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Two big announcements this past week

1) Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to land an unmanned spacecraft on Mars by 2018. The Dragon

What makes The Dragon unique is that it will land, scoop some martian soil and then return to Earth. First time a spacecraft has done that, and obviously a prerequisite to a human mission.

2) The James Webb Space Telescope. (JWST) This huge telescope also has a planned launch date of 2018. It’s the successor to the Hubble Telescope.

Unlike, the Hubble, the JWST will orbit the sun about a million miles from earth and it will be 5 times more powerful than the Hubble. One example of it’s power - it will be capable of detecting the heat signature of a bumble bee on the moon.

well that's a waste we all know there are no bumblebees on the moon...

Actually I am very anxious to see its pictures of deep space.

I'm worried the JWST won't open properly after its deployment. The Hubble was messed up, but they were able to go back to fix it. That won't be possible with the JWST. One shot and it HAS to open perfectly.

I'm also curious to see what schedule NASA has for future landing missions. I guess the goal was to land on Mars by 2030, but there were also plans to land on the Moon sometime in the near future as a way to gear-up and practice for Mars. I think it would be incredible to see some Moon landings again. Especially with the kind of High Def cameras we have these days.

Yes, I worry about that JWST launch/deployment too.

The thing is huge (three stories tall) and very fragile. And very, very expensive ($6 Billion).

And if you breath on it or look at it cross-eyed, it needs to be repaired.

A million things could go wrong.

Obviously, the pay-off is big with many questions answered about the beginning of the Universe.

Human curiosity is such an amazing and admirable characteristic.

quote above by texas:

"well that's a waste we all know there are no bumblebees on the moon..." brownie

Nice return on that soft volley texas.

Actually, we could colonize the moon with bumble bees and then we could "keep an eye on them".

I saw we save the 6 billion dollars and just Ask Gladys Kravitz what's going on out there.

that would annoy Abner

Which Gladys Kravitz?

Only the first

Great.

Is this gonna turn into a Bewitched thread?

The two Darrins.

neither was worthy of Liz...

...both were Dicks.

Dick York for me

What a babe.



Remember when Samantha’s evil twin sister Serena posed for Playboy?



“What is your command master?”

oopppsss... never mind

...and if they put one up there just so we can use the new telescope it'll die and not even have a heat signature.

Man, they really think we're dumb.

So, do I have this right? Musk's spacex is planning on going to mars in 2018? I don't know - is that a private business/venture?

And nasa is planning on getting there sometime in the 2030's? A gov't. agency.

Do I have this correct, or, what am I missing?

arch:

The 2018 SpaceX mission is unmanned. Kind of a dress rehearsal to make sure we can get a ship there and back (we haven't done that yet).

I think NASA and Spacex are going to rely on the results of this mission for testing and fine tuning control systems for the manned missions. (control systems - for instance, controls to ensure crew survivability - there's a lot of ways a human could die during a multi-year trip in outer-space)

Missions to Mars will only be done every ~ 2 years when the trip is a lot shorter because Earth and Mars are at their closest points to each other.

So SpaceX wants to do this and thinks they can send the unmanned mission by 2018. (the next Mars launch window)

2030 is the hoped for time to send a manned mission. I'm not sure what the collaboration between NASA and SpaceX is on that plan (they themselves probably don't know - probably upto our next president and congress)

I think SpaceX is planning to go to Mars regardless of the collaboration.

Got it. That was what I was missing. Thanks.

I did find this article from a year ago:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/20/9003419/nasa-moon-plan-permanent-base

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.


The NexGen study references SpaceX's ISS resupply costs as an example of where these savings will come from. SpaceX currently charges NASA about $4,750 for every kilogram sent to orbit aboard its Falcon 9 rocket, far less than the price of the Apollo-era Saturn V ($46,000 per kilogram) or even the space shuttle ($60,000 per kilogram). While the study does use SpaceX's next generation rocket, the Falcon Heavy, as an example in its plans to get to the moon, SpaceX claims the Falcon Heavy will be as cheap or cheaper per kilogram than the Falcon 9.

