Space news and Exploration II

[ScienceRocks]

Gliese 892 - six planets (as least one planet in transit)

 

[mamooth]

The Hunt For Extraterrestrial Life Just Got A Groundbreaking 100 Million Investment - Forbes
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The tantalizing possibility of finding intelligent life beyond Earth got a little closer on Monday, when billionaire technology investor Yuri Milner announced he was investing $100 million of his personal fortune into a new scientific search that’s unprecedented in its scale and scope.

....

The program will cover 10 times more of the sky than previous programs, and spark an unprecedented flood of new data on the radio spectrum in space, which is traditionally seen as the best place to do SETI. When the project kicks off in January, one day of data collection will be equivalent to a year’s worth of previous global research by SETI scientists, said Andrew Siemion, a director at the University of Berkeley’s SETI research centre, who will act as a lead investigator with Milner’s project.
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[ScienceRocks]

New NASA's DSCOVR satellite provides breathtaking view of Earth
By Anthony Wood - July 21, 2015 6 Pictures

NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) has returned a breathtaking image of planet Earth from a distance of roughly one million miles from the homeworld. The image captures the full disk of our planet showing a stunning sunbathed vista of blue oceans and swirling clouds, with glimpses of the North and Central America land masses.

 

[ScienceRocks]

New Horizons captures two of Pluto's smaller moons | Astronomy.com
New Horizons has captured its first images of Pluto's moons Nix and Hydra, which were both discovered in 2005 with the Hubble Space Telescope.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) gets its first planet, KMT-2015-1b

Hwang et al. (2015) "KMT-2015-1b: a Giant Planet Orbiting a Low-mass Dwarf Host Star Discovered by a New High-cadence Microlensing Survey with a Global Telescope Network"
1507.05361 KMT-2015-1b a Giant Planet Orbiting a Low-mass Dwarf Host Star Discovered by a New High-cadence Microlensing Survey with a Global Telescope Network

 

[ScienceRocks]

"The largest-scale laser system would employ 50 to 70 gigawatts of power to propel the craft forward, about as much as is used to launch current spacecraft to Earth orbit. That laser setup, which Lubin described in a proposal paper, could propel a tiny spacecraft with a [one gram] 3.3-foot (1 meter) sail up to 26 percent the speed of light in 10 minutes.

Such a craft could reach Mars in 30 minutes, catch up with Voyager ...

See More

Lasers Could Blast Tiny Spacecraft to the Stars
Blasting tiny, waferlike sailing spacecraft with powerful lasers could slash interstellar flight times from thousands of years to mere decades, one researcher says.
space.com

 

[ScienceRocks]

A new NASA-funded study lays out a plan to return humans to the Moon

Humans could return to the Moon in the next decade and live there a decade after, a new study claims. The announcement was made on the 46th anniversary of the Apollo 11 crew's first steps on the lunar surface.
The study, performed by NexGen Space LLC and partly funded by NASA, concludes that the space agency could land humans on the Moon in the next five to seven years, build a permanent base 10 to 12 years after that, and do it all within the existing budget for human spaceflight. The way for NASA to do this is to adopt the same practice that it's using for resupplying the International Space Station (and will eventually use for crew transport) — public-private partnerships with companies like SpaceX, Orbital ATK, or the United Launch Alliance.
NASA can cut the cost of establishing a human presence on the Moon "by a factor of 10," according to Charles Miller, NexGen president and the study's principal investigator. Savings of that magnitude would allow NASA to expand its ambitions for lunar exploration without reaching beyond the almost $4 billion per year it receives for human spaceflight.

 

[ScienceRocks]

NASA's making a big exoplanet announcement this week, watch it live!
We're excited.
NASA s making a big exoplanet announcement this week watch it live - ScienceAlert
FIONA MACDONALD
22 JUL 2015

NASA has had a pretty big month already, but apparently the US space agency's not done yet. The Ames Research Centre team has just revealed that they'll be making a big announcement on Thursday at 4pm UTC (9am PDT on Thursday, or 2am AEST on Friday) about the exoplanet-hunting Kepler mission. And speculation is already running wild that they may be about to announce the discovery of a new Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of a star... in other words, a potential new home for humanity (or prime spot to look for extraterrestiral life). You can watch the announcement live at the bottom of this page.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Second Mountain Range Rises from Pluto's 'Heart' (Photo)
by Mike Wall, Space.com Senior Writer | July 21, 2015 05:48pm ET

Second Mountain Range Rises from Pluto s Heart Photo

Pluto has a big heart — big enough to accommodate at least two sets of mountains, a new photo from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reveals.

