An example of the spectrum from two laser frequency combs, with their evenly spaced emission lines. (Courtesy: ESO).
Topics: Astronomy, Astrophysics, Exoplanets, Optics, Space Exploration
A new type of laser frequency comb (LFC) has been developed by scientists in Europe. The prototype device could lead to improvements in how scientists search for Earth-like exoplanets, measure the expansion of the Universe and test the fundamental constants of nature.
LFCs produce spectral lines of light with evenly spaced frequencies and have a wide range of applications in metrology and spectroscopy. The new LFC was developed by Tobias Herr of the Swiss Centre for Electronics and Microtechnology, Francesco Pepe of the Geneva Observatory and colleagues. It uses a laser-driven microresonator on a silicon-nitride chip that produces 24 GHz pulses for use in calibrating near-infrared spectrometers. This gives it an advantage over traditional LFCs, which operate at frequencies below 10 GHz and create a line spacing that is too small for astronomical spectroscopy.
The pulses are produced by way of a phenomenon known as temporal dissipative Kerr-cavity solitons (DKSs), which involves trapping ultra-short pulses of light in a circular, micron-sized microresonator. Each time the DKS pulse passes the microresonator’s input-output coupler, some of the pulse is siphoned away and directed towards the spectrometer, producing a series of spectral lines that, in the prototype, are each precisely 24 GHz apart. These lines form a spectral comb and act as a precise calibration tool for the spectrometer.
One popular method of detecting exoplanets is the radial velocity technique. This involves measuring a star’s subtle motion that is caused by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. These motions are often no faster than walking pace and require highly accurate spectroscopic measurements of the Doppler shift in the star’s light as it moves. The size of the Doppler shift and the period at which it occurs can tell astronomers both the mass and the distance from the star of the planet. The greater the mass of the star, or the less massive or more distant the planet, the smaller the Doppler shift.
Topics: Bose-Einstein Condensate, Modern Physics, Quantum Mechanics
It’s been more than two decades since Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell created the first Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC), confirming the counterintuitive prediction that a macroscopic population of atoms can pile into a single quantum ground state if cooled below some critical temperature. In all those years, the recipe for creating the condensates has hardly changed: Laser Doppler cooling chills the cloud of atoms as close to the critical temperature as possible; when that technique can go no further, evaporative cooling does the rest. But the evaporative cooling step is inefficient. It works by jettisoning most of a cloud’s atoms in order to cool the remaining few—a relatively slow process that can take a minute or more. Now MIT researchers led by Vladan Vuletić have come up with an alternative approach that allows them to create BECs in a fraction of the time.
This edited volume will offer an opportunity for authors to investigate the ways in which blackness is reimagined in both mainstream and independent comics. Specifically, I propose responding to the following questions: What are the ways in which heroism is redefined by black characters? How are black futures reimagined? What gendered arguments are made through this medium? What are the challenges in presenting to black audiences in this largely white genre? How do the creators depict the continent of Africa and/or communities in the African Diaspora? How are black bodies presented in graphic comics and novels? Finally, how are themes of social justice specific to black communities presented in this type of medium?
This volume would address the above questions in addition to the themes indicated below.
Black Futurism
Black Femininity
Black Masculinity
Imagery of Blackness
Conceptions of Africa and/or Diaspora
Black Bodies in Comics
The Use of Comics for Social Change
Narratives of publishing Black-themed Graphic Novels and Comics
All submissions should include a 200-word abstract. Finalized contributions should be sent as Microsoft Word and/ or JPEG attachment by March 31st, 2018. Articles will be in English. Please send an email to byates@sju.edu for instructions to submit via Dropbox. In terms of submission requirements, utilize FIRE!!!’s style guide located at http://fire-jbs.org/ under the author’s tab.
Pulsars spin rapidly while emitting powerful beams of radiation.Credit: Dana Berry/NASA
Topics: Astrophysics, Instrumentation, International Space Station, NASA, Space Exploration
NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
From its perch aboard the International Space Station, a NASA experiment has shown how future missions might navigate their way through deep space. Spacecraft could triangulate their location, in a sort of celestial Global Positioning System (GPS), using clockwork-like signals from distant dead stars.
