clean house, and the systems likely formed from an initially more massive cloud of gas and dust than our solar system.

The gap between the inner and outer debris belts for Vega and Fomalhaut also proportionally corresponds to the distance between our Sun’s asteroid and Kuiper belts. This distance works out to a ratio of about 1:10 with the outer belt 10 times farther away from its host star than the inner belt. As for the large gap between the two belts, it is likely there is several undetected planets, Jupiter-sized or smaller, creating a dust-free zone between the two belts. A good comparison star system is HR 8799, which has four known planets that sweep up the space between two similar disks of debris.

“Overall, the large gap between the warm and the cold belts is a signpost that points to multiple planets likely orbiting around Vega and Fomalhaut,” said Su.

If unseen planets do in fact orbit Vega and Fomalhaut, these bodies likely will not stay hidden.

“Upcoming new facilities such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope should be able to find the planets,” said Karl Stapelfeldt of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

[gramercy]

Originally Posted by trekie

ok, tell me more!

was this made by snapshots taken over several years? could we make movies like this using our rotation around the galactic core or would that take millions of years...?

[trekie]

OK this is a brilliant discovery,

Giant Mars Crater Shows Evidence of Ancient Lake



This view of layered rocks on the floor of McLaughlin Crater shows sedimentary rocks that contain spectroscopic evidence for minerals formed through interaction with water. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recorded the image. Image released Jan. 20, 2013.
CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona


New photos of a huge crater on Mars suggest water may lurk in crevices under the planet's surface, hinting that life might have once lived there, and raising the possibility that it may live there still, researchers say.

Future research looking into the chances of life on Mars could shed light on the origins of life on Earth, scientists added.

The discovery came from a study of images by NASA's powerful Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that revealed new evidence of a wet underground environment on the Red Planet. The images focused on the giant McLaughlin Crater, which is about 57 miles (92 kilometers) wide and so deep that underground water appears to have flowed into the crater at some point in the distant past.




Today, the crater is bone-dry but harbors clay minerals and other evidence that liquid water filled the area in the ancient past.

"Taken together, the observations in McLaughlin Crater provide the best evidence for carbonate forming within a lake environment instead of being washed into a crater from outside," study lead author Joseph Michalski, of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., and London's Natural History Museum, said in a statement.



A wet Mars underground



Space agencies have deployed many missions to Mars over the decades to explore how habitable its surface may have been or is today. However, the Martian surface has been extremely cold, arid and chemically hostile to life as we know it for most of the history of Mars.

Instead of scanning the surface of Mars for life, scientists have suggested the most viable habitat for ancient simple life may have been in Martian water hidden underground.

On Earth, microbes up to 3 miles (5 km) or more underground make up perhaps half of all of the planet's living matter. Most of these organisms represent some of the most primitive kinds of microbes known, hinting that life may actually have started underground, or at least survived there during a series of devastating cosmic impacts known as the Late Heavy Bombardment that Earth and the rest of the inner solar system endured about 4.1 billion to 3.8 billion years ago.

Since Mars has less gravity — a surface gravity of a little more than one-third Earth's — its crust is less dense and more porous than that of our planet, which means that more water can leak underground, researchers said. Wherever there is liquid water on Earth, there is virtually always life, and microbes underground on Mars could be sustained by energy sources and chemical reactions similar to those that support deep-dwelling organisms on Earth.

"The deep crust has always been the most habitable place on Mars, and would be a wise place to search for evidence for organic processes in the future,"



Subterranean Mars


This color image draped onto digital topography shows McLaughlin Crater in a 3D perspective, looking toward the east. Light-toned deposits on the crater floor contain alteration minerals that are overlayed by debris flows from Keren Crater, present on the south rim. McLaughin Crater once contained a lake that was likely fed by groundwater.
CREDIT: High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC)/Mars Express/Freie Universität Berlin



While researchers currently have no way to drill deep underground on the Red Planet, they can nevertheless spot hints of what subterranean Mars is like by analyzing deep rocks exhumed by erosion, asteroid impacts or materials generated by underground fluids that have welled up to the surface.

Such upwelling would first occur in deep basins like McLaughlin Crater — as the lowest points on the surface, they would be where underground water reserves would most likely get exposed.

Scientists focused on McLaughlin Crater because it is one of the deepest craters on Mars. McLaughlin is about 1.3 miles (2.2 km) deep and is located in Mars' northern hemisphere.

The mineral composition of the floor of McLaughlin Crater suggests there was a lake made of upwelled groundwater there. Channels seen on the crater's eastern wall about 1,650 feet (500 meters) above its floor also hint at the former presence of a lake surface.