New Horizons has spotted a second mountain range inside Tombaugh Regio, the 1,200-mile-wide (2,000 kilometers) heart-shaped feature that mission team members named after Pluto's discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh.

This newfound range rises up to 1 mile (1.6 km) above Pluto's frigid surface, making it comparable in height to the Appalachian Mountains of the eastern United States, NASA officials said. Tombaugh Regio's other known mountain range, by contrast, is more similar to the tall and jagged Rocky Mountains, topping out at more than 2 miles (3.2 km) in elevation.

The newly discovered range lies just west of the ice plains known as Sputnik Planum and is 68 miles (110 km) northwest of the taller mountain range, which mission scientists are calling Norgay Montes after Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who along with Edmund Hillary completed the first-ever ascent of Mt. Everest, in 1953. (Tombaugh Regio, Norgay Montes and other such names remain informal monikers until they're officially approved by the International Astronomical Union.)

The new photo, which New Horizons captured during its historic Pluto flyby on July 14, shows a startling complexity of terrain within Tombaugh Regio, researchers said.

"There is a pronounced difference in texture between the younger, frozen plains to the east and the dark, heavily cratered terrain to the west," Jeff Moore, leader of New Horizons' geology, geophysics and imaging team, said in a statement today (July 21) upon the photo's release.

 

[jon_berzerk]

You are aware of course that Obama with support of the Democrats stripped NASA of anyway to reach orbit or space? We must hire private enterprise to deliver materials to the space station and must use Russia to send people into space.

We have no space vehicle and no plans to make another. Ohh did I mention that Obama and the democrats cut NASA's budget to the bone?

yes they have mostly been reassigned to the man made global warming scam

 

[ScienceRocks]

Second Mountain Range Rises from Pluto s Heart Photo

 

[ScienceRocks]

You are aware of course that Obama with support of the Democrats stripped NASA of anyway to reach orbit or space? We must hire private enterprise to deliver materials to the space station and must use Russia to send people into space.

We have no space vehicle and no plans to make another. Ohh did I mention that Obama and the democrats cut NASA's budget to the bone?

yes they have mostly been reassigned to the man made global warming scam

Then you haven't been paying attention. haha. We just took about 1800 photo's of pluto, Charon, etc...We are orbiting the largest Asteroid/Dwarf planet Cures and we have about 3 orbiters around Mars with 3 working rovers! Next year we will have a lander that will be used to learn more about further into the crust of Mars landing their! A whole lot more good stuff to come if I have my way!!!

Of course that isn't your reason for being in this thread. Your reason to be in this thread is to demand that we defund everything and go back to the 18th century. You don't believe America should lead in anything outside of cow farts and bombs like North Korea. America leads because we value science...That is just a cold hard fact. The goat fuckers of the middle east don't' and they don't lead.

People like you have won the past 40 years and kept America from building a outpost on the moon or mars. It is you that has done that and you are blaming people that know what we need to do to get it done? hahahaha I really don't understand your beef against getting at the resources of our solar system but it just doesn't make any sense.

I know more about space exploration in the tip of my little finger then you will ever know and I know that we're building a rocket that is nearly as big as the saturn 5. HOpefully, we will finally go back to the moon.

 

[ScienceRocks]

What's sad is you haven't been reading my thread You'd know all these things if you had!

New Method Finds Best Exoplanet Candidates for Telescope Time

If life exists on planets beyond our solar system, its presence could be obscured by the haze and clouds in the planet's atmosphere.

Even next generation telescopes — such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as well as ground-based telescopes like the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) — will have a hard time penetrating such hazy worlds in search of biomarkers. Astronomers Amit Misra and Victoria Meadows of the University of Washington have developed a new technique to check if a planet has clear skies, which will make it easier for astrobiologists to target the most promising exoplanet candidates for life.

Their research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute element of the Astrobiology Program at NASA.

New Method Finds Best Exoplanet Candidates for Telescope Time

 

[ScienceRocks]

New Horizons reveals more mountains in Pluto's heart

22 July 2015

The latest images from the New Horizons spacecraft have revealed another range of ice mountains on Pluto.
The frozen peaks were found on the lower-left edge of the dwarf world's "heart" and are 1-1.5km-high.
They sit between a patch of icy, flat terrain, called Sputnik Planum, which scientists believe is less than 100 million years old, and a dark area dating to billions of years ago.
More close-ups will be unveiled on Friday at a press conference.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-33622408

 

[mamooth]

NASA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) has returned a breathtaking image of planet Earth from a distance of roughly one million miles from the homeworld. The image captures the full disk of our planet showing a stunning sunbathed vista of blue oceans and swirling clouds, with glimpses of the North and Central America land masses.