Last November, the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) spent a day and a half looking at a handful of pulsars — rapidly spinning stellar remnants that give off beams of powerful radiation as they rotate. By measuring tiny changes in the arrival time of the pulses, NICER could pinpoint its location to within 5 kilometres.
It is the first demonstration in space of the long-sought technology known as pulsar navigation. One day, the method could help spacecraft steer themselves without regular instructions from Earth.
My wife and I were in the local MLK Walk today. We also donated suits and coats! Last year I was obese and hated walking to the mailbox. Losing 100lbs had made a huge impact on my life.
Topics: Civics, Civil Rights, Human Rights, Martin Luther King, Star Trek
Notwithstanding our national projected life expectancy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would have been 89 years old today; Mrs. Coretta Scott King was two years his senior. This is also the 50th anniversary year of his assassination, as it had been pointed out ten years earlier on the election of the first and only African American president in the history of the republic. It is poignant we're post/after the obvious racist comments of a continent and diverse cultures of humanity by our current president* with absolutely no doubt that he, his followers and his political party are indeed racists.
Star Trek was born in this similar cauldron, and Dr. King was a great fan, especially for his young kids at the time. Civil Rights, Voting Rights, the Vietnam War; the ever-present "nuclear button." civil defense drills (not like the botched alert in Hawaii) and the Cold War exacerbated one's sense of whether or not "we were going to make it" as a species. It was especially powerful to African Americans like Dr. Mae Jemison, Dr. Ron McNair, my friends; me that could see a future that we could count on being more humane, civilized, just; SANE and survivable.
And yet, we're all here: the year is 2018, in a covfefe-Twitter-Twilight-Zone where a president* post Charlottesville praises tiki-torch Neo Nazis as "fine people" and little comment on activist Heather Heyer, who lost her life; comments on his "performance" as if still in reality television mode, and racially slurs an entire continent and diverse cultures. April Ryan point-blank called him out. After his empty comments about Dr. King in a staged photo op with black sycophants (among whom were sadly, the ever-sleepy Ben Carson and Isaac Newton Farris, Jr., Martin Luther King's nephew and his inept soft peddle of 45's racism); cowardly walked away as he did from a contentious visit to the UK that promised to be embarrassing for him. He's insulted Gold Star families (especially those of color), women, minorities, the Pope and NONE, not one nickname, belligerent bowel movement-inspired tweet or witty zinger for his pimp benefactor Vladimir Putin and his Wikileaks minions. The UN has called the president* racist. It's "unfortunate" and "unhelpful" to Speaker Ryan; as of the Friday after the slur, silence from Senate Majority Leader McConnell. A party that's facing demographic oblivion could (possibly) sell its political soul to a Russian devil for survival. They are slowly dying. They're not convincing enough youth, women, minorities et al to be politically viable in 10 years, let alone the midterms. Our current president*, along with his limited vocabulary, enabling weak party, diminished mental faculties probably finds the concept of adjusting for demographics as alien as they'd consider Dr. King.
To survive him, this summoned-from-the-pit xenophobia and reclaim what is left of our republic will take time. It will take rediscovering Dr. King's "Beloved Community."
Maybe... he was thinking about Star Trek.
“The Beloved Community” is a term that was first coined in the early days of the 20th Century by the philosopher-theologian Josiah Royce, who founded the Fellowship of Reconciliation. However, it was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who popularized the term and invested it with a deeper meaning which has captured the imagination of people of goodwill all over the world.
For Dr. King, The Beloved Community was not a lofty Utopian goal to be confused with the rapturous image of the Peaceable Kingdom, in which lions and lambs coexist in idyllic harmony. Rather, The Beloved Community was for him a realistic, achievable goal that could be attained by a critical mass of people committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence.
Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry and prejudice will be replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes will be resolved by peaceful conflict-resolution and reconciliation of adversaries, instead of military power. Love and trust will triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice will prevail over war and military conflict. [2]
*The usage of the asterisk (*) next to president* I borrow from and attribute to Charles P. Pierce, a writer for Esquire magazine and frequent media commentator on MSNBC. He's also author of the prescient book: "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free." And so, despite his and other authors' warnings to the contrary, our republic is at the stage-edge of this cliff...
The last 18 months in my life have been unpredictable, and not in good ways. Now that my health issues seem to have quieted down, it's past time I posted here.
