Valentina Tereshkova, Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Yuri Gagarin (1963).
If Breakthrough Starshot succeeds in launching a fleet of tiny probes to Proxima Centauri in 30 or 40 years, their payloads will be highly miniaturized and built to specifications far beyond our capabilities today. But the small ‘Sprites’ launched into low Earth orbit on June 23 give us an idea where the research is heading. Sprites are ‘satellites on a chip,’ growing out of research performed by Mason Peck and his team at Cornell University, which included Breakthrough Starshot’s Zac Manchester, who used a Kickstarter campaign to develop the concept in 2011 (see Sprites: A Chip-Sized Spacecraft Solution for background on the Cornell work).
Large asteroid comes 1/3 Moon distance. Gets its orbit bent by Earth. #2017OO1
click for simulation: https://t.co/K3crkSIHxw pic.twitter.com/lxwRha2k5s— Tony Dunn (@tony873004)July 26, 2017
NASA-funded Citizen Science Project Discovers New Brown Dwarf
A paper about the new brown dwarf was published on May 24 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Four citizen scientists are co-authors of the paper, including Castro. Since then, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 has identified roughly 117 additional brown dwarf candidates.
The collaboration was inspired by the recently proposed ninth planet, possibly orbiting at the fringes of our solar system beyond Pluto.
“We realized we could do a much better job identifying Planet Nine if we opened the search to the public,” said lead researcher Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Along the way, we’re hoping to find thousands of interesting brown dwarfs.”
We pointed an on-orbit Dove satellite towards the Baikonur Cosmodrome to capture the images used in this animation of the launch of our latest flock of 48 satellites on board the Soyuz rocket.
Welcome to Outer Space View
Starting today, you can now explore the International Space Station in Street View in Google Maps. Thomas Pesquet, Astronaut at the European Space Agency (ESA), spent six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as a flight engineer. He returned to Earth in June 2017, and in this post he tells us about what it’s like to live on the ISS and his experience capturing Street View imagery in zero gravity.
Japan’s space agency has for the first time released photos and videos taken on the International Space Station by its resident robot drone, which can be remote-controlled from Earth. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) says footage taken by the Internal Ball Camera (or Int-Ball) can be checked in real time by flight controllers and researchers on the ground and then fed back to the onboard crew.
Using actual New Horizons data and digital elevation models of Pluto and its largest moon Charon, mission scientists have created flyover movies that offer spectacular new perspectives of the many unusual features that were discovered and which have reshaped our views of the Pluto system – from a vantage point even closer than the spacecraft itself.
It’s been a year since Juno arrive in Jupiter orbit and while it’s been doing some great science on its mission to understand Jupiter’s interior, the general public has primarly seen the images from the Junocam ‘public outreach’ instrument.
It’s worth explaining exactly how this instrument works because it’s quite different from a regular camera.
What Happens if We Detect Extraterrestrial Intelligence?
“KIC 8462852 is a very, very interesting star. It’s a singular object in astronomy. We know of no other object—no other star—that is like it,” says Siemion. “So that makes it intrinsically very exciting for astronomy, and, I think, also very exciting for SETI.”
The odds of finding intelligent life circling Boyajian’s Star (or any place else, for that matter) are, in a word, slim.
“It’s a one in a million shot,” says Boyajian, but “why not look?” After all, whether or not we’re alone in the universe is arguably the biggest question humanity faces.
But say that, one day, researchers actually do find a signal—either from Boyajian’s star or from somewhere else—and that other scientists verify it as the product of something undisputedly extraterrestrial and intelligent. Then what?
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