NASA says they'll eventually be putting all the images on a publicly accessible web page, an image every 1.8 hours. They say mid-September.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Stephen Hawking: Intelligent Aliens Could Destroy Humanity, But Let's Search Anyway http://www.msn.com/en-in/news/techandscience/stephen-hawking-intelligent-aliens-could-destroy-humanity-but-lets-search-anyway/ar-AAdjNKY?ocid=mailsignoutmd…

 

[ScienceRocks]

Space exploration rocks! Loserterianism sucks!

Two different views of the 5-km mountain on Ceres, processed from NASA. http://fb.me/6Ou9ipG1r

 

[ScienceRocks]

Kepler-452b: Earth's Bigger, Older Cousin -- Briefing Materials
NASA will host a news teleconference at noon EDT Thursday, July 23 to announce new discoveries made by its planet-hunting mission, the Kepler Space Telescope.

The first exoplanet orbiting another star like our sun was discovered in 1995. Exoplanets, especially small Earth-size worlds, belonged within the realm of science fiction just 21 years ago. Today, and thousands of discoveries later, astronomers are on the cusp of finding something people have dreamed about for thousands of years -- another Earth.

The briefing participants are:

• John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington
• Jon Jenkins, Kepler data analysis lead at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California
• Jeff Coughlin, Kepler research scientist at SETI Institute in Mountain View, California
• Didier Queloz, professor of astrophysics at Cambridge University, United Kingdom

NASA Media Advisory
NASA Press Release

Figure 1

Kepler measures the brightness of stars. The data will look like an EKG showing the heart beat. Whenever a planet passes in front of its parent star as viewed from the spacecraft, a tiny pulse or beat is produced. From the repeated beats we can detect and verify the existence of Earth-size planets and learn about the orbit and size of the planet.
Credits: NASA Ames and Dana Berry

Figure 2



Credits: NASA

Figure 3


The sweep of NASA Kepler mission’s search for small, habitable planets in the last six years. The first planet smaller than Earth, Kepler-20e, was discovered in December 2011 orbiting a Sun-like star slightly cooler and smaller than our sun every six days. But it is scorching hot and unable to maintain an atmosphere or a liquid water ocean. Kepler-22b was announced in the same month, as the first planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star, but is more than twice the size of Earth and therefore unlikely to have a solid surface. Kepler-186f was discovered in April 2014 and is the first Earth-size planet found in the habitable zone of a small, cool M dwarf about half the size and mass of our sun. Kepler-452b is the first near-Earth-Size planet in the habitable zone of a star very similar to the sun.
Credits: NASA Ames/W. Stenzel
Searching for Habitable Worlds
Figure 4


This artist's concept depicts one possible appearance of the planet Kepler-452b, the first near-Earth-size world to be found in the habitable zone of star that is similar to our sun. The habitable zone is a region around a star where temperatures are right for water -- an essential ingredient for life as we know it -- to pool on the surface. Scientists do not know if Kepler-452b can support life or not. What is known about the planet is that it is about 60 percent larger than Earth, placing it in a class of planets dubbed "super-Earths." While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have a better than even chance of being rocky. Kepler-452b orbits its star every 385 days. The planet's star is about 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. It is a G2-type star like our sun, with nearly the same temperature and mass. This star is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun. As stars age, they grow in size and give out more energy, warming up their planets over time.
Credits: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
Soaking up the Rays of a Sun-like Star
Figure 5


This size and scale of the Kepler-452 system compared alongside the Kepler-186 system and the solar system. Kepler-186 is a miniature solar system that would fit entirely inside the orbit of Mercury. The habitable zone of Kepler-186 is very small compared to that of Kepler-452 or the sun because it is a much smaller, cooler star. The size and extent of the habitable zone of Kepler-452 is nearly the same as that of the sun, but is slightly bigger because Kepler-452 is somewhat older, bigger and brighter. The size of the orbit of Kepler-452b is nearly the same as that of the Earth at 1.05 AU. Kepler-452b orbits its star once every 385 days.
Credits: NASA/JPL-CalTech/R. Hurt
Kepler-452 and the Solar System
Figure 6


Since Kepler launched in 2009, twelve planets less than twice the size of Earth have been discovered in the habitable zones of their stars. These planets are plotted relative to the temperature of their star and with respect to the amount of energy received from their star in their orbit in Earth units. The light and dark shaded regions indicate the conservative and optimistic habitable zone. The sizes of the blue disks indicate the sizes of these exoplanets relative to one another and to the image of Earth, Venus and Mars, placed on this diagram for reference. Note that all the exoplanets discovered up until now are orbiting stars which are somewhat to significantly cooler and smaller than the sun. Kepler-452b is the first planet less than twice the size of Earth discovered in the habitable zone of a G-type star.
Credits: NASA Ames/N. Batalha and W. Stenzel
Figure 7