As a freelance reviewer for Foreword Reviews magazine, I get to read free books of above-average quality from independent presses. The standout- read for last year was An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. You can find my review here: https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/an-unkindness-of-ghosts/
Solomon is amazing. It seems as though this young writer distilled the essence of Octavia Butler's work and added personal perspective; what resulted is a wonder, and more than just a mixing. This novel deserves all the awards and then some; the sad and likely fact is that it probably will go mostly unnoticed.
Posted by Nelo Maxwell on January 13, 2018 at 11:07am
So thanks to some suggestions and consideration I'm continuing my first comic series The Hierophants. I will bring production on issue 2 early/mid year. Might do a kickstarer but who knows. Stay tuned.
Read more…
Named for Cornell psychologist David Dunning and his then-grad student Justin Kruger, this is the observation that people who are ignorant or unskilled in a given domain tend to believe they are much more competent than they are.
Dunning and Kruger documented this effect in a number of quantitative contexts. Its first publication, in 1999, bore the memorable title, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." The authors observed that you need skill and knowledge to judge how skilled and knowledgeable you are. A tone-deaf singer may be unable to distinguish her talent from that of the greatest stars. Why then shouldn't she believe she's their equal? Source: Psychology Today
I casually conducted an interesting thought experiment with my wife. I asked her the name of the gynecologist that delivered our youngest son. She recalled her. "How do you think she became an OB/GYN?" I asked. The obvious answer was going to college and making excellent grades, getting into grad school with impeccable MCAT scores, then after four years or so, graduating with an MD, residency and eventually her own practice. In other words, several YEARS of preparation, internship and study.
We don't think of politics in that light, and the advent of the Internet has taken our impatience with the governing process to Attention Deficit Disorder levels nationally. We "get the gist" of a subject in a few Internet searches, assuming that's all the expertise one would need. A librarian at my last high school in Manor, Texas tried mightily to instruct using Boolean logic search terms and strategies to narrow focus, rather than merely going with a single wild card term and taking the first links provided. It seemed for my class at least to fall on deaf ears. My generation (admittedly) and literally created the analog version of this need to get-to-the-answer: Cliff Notes, followed by Made Simple, Schaum's Outline, Research Education Associates Problem Solvers and the most recent incarnation "For Dummies" series'. These were and still are, supplement books we bought and READ as well as the hard, grinding work of rewriting notes, going to study groups and mastering the material. I'm not against Internet searches (I use them), but eventually you have the problem, in front of you or on paper you have to solve, either under the stress of a testing environment or a deadline. Sadly, the democratization of information has not produced wisdom.
The Constitution was crafted literally in the "horse and buggy" days, things were slow and the Founders - property/(reprehensible) slave owners - were steeped in learning and history, especially of Europe and the tendency to hide the corruption of royalty and the aristocracy, thereby empowering autocrats. "Checks and balances" were designed for a government not to get overarching, or not let any president become a demagogue or tyrant. A governing document created post the advent of electricity and Twitter would change overnight - several times several times - at the whim of "likes" or emojis. That is a republic foundation built on sifting, Silicon quicksand. We are currently at 2,000 lies, and apparently racially slurring nations of color is just as "presidential" as Andrew Jackson's Trail of Tears.
Quoting the link from Psychology Today:
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Those who have the slightest bit of experience think they know it all. That's the peak at upper left. Then, with increasing experience, people realize how little they do know, how modest their skills are. Perceptions reach a minimum (center of chart), then slant upward again. Those at the level of genius recognize their talent, though tend to lack the supreme confidence of the ignoramus.
The chart is almost a emoticon: a smile turned smirk.
I'm purposely avoiding the use of any names. As such, I do not think any celebrity - talk show host or reality star - should ascend to the role of president without academic preparation, judicious study and experience in jurisprudence as well as law.
Would anyone want an amateur performing an episiotomy on your wife, or "winging it" on Braxton Hicks contractions? No one can "Google" that!
Expertise...matters.
"The whole problem with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." Bertrand Russell
The next trilogy in the Darkside Universe is nearly completed. My intention is to get all three volumes published simultaneously and I'm going to need help.
