The image above, courtesy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows the CubeSat ASTERIA as it was being launched from the International Space Station in 2017. The size of a briefcase, ASTERIA is part of a growing armada of tiny spacecraft being launched around the world and adding an increasingly important (and inexpensive) set of …
Continue reading "For First Time, Tiny CubeSat Locates a Distant Exoplanet"
Earlier last week, NASA put out a release alerting journalists to "an exciting announcement about the agency’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) mission." Given the controversial history of the project -- the current administration has formally proposed cancelling it for several years and the astronomy community (and Congress) have been keep it going -- …
https://videopress.com/v/SgQvMH55?preloadContent=metadata Scenes from the virtual reality talk on Hayabusa2 with students from the Yokohama International School. Each student has a robot avatar they can use to look around the scene, talk with other people and interact with objects. (OmniScope) Have you ever wondered what it would be like to stand on an asteroid? A rugged …
It was not all that long ago that a "map" of our moon, of Mars, of a large asteroid such as Vesta, of Titan, or of any hard-surfaced object in our solar system would have some very general outlines, some very large features identified, and then the extraterrestrial equivalent of the warning on Earth …
https://videopress.com/v/FRkiDN2V?posterUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fmanyworlds.space%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F04%2Fproxima_centauri_c_manysmallrocks.png&preloadContent=metadata Artist impression of Proxima Centauri c. Press "HD" on the player for the best image quality (E. Tasker). The discovery of Proxima Centauri b in 2016 caused a flood excitement. We had found an extrasolar planet around our nearest star, making this the closest possible world outside of our solar system! But despite its …
Continue reading "Have We Photographed Our Nearest Planetary System?"
When the word "virus" first came into use, it was as a "poison" and “a very small disease-causing agent.” While the presence of viruses was theorized earlier, they were not fully identified until the 1890s. So from their earliest discovery, viruses were synonymous with disease and generally of the ghastly epidemic type of disease …
Continue reading "Viruses, the Virosphere and Astrovirology"
Change is the one constant in our world-- moving in ways tiny and enormous, constructive and destructive. We're living now in a time when a rampaging pandemic circles the globe and when the climate is changing in so many worrisome and potentially devastating ways. With these ominous changes as a backdrop, it is perhaps useful …
Continue reading "Everything Changes: The Rise and Fall of the Northern Ocean of Mars"
By now, the coronavirus is an all too familiar menace to most of the peoples of the world. How it is spread, the symptoms of the disease, the absolute necessity of taking precautions against it -- most people know something about the coronavirus pandemic. But the question of what a virus actually is, what are …
Sometime in the early to mid-2020s, the capsule of the Japanese Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is scheduled to arrive at the moons of Mars – Phobos and Deimos. These are small and desolate places, but one goal of the mission is large: to collect samples from the moons and bring them back to Earth. …
Continue reading "Planetary Protection and the Moons of Mars"
Artist impression of JAXA's MMX spacecraft around Mars (JAXA). Japan in planning to launch a mission to visit the two moons of Mars in 2024. The spacecraft will touchdown on the surface of Phobos, gathering a sample to bring back to Earth. But what is so important about a moon the size of a city? …
Many Worlds 