This Evolvable Lunar Architecture plan would also stir a new economy by mining the Moon for hydrogen in the polar water ice. The hydrogen would be processed and turned into cryogenic propellant, which would be stored in a propellant depot craft which orbits the Moon. That fuel would be sold to NASA or others looking for a way to fuel up for a trip to Mars. "You basically expand free enterprise to the Moon," Miller says.

It would cost NASA a total of $10 billion over the five-to-seven-year period, with $5 billion going to each of the two selected competitors, much like how NASA awarded dual contracts for its commercial cargo and commercial crew programs. Each company would develop its own crewed lunar lander, and have to develop or upgrade a commercial crew spacecraft. (SpaceX, for example, would have to modify the crewed version of its Dragon capsule.) "One provider’s not enough," Miller says. "You need to expect that one of them is going to go down. You need redundancy."


This is not new money NASA would have to spend. It is instead a readjustment. NASA is already planning to go back to the Moon with its next-generation rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), but there are no plans to land. By using commercial partners, NASA could reduce the number of planned SLS launches from 12 to around three, reducing the cost of the program while still developing the technologies necessary to support it.

The NexGen study lays out a detailed roadmap for when and how to take the next step of performing a landing. A robotic return to the Moon could happen as soon as 2017, if NASA were to adopt the plan right away. Rovers would scout the lunar poles for hydrogen in 2018, and prospecting could begin by 2019 or 2020. Robotic construction of a permanent base would begin in 2021 in anticipation of landing humans on the Moon later that year.

A number of obvious risks are addressed in the study. For one, the cost and risk of developing a lunar base is far beyond that what is considered acceptable for businesses looking for a return on their investment. The study also lays out strategies for how to respond to things like the loss of a launch vehicle, loss of lander vehicles, and even loss of crew.

There is also the risk of ever-changing government support. "It is difficult to imagine industry trusting that NASA can keep such a commitment without significant changes," the study says. To solve these, the study proposes the formation of an International Lunar Authority to oversee things, and references existing models like CERN or the Port Authority of NY/NJ as examples. "

The study was vetted by a 21-person independent review team made up of former members of NASA's administration, members of the commercial spaceflight community, and four former NASA astronauts. Tom Moser, who is a member of the study's review team, was the first program director for the International Space Station, so he's familiar with how hard it is to convince people of the benefits of major space programs. To get the space station off the ground, he told the government they should set a timeline and "deep six it into the Pacific Ocean" if it didn't produce. Congress agreed to invest in the idea, and the space station is still around. "Every single person in the United States benefits from space every single day," Moser says.

Moser says he believes in the proposed mission but that it won't happen without support and education from United States leadership. "If somebody at the level of president wants to do it it’s going to take a campaign to educate the public on why it’s a good thing to do," Moser says.

Miller agrees, but he's hopeful that today's news will inspire Congress or some of the 2016 presidential candidates to take action. "If the next president is just satisfied with what we’re doing in deep space and human spaceflight, then there’s no need for this," Miller says.

Great read. Thanks Excl.

I wish I was 20 years-old. It looks like these next 50 years are going to be exciting.

Carl Sagan would be in awe.

sign me up, I'll go.

On May 23rd, Mars will be the brightest it's been in over a decade.

If you're fortunate enough to see it, you'll know why they call it the "red planet". Especially with binoculars or a telescope.



OK, the "grayish pink planet".

But I thought Martians were green?

Everyone says that, but in fairness they are more like a sage green, and not the deep green many people expect.

They are also some of the nicest extraterrestrials in the Milky Way.

I built my first working spaceplane in Kerbal Space Program this week:



(open image in new tab to enlarge)

Yes, but can you get it to the Mun?

Astronomers discover dark matter galaxy, by accident

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/astronomers-discover-dark-matter-galaxy-by-accident/

Sometimes, a flaw in your magnifying glass can be a good thing; in the case of some new research, it can even reveal invisible dark matter galaxies.

