Slashdot Mirror
Distant Planet Imaging Project Gets More Funding
It doesn't come easy writes "NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts has chosen a proposal by the University of Colorado (UC) at Boulder to image distant planets around other stars for a second round of funding. Known as the New Worlds Observer, the UC project is for an orbiting, soccer-field sized "starshade" shaped like a daisy that would funnel light from distant planets between its petals to a second spacecraft trailing 50,000 miles behind. If the concept proves feasible, it could 'identify planetary features like oceans, continents, polar caps and cloud banks, and even detect biomarkers like methane, water, oxygen and ozone [...]'"
...we can see them building the invasion fleet in time.
Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which is why engineers sometimes smell really bad.
But did they really have to shape it like a giant flower?
It sure sounds feasible to me. No alarm bells going off at all.
All they need now is an artists impression of what it might look like.
=======
Science -- Sealed, Delivered.
...I can see my house from here! ;-)
libertarianswag.com
stop feeding a few well-fed children to get even more funding?
/passes a few lightyears from the sun, uses telescope Hey! I can see my house from here!
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
University of Colorado goes by CU.
But cool project. It would be interesting to see what other worlds look like, not just know that they are there.
How will the religious establishment react to such discoveries? Suppose a distant planet with many of the features of earth (oceans, deserts, mountains, etc.) is found. But let's not go so far as to say that plant life (or something like it) is found.
How would the religious establishment react? Such discoveries would, in effect, refute many of the religious claims.
We have already seen pseudo Christians going to extreme lengths to ban the teaching of evolution in places like Kansas and Tennessee. Would they take a similar route were discoveries that didn't mesh to well with their teachings to be found?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
NWO? Really?
Zoom Player Lead Dev.
Clearly we are unable to function without Their Googly Appendages, so I don't know how NASA is going to pull this off. Although a soccer-field-sized Space Daisy observatory does sound like something eBay would acquire, and that might get Google interested in a competing Cricket-Pitch Space Tulip.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Google plans to unveil their new software aptly named 'Google Solar System', which sews the surface maps of the planets together for an interactive flythrough.
Colonel Cranium this is Rectal Reconnaissance, we are on a collision course sir, Abort Abort!
it can also detect planetary features like large pockets of hydrogen, methane and nitrogen gas, rings, color bands and thick soupy atmospheres. ;-) Sorry, but I think we're too far away to see anything earth size for now. Maybe in 10-20 years we'll have the technology down.
> it could 'identify planetary features like oceans,
> continents, polar caps and cloud banks, and even
> detect biomarkers like methane
The bad part will come with version 3.0, launched in the later part of this century, when we zoom on on their alien babes on beaches, and see if they have silly laws regulating nudity, too. Or churches.
Quite frankly, I'd be way more scared if they had churches than if they did not.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Having recently watched Independence Day, I can say that I'm relieved that NASA is finally getting around to that RFDEW (Really F#*king Distant Early Warnings) system I've been proposing for years.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
Very cool. However, there's one little problem --- how the hell do you turn it? If the sensor's got to be 50'000km away from the lens, then to turn it 90 degrees (why does Slashdot block Unicode?) you're going to have to move the sensor some 70'000km, which means a lot of hydrazine.
Or do they have something more cunning up their sleeves?
"Using photometry and spectroscopy, we could identify planetary features like oceans, continents, polar caps and cloud banks, and even detect biomarkers like methane, water, oxygen and ozone," said Cash.
0 213412/102-1365682-2218526?v=glance
This reminded me of Star Trek, Ep. 37 'The Changeling'
Nomad was sent out by Earth "in the early 2000s" according to Kirk on a mission to scout for life. Nomad collided with a meteor and was damaged and had lost a good portion of its memory until it encountered another probe, this one alien, with equally advanced artificial intelligence. The alien probe, which had the mission of sterilizing imperfections in soil for colonization purposes, merged with Nomad to repair one another. The convoluted mixup made Nomad think his duty was to sterlize anything that isn't perfect. This is what happened to the poor Malurians - they were killed because they were imperfect.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/630
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
and even detect biomarkers like methane, water, oxygen and ozone
I hope I live to see the day when this thing detects a faint glow on the planet's continents that are facing away from the planet's sun at that moment. *shudder*
Technoli
During the recent comet impactor mission, the accuracy needed to strike the probe onto the comet seemed to be at the limit of our abilities.
Can we really move a pinhole shaped opening directly in front of the target at 50,000km?
The University of Colorado goes by CU, not UC. The Boulder campus goes simply by CU Boulder. (yeah well, it's a slow news day for me too...)
Mox
Google "Not" Earth then.... Or maybe GoogleGalaxy.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Seriously, why did you even bother typing?
Heh kind of reminds me of the book titled "Blind Lake" (sorry can't remember the author) Basically they had a super telescope getting more and more detail, hooking it up super computers for further analysis of the data, and more and more data starts pouring in from the computers in greater and greater detail...even after the original telescopes stop working!
im just waiting for: alienvideo.google.com "Video Chat with your new Alien Friends!"
