AltaGuy has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000.
Join Date: Jun 2007
Location: At le pub...
Exp:
Jurassic Park's first dinosaur is gonna be a bird?
One of the most extraordinary conceptual spacecraft detailed in the report also would exit the solar system, but only just. And its focus, literally, would be on alien worlds.
This conceptual spacecraft would be parked in near interstellar space to use our sun as a gigantic lens, allowing zoomed-in close-ups of planets orbiting other stars. A space telescope would be lofted to a position far beyond Pluto, some 550 times the distance from Earth to the sun, or farther. It would take advantage of an effect described by Einstein: the power of gravity to bend light rays.
The stream of light from a distant star and its planet would be bent around the edges of the sun, like water flowing around a rock, meeting on the other side at a focal point—where it would be greatly magnified. The telescope would be placed in just the right position to capture these images.
The images would be smeared into a ring around the sun, called an Einstein ring, and the technical challenges would be immense: the distortions would have to be corrected and the fragmentary images reassembled. But if successful, the lens could be powerful enough to reveal surface features of an exoplanet—a planet around another star.
SpaceX did their first launch since the explosion last year. Seems to be going well, the cool thing this time is the camera on the stage 1 didn't cut out on the way down like it had on previous landing attempts, so got a complete video all the way to a successful landing.
Pretty cool. Iridium probably breathing a sigh of relief too, 10 of their satellites made it to space.
EDIT: Video, you can go back to the landing starting at about T+6:30
__________________ Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position.
But certainty is an absurd one.
What would it be like to actually land on Pluto? This movie was made from more than 100 images taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft over six weeks of approach and close flyby in the summer of 2015. The video offers a trip down onto the surface of Pluto -- starting with a distant view of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon -- and leading up to an eventual ride in for a "landing" on the shoreline of Pluto's informally named Sputnik Planitia.
To create a movie that makes viewers feel as if they’re diving into Pluto, mission scientists had to interpolate some of the panchromatic (black and white) frames based on what they know Pluto looks like to make it as smooth and seamless as possible. Low-resolution color from the Ralph color camera aboard New Horizons was then draped over the frames to give the best available, actual color simulation of what it would look like to descend from high altitude to Pluto’s surface.
After a 9.5-year voyage covering more than three billion miles, New Horizons flew through the Pluto system on July 14, 2015, coming within 7,800 miles (12,500 kilometers) of Pluto. Carrying powerful telescopic cameras that could spot features smaller than a football field, New Horizons sent back hundreds of images of Pluto and its moons that show how dynamic and fascinating their surfaces are. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
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The idea of reaching Proxima b is not just science fiction. In fact, a few months before the discovery of the exoplanet, a group of business leaders and scientists took the first steps towards visiting the Alpha Centauri star system, thought to be home to Proxima. They announced Breakthrough Starshot, an effort backed by US$100 million from Russian investor Yuri Milner to vastly accelerate research and development of a space probe that could make the trip. When Proxima b was found (G. Anglada-Escudé et al. Nature 536, 437–440; 2016), the project gained an even more tantalizing target.
Getting there won’t be easy. Despite Proxima b’s name, it is still nearly 2,000 times farther from Earth than any human-made object has ever travelled. To reach it within a scientist’s working lifetime, a probe would have to reach around one-fifth the speed of light and navigate a treacherous path through unseen debris in our own Solar System and interstellar space. Then it would need to collect useful data during a 60,000-kilometre-per-second fly-by of the Proxima system, and beam the information back across the 4 light years to Earth. It all amounts to a monstrous engineering challenge, but project researchers say it is possible and are now moving towards that goal.
The Starshot team plans to use conventional rockets to send its probes into orbit. Then a 100-gigawatt laser array on Earth would fire continuously at the sail for several minutes, long enough to accelerate it to 60,000 kilometres per second.
I love anything space news. It really is the cutting edge of technology and space exploration really should be more funded and focused on on an international level. In a way, it's our ultimate destiny to do so, so it's not a question of if, but when. Hopefully we see some amazing space exploration breakthroughs in our lifetime.
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To me the Space Shuttle was one of the biggest killing factors in terms of the exploration of space. We went from explorers to exploiters and didn't continue to develop manned craft that would push us deeper into our solar system.
At some point we decided that it was good enough to have an international space station and probes, and safer, while we should have been pushing to explore the rest of our solar system in person.