Astronomers probing the sky used the gravity of a massive galaxy as a natural magnifying glass, and they found a strange distortion on its edge. That distortion proved to be a smaller, invisible galaxy composed of dark matter. The discovery, explained in a new video, could pave the way to finding more of these unusual objects, providing a better understanding of the mysterious material that makes up most of the matter in the universe.


38 PHOTOS
Breathtaking Hubble Telescope images
"We can find these invisible objects in the same way that you can see rain droplets on a window," lead author Yashar Hezaveh said in a statement. Like raindrops, the massive clumps of matter warp objects seen through them. Hezaveh, an astronomer at Stanford University in California, worked with a team of scientists that used a massive radio telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, to find a clump of missing matter in the outer rim of a larger galaxy that.

"You know they are there because they distort the image of the background objects," Hezaveh said.

Observing objects in the distant universe can challenge the limits of current technology. As a shortcut, astronomers can rely on a much older tool: massive galaxies large enough to distort space-time. As predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, the enormous collections of stars serve as magnifying glasses by causing light to bend as it passes by. The distant light curves around the nearer galaxy, creating a so-called "Einstein ring." This reveals faraway objects behind the nearby galaxy.

Scientists take advantage of the gravitational lensing phenomenon to study incredibly distant galaxies, many of which formed only a few billion years after the universe's Big Bang.

The team of astronomers noticed that the newly updated ALMA's image of an Einstein ring known as SDP.81 contained a strange distortion, unveiled only after thousands of computers working together searched for subtle anomalies. The unprecedented detail of the star-free region around the closer lensing galaxy, known as the halo, revealed a distinctive clump of matter less than one-thousandth the mass of the Milky Way. This clump's location and mass, and the fact that no object could be spotted in the region suggested that the cluster could be an extremely faint dwarf galaxy of dark matter lying nearly 4 billion light-years from Earth.

Dark matter makes up more than three-fourths of the matter in the universe, but cannot be seen via visible light or electromagnetic radiation. Instead, scientists must use distortions produced by dark matter's gravity to detect the material.

In the case of galaxies, smaller dark-matter clusters could help astronomers solve a long-standing puzzle. Theory predicts that most galaxies should host dwarf galaxies in their halos, but few of these smaller galaxies have been spotted. Only about 40 of the predicted thousands of such galaxies have been seen orbiting the Milky Way.

"This discrepancy between observed satellites and predicted abundances has been a major problem in cosmology for nearly two decades, even called a 'crisis' by some researchers," said team member Neal Dalal, of the University of Illinois.

"If these dwarf objects are dominated by dark matter, this could explain the discrepancy while offering new insights into the true nature of dark matter," he said.

According to the researchers, ALMA may bring more of these dark matter satellites to light. With its incredible sensitivity, the enormous array of instruments could pinpoint other invisible dwarf galaxies hovering around the edges of natural magnifying glasses throughout the universe.

"This is an amazing demonstration of the power of ALMA," said team member Gilbert Holder, of McGill University in Canada. "We are now confident that ALMA can efficiently discover these dwarf galaxies.

"Our next step is to look for more of them."

So they're not like Claussen pickles? Dang, I like my Martians cold and crispy.

That's spacist!

I am anxious to see pics too...it's where our QB of the future is

That pixie stick? no. And I can't land it worth a darn either. But since you know what the Mun is, I'm guessing you already knew this

Right now I have a scientist orbiting the mun, making alot of weird maneuver changes and taking crew reports from various locations. Now that I can asparagus stage in this career mode, getting tons of fuel into orbit is much easier.

I can get a spaceplane into kerbin orbit, but nowhere close to the moon. Apparently some people can get a plane all the way to Duna, which just seems nuts.

thats nuts, although I watch Scott Manley on youtube and he does some crazy things in KSP...

