Space news and Exploration II

[FA_Q2]

Basically a space probe on a microchip with a sail propelled by a laser. They can reach alpha centauri in 20 years. They travel 1/5 the speed of light.

Each space probe costs as much as an iPhone.

Very interesting. That would make exploration of the closest stars very plausible and affordable.

To bad that these things will always have such a large time horizon.

What's a time horizon? They are hoping they can get them there in 20 years and send the info back in 4. That's not too long to wait.

So we have telescopes finding thousands of moons and planets that could hold life and these spaceships cost as much as an iPhone to make. We can send out as many of these chips as we want and if any life is intelligent maybe they'll find them. What would we do if we discovered a spaceship like this from another planet?

Or id love to find a planet that has everything we need but no intelligent life.

What if we found a planet with humans but they are more like native American Indians? Would we do it the same way again? I would hope not but suspect we would.

And what if they were 1% smarter than us? How would they welcome us? Would they experiment on us like we would them?

Id love a planet with no humans and no dinosaurs

We would just tell ourselves that the planet or moon had huge deposits of gold or diamonds or some other expensive desirable stuff right on the surface so any explorer volunteers would become instantly incredibly wealthy for their efforts.

Meh - there is already something far more valuable on any garden world than those - land.

It will take a VERY long time to get any appreciable number of people to hop on a space craft and travel possibly for 2 or three generations just so they can have more elbow room.

I disagree. I think you could manage it right now if we had reliable info on another planet and the financial backing. There are 7 BILLION people on this planet. Many of them want to do some AMAZINGLY asinine shit. Traveling to another planet will get plenty of volunteers. What is missing is the enormous expense that would take and the information that such a trip would yield results.

 

[HUGGY]

What's a time horizon? They are hoping they can get them there in 20 years and send the info back in 4. That's not too long to wait.

So we have telescopes finding thousands of moons and planets that could hold life and these spaceships cost as much as an iPhone to make. We can send out as many of these chips as we want and if any life is intelligent maybe they'll find them. What would we do if we discovered a spaceship like this from another planet?

Or id love to find a planet that has everything we need but no intelligent life.

What if we found a planet with humans but they are more like native American Indians? Would we do it the same way again? I would hope not but suspect we would.

And what if they were 1% smarter than us? How would they welcome us? Would they experiment on us like we would them?

Id love a planet with no humans and no dinosaurs

We would just tell ourselves that the planet or moon had huge deposits of gold or diamonds or some other expensive desirable stuff right on the surface so any explorer volunteers would become instantly incredibly wealthy for their efforts.

Meh - there is already something far more valuable on any garden world than those - land.

We will locate a planet that's ripe and send our seed ship to somehow get man there so we can reproduce and populate that planet. Its what humans do. We didn't stay in England we settled the west. I would go.

Most likely any voyage of that type would require a few generations in time to complete. Maybe some kind of suspended animation where the participants are "frozen" for the greatest part of the voyage. It sounds risky to me. Maybe a rotation of "live" people at the wheel in case the unforeseen happens. I wouldn't trust 100% in automation for such an endeavor.

You made me think what if we had eggs and spirm and robots and baby formula and all the technology for robots to raise the humans once the ship arrives.

What? The robots would keep the "ingredients" for human life in liquid nitrogen for the voyage? What would they do to duplicate a womb? How would these robots simulate a "birth"? Seems like raising "normal" human babies would be problematic. Maybe THAT"S where the hologram environment kicks in to give the children something like a "normal" human experience as the children develop.

 

[ScienceRocks]

I think humanity should go for it as it preservers our species and makes sure we can't be wiped out if something happens to the earth. But more so, just because we're a species that loves to explore.

Within my opinion, only about 3-4 planets of the 1200 released today get me anywhere near excited. One of them is kind of like kepler 452b Another is kind of like Kepler 62e.

 

[sealybobo]

http://www.leonarddavid.com/europes-...off-next-year/

The voyage of Europe’s ExoMars 2016 spacecraft is moving closer to the Red Planet – departing the clean rooms of Thales Alenia Space in Cannes for shipment to Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

This ExoMars spacecraft is headed for a March 2016 liftoff atop a Proton booster.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope gets its first mirror

• Chris Wood
• November 26, 2015
• 2 PICTURES

Construction is well under way on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) – the space agency's next generation installation, scheduled to launch in 2018. The instrument is really starting to take shape, with engineers successfully installing the first of 18 mirrors.

This Sunday instead of learning about the lord I learned about the James Webb telescope set to be launched in 2020?

What do we know about planets in the habitable zone? As of right now we don't know if they have life or not, correct? So there is imo at least a 50 50 chance planets that are in the habitable zone have life. What that life looks like who knows but life none the less.

Science is great.

 

[sealybobo]

I think humanity should go for it as it preservers our species and makes sure we can't be wiped out if something happens to the earth. But more so, just because we're a species that loves to explore.

Within my opinion, only about 3-4 planets of the 1200 released today get me anywhere near excited. One of them is kind of like kepler 452b Another is kind of like Kepler 62e.

You mean excited as far as us being able to live on them? I agree. It'll be great if life is on Europa but that doesn't mean I can go swim there.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Why does Saturn's moon Titan have 700mph+ winds?

 

[Fort Fun Indiana]

Why does Saturn's moon Titan have 700mph+ winds?

You rest. We will look that up for you.

 

[sealybobo]

1501.01305 Kepler-445 Kepler-446 and the Occurrence of Compact Multiples Orbiting Mid-M Dwarf Stars

KEPLER-445, KEPLER-446 AND THE OCCURRENCE OF COMPACT MULTIPLES ORBITING MID-M DWARF STARS

We confirm and characterize the exoplanetary systems Kepler-445 and Kepler-446: two mid-M dwarf stars, each with multiple, small, short-period transiting planets. Kepler-445 is a metal-rich ([Fe/H]=+0.25 ± 0.10) M4 dwarf with three transiting planets, and Kepler-446 is a metal-poor ([Fe/H]=-0.30 ± 0.10) M4 dwarf also with three transiting planets. Kepler-445c is similar to GJ 1214b: both in planetary radius and the properties of the host star. The Kepler-446 system is similar to the Kepler-42 system: both are metal-poor with large galactic space velocities and three short-period, likely-rocky transiting planets that were initially assigned erroneously large planet-to-star radius ratios. We independently determined stellar parameters from spectroscopy and searched for and fitted the transit light curves for the planets, imposing a strict prior on stellar density in order to remove correlations between the fitted impact parameter and planet-to-star radius ratio for short-duration transits. Combining Kepler-445, Kepler-446 and Kepler-42, and isolating all mid-M dwarf stars observed by Kepler with the precision necessary to detect similar systems, we calculate that 21 +7 −5 % of mid-M dwarf stars host compact multiples (multiple planets with periods of less than 10 days) for a wide range of metallicities. We suggest that the inferred planet masses for these systems support highly efficient accretion of protoplanetary disk metals by mid-M dwarf protoplanets.

I wanted to see if anyone ever talked about GJ 1214B. You mentioned it 10 years ago. Did you know it is made up almost entirely of water?

This planet known as “GJ 1214B” is made of pure water, and consists of no rocky surface. It’s nicknamed the ocean planet, as it’s completely underwater. This planet lies approximately 40 light years away and has a radius of about 10,000 miles.

So the core is rock but it's 100 under water? I don't think we knew this 10 years ago. We just knew it was metal-poor.

Kepler-446 b is not completely covered in water.​