(9 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Newly Found Planet Could Hold Water
March 22, 2010 [fair warning: FoxNews Link]
A newly discovered gas giant planet may have an interior that closely resembles those of Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System, and may hold water, the building block of life.
The newly found Corot-9b is one of a class of heavenly bodies called exoplanets — planets like Earth and Saturn that are discovered outside of our solar systems. More than 400 have been found so far, and of the billions of stars in the sky, many are likely to have planets.
[…]
Although the planet itself is a gas giant and hence has no solid surface to stand on, what if it possessed a moon like Saturn’s Titan? If the temperature were towards the lower end of the estimated range, then any moon would be an ice ball. If it were towards the upper end, it would be rather too hot for liquid water. But what if it were somewhere in the middle … ?
New worlds await.
But do we have the ingenuity to challenge the obstacles, and one day … Manage to Reach Them?
Even if Space Travel, seems a struggle for another generation — it still can serve as the “spark plug” which fires our Imaginations. In my opinion, the pursuit of Science, is rarely a bad investment.
Without Science, we’d all still be hunter-gatherer, nomadic peasants.
With a well funded Pursuit of Scientific Knowledge, just imagine the Possibilities …
Exo-planet found in balmy orbit – is it Avatar’s Pandora?
Mar 17, 2010
No sign of Avatar’s blue-skinned Na’vi aliens, but Europe’s CoRoT space telescope Wednesday yielded the discovery of a Jupiter-sized world orbiting a “temperate” distance from its star.
The discovery marks the first “transit” detection, where the dip in starlight caused by a planet orbiting in front of its star tips off astronomers to its existence.
Granted, dreams of Space Traveling to distance worlds are not likely to happen in our life-times.
But that should NOT put the Brakes on Discovery — we could not “stand on the ‘Shoulders of Giants'” NOW — Unless those free-thinkers, who have gone before us, had at one point, Dare to Dream …
As Children still Dare to Dream, with the hope of one day Discovering ‘New Worlds’ and ‘New Possibilities’ — who are we, to pull the plug on those Dreams … to extinguish the Hope of the Human Spirit?
10 Space Jobs From the Near Future
By Lonnie Morgan April 7, 2010
If Congress goes through with the budget proposal (and that is a big if), NASA will stop work on the Constellation program, including the in-development Orion module and Ares rocket and focus instead on a new heavy-lift vehicle and new space-related technologies. The move will pave the way for companies like SpaceX to take up the helm for low-Earth orbit (LEO) human spaceflight.
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So what will a job market for the aspiring space junkie look like in 20 to 30 years? For a long time, the single goal for kids that were obsessed with spaceflight was to become an astronaut. Now, it looks like that job title will have some competition. Here are 10 non-scientist jobs I believe youngsters should start to prepare for:LEO pilot (eventually, lunar transfer pilot)
Space-travel ticket broker
Spaceport traffic control (also, on-orbit traffic control, Earth and lunar)
Human-rated spacecraft maintenance
Space communications specialist
Space Construction and Repair Specialist
Lunar base psychologist (presence on the moon not required)
Mars colony psychologist
Nuclear and solar power engineers
On-orbit refueling specialist
The movie Avatar was set in 2154.
Given that kind of lead time, and a vision to reach for that Better Future — our descendants — could reach worlds like Pandora, much faster than we … can now dare, Imagine …
That is,
If only WE dare to Dream … to open that Future Science Box … and imagine just WHERE those future generations will “eventually stand”?
… like Jeff Goldblum says in the movie Jurassic Park,
“Life — will always find a way.”
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is guarded by fear,
and the absence of vision.
perhaps we only “stand”,
on the planks of futility?
Obama is going to down-size and privatize the space program so it can go where every man has gone before.
is difficult in this world of buzzards.
1. I don’t think we should be concentrating on this when we’re fucking up our planet so badly, and most of the impulse and technology for it is military in nature.
2. OTOH, we have a need to explore, and maybe this could be a way that our impulses to build things to destroy stuff could be turned in a better direction.
The movie Avatar is
by the wayabout how humans and militarism screwed up so badly on our own planet, and how we tried to screw up a paradise planet for profit–and were sent home in disgrace.The Space Shuttle is these days basically just a PR stunt and a gravy train for certain companies.
If the money used on the shuttle program was instead spent on unmanned space probes we would receive much more important scientific data.
Of awareness and discovery and other natural experiences that words cannot sufficiently express. It is out there and inside. Can man connect the dots? Some explore light years into the past on wings of science and look to the future with hope and excitement; others tremble at the unknown and the different, and are guided by fear.
To leave the world in the hands of today’s politicians is suicide, exemplified in Reagan’s Star Wars and Bush’s Shock and Awe; and the absurd and infantile notions that you can privatize space and matter. I wonder if they can dig a little deeper than their vestigial hankering for gold? How the buffoons and hucksters have managed to steal the combination to the safe doesn’t say much for natural selection.
Wouldn’t want to be caught flat-footed? Is Obama keeping us safe from alien invasions? I think Obama may be soft on aliens. Maybe I should do a diary about that on GOS.