The Archangel X Trilogy continues the saga of the Darkside Trilogy, following the extraordinary community of African Americans who discovered the means to beat NASA to the moon and live there secretly before Neil Armstrong arrived. The three volumes are Quarantine, Enmity, and Enlightenment, with the third installment over half way completed.
Please take a look at my GoFundMe campaign and see if it's something you can contribute to. There are Premiums for those who contribute to the campaign. Please give it serious consideration, and thank you in advance for checking it out. Thank you so much for your consideration!
Cyclones swirl at Jupiter's south pole in this photo from NASA's Juno spacecraft. Credit: Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles/NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Topics: Jupiter, NASA, Planetary Science, Space Exploration
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Before NASA sent its Juno spacecraft to explore Jupiter, astronomers were "totally wrong" about much of what they thought they knew about the planet, the mission's principal investigator, Scott Bolton, said during a lecture here at the 231st meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Tuesday (Jan. 9).
Juno, which launched in 2011 and is currently orbiting Jupiter, is not the first spacecraft to study the gas giant up close. NASA's Pioneer and Voyager missions flew by Jupiter in the 1970s, and the Galileo spacecraft later spent eight years orbiting the planet. Even before that, humans had been studying Jupiter with telescopes for hundreds of years.
By the time Juno launched, astronomers had a pretty good idea of what to expect from the new images and data it would collect at Jupiter — or so they thought.
"Our ideas were totally wrong about the interior structure, about the atmosphere, [and] even about the magnetosphere," Bolton said. Astronomers believed that Jupiter had either a very small and dense core, or perhaps no core at all. But data from Juno revealed that Jupiter has an enormous, "fuzzy" core that might be partially dissolved. This discrepancy between scientists' expectations and the data suggests that there's a lot we still don't know about giant gas planets, he explained.
A genetically engineered E.coli. The small white structures are gas vesicles. ANUPAMA LAKSHMANAN/CALTECH
Topics: Biology, Genetics, Research
Scientists at the California Institute of Technology in the US have genetically engineered bacteria capable of sending sonar signals from deep within the human body.
The modified Escherichia coli contain genes from two other species of bacteria, enabling them to grow new internal structures called gas vesicles. The vesicles – used by some water-dwelling microbes to regulate buoyancy – can reflect ultrasound signals beamed in by medicos, revealing their precise location.
The GM E.coli, as reported in the journal Nature, potentially have many uses, including providing a signalling mechanism to allow doctors to determine whether certain drugs or other treatments are reaching optimum locations.
Researchers led by Mikhail Shapiro and Raymond Bourdeau started looking into the potential of bacteria as living soundboards more than six years ago. They were seeking solutions to a key problem in medical diagnosis: the depth and density of the human body is such that light-based imaging techniques are defeated at all but the shallowest insertions.
Ultrasound, they reasoned, is able to penetrate much more deeply. If it could be bounced off target bacteria, then precise locations could be identified and treatments modified in response to the data.
In Star Trek, the starship Enterprise encounters an alien Dyson Sphere. On Earth, NASA could detect one with its next-gen telescopes, astrobiologists suggest. CBS VIA GETTY IMAGES
Astrobiologists are calling on NASA to use what geologists are learning about a new era sometimes called the “Anthropocene” to help develop space missions for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Not that astronomers can peer into the rock strata of alien worlds in the hope of finding traces of existing (or vanished) civilizations. What they can do is look for changes in planetary atmospheres — changes that Haqq-Misra and colleagues refer to as “techno-signatures” in a policy paper submitted to the US National Academy of Sciences.
Abstract
Human influence on the biosphere has been evident at least since the development of widespread agriculture, and some stratigraphers have suggested that the activities of modern civilization indicate a geological epoch transition. The study of the anthropocene as a geological epoch, and its implication for the future of energy-intensive civilizations, is an emerging transdisciplinary field in which astrobiology can play a leading role. Habitability research of Earth, Mars, and exoplanets examines extreme cases relevant for understanding climate change as a planetary process. Energy-intensive civilizations will also face thermodynamic limits to growth, which provides an important constraint for estimating the longevity of human civilization and guiding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We recommend that missions concepts such as LUVOIR, HabEx, and OST be pursued in order to make significant progress toward understanding the future evolution of life on our planet and the possible evolution of technological, energy-intensive life elsewhere in the universe.
