Kepler Probe Begins To Find Exoplanets In Habitable Zone (And other cool cosmology stuff)

[bornagainathiest]

That is exactly why Asimov suggested colonizing the moon first. Get there then use it to build the bigger ships as it is already further out of the gravity well.

 

Amen to that!

 

We even know where to build the first moonbase.

Here...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shackleton_(crater)

 

So...Why aren't we funding this?

 

BAA.

[stryper]

That is exactly why Asimov suggested colonizing the moon first. Get there then use it to build the bigger ships as it is already further out of the gravity well.

 

Amen to that!

 

We even know where to build the first moonbase.

Here...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shackleton_(crater)

 

So...Why aren't we funding this?

 

BAA.

 

Because Newt won't win.

 

Romney would fire the prick. And probably dismantle NASA.

 

And despite Obama's state love of NASA he, like nearly every president before him, has become a slave to the bureaucracy, and simply won't or can't push the money through. The White House budget office makes the budget. They are not elected officials. They aren't even confirmed by congress. Then the house rejects it and proposes their own, and a grand and useless compromise happens, or not as is the case mostly.

[stryper]

Addendum to the previous.

 

What if we looked at an NPR funding model for NASA?

 

I was thinking that Neil deGrasse Tyson is on a campaign to get NASA funding back. But what if you took the millions of elementary, middle and high school kids and got them involved with raising money for moon base, mars mission, whatever. NASA would then be tasked with being held accountable to the children of the US.

 

However, taking a cue from the dolphin free tuna guys in the 1980's. You get the kids involved, the parent will respond. If the parents start demanding it Congress will listen.

 

Have like a spring and fall fund raiser for space. Have bake sales and shit. Hell steal christian missionary tactics or fundraising. Call up bill gates and offer to name the vessel to his choosing. Fuck do it like 3comm park.

 

The money is out there. It just needs a different tack to get it.

[mcdaddy]

That is exactly why Asimov suggested colonizing the moon first. Get there then use it to build the bigger ships as it is already further out of the gravity well.

 

The moon doesn't have any resources to build with?

[Ouroboros]

That is exactly why Asimov suggested colonizing the moon first. Get there then use it to build the bigger ships as it is already further out of the gravity well.

 

The moon doesn't have any resources to build with?

There's a lot of minerals and material on the Moon. They even found some water (probably not much though and hard to extract). I don't know about oxygen, that could be a problem.

 

--edit--

 

Sorry, Checked some charts. Yes, oxygen is there too, bound to other materials. The day we can use cyborg technology and replaced heart/lungs and other body parts with artificial, we might solve some of these problems by changing completely how an astronauts body functions, but that's 50-100 years from now, and not possible as long as we fight petty wars over whose religious or ideological dick is the largest.

[stryper]

.........functions, but that's 50-100 years from now, and not possible as long as we fight petty wars over whose religious or ideological dick is the largest.

 

ah the religious circle jerk.

[stryper]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/21/nasa_swift_supernova_findings/

 

 

No exactly Kepler, but intersting. I think it would be cool if kepler picked up a Supernova.

[REBOOT]

I was thinking that the big, rotating ships would be used for interstellar travel, which would take many years. If you want to get to Mars without suffering the ill effects of space, it's probably cheaper to make a ship that can accelerate quickly and get you there faster, say in less than a month, and skip the need for rotation. The technology to do this will probably be around in less than a century, while the ability to build big-ass rotating ships is probably much, much further out. I'm not sure what the best method of getting people to the outer solar system is, though; it might be large, rotating ships that cycle between Earth and the destination planets on extremely eccentric orbits that rendevous with faster, smaller craft near the start and end points, but that's just me shooting from the hip.

 

At this point in time, if you absolutely needed to escape planet earth due to an impending disaster (unstable sun), the only solution would be many big ass rotating ships as depicted by Kubrick's '2001 a space odyssey'. (Unless someone has developped artificial gravity)

 

We'd build the things within 20 years, the cost in lives would be tremendous but the survival of the many would justify the losses. We'd spare no expenses, the concept of expense in lives, material, and effort would have no meaning anyways.

 

Imagine 100 of these monsters rolling out of our solar system. Where would we be heading ? Anywhere we've been able to locate planets within habitable zones and since we're in a hurry we'll use the Kepler observations... (5%)

http://www.foxnews.c...lky-way-galaxy/

 

Hopefully we won't be forced out before we get ITER or other fusion strategies online. Using fusion energy to power up and propulse yourself out is the best way to go.

 

Noah's ark would be nothing compared to this venture. But then again is the Noah's ark story really about a flood ? On a cosmic scale the passage of our sun to red giant status is much more significant... we've got 5 billion years to build the ark, really no choice in the matter.

 

Would make an awesome movie !!

