Episode 1 of National Geographic’s Why Should We Go To Mars? was world class, and there are more to come! Watch the trailer, and go hunt down the program itself to learn about it. If you need more reasons, China will be heading there in just a few years; do we really want to be left behind, and left out of this amazing exploration?
Damian Peach took a series of images of Jupiter between March 18th to 22nd this year, and put them together to create this video he calls The Entire Face of Jupiter. He posted it earlier this week, so I thought I would share it here.
The Smithsonian has an online exhibit you may enjoy: 50 Years of Human Spaceflight. Of course, the first humans were launched into space in 1961, so I am guessing that was originally an exhibit at the brick and mortar Air and Space Museum back in 2011. There is some fascinating information including a lot of details most folks have forgotten these days.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center does not often partner with someone to create a music video, but they did for this one. NASA Goddard video producer David Ladd got together with musicians Javier Colon and Matt Cusson to create a piece about NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) that they hoped would ignite the imagination of young potential future engineers and scientists. Besides inspiring the kids, it also needed to engage the parents and educators around them, so they could encourage and support them during the education period they would need to go through to reach that goal. The first lesson to be learned would benefit all of them, whatever they decided to do with their lives: that nothing is beyond their reach if they put the effort into it! That seemed like a pretty positive thing to me, so I had to share it here. This is how we build the future.
If you missed seeing the Rosetta Destruction by Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko after its 2 year exploration, you can watch it again complete with all the commentary and analysis the leading scientists can bring to bare on the project. It was a magnificent run, and a huge amount of science was done, questions answered, every answer spawning 2 or more new questions. Watch the program and you might just begin to understand the vastness of even our local space here within the Heliopause, a tiny percentage of the distance even to the closest star.
The headline says it all, because the news is we really do have a Rocky Planet (as opposed to a Gas Giant) that is only a touch more than 4 light years away, according to the ESO who made the discovery, the ESA, and NASA. It is in the Goldilocks Zone of its star Proxima Centauri, and about 1.3 times the mass of Earth. The size and mass of the planet as well as the age of the star it orbits means it at least started out with the majority of the same elements that make up the Earth. The Goldilocks Zone orbit means water would be a liquid at most places on its surface, although the fact that Proxima Centauri is a Red Dwarf makes it likely that any near-Earth planet that close would be in tidal lock-down, with a single side always facing the star. That kind of thing tends to boil off an atmosphere on the hot side, and have it fall as snow on the cold side, not terribly conductive to life (or keeping your atmosphere). The good news is Proxima Centauri is the smallest and most distanced member of a triple star system known as Alpha Centauri; since the planet is not orbiting the central duo of the set, it runs a much smaller risk of being pulled apart into an asteroid belt over the next few eons.
So yes, this is one of those good news/bad news kind of things. The good news is that our nearest stellar neighbor has a planet which could evolve life, if all the other details work out. The bad news is that the odds are good it doesn’t have life more complex than viruses because of the orbital mechanics. The REALLY good news is the implication this discovery makes obvious; for us to find a planet in the Goldilocks Zone of our nearest stellar neighbor, such combinations must be a lot more likely than we ever thought possible. Just to keep me from jumping off the deep edge, let’s take a look at what SETI had to say about what we might find there just last November…