"The Science Of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination Of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets,
"The Science of Star Wars: An Astrophysicist's Independent Examination of Space Travel, Aliens, Planets, and Robots as Portrayed in the Star Wars Films and Books" by Jeanne Cavelos
More Posts from Aspergers1044 and Others
It's not quite warp drive, but researchers are hot on the trail of building nuclear fusion impulse engines, complete with real-life dilithium crystals. Read this article by Amanda Kooser on CNET.
NASA’s TESS Mission to Search for Lots More EXOPLANETS is now about to be Launched someday really soon!
The Hunt for New Worlds Continues with TESS
We’re getting ready to start our next mission to find new worlds! The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find thousands of planets beyond our solar system for us to study in more detail. It’s preparing to launch from our Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.
Once it launches, TESS will look for new planets that orbit bright stars relatively close to Earth. We’re expecting to find giant planets, like Jupiter, but we’re also predicting we’ll find Earth-sized planets. Most of those planets will be within 300 light-years of Earth, which will make follow-up studies easier for other observatories.
TESS will find these new exoplanets by looking for their transits. A transit is a temporary dip in a star’s brightness that happens with predictable timing when a planet crosses between us and the star. The information we get from transits can tell us about the size of the planet relative to the size of its star. We’ve found nearly 3,000 planets using the transit method, many with our Kepler space telescope. That’s over 75% of all the exoplanets we’ve found so far!
TESS will look at nearly the entire sky (about 85%) over two years. The mission divides the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will look at 13 of them in the southern sky during its first year before scanning the northern sky the year after.
What makes TESS different from the other planet-hunting missions that have come before it? The Kepler mission (yellow) looked continually at one small patch of sky, spotting dim stars and their planets that are between 300 and 3,000 light-years away. TESS (blue) will look at almost the whole sky in sections, finding bright stars and their planets that are between 30 and 300 light-years away.
TESS will also have a brand new kind of orbit (visualized below). Once it reaches its final trajectory, TESS will finish one pass around Earth every 13.7 days (blue), which is half the time it takes for the Moon (gray) to orbit. This position maximizes the amount of time TESS can stare at each sector, and the satellite will transmit its data back to us each time its orbit takes it closest to Earth (orange).
Kepler’s goal was to figure out how common Earth-size planets might be. TESS’s mission is to find exoplanets around bright, nearby stars so future missions, like our James Webb Space Telescope, and ground-based observatories can learn what they’re made of and potentially even study their atmospheres. TESS will provide a catalog of thousands of new subjects for us to learn about and explore.
The TESS mission is led by MIT and came together with the help of many different partners. Learn more about TESS and how it will further our knowledge of exoplanets, or check out some more awesome images and videos of the spacecraft. And stay tuned for more exciting TESS news as the spacecraft launches!
Watch the Launch + More!
Sunday, April 15 11 a.m. EDT - NASA Social Mission Overview
Join mission experts to learn more about TESS, how it will search for worlds beyond our solar system and what scientists hope to find! Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast.
Watch HERE.
1 p.m. EDT - Prelaunch News Conference
Get an update on the spacecraft, the rocket and the liftoff operations ahead of the April 16 launch! Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast.
Watch HERE.
3 p.m. EDT - Science News Conference
Hear from mission scientists and experts about the science behind the TESS mission. Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast.
Watch HERE.
4 p.m. EDT - TESS Facebook Live
This live show will dive into the science behind the TESS spacecraft, explain how we search for planets outside our solar system and will allow you to ask your questions to members of the TESS team.
Watch HERE.
Monday, April 16 10 a.m. EDT - NASA EDGE: TESS Facebook Live
This half-hour live show will discuss the TESS spacecraft, the science of searching for planets outside our solar system, and the launch from Cape Canaveral.
Watch HERE.
1 p.m. EDT - Reddit AMA
Join us live on Reddit for a Science AMA to discuss the hunt for exoplanets and the upcoming launch of TESS!
Join in HERE.
6 p.m. EDT - Launch Coverage!
TESS is slated to launch at 6:32 p.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Watch HERE.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
This is The Smallest Sized EXOPLANET Discovered by NASA's TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVEY SATELLITE so far!
NASA's TESS mission finds its smallest planet yet
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet, called L 98-59b, marks the tiniest discovered by TESS to date.
Two other worlds orbit the same star. While all three planets’ sizes are known, further study with other telescopes will be needed to determine if they have atmospheres and, if so, which gases are present. The L 98-59 worlds nearly double the number of small exoplanets – that is, planets beyond our solar system – that have the best potential for this kind of follow-up.
“The discovery is a great engineering and scientific accomplishment for TESS,” said Veselin Kostov, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “For atmospheric studies of small planets, you need short orbits around bright stars, but such planets are difficult to detect. This system has the potential for fascinating future studies.”
A paper on the findings, led by Kostov, was published in the June 27 issue of The Astronomical Journal.
Keep reading
I sure can’t wait until Asteroid and Lunar Mining become real_industries someday!
Diamond Planets are rare. At least in our section of The Milky Way Galaxy.
I wonder what Alien Lifeforms which have evolved on Habitable_Zone Moons and Habitable_Zone Planets in Other Solar_Systems would look like?
3D_XPOINT Advanced Computer Memory from Intel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgk4U4qVpNY&feature=share This New Highly Advanced 3D Computer Memory from Intel might someday replace Today's Computer Memory Technologies (like, Random Access Memory and Most Types of Flash_Memory) and yet it might even Replace The Microprocessor or CPU in Many Desktop and Minitower Computers someday!
Peace Corps.
Colorin colorado, este cuento se ha acabado
July 1, 2016
It feels like an impossible task to condense all that I’ve learned and experienced and become in the last three years into one final blog post, especially since I’m sleep deprived and feeling all of the feelings. Maybe in the next days or weeks or months I will attempt this. But in the meantime, I leave you with this poem, which begins to speak to my feelings toward Peace Corps and toward the Dominican Republic.
Children Running Through
by Rumi, Translation by Coleman Barks with John Moyne
I used to be shy. You made me sing.
I used to refuse things at table. Now I shout for more wine.
In somber dignity, I used to sit on my mat and pray.
Now children run through and make faces at me.
Thank you for following my journey!
Here's a Good Look at Alien Aerospace Engineering.
This is part two of a Science Documentary about: UFO Propulsion.
Here's a good new Kindle Book on The Future of Driverless Vehicles to read. "Life As A Passenger: How Driverless Cars Will Change the World" by David Kerrigan