To me we should have been walking on Mars 10 years ago.
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Location: Close enough to make a beer run during a TV timeout
Exp:
I can see it now. The Centaurians see hundreds of these things heading towards them at high speed and assume they are under attack. They being slightly more advanced than us launch a counter attack.
I love anything space news. It really is the cutting edge of technology and space exploration really should be more funded and focused on on an international level. In a way, it's our ultimate destiny to do so, so it's not a question of if, but when. Hopefully we see some amazing space exploration breakthroughs in our lifetime.
The ability to visit neighboring stars, planets and systems will fundamentally change the human race. Politics, Religion, economy, industry, spirituality . . . everything will change.
Well, at least those who want it to. There will always be those who will be fixated on minuscule, obsolete problems who's god is better and how much land a person deserves. Here's hoping most humans become visionaries.
Last edited by Ozy_Flame; 02-01-2017 at 02:24 PM.
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The ability to visit neighboring stars, planets and systems will fundamentally change the human race. Politics, Religion, economy, industry, spirituality . . . everything will change.
Well, at least those who want it to. There will always be those who will be fixated on minuscule, obsolete problems who's god is better and how much land a person deserves. Here's hoping most humans become visionaries.
Can we build a wall between earth and mars?
When earth sends it's people, it's not sending it's best and brightest.
The idea of reaching Proxima b is not just science fiction. In fact, a few months before the discovery of the exoplanet, a group of business leaders and scientists took the first steps towards visiting the Alpha Centauri star system, thought to be home to Proxima. They announced Breakthrough Starshot, an effort backed by US$100 million from Russian investor Yuri Milner to vastly accelerate research and development of a space probe that could make the trip. When Proxima b was found (G. Anglada-Escudé et al. Nature 536, 437–440; 2016), the project gained an even more tantalizing target.
Getting there won’t be easy. Despite Proxima b’s name, it is still nearly 2,000 times farther from Earth than any human-made object has ever travelled. To reach it within a scientist’s working lifetime, a probe would have to reach around one-fifth the speed of light and navigate a treacherous path through unseen debris in our own Solar System and interstellar space. Then it would need to collect useful data during a 60,000-kilometre-per-second fly-by of the Proxima system, and beam the information back across the 4 light years to Earth. It all amounts to a monstrous engineering challenge, but project researchers say it is possible and are now moving towards that goal.
The Starshot team plans to use conventional rockets to send its probes into orbit. Then a 100-gigawatt laser array on Earth would fire continuously at the sail for several minutes, long enough to accelerate it to 60,000 kilometres per second.
I literally said F***ing Cool out loud. I would get info back in my lifetime. Amazing... I could see pictures of a planet from another planetary system.
I only hope that technology continues on its exponential pace and the remainder of my life is filled with extra-solar discoveries.
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I literally said F***ing Cool out loud. I would get info back in my lifetime. Amazing... I could see pictures of a planet from another planetary system.
I only hope that technology continues on its exponential pace and the remainder of my life is filled with extra-solar discoveries.
The solar gravity lens in post #2905 might be our most practical way to view extra-solar planets in the near future.
they want this thing to fly through the Oort cloud, which IIRC is the birthplace of comets a huge intergalactic ice field.
So we're going to try to navigate a unguided sailing ship through this field of randomly movie ice bits that are influenced by the Suns gravity. And then we're going to try to shoot a laser through it to send back data.
I'm not a smart man, but this seems to be almost an impossible theory.
__________________
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
The biggest risk at this stage is serious damage from collisions with dust specks, hydrogen atoms and other particles in the interstellar medium. Added danger comes in the form of cosmic rays — atomic nuclei that zip through space at close to the speed of light and could degrade crucial electronics. No one knows exactly how many particles fill interstellar space, or how big they are, but Starshot plans to protect its craft from potential collisions by covering the leading edge with at least a millimetre-thick coating of a material such as beryllium copper.
Even if it doesn’t destroy the craft, a strike could send the probe hurtling off-course. The probe will therefore need its own navigation and steering systems, powered by a lightweight generator that uses a radioactive isotope such as plutonium-238 — essentially a nuclear battery. These systems will need to include rudimentary artificial intelligence that monitors the position of stars and adjusts course by firing photon thrusters.
I think the plan is to launch a fleet of probes, maybe 100, in case some don't make it.
