Setting sail has always been the image of a new undertakings, of exploration, of adventuring beyond the known lands and into history. Simply running out of Earth oceans is no reason to stop. A new research proposal would put a science-ship on Titan, sailing seas of liquid methane to find fantastically foreign shores.
The outer edges of the Milky Way's may be stalked by innumerable invisible galaxies, one of which appears to be crashing into our own. Back in 2005 astronomers discovered the first evidence of mysterious dark galaxies with no starlight -VIRGOHI 21 -a mysterious cloud of hydrogen in the Virgo Cluster 50 million light-years from the Earth found to be colliding with our galaxy - revealed its existence from radio waves from neutral hydrogen coming from a rotating cloud containing enough hydrogen gas to spawn 100 million stars like the sun and fill a small galaxy.
"As Sherlock Holmes said, eliminate all other factors and the one that remains must be the truth. The list of possible sources of methane gas is getting smaller and excitingly, extraterrestrial life still remains an option. Ultimately the final test may have to be on Mars."
Mark Sephton, Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London
NASA's
most awesome mission since pointing at the sky and saying "I bet we can
put people there" has come to fruition, with absolute proof that
there's water ice on the Moon - and lots of it.
The Lunar
Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is the most explosive
euphemism since Tom Clancy discovered the thesaurus. It 'sensed' the
contents of the lunar crater Cabeus by dropping an entire Centaur
rocket booster into it, and when you 'drop' something in orbit it's
very much like 'fired at' by the time it hits the ground. The booster
slammed into the shadowed regolith like a two ton bullet, blowing a
twenty meter hole in the moon and ejecting dust tens of kilometers into
space - where the LCROSS satellite, chasing the Centaur, could get a
good look at it for four minutes before its own suicide strike into the
same crater.
A Mars mission to be launched in October on a Russian robot spacecraft
will include specimens of thale cress; tiny water creature tardigrade -
or water bear - which can
also survive extraordinary extremes of temperature and pressure;
samples of brewer's yeast; and permafrost from the Siberian Arctic.
Together with several other microscopic organisms, these
representatives of Earth life will be carried in a package that will
be flown to Mars and are scheduled to be returned to Earth in 2012.
The ancient isolated lakes of Antarctica are living biology labs that may yield clues to microbial life existing on Mars and future exploration of Jupiter's Europa and more distant exo-planets beyond of Solar System.
Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says we are on the brink of a great paradigm shift in planetary exploration, and the next round of robotic explorers will be nothing like what we see today.
Expanding into space has been a dream of scifi since before the genre had a name. Adventure, overcrowding, the chance of green-skinned women - the reasons are manifold but the idea is always the same, because the need to advance and prosper in new locations is fundamental to our species. The fact it's usually because we ruined the last place (or we don't like the people who live there) is best ignored.
"Pulsar Power," the Next Big Thing! The European Space Agency’s Ariadna
initiative is studying a totally awesome navigation system that creams
the one you'll find in your new Porche: they are examining the
feasibility of navigation relying on millisecond pulsars, rotating
neutron stars that spin faster than 40 revolutions per second. The
pulses of these dead stars can be used as exquisitely accurate timing
mechanisms.
Pulsars have huge advantages over a traditional deep space satellite
network to fix a ship's position — it doesn’t scale and costs a
fortune. Autonomous navigation is clearly preferable, tying the
navigation system to natural objects like pulsars.
Setting sail has always been the image of a new undertakings, of exploration, of adventuring beyond the known lands and into history. Simply running out of Earth oceans is no reason to stop. A new research proposal would put a science-ship on Titan, sailing seas of liquid methane to find fantastically foreign shores.
The outer edges of the Milky Way's may be stalked by innumerable invisible galaxies, one of which appears to be crashing into our own. Back in 2005 astronomers discovered the first evidence of mysterious dark galaxies with no starlight -VIRGOHI 21 -a mysterious cloud of hydrogen in the Virgo Cluster 50 million light-years from the Earth found to be colliding with our galaxy - revealed its existence from radio waves from neutral hydrogen coming from a rotating cloud containing enough hydrogen gas to spawn 100 million stars like the sun and fill a small galaxy.
"As Sherlock Holmes said, eliminate all other factors and the one that remains must be the truth. The list of possible sources of methane gas is getting smaller and excitingly, extraterrestrial life still remains an option. Ultimately the final test may have to be on Mars."
Mark Sephton, Department of Earth Science and Engineering at Imperial College London
NASA's
most awesome mission since pointing at the sky and saying "I bet we can
put people there" has come to fruition, with absolute proof that
there's water ice on the Moon - and lots of it.
The Lunar
Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is the most explosive
euphemism since Tom Clancy discovered the thesaurus. It 'sensed' the
contents of the lunar crater Cabeus by dropping an entire Centaur
rocket booster into it, and when you 'drop' something in orbit it's
very much like 'fired at' by the time it hits the ground. The booster
slammed into the shadowed regolith like a two ton bullet, blowing a
twenty meter hole in the moon and ejecting dust tens of kilometers into
space - where the LCROSS satellite, chasing the Centaur, could get a
good look at it for four minutes before its own suicide strike into the
same crater.
A Mars mission to be launched in October on a Russian robot spacecraft
will include specimens of thale cress; tiny water creature tardigrade -
or water bear - which can
also survive extraordinary extremes of temperature and pressure;
samples of brewer's yeast; and permafrost from the Siberian Arctic.
Together with several other microscopic organisms, these
representatives of Earth life will be carried in a package that will
be flown to Mars and are scheduled to be returned to Earth in 2012.
The ancient isolated lakes of Antarctica are living biology labs that may yield clues to microbial life existing on Mars and future exploration of Jupiter's Europa and more distant exo-planets beyond of Solar System.
Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says we are on the brink of a great paradigm shift in planetary exploration, and the next round of robotic explorers will be nothing like what we see today.
Expanding into space has been a dream of scifi since before the genre had a name. Adventure, overcrowding, the chance of green-skinned women - the reasons are manifold but the idea is always the same, because the need to advance and prosper in new locations is fundamental to our species. The fact it's usually because we ruined the last place (or we don't like the people who live there) is best ignored.
"Pulsar Power," the Next Big Thing! The European Space Agency’s Ariadna
initiative is studying a totally awesome navigation system that creams
the one you'll find in your new Porche: they are examining the
feasibility of navigation relying on millisecond pulsars, rotating
neutron stars that spin faster than 40 revolutions per second. The
pulses of these dead stars can be used as exquisitely accurate timing
mechanisms.
Pulsars have huge advantages over a traditional deep space satellite
network to fix a ship's position — it doesn’t scale and costs a
fortune. Autonomous navigation is clearly preferable, tying the
navigation system to natural objects like pulsars.
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