“If you saw a planet like Earth, around a yellow star and you saw methane and ozone and carbon dioxide, that’s a classic bio-signature,” Haqq-Misra says. “But if you see a planet like Mars, just a little outside the traditional habitable zone, where you’d expect it to be cold, but you observe CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and PFCs (perfluorocarbons) and exotic greenhouse gases that seem to be raising the [planet’s temperature], that would be pretty good evidence for terraforming — like us terraforming Mars.”
Techno-signatures might also take the form of infrared light that might represent heat loss from large-scale engineering projects, such as orbiting solar collectors or planetary sun shades designed to offset global warming.
Such things, Haqq-Misra says, might lie in the future of any technologically advanced civilization faced with the dual problems of population growth and increasing energy needs.
Illustration showing fluctuations between regions of two different local structures of water. High density is shown as red and low density as blue. (Courtesy: Stockholm University)
Water could exist in two different liquid phases with different densities. That is the conclusion of researchers in Sweden, Japan and Korea, who have used ultrafast X-ray scattering to measure the properties of supercooled water droplets.
Despite being the most ubiquitous and important liquid on Earth, water is a deeply puzzling substance with physical properties that deviate significantly from those of an idealized liquid. Several theories have been advanced to account for some of water’s idiosyncrasies, but experimental data have been lacking.
Solid ice is the most stable phase of water below 0° C, but the liquid phase remains metastable at sub-zero temperatures. Under normal circumstances, impurities such as dust particles provide nuclei around which ice crystals can form, so freezing occurs quickly. In the laboratory, however, it is relatively easy to supercool liquid water to well below 0° C by removing impurities. As the temperature goes down further, however, molecular motion slows and, below around -40° C, water molecules begin to form crystals around one another, allowing even pure water to crystallize very rapidly.
Steve Bannon - before he became the president* whisperer, White House resident white supremacist Grand Poo-Bah and all-around jerk face (that always looks drunk when he's supposedly trying to be sober and serious), was an executive producer on "Seinfeld" - a comedy show literally about... nothing.
There was no particular theme to the show other than Jerry Seinfeld occasionally doing stand up, struggling at it but never going "poor." There was never any social commentary like other comedy shows - Good Times, The Jefferson's, Chico and the Man, All in the Family, Family Ties, Family Matters and most recently, Black-ish - would delve into. That would be WAY too serious. Because Bannon produced the show, it explains the lack of diversity in its cast and feature shots of New York City - one of the most diverse places in the world - with few people of color or other nationalities. Fans viewed Seinfeld's day-to-day experiences with his friends - especially Kramer - as a farcical escape from mundane reality. When the last show was broadcast, many in my office (at the time, Motorola) were depressed. I was not a fan, so I did not share in their angst on the disappearance of... nothing. Quora has a better summation.
Michael Wolff's "Fire and Fury" book dropped like a lead balloon from a Zeppelin with C4 strapped to it. The salacious charges most likely will be pushed back on by this administration and many proven false with respect to sourcing, but it's featured on Brietbart, and his 16 tweets didn't help (see "Related links"). The 20 revelations Newsweek summarizes you can peruse at your leisure. Numbers 3, 11, 13, 14 and 16 should give you pause:
3. Trump didn't want to win, and no one in his campaign thought he would win. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” former national security adviser Michael Flynn assured his friends about his decision to accept $45,000 for a speech in Russia.
11. As a candidate, Trump had no interest in learning about the Constitution, which he knew very little about. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment, before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head,” said Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to the Trump campaign.
13. Trump didn't enjoy his own inauguration. "He was angry that A-level stars had snubbed the event, disgruntled with the accommodations at Blair House, and visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears," the book claims.
14. Trump reassured Melania that he would not win the election. On election night, when it became clear that he would win, "Melania was in tears—and not of joy."
16. Trump never reads. “He didn't process information in any conventional sense. He didn't read. He didn't really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semi-literate,” the book says.
He didn't want the job?
Could that be what this has been all about?