Michalski was actually originally trying to disprove the idea that groundwater breached the surface in many locations on Mars.

"Lo and behold, there was strong evidence for that process in this crater," he said. "Science is special because we are allowed to change our minds."

The researchers estimate that a lake existed at McLaughlin Crater for an unknown duration between 3.7 billion and 4 billion years ago. "That makes the deposits as old as or older than the oldest rocks known to exist on Earth," Michalski said.

Mounds seen on the crater floor may have come from landslides or subsequent meteor impacts. These are important because they may have rapidly buried crater floor sediments.

"That is really cool because rapid burial is the scenario that is most advantageous for preservation of organic material, if any was present at that time," Michalski said.

Since life on Earth may have begun underground, learning more about any underground life that might have lived — or may still live — on Mars could shed light on the origins of life on Earth, researchers said.

"We should give serious consideration to exploring rocks representing subsurface environments in future missions," Michalski said. "That doesn't mean drilling, but instead exploring rocks formed from upwelling groundwater, or rocks naturally exhumed from the subsurface by meteor impact."

Michalski noted that some people may ask, "'Why do I hear about the detection of water or possibility of life on Mars all the time?' The answer is because Mars is habitable in more ways than we ever realized for many years, and we are finding water in many forms and environments on Mars — many more than we predicted for a long time."

The ingredients for life the researchers describe, "including energy sources, would have been more available early in Mars' history, but it doesn't take too much imagination to picture a scenario in which the subsurface is habitable today," Michalski said. He cautioned, however, "that is much different from saying that life is there today."

[AnOldBlackMarble]

Originally Posted by gramercy

ok, tell me more!

was this made by snapshots taken over several years? could we make movies like this using our rotation around the galactic core or would that take millions of years...?

No way was this made by angular progression, at least I don't think it is possible. Even the width of our solar system is insignificant to the distances where this nebula is. This has to be Photoshop. Split the image into a bunch of layers and then gradually separate them from left to right, and with a few other perspective adjustments it should do the trick.

[trekie]

Originally Posted by gramercy

ok, tell me more!

was this made by snapshots taken over several years? could we make movies like this using our rotation around the galactic core or would that take millions of years...?

its just phtoshop image manipulation to give 3d effect, its a great image none the less.

Original image were taken from the Hubble telescope, but our solar system is only 0.3 light years across, this includes the Oort Cloud which extends to 50 000 AUs, This Nebula and star forming region is about 15 light years across, or 50 times the size of our own entire solar system.

U can generate a 3d image based on Hubble telescope, using cleaver piece of CGI animation you can generate 3D image of the entire galaxy all in super high definition (50 mega pixels or higher resolution) but problem is that creating a details CGI model (based on Hubble Telescope images) would take a long time, and a large team of computer animators. We are talking 5 year effort by a team of 50 animators.

Resources at this point out of reach of most universities and educational and scientific institutions.

Our own solar system orbits around the milky way galaxy at rate of 220 million years.

[gramercy]

but then there are some 'videos' made by comprising frames of the same object taken over time, like that pulsar wind video

are there other 'videos' like that out there? those are really cool, especially when you consider scale of the objects

i also saw that video about the galactic center with the stars orbiting the black hole

---

is there a good map of the milky way galaxy / our neighborhood?

[PaulFCB]

Earth was hit by gamma ray burst from space in eighth century, say scientists

A massive cosmic explosion in deep space sent out a pulse of high-energy radiation that hit the Earth between the years 774AD and 775AD when the emperor Charlemagne ruled much of Western Europe, scientists have found.

The radiation pulse was probably the most intense cosmic event to have affected the Earth in the past 3,000 years and it left an indelible imprint in ancient cedar trees dating to that time, they said.

Last year, scientists discovered that tree rings from Japanese cedars had much higher levels of radioactive carbon 14 than normal for the years 774AD-775AD, suggesting that something dramatic must have happened in the global atmosphere to trigger the rise of radioactive carbon.

One suggestion was an intense solar flare from the Sun, but this was soon discounted as implausible. Now Professor Ralph Neuhauser of the University of Jena in Germany has suggested that the cosmic radiation came from a massive collision either between two black holes or two massive stars located between 3,000 and 12,000 light years away, within our own Milky Way galaxy

Link

[gramercy]

Originally Posted by gramercy

are there other 'videos' like that out there? those are really cool, especially when you consider scale of the objects

f.eks.:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nANww6ej_sI

[Ulpia-Serdica]

NASA joins ESA dark stuff hunt



NASA has signed on for a European Space Agency project to send a telescope to the L2 earth-sun Lagrange point in 2020, to investigate dark matter and dark energy.