Today Kepler-452b is receiving 10 percent more energy from its parent star than the Earth is from the Sun. If Kepler-452b had the same mass as Earth it would be on the verge of experiencing the runaway greenhouse effect and the loss of its water inventory. However, since it is 60 percent bigger than Earth, it is likely to be approximately five Earth masses, which provides additional protection from the runaway greenhouse effect for another 500 million years. Kepler-452b has spent six billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth.
Credits: NASA Ames/J. Jenkins
Figure 8


Today Kepler-452b is receiving 10 percent more energy from its parent star than the Earth is from the Sun. If Kepler-452b had the same mass as Earth it would be on the verge of experiencing the runaway greenhouse effect and the loss of its water inventory. However, since it is 60 percent bigger than Earth, it is likely to be approximately five Earth masses, which provides additional protection from the runaway greenhouse effect for another 500 million years. Kepler-452b has spent six billion years in the habitable zone of its star; longer than Earth.
Credits: NASA Ames/J. Jenkins


Figure 9


Twelve Exoplanet discoveries from Kepler that are less than twice the size of Earth and reside in the habitable zone of their host star. The sizes of the exoplanets are represented by the size of each sphere. These are arranged by size from left to right, and by the type of star they orbit, from the M stars that are significantly cooler and smaller than the sun, to the K stars that are somewhat cooler and smaller than the sun, to the G stars that include the sun. The sizes of the planets are enlarged by 25X compared to the stars. The Earth is shown for reference.
Credits: NASA/JPL-CalTech/R. Hurt
A Kepler's Dozen: Small Habitable Zone Planets
Figure 10


There are 4,696 planet candidates now known with the release of the seventh Kepler planet candidate catalog - an increase of 521 since the release of the previous catalog in Jan. 2015. The blue dots show planet candidates from previous catalogs, while the yellow dots show new candidates from the seventh catalog. New planet candidates continue to be found at all periods and sizes due to continued improvement in the detection techniques. Notably, several of these new candidates are near-Earth-sized and at long orbital periods, where they have a chance of being rocky with liquid water on their surface.
Credits: NASA Ames/W. Stenzel
Kepler Planet Candidates, July 2015
Figure 11


Highlighted are new planet candidates from the seventh Kepler planet candidate catalog that are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit in the stars' habitable zone—the range of distances from a star where liquid water could exist on the surface of an orbiting planet. The dark green area represents an optimistic estimate for the habitable zone, while the light green area represents a more conservative estimate for the habitable zone. The candidates are plotted as a function of the star's surface temperate on the vertical axis and by the amount of energy the planet candidate receives by its host star. Open yellow circles show new planet candidates in the seventh catalog. Open blue circles show candidates from previous catalogs. Filled-in circles represent candidates that have been confirmed as planets due to follow-up observations. Note that the new candidates tend to be around stars more similar to the sun, representing progress in finding planets that are similar to the Earth in size and temperature that orbit sun-like stars.
Credits: NASA Ames/W. Stenzel
Twelve New Small Kepler Habitable Zone Candidate
Figure 12


A unique feature of the seventh Kepler candidate catalog is that it is the first to fully automate the assessment of transit-like signals. The total height of each bar shows the total number of Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs), or transit-like signals, in each catalog. The blue area shows the number that was assessed, which includes all newly found KOIs. The grey area shows the number that were not able to be assessed due to time constraints imposed by manual assessment, which includes KOIs assessed in previous catalogs. As a result of the new automated procedures employed in this seventh catalog, all KOIs could be assessed. The resulting impact is that we are able to deliver a more uniform planet candidate catalog that utilizes the entire Kepler dataset, which will enable more accurate estimates of the number of small habitable zone planets in our galaxy.
Credits: NASA Ames/W. Stenzel and SETI Institute/J. Coughlin
Figure 13


Credits: NASA Ames/W. Stenzel

 

[ScienceRocks]

A Kepler's Dozen: Small Habitable Zone Planets - Kepler-452b makes a dozen! http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/a-keplers-dozen-small-habitable-zone-planets…





Comparison between Earth and Kepler-452b (their host stars too!). http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-kepler-mission-discovers-bigger-older-cousin-to-earth…

 

[ScienceRocks]

China starts assembling world's biggest radio telescope
July 24, 2015


China has started assembling the world's largest radio telescope, which will have a dish the size of 30 football pitches when completed, state media reported as Beijing steps up its ambitions in outer space.
China starts assembling world s biggest radio telescope