[bornagainathiest]

http://www.nasa.gov/...12/12-33AR.html

 

This is excellent news.

 

It takes three transits for Kepler to positively identify a planet moving across the face of a star. If it were looking at our solar system from many light-years away it would need 3+ years to see the Earth transit (move across) the face of the Sun. Kepler's been at work since '09, so it's coming up to to that magic three year period of uninterrupted observations. This means that any Earth 'twins' (other planets orbiting their stars in about 365 days) in it's field of view will soon begin to show up in the data.

 

Extending it's observing run to 2016 will enable it to snag planets moving around their stars in even wider orbits. This may not sound like a big deal, but the point to remember is that some stars have wider Habitable Zones around them than our Sun does. Therefore, any planets orbiting in these zones will take longer than Earth's 365 days to complete one orbit. For instance, Mar's orbital period (year) is 686.971 days, so to see it transit the Sun, Kepler would need to be watching for at least 2,062 days or 5.64 years. That period is now within it's mission window.

 

Thanks to it's mission extension it may also be possible for Kepler to find more than one planet orbiting inside a star's habitable zone. Venus is just inside the Sun's hab zone, making it too hot for any kind of life that we know of. Mars is just on the outer edge of the zone, but it's too small and has too little gravity to hold onto a dense enough atmosphere too keep it above a mean temperature of -63 degrees celsius.

 

However, there's nothing to say that another star can't have one, two or even three planets sitting comfortably in it's habitable zone. We now have the capability to find these suckers!

 

So, watch this space!

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.

[Legion]

BAA! Yeah!

 

Man thanks.

[bornagainathiest]

BAA! Yeah!

 

Man thanks.

 

No problem friend!

 

Now here's a mind-blowing thought for you to blow your mind with.

 

Ours may well be the very last generation to be total ignorance of the possibility of alien life.

Ours may well be the very first generation to know for certain that alien life does exist.

Ours may also be the very first to know for certain that intelligent alien life exists.

 

As such, we who are alive today are very, VERY privileged indeed.

 

Past generations have never had the opportunities for discovery that we now have.

Future generations will never have the same opportunity to discover what we will may well discover in the next few years.

 

Just as I am a child of the Space Age (born after Yuri Gagarin blasted off from Baikonur in Russia), so future generations will be born and grow up accepting alien life as just another part of history - not something new and amazing.

 

Savor it, Legion! The very best period of human history to live in is - RIGHT NOW!!!

 

BAA.

[stryper]

[Tabula Rasa]

because if it were, then there would be others visiting us already and proving that it can be done.

 

But again, I hope I'm wrong.

 

Not necessarily, the Universe is a big place, maybe they just haven't found us yet. When we have first contact, I want to be the first to fuck one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7OxJhtDlXw

 

What's going to get interesting, is if any species we encounter, have similar or different reproductive/sexual organs to humans. What'll also be interesting is in regard to sexual orientation and gender. How do you classify species that might have more than two genders? Or no gender at all?

If some humans do decide to try sex with alien species, they'll have to be very open minded.

[bornagainathiest]

3 Sky Events for 2013.

 

One of the aspects of Astronomical exploration that pleases me is the predictable nature of it's events.

 

Eclipses, meteor showers, planetary conjuctions and alignments are many other events can be accurately forecast. Other stuff like aurorae (the Nothern/Southern lights) are less predictable, but our understanding of these things is coming on in leaps and bounds. Solid, precise predicability can also be found in the behavior of extra-solar planets and binary stars. Astronomers know where to point their telescopes and when to do so, to see and discover more fascinating stuff.

 

This same, "where-and-when" approach is used by the scientists responsible for on-going space missions too. They've exactly calculated and controlled when certain satellites have achieved their goals and also how these missions can be usefully extended. They've also ensured that certain space probes reach their designated targets at set times and dates.

 

Therefore, it gives me great pleasure to preview some events for next year.

 

The Gaia Mission.

http://www.esa.int/export/esaSC/120377_index_0_m.html

 

Of relevance to this thread is the expectation that Gaia will discover tens to hundreds of thousands of new extra-solar planets. It will also refine our knowledge of currently-known exoplanets, firming up data about their orbits and the nature of their host stars. As with any aspect of science, the larger and more accurate the data sample we have, the more we are able to say about the given subject. Since Gaia will be gathering exceptionally accurate information on all stars within 650 light-years of Earth, it will soon become possible to feed this data into the Drake Equation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation ) and derive a much more precise understanding of our status within the Milky Way galaxy.

 

Curiosity, the next Mars Rover.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

 

Scheduled for an early August touch-down on the Red planet, if Curiosity excels and exceeds it's basic design parameters like it's noble forebears, Spirit and Opportunity ( http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/ ) then we can expect many years of thrilling and informative exploration from this car-sized rover.

