エピソード

  • 341E-364-Laser Surfing

    341E-364-Laser Surfing
    2025/06/17
    When we find a planet which appears to have the chemical signs of living organisms in its atmosphere, the desire to take a close up look at it will be hard to contain. In a Scientific American article, Lee Billings describes Yuri Milner's 100 million dollar project "Breakthrough Starshot" which has been created to leap frog our current rocket technology's extremely long travel times to nearby planets. The plan is to put ultra light space probes on paths which will enable them to collect data as they streak by nearby potentially habitable planets. Our current iPhone technology is being used to envision a tiny robotic space probe which features cameras, life detecting sensors, maneuvering rockets, computers, and communications gear and yet has a mass of about that of a dime. Photons from 100 gigawatt pulses from a ground based laser array are then envisioned to reflect off the tiny spacecrafts solar sail where they transfer momentum to the space craft accelerating it to 20% of the speed of light. Numbers of these tiny robotic investigators could be launched together into Earth orbit and perhaps one a day could be sent towards a nearby star accelerated by laser pulses each of which contains the energy required to send a space shuttle into orbit. In a few decades closeup views and data from nearby worlds would begin streaming back towards the residents of our planet. The cost of investigating our planetary life hosting neighbors is likely to be less than what the US is planning to spend upgrading its nuclear weapons.
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    2 分
  • 853-Tardigrade

    853-Tardigrade
    2025/06/13
    In the search for life on Mars, Europa, Titan, and elsewhere in the universe astro-biologists are scouring the Earth for creatures tough enough to flourish under really difficult conditions. So far the leading species are the Tardigrades commonly known as water bears or moss piglets.
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    2 分
  • 852-Landing On Mars

    852-Landing On Mars
    2025/06/06
    The good news is a Mars landing by human colonists and their equipment seems technically feasible given a large budget of cash and grit.
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    2 分
  • 339E-359-Ice World

    339E-359-Ice World
    2025/06/03
    Recently Dr. Yossi Shvartzvald led a team which published their discovery of an Earth sized planet using microlensing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The newly discovered planet OGLE-2016-BLG-1195Lb orbits a small dim object about 13,000 light years from us. With only 7.8% of the Sun's mass the new planet's star may be a brown dwarf and not a star at all. At about the same distance from its star as we are from the Sun this new planet is likely to be an ice ball world colder than Pluto.
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    2 分
  • 851-Scientists Views Odds of Aliens

    851-Scientists Views Odds of Aliens
    2025/05/30
    In a recent paper published in Nature Astronomy entitled “Surveys of the scientific community on the existence of extraterrestrial life” Dr. Peter Vickers and his team of 10 co-authors report the results of their survey of the lead authors for the past 10 years in the top three astro-biological journals. These researchers sought to measure if their sample group of scientists thought it likely that 1) simple life, and/or 2 ) life more complex than terrestrial bacteria, and/or 3) Intelligent life comparable or superior to human beings exists outside of Earth.
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    2 分
  • 338E-357-Double Trouble

    338E-357-Double Trouble
    2025/05/27
    When I discovered 2014 JO25 with the NASA funded Catalina Sky Survey's 60 inch telescope on May 5, 2014, it appeared as a single point of light as it moved past us. As 2014 JO25 approached the Earth from the direction of the Sun in 2017, no-one had any idea that it is really a double asteroid system nearly a mile in diameter.
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    2 分
  • 850-Who Owns A Space Rock

    850-Who Owns A Space Rock
    2025/05/23
    Since there is a world wide market for meteorites some of which can be sold for millions of dollars, on line, the question of ownership becomes important.
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    2 分
  • 337E-356-Seeds

    337E-356-Seeds
    2025/05/20
    When a fleet of interstellar spaceships leaves our solar system for a planet circling a nearby star the most important of all of the riches that human explorers will carry with them will be libraries of our planet's DNA and the seeds of plants. They are the connection between past life, the inorganic world, and future life.
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    2 分