Last month, the European Space Agency's Gaia mission released the most accurate catalogue to date of positions and motions for a staggering 1.3 billion stars. Let’s do a few comparisons so we can be suitably amazed. The total number of stars you can see without a telescope is less than 10,000. This includes visible stars …
Continue reading "Know Thy Star, Know Thy Planet: How Gaia is Helping Nail Down Planet Sizes"
When thinking and talking about "astrobiology," many people are inclined to think of alien creatures that often look rather like us, but with some kind of switcheroo. Life, in this view, means something rather like us that just happens to live on another planet and perhaps uses different techniques to stay alive. But as defined …
Direct imaging of exoplanets remains in its infancy, but goodness what a treat it is already and what a promise of things to come. Almost all of the 3,714 exoplanets confirmed so far were detected via the powerful but indirect transit and radial velocity methods -- measures of slightly decreased light as a planet crosses …
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket transporting the TESS satellite lifts off from launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Wednesday, April 18, 2018. The space telescope will survey almost the entire sky, staring at the brightest, closest stars in an effort to find any planets that might be …
The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved the ARIEL space mission—the world's first dedicated exoplanet atmosphere sniffer— to fly in 2028. ARIEL stands for the “Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-Survey mission.” It is a space telescope that can detect which atoms and molecules are present in the atmosphere of an exoplanet. The mission was …
In my recent column about The Northern Lights, the Magnetic Field and Life, I explored the science and the beauty of our planet's aurora borealis, one of the great natural phenomenon we are most fortunate to see in the far North (and much less frequently in the not-quite-so-far North.) I learned the hard way that …
“You can feel what it’s like on Venus here on Earth,” said Kevin McGouldrick from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Heat a hot plate until it glows red, place your palm on its surface and then run over that hand with a truck.” The surface of Venus …
Continue reading "To Understand Habitability, We Need to Return to Venus"
I regret that the formatting of this column was askew earlier; I hope it didn't make reading too difficult. But now those problems are fixed. Behind the front page space science discoveries that tell us about the intricacies and wonders of our world are generally years of technical and intellectual development, years of planning and …
Continue reading "Putting Together a Community Strategy To Search for Extraterrestrial Life"
Unmanned missions to planets and moons and asteroids in our solar system have been some of NASA's most successful efforts in recent years, with completed or on-going ventures to Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, the asteroid Bennu, our moon, Pluto, Mercury and bodies around them all. On deck are a funded mission to Europa, another to Mars …
Continue reading "Two Tempting Reprise Missions: Explore Titan or Bring Back a Piece of A Comet"
The media was abuzz last week with the latest NASA news conference. A neural network -- a form of artificial intelligence or machine learning -- developed at Google had found two planets in data previously collected by NASA’s prolific Kepler Space Telescope. It’s a technique that could ultimately track-down our most Earth-like planets. The new …
Many Worlds 