L2 is a spot where the gravity of sun and Earth will keep the spacecraft in a stable orbit in Earth’s shadow behind the Earth (relative to the Sun). Once stationed at L2, the Euclid mission plans to map the position and shape of as many as two billion galaxies across one-third of the sky.

NASA has agreed to provide 20 infrared detectors – 16 in service and four spares – for one of Euclid’s instruments. The agency has also nominated 40 new members to the Euclid Consortium, in addition to the 14 US scientists now working on the mission.

The agreement formalises a Memorandum of Understanding announced in mid-2012.

Euclid will carry a 1.2 meter optical telescope, and three imaging and spectroscopic instruments working in the visible and near-infrared wavelengths.

“These instruments will explore the expansion history of the Universe and the evolution of cosmic structures with look back time by measuring shapes and red*shifts of galaxies as well as the distribution of clusters of galaxies as function of redshift over a very large fraction of the sky,” the project’s Website states.

Given that NASA has also suggested stationing a manned craft at L2 to control a robotic moon mission, The Register hopes the Lagrange point doesn't become too crowded.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01...lid_agreement/

[trekie]

Asteroid Mining Could Pave Way for Interstellar Flight




Exploiting the many resources of our solar system may enable humanity to venture beyond its confines for the first time, and blaze a trail to other stars.

Building a spaceship that can travel to other star systems on human timescales — over the course of mere decades — will be a challenging and expensive proposition, with costs likely running into the hundreds of billions of dollars. But the economic and technological hurdles won't be so steep if our species has begun tapping the vast riches locked up in asteroids and other bodies beyond Earth orbit, advocates say.

"A solar-system-wide economy could kickstart research and development of the technologies that will allow us to engage in interstellar flight," said Richard Obousy, president of Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit group devoted to pursuing interstellar spaceflight.


Light-years away



Interstellar flight is so daunting because of the vast distances separating stars. The extrasolar system closest to us, for example, is the three-star Alpha Centauri, which lies about 4.3 light-years away, or more than 25 trillion miles (40 trillion kilometers).

The farthest-flung spacecraft ever launched from Earth is NASA's Voyager 1 probe, which has covered about 11.3 billion miles (18.2 billion km) since blasting off in 1977. But it would take Voyager 1 roughly 70,000 more years to reach Alpha Centauri, and its newly discovered Earth-size planet, if the probe were headed toward that particular system (which it isn't).

So traditional chemical-propulsion technology, such as that used by Voyager 1 and other spacecraft plying the solar system today, is just not going to cut it for interstellar flight.

"We need to start looking at alternatives if we're ever going to bring into reality some of the stuff that we've been dreaming about and that makes up a staple of science fiction — how to explore these new worlds beyond the solar system," Obousy told SPACE.com.

Possible alternatives include harnessing the power of nuclear fusion or matter-antimatter reactions. Or a probe could cruise through space like a boat through the ocean, propelled by super-focused light beamed from the environs of Earth onto a gigantic sail.

Such approaches could accelerate a spacecraft to some appreciable fraction of the speed of light. But engineers may even be able to achieve faster-than-light travel by manipulating the fabric of space-time, creating a long-sought "warp drive." [Star Trek's Warp Drive: Are We There Yet? (Video)]

Researchers had thought that such a warp drive would require a power source with the minimum mass-energy of the planet Jupiter. But recent calculations by Harold "Sonny" White, of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, suggest that some design tweaks could bring that figure down to the mass-energy of a spacecraft like Voyager 1, which weighed 1,800 pounds (815 kilograms) at launch.

"I might have moved this idea from impractical to plausible," White, who is also an Icarus Interstellar team member, told SPACE.com. He and his colleagues are now building a small tabletop experiment as a first-step "existence proof" of the idea.



A solar system economy





None of these advanced propulsion technologies are close to flight ready, so any effort to build an interstellar spacecraft will require a lot of research and development work.

The costs will thus be quite high. While stressing the difficulty of estimating potential price tags at this early stage, Obousy ventured that an unmanned interstellar probe might cost several times more than the $100 billion International Space Station. And a crewed vehicle could top $1 trillion.

Those numbers might be off-putting to many governments, especially in these tough fiscal times. But tapping the riches of the solar system could help change things, Obousy said.

Asteroid mining is a good example. Scientists have estimated that a single near-Earth asteroid, the 1.5-mile-wide (2.5 km) Amun 3554, contains $20 trillion worth of platinum and other metals.

Such figures have enticed two separate companies, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, Inc., to get into the asteroid-mining business within the last nine months. Both firms plan to extract from asteroids not only metals but also water, which can be split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen — the chief components of rocket fuel.