 

Black Hole's 'feeding frenzy' will be observed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16178112

Ok, so we won't actually see this from our neighborhoods, but the scientists with the BIG 'scopes know where and when to watch this happening. What they discover should be massively important for Astrophysics and Cosmology.

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.

[stryper]

Your comment about the predictability of the cosmos is part of the reason why it was reject for many centuries that asteroids would actually hit earth.

 

Course it also helped to propagate the myth that god was in charge because it was so orderly.

 

Then people started to dig.

[Legion]

I've heard a proposal for humanity's path into the colonization of the solar system. It goes... Arctic, Moon, Mars. I like this proposal for a variety of reasons. I think if we went to the Arctic first then we could thereby develop an operating body of knowledge and expertise about building self-sustaining colonies in extreme environments. Then we apply this knowledge to populating the moon, then we use the moon as a jump off point for Mars.

[stryper]

that is basically what Asimov stated decades ago.

 

 

The bio-dome was suppose to be a test for that. Most of the inhabitants ended up vegetarians because the scientists could bring themselves to butcher a pygmy pig.

[stryper]

not kepler but funny science.

 

http://www.xkcd.com/992/

[BrotherJosh]

New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows that NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.

 

http://www.msnbc.msn...e/#.T4dAeatDzgU

 

Not sure what to think of it, since the way they determined it seems...odd. Thoughts?

[stryper]

it does seem odd. However, in economics, we sometimes with classify data into indices or apply other groupings to it.

 

This allows for a smoothing of the data that can then show patterns which can be obscured by using individual raw numbers. Prime example is income. You can see more by classifing people in to income bands 0-$25K $25K-$45K per yr etc, then by using $17,500, $50,000 , $23,764, etc.

 

That sounds like what they did. Whereas Initially they were looking for obvious signs of life. Like actual bacteria.

[stryper]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/11/max_planck_quantum_network/

 

It seems to me that the US is falling way behind in science. The germans and chinese seem to be ahead of US.

 

However, this does bode well for instantaneous long distance communication I would think.

[stryper]

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/new-analysis-adds-two-more-planets-to-an-already-crowded-system.ars

 

 

legitimate 9 planet solar system found.

 

 

: ponders changing title of thread to cool cosmology stuff :

[Sexton Blake]

What we need is a space craft that will accelerate (and decelerate) at 1G force, which is under 22 miles per hour, per second increase in speed for very long periods.

 

Not only will this do away with the many problems of weightlessness but in less than a year you could reach almost light speed, so many nearby stars would then be within our reach.

[Thought2Much]

What we need is a space craft that will accelerate (and decelerate) at 1G force, which is under 22 miles per hour, per second increase in speed for very long periods.

 

Not only will this do away with the many problems of weightlessness but in less than a year you could reach almost light speed, so many nearby stars would then be within our reach.

 

Such a beast would be very, very difficult to build, even with very advanced technology.

 

As you get closer to the speed of light, it starts to take insane amounts of energy to get something to move faster than it's already going. This means that you have to carry a lot of fuel to move that mass. Which means it takes even more energy to get your ship moving faster. Which means you need more fuel. Even getting a very small target mass moving near the speed of light requires amounts of fuel in the ten to the ludicrous power range. There may be some ways around that on the outbound part of the journey, such as using lasers based in the home system to accelerate a ship equipped with a lightsail, but without lasers on the other end to slow you down, you're still going to need lots of fuel.

 

Then, you also have to factor in that when you get close to the speed of light, you not only have to worry about interstellar debris destroying your ship, but light from every star that you're heading in the general direction of gets blue-shifted due to doppler effect, soaking your ship in what amounts to gamma radiation. To prevent this, you need heavy shielding, which means you have more mass, which means you need...more fuel.

 

The science fiction author Charles Stross wrote an interesting blog entry about some of the hurdles involved with interstellar travel, and the numbers just don't look good at all.

[REBOOT]

As you get closer to the speed of light, it starts to take insane amounts of energy to get something to move faster than it's already going. This means that you have to carry a lot of fuel to move that mass. Which means it takes even more energy to get your ship moving faster. Which means you need more fuel. Even getting a very small target mass moving near the speed of light requires amounts of fuel in the ten to the ludicrous power range. There may be some ways around that on the outbound part of the journey, such as using lasers based in the home system to accelerate a ship equipped with a lightsail, but without lasers on the other end to slow you down, you're still going to need lots of fuel.

 

We're not going to be doing this with fossil fuels.

 

It's either going to be fusion propulsion or ...

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Space_Transport_and_Engineering_Methods/High_Energy_Particle_Engines

 

Interstellar scramjets... sucking up interstellar gases to fuel the transport.