The NAIC website has a smidgen more info on it -- namely that there were four other research projects funded as well.
There's a PDF on this project that may contain more info, but my copy of Acrobat (6.0) declines to render the entire thing (or the PDF is junk, dunno which).
There's also an article on Astrobio.net that gives little more detail than the CU link... but it does have links to other sources that may be informative. Really though, this concept seems to be in such an infancy stage that "simple" questions like "so how do you turn it?" haven't been answered yet (in fact, in this NASA link how to keep the two craft in alignment is listed as a "main technological hurdle").
With technology like this, we could even determine if the inhabitants of distant planets are so mindbogglingly primitive that they're still driving SUVs!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
... an orbiting, soccer-field sized "starshade" shaped like a daisy ...
Let's just clue the entire galaxy in to the fact that so many hippies live here.
Is your terror cell living in terror? Is your safe-house not so safe? If so, read the New York Times, the jihad journal.
How will the real estate market react?
When can we condemn the beach front property for commercial development?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Not the best picture but you get the idea... http://www.physorg.com/news7177.html
All except for perhaps Scientology. They are the most open to honest scientific inquiry.
Where "here" = among the living on planet Earth, if you actually think Scientologists welcome scientists nosing into their racket.
Infuriate left and right
You went to either CU or CSU?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Considering that he quoted CU's fight song, I would say it's probably fairly likely that he went to CU.
And guess who those interest payments are going to? (Hint #1: Not you. Hint #2: Nobody you know. Hint #3: I wonder how China paid for its new space program...)
It would be cool if they did that using maps.google.com for all the planets that we have mapped. Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and all the moons with each. It would be useful for kids to be able see that. Imagine zooming down to Mars from a POV of MGS, or perhaps images from one of the lunar mappers.
Something like that combined with www.nineplanets.org, would be inspirational.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I don't see how this is very different from discovering that some stars are significantly more than 6,000 light years from here.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It's probably shaped that way because to get it into space you have to fold it up into a shape that will fit into a launch vehicle fairing. A BIG fairing only gives you about a 5 meter diameter, so a lot of folding is required. Some kind of unfolding truss would make sense to me.
"The impossible often has a certain integrity that the merely improbable lacks" - Dirk Gently
Whats percentage of these concept studies actually become vehicles and are launched? I'd guess it is a single-digit percentage. There are lots of nifty ideas out there compared to what NASA is able to implement.
I went to CSU, so I never pay attention to CU. I should have thought about that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The NASA budget is such a small sliver of federal spending that even if you zeroed it it would have little overall effect.
Projects like this compete with similar projects for funds, not with porkbarrel road projects of Iraq reconstruction.
"The impossible often has a certain integrity that the merely improbable lacks" - Dirk Gently
What they don't tell you is that it can focus sunlight into a tiny dot. Ah, the smell of burning aliens!
Since the precursor missions for this, TPF-I and TPF-C, just took huge budget hits, and will not be launching anytime soon ("soon" was already 2015).
Use a nuclear ion drive system.
Daisy, Daisy,
Give me your answer do!
I'm half crazy,
All for the love of you!
- Hal
You know that they are just going to use it to peek at sunbathers. They just "say" that it's to see other planets.
It's full of Perverts!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
the guys in Colorado that to be Hippies in space they don't need to actually get there physically. A flower in space is a nice touch though.
Je me souviens.
Sci-fi about implications of "telescopes" that can receive all information from all sides with "infinite" zooming.
Much of it is a flight of fancy, but still not too bad a read.
Detection biomarkers like methane is pretty easy if you can isolate the light from the planet and can get a decent number of photons. (Either through a large collection area or long integrations.) You just look for the distinctive spectral bands for the molecules like methane or ozone. (Oxygen, alas, leaves little mark in the spectrum since it's a homonuclear diatomic molecule and light tends to ignore it.)
Imaging the surfaces will be tougher. You'll need a damn wide apeture (long integration don't help and the resolving power goes linearly with apeture). Remember, we've only imaged a few stars so far, and most of those are larger (in angular size) than these planets. Crud, look at Cassini: we're only getting good images of moons in our own solar system now because we have a spacecraft flying close to them.
The abbreviation for the University of Colorado Boulder is CU not UC.
eMelody Web Directory add your site today!
In an infinite (bounded or unbounded), any point can be considered its centre --is that what you implied? (I got the joke, I'm just not sure I remember the logic correctly)
I speak England very best
Yeah, because nobody has ever thought of doing that before.
Partly. Even if the universe is bounded, there's no way to tell where the center is, so claiming the Earth is the center is as good as answer as any other.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Now, ozone... that would be a marker for, what... grow-ops?
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
I'll probably take a hit for this too, but people really need to stop modding the clueless troll CyricZ up!
Clever signature text goes here.