Tag: Planet

How Random Is Life?

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A little asteroid just whizzed by Earth. Not terribly large. Estimates say 20-60 feet long. 2015 HD-1 is one of billions of rocks randomly orbiting the Sun. Tonight it came really close to us.

With asteroids, astronomers calculate the object’s closest distance from Earth and compare that with our distance from the Moon. 2015 HD-1 was only .17 LD (Lunar distances) from our planet. Roughly 40,000 miles.

Astronomers have only known about this interplanetary speck a few days. An automated sky search run by the University of Arizona found it first. It was magnitude 20.1. Very dim.

Sixty feet long isn’t enough to do the Earth in. A sixty footer would probably break up in the atmosphere. Much of it would burn, but plenty of large rocky fragments would fall to earth. And there’d be a destructive sonic boom.

When an asteroid exploded over Siberia a few years it was flying glass from the sonic boom that injured nearly 1,500.

We didn’t know it existed until Saturday. How random is life?

I Love You NASA, But…

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I was just reading a release on the progress of NASA’s New Horizons mission. It was sent toward Pluto back when Pluto was still a planet. It gets there this summer.

New Horizons is still over 100 million miles out, but closing fast. Low-res images of two of Pluto’s four moons are coming in. It’s an amazing achievement.

But why?

Actually, I know why. Space technology creates many well paying jobs. It’s a political landmine to cut.

Unfortunately, there is almost no practical payoff to space. All the good discoveries happened decades ago. I’ve been hearing about pharmaceuticals and metallurgy in space for the last forty years! Don’t hold your breath.

i19_025588I don’t know what they do on the International Space Station on a daily basis, but it’s the modern version of a ham radio operator’s basement from the sixties. And, it’s expensive.

What we need is to better explore Earth. We need to understand and leverage the natural power around us. There is untapped energy in tides and ocean currents. There is great heat at the center of the Earth.

The same types of skills NASA employs for space are needed for Earth! Only the mission need be changed.

Could harnessing heat from the Earth’s core be any more difficult that sending a mission to Pluto?

This is a pipe dream. I don’t see it happening. I wish it would.

There are so many bright and wonderfully talented people at NASA. Their accomplishments are way beyond mind boggling. They’re just solving the wrong problems.

Keeping NASA’s Planetary Discoveries In Perspective

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The headlines are breathless and shouted. “NASA’s Kepler Mission Announces a Planet Bonanza, 715 New Worlds.”

Big deal? Maybe it is. Likely it isn’t.

The Kepler mission points an orbiting telescope at a small slice of the sky. Day-after-day it watches the light from the stars in that slice, looking for variations in intensity.

When a planet crosses in front of its star as viewed by an observer, the event is called a transit. Transits by terrestrial planets produce a small change in a star’s brightness of about 1/10,000 (100 parts per million, ppm), lasting for 1 to 16 hours. This change must be periodic if it is caused by a planet. In addition, all transits produced by the same planet must be of the same change in brightness and last the same amount of time, thus providing a highly repeatable signal and robust detection method. – NASA

The planets aren’t actually being seen. That’s why the image at the top of this entry is an artist’s conception, not a photo. Kepler is instead looking for a predictable dimming as planets pass between the stars and Earth.

The rest is speculation! We have no idea what the planets are made of or conditions on their surface.

NASA looks for planets in the ‘habitable zone.’ That doesn’t mean they’re habitable! These objects are incredibly far away. Our data is thin.

NASA readily admits what is doesn’t know, but since that’s not the glamorous part of the release we seldom hear it.

One of these new habitable zone planets, called Kepler-296f, orbits a star half the size and 5 percent as bright as our sun. Kepler-296f is twice the size of Earth, but scientists do not know whether the planet is a gaseous world, with a thick hydrogen-helium envelope, or it is a water world surrounded by a deep ocean.

Even the Earth, the benchmark for habitable planets, is only ‘habitable’ over a small portion of its surface. We can’t live in the ocean, or tall mountaintops, or where it’s too hot or cold, or too dry or wet. We’re picky eaters in the world of habitation!

So, what does the Kepler mission and these discoveries mean to us? From a practical standpoint, little. Maybe nothing!

These planets are too far to ever consider visiting. Our lives won’t change. We’ll learn enough to solidify some theories, no more.

Kepler is an amazing engineering accomplishment. That’s indisputable. It has taken complex planetary theories and made them observable. No small trick. Just don’t expect an exoplanet photo or financial payoff soon… or ever.

Billions Of Stars

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I just read an article from The Royal Astronomical Society. British. Nearly 200 years old. Well respected.

RAS says, “Astronomers anticipate 100 billion Earth-like planets.” That’s a lot.

It’s also a meaningless number.

Distant space travel is impractical. We’ll never visit a planet beyond our solar system.

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a wet blanket but, it’s true.

Humans can only live within a tight range of parameters. We need oxygen and moderate temperatures. We need food. We need to return to Earth! Carrying enough supplies to accomplish that is orders of magnitude beyond any capability we have now.

Time is a problem too. The nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light years away. Our farthest satellite, Voyager 1, is a little over 17 light hours away and it’s been in space since 1977!

To go light years would take centuries!

We know about a few extrasolar planets. Not as much as you think.

We know they’re there, orbiting some distant stars through mathematics. We don’t actually see them. We do see the gravitational effect they exert on their star. These space wobbles are covered nicely by the laws of physics.

But that’s all we’re really seeing–stars wobble. All we know about any planet beyond our solar system is implied from the actions of things we can see.

It’s cool that astronomers can make these projections. Alas, they have no practical application or purpose.

Why Newt’s Wrong About The Moon

Space is also big. Other planets are far. Other solar systems are crazily far even at the speed of light.

I’ve been reading about Newt Gingrich’s call for American bases on the Moon before the end of his second term. His heart is in the right place, but that mission isn’t going to happen. Few are willing to say it, but the real future of space exploration doesn’t include men.

The simple truth is once you leave the surface of the Earth it’s extremely difficult to provide a living environment that allows work. There is no walking in your shirtsleeves on a nice summer’s day anywhere but Earth!

Space is also big. Other planets are far. Other solar systems are crazily far even at the speed of light. Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and it’s still within our own solar system.

NASA figured this out a long time ago. They send turnkey projects into space. A rover on Mars doesn’t need a driver. It arrives mostly assembled and finishes the job on its own!

NASA’s expertise could be scaled up to build larger projects deployed away from Earth. It’s possible there are commercial implications though I don’t see any.

Space travel without humans is no less meaningful. It’s a lot less romantic.