Speculation: I think it was really meant to be a long con. He'd be howling from the sidelines on Fox at the "Crooked Hillary Administration" as he talked their chief propagandists Hannity and O'Reilly to what would eventually be Trump TV, 24/7. Money is his god, and the con his altar. Being president* was an accident of our collective civics ineptitude and an antiquated electoral college designed to give southern, slave-owning states an equal footing with those damned, northern Yankees, which technically he is. But birtherism, Russian interference and bigotry at the first and only African American president; a little misogyny and self-loathing from the 53% of white women and hypocrisy from the 81% of "family values" white evangelicals that voted the p-grabber in, and we're at this epoch of a twitter feud between two infantile, bad hairdo, insane narcissists comparing the size of their nuclear button-schlongs.
Gripping his tiny own and howling conspiracy theories from the sidelines is so much more fun than the aforementioned conspiracy theorist having the nuclear codes.
The Olympic levels of obfuscation totaling 1,950 in 347 days (and counting); the roller coaster news cycles that focus on the next level of low from an obnoxious narcissist that underestimated the scope of the job he never wanted. A man who has dubious ties to organized crime and Russian oligarchs to cover for a lack of business acumen. A man that believes his own myths about himself, literally taking Karl Rove's "created realities" and making his own bubble/covfefe Twilight Zone. A president* whose not even intelligent enough to be Seinfeld: he's more like Kramer, gene-spliced with Archie Bunker in the Jeff Goldblum 80's remake of "The Fly."
He may yet "make America great again" if we survive this: by reminding us our federal republic is precious and without attention (or care), fleeting.
*The usage of the asterisk (*) next to president* I borrow from and attribute to Charles P. Pierce, a writer for Esquire magazine and frequent media commentator on MSNBC. He's also author of the prescient book: "Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free." And so, despite his and other authors' warnings to the contrary, our republic is at the stage-edge of this cliff...
Artist’s depiction of a space probe, propelled by a solar sail. (Image credit: Andrzej Mirecki)
Topics: Exoplanets, Interstellar Travel, NASA, Space, Space Exploration, Spaceflight, Spacetime
Solar sails have been discussed for a long time as the most viable option for interstellar travel at current technological attainment. That will entail the nanoengineering of polymers that can be durable to things like micro-meteor strikes at 0.1 c (one-tenth the speed of light) as well as shielding for electronics so as not to fry instrumentation on the exceedingly long journey. I hope we're mature enough societally, socially and emotional intelligence-wise to complete the project. It would be a shame if our instrument transmitted information back to Mother Earth, and for a myriad of bad reasons, no one was here to receive the message.
NASA is in the earliest stages of planning an exoplanet expedition, set to mark the 100th anniversary of its first crewed Moon landing, Apollo 11. A small team based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hopes to send a spacecraft to a distant planet in search of life.
In 2016, a funding bill was passed that called upon NASA to investigate methods of interstellar travel that could reach at least 10 percent of the speed of light by 2069 [the 100th year anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission]. It also requested a mission to Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to our own.
A probe is set to be sent to the chosen exoplanet to determine whether or not life is present. A few years after its launch, NASA will send a large telescope into deep space, which will use gravitational lensing to offer a full view of the exoplanet.
At present, there’s some debate as to whether Alpha Centauri or another system will be selected, as there are several candidates being considered. Of course, there are some big questions to be answered before this mission becomes a reality.
NASA is eyeing SEP to further enable its crewed space exploration efforts. Image Credit: NASA
Topics: Ion Propulsion, NASA, Space Exploration, Spaceflight
NASA is hard at work developing what they believe is the best space engine for future missions to Mars and beyond. It’s not warp drive. No, nothing so exotic or dreamy. In fact, it already exists. The challenge is to enhance it for our needs in space in the coming decades. That is the hope, and the goal, of NASA’s continuing development of solar electric propulsion (SEP).
Solar electric propulsion uses electricity generated from solar arrays to ionize atoms of the propellant xenon. These ions are then expelled by a strong electric field out the back of the spacecraft, producing thrust. So, in short, SEP is a propulsion system that is a combination, or coupling, of solar array technology and ion thruster technology.
The NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, has been a leader in both ends of this technology for decades. Its work with ion thruster technology began with the Space Electric Rocket Test 1 in 1964. Today, ion thrusters are used to keep over 100 geosynchronous Earth orbit satellites in their locations, a process called station keeping. The Deep Space 1 mission, which made flybys of asteroid Braille and the comet Borelly between 1998 and 2001, used the NASA Solar Technology Application Readiness (NSTAR) ion propulsion system.