This is my only notable accomplishment. Granted I did it in non-career mode and with a heck of a lot of reloads:

Oh that's fantastic! Was this landed in one pass or did you assemble it in pieces on the surface?

in pieces, you can see the little 6 wheeled assemblers under the body. No way could I have done that in one go. Landing just one piece is hard enough!

May 10, 2016
RELEASE 16-051
NASA's Kepler Mission Announces Largest Collection of Planets Ever Discovered


NASA's Kepler mission has verified 1,284 new planets – the single largest finding of planets to date.

“This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler,” said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth.”

Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescope’s July 2015 planet candidate catalog, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of “planet.” An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.

"Before the Kepler space telescope launched, we did not know whether exoplanets were rare or common in the galaxy. Thanks to Kepler and the research community, we now know there could be more planets than stars,” said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters. "This knowledge informs the future missions that are needed to take us ever-closer to finding out whether we are alone in the universe."

Kepler captures the discrete signals of distant planets – decreases in brightness that occur when planets pass in front of, or transit, their stars – much like the May 9 Mercury transit of our sun. Since the discovery of the first planets outside our solar system more than two decades ago, researchers have resorted to a laborious, one-by-one process of verifying suspected planets.

This latest announcement, however, is based on a statistical analysis method that can be applied to many planet candidates simultaneously. Timothy Morton, associate research scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey and lead author of the scientific paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, employed a technique to assign each Kepler candidate a planet-hood probability percentage – the first such automated computation on this scale, as previous statistical techniques focused only on sub-groups within the greater list of planet candidates identified by Kepler.

"Planet candidates can be thought of like bread crumbs,” said Morton. “If you drop a few large crumbs on the floor, you can pick them up one by one. But, if you spill a whole bag of tiny crumbs, you're going to need a broom. This statistical analysis is our broom."

In the newly-validated batch of planets, nearly 550 could be rocky planets like Earth, based on their size. Nine of these orbit in their sun's habitable zone, which is the distance from a star where orbiting planets can have surface temperatures that allow liquid water to pool. With the addition of these nine, 21 exoplanets now are known to be members of this exclusive group.

"They say not to count our chickens before they're hatched, but that's exactly what these results allow us to do based on probabilities that each egg (candidate) will hatch into a chick (bona fide planet)," said Natalie Batalha, co-author of the paper and the Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “This work will help Kepler reach its full potential by yielding a deeper understanding of the number of stars that harbor potentially habitable, Earth-size planets -- a number that's needed to design future missions to search for habitable environments and living worlds.”

Of the nearly 5,000 total planet candidates found to date, more than 3,200 now have been verified, and 2,325 of these were discovered by Kepler. Launched in March 2009, Kepler is the first NASA mission to find potentially habitable Earth-size planets. For four years, Kepler monitored 150,000 stars in a single patch of sky, measuring the tiny, telltale dip in the brightness of a star that can be produced by a transiting planet. In 2018, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will use the same method to monitor 200,000 bright nearby stars and search for planets, focusing on Earth and Super-Earth-sized.

Ames manages the Kepler missions for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation operates the flight system, with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

For more information about the Kepler mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

For briefing materials from Tuesday’s media teleconference where the new group of planets was announced, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/kepler/briefingmaterials160510

-end-

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-...ever-discovered

But will we ever have a way to reach these planets, and are they still viable for life after the 20,000 years it will take us to reach them (provided we manage to hit 10% of the speed of light), not to mention the 1000s of years it took the light to reach us in the first place.

quote above by Erik:

"But will we ever have a way to reach these planets, and are they still viable for life after the 20,000 years it will take us to reach them (provided we manage to hit 10% of the speed of light), not to mention the 1000s of years it took the light to reach us in the first place."

Ok here's the deal.

We (humans) probably won't ever visit planets beyond our solar system.

But it won't be because we can't. It will be because we devolve (regress intellectually, physically, spiritually).

There's a bizarre relationship between space and time that Einstein only barely scratched the surface of.

Think about it. How can space and time possibly be intertwined?

Humans need to advance and explore. What seems like great distances can be mastered.