If all goes according to plan, the companies' work could lead to the establishment of an in-space manufacturing industry that builds habitats, satellites and other spacecraft away from our planet. Asteroid mining could also help set up off-Earth "gas stations" that allow traditionally fueled craft to top up their tanks cheaply and efficiently.

These developments would help humanity extend its reach throughout the solar system, a necessary step along the path to interstellar flight, experts say.

"I think before we ever really undertake sending something to another star, we will probably have to be masters of our own solar system," Les Johnson, deputy manager of the Advanced Concepts Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. (and also an accomplished science-fiction writer), told SPACE.com.

Obousy voiced similar sentiments, pointing out the economic importance of such a big footprint.

"If we can become a civilization that has vast resources at its disposal — orders of magnitude more than we have today, as a product of space exploration, space mining and the solar-system-wide economy — then we may reach a stage where an interstellar mission doesn't actually cost us that much in the bigger scheme of the gross domestic product of the solar system," he said.



Flying to another star by 2100




Icarus Interstellar aims to help humanity achieve interstellar flight by the year 2100. Obousy said he believes that this can indeed happen, despite the economic and technological hurdles that must be overcome.

One reason for optimism is the ongoing exoplanet revolution, which has shown that our Milky Way galaxy is teeming with planets. Researchers have confirmed more than 800 worlds beyond our solar system, and scientists estimate that billions more are out there.

Astronomers have confirmed a planet in the Alpha Centauri system and detected five potential worlds circling the star Tau Ceti, just 11.9 light-years away. That includes two that might be in the star's habitable zone, the range of distances from a star in which liquid water could exist on the world's surface.

The discovery of the first true "alien Earth," a planet the size of our own in its star's habitable zone, could help build a groundswell of public support for interstellar spaceflight, Obousy said. Our species might want to examine such a world up close for any signs of life. The detection of electronic signals from an intelligent alien civilization could have a similar galvanizing effect.

Overall, Obousy thinks humanity has a good shot of launching its first interstellar mission by the end of the century. As an example of our species' potential, he points to how quickly air travel became routine after the Wright brothers' ramshackle first flight in 1903.

"I think a lot of people tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in the short term, in the next five to 10 years," he said. "But they also vastly underestimate what we can accomplish in the long term, decades or a century from now."

brilliant story guys, read it plz....

[EdgarsSTAR]

Pictures looks great!!

[Сталин]

Awesome, I just hope the peeps at the life extension thread find something for us all to live past 2520 to see asteroid mining start!

[ramanujann]

Astronomers have confirmed a planet in the Alpha Centauri system and detected five potential worlds circling the star Tau Ceti, just 11.9 light-years away. That includes two that might be in the star's habitable zone, the range of distances from a star in which liquid water could exist on the world's surface.

Even though 12 light-years is a tiny distance in astronomy, for humans it's huge. Even if hypothetically we could travel nearly at a speed of light.
But the problem is in communication. The two-way communication in this case would take 24 years... simply to learn from them that they have arrived and to congratulate them, it would take 24 years...

For more distant travel the communication would be completely useless. We simply won't know anything about their fate. Even if the next generations of Earthians someday receive their message it will be useless because it will loose it's validity.

[gramercy]

we don't need humans to go out there

what we need, is (microscopic, nano) robots capable of self-replicating in space (containing both the machinery and the programming to do so) and also capable of modest interstellar flight (say 10% of the speed of light)

if we had that now, we could send 1 such robot into the asteroid belt, it would mine it, create 2^n replicants of itself, which would then go out into interstellar space in every direction and after ~165 years we would have a "live" feed of data coming in from ~40 star systems (systems within 15 light years)

given the nature of these theoretical robots, they would constantly refurbish themselves in their target systems, so after about a million years, we would have a "live" feed of data covering the entire milky way galaxy


think we are being watched?

[Atmosphere]

Originally Posted by ramanujann

Even though 12 light-years is a tiny distance in astronomy, for humans it's huge. Even if hypothetically we could travel nearly at a speed of light.
But the problem is in communication. The two-way communication in this case would take 24 years... simply to learn from them that they have arrived and to congratulate them, it would take 24 years...

For more distant travel the communication would be completely useless. We simply won't know anything about their fate. Even if the next generations of Earthians someday receive their message it will be useless because it will loose it's validity.

Isn't quantum entanglement a way for instant communication? Tests with quantum entanglement have already shown that's it's possible to instant manipulate a particle which is hundred of kilometers away. It doesn't break the speed-of-light law as there are no travelling particles. If the theory is correct, you should be able to have instant communication even if you're at the other end of the universe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement