Tag Archives: space

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Well, when I say “Earth-like”…

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… I certainly don’t mean “capable of supporting life of the sort found on Earth, or even recognisably similar at a glance”. Yeah, it’s another (albeit milder) sexing-up-science-headlines post! The Kepler telescope has confirmed the discovery of the first “Earth-like” exoplanet, says COSMOS Magazine (who, in fairness, are a good science publication), while Wired picked the more honest “definitively rocky”. Basically, “Earth-like” in this context means “not a gas planet”; from the Wired piece:

… the starquake measurements make astronomers even more certain that Kepler-10b is a ball of rock. COROT-7b’s host star is magnetically active, Batalha says, making it difficult to tease the planet’s gravitational pull from the star’s own magnetic jitters. Some measurements of the planet’s mass leave room for other interpretations of the planet’s composition, like a planet that is more than half water.

Kepler-10b, on the other hand, is denser than the Earth, meaning it is probably made up of rock and iron.

Unfortunately, the new rocky world is hot enough to melt iron. It orbits its star once every 0.84 days, meaning the planet is 23 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun. At such a close orbiting distance, the planet shows the same face to the star at all times, the same way the moon always shows the same face to the Earth. Temperatures on the daytime side of the planet would reach 2780 degrees Fahrenheit, as hot as some red dwarf stars.

So: in a totally different orbital zone to Earth, with no day/night transition like Earth’s, no atmosphere like Earth’s, and a temperature that ensures there isn’t and probably never was any biosphere like Earth’s. But hey, it’s made of rocks – just like Earth!

Look, I’m pretty much a lifelong space geek, and I think this is an awesome discovery. But this journalistic upselling of new discoveries just cheapens them, y’know?

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In Soviet space-future, scream hears you

A bit of visual fizzle for the weekend, courtesy the mighty aggregation powers of MetaFilter. Born In Concrete is the gallery/blog of one Derek Stenning, who makes these rather super (if somewhat grim) Soviet-inspired space art posters:

Destrudo - Derek Stenning

Lots more at the site itself, so go take a look. Someone in the MetaFilter comments thread suggested Stenning should be doing graphic novels of Stanislav Lem titles; I’d add Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series to that suggestion. Heck, get the guy doing commissions for space opera novel jackets; that’s a strong visual hook, right there.

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More molecules: perchlorates on Mars

It’s just like buses; you wait for ages, and then two life-molecules-in-space stories come along at once. This one’s a little closer to home than the Saturnian subsystem, though; a discovery by the Phoenix rover in 2008 encouraged scientists to re-evaluate some old Viking data:

Phoenix detected a chlorine-containing chemical called perchlorate at its landing site, near the Martian north pole. The researchers suspected that perchlorate may have produced what Viking found, destroying original soil organics and leaving behind the two chlorinated compounds, chloromethane and dichloromethane.

So the scientists performed a lab experiment. They grabbed some dirt from Chile’s Atacama Desert — widely considered to be a Martian analog environment — and spiked it with perchlorate. Then they heated the mixture up in the lab, just as the Viking landers did on Mars.

Just as with Viking, the researchers found chloromethane and dichloromethane.

“The simplest, most reasonable explanation of the Viking results is that there were organics in the soil, and they were consumed by the perchlorate,” McKay said. “I think it’s pretty convincing.”

Don’t get too excited, though:

The results don’t prove that life exists — or ever existed — on Mars. While organics are associated with life here on Earth, that’s not necessarily the case elsewhere in the solar system, McKay said.

[…]

But the prospect of Martian life may be a bit more likely now, since Viking seemingly found life’s building blocks in the planet’s red dirt more than three decades ago.

Said it before, and I’ll say it again – let’s just go there, properly, and find out for real.

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Existential risk simulator: throw asteroids at the Earth

Had a bad week? Or just simply looking for a way to kill time at work as the year winds down? How about simulating asteroid collisions with the Earth? [via Space.com]

Just to get the disappointment up front: you don’t get a Hollywood CGI rendering of your imaginary impact (though there is a sort of intro video of a rock falling into the gravity well that runs while the calculations are being done, a bit like a cut-scene from Bruce Willis Saves The Planet While Wearing a Grubby Wifebeater Vest: The Computer Game or something). But what you do get is a list of statistical stuff: energy released in impact, crater size, thermal radiation, that sort of thing.

So, a pretty decent tool for doing the worldbuilding due diligence on your apocalypse novel… or simply exercising your inner misanthrope (fluffy white lap-cat and hammy accent optional).

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SpaceX Dragon capsule: breaking a trail to a new economic frontier?

You’d have had to be living under that oft-mentioned internet-proof rock (or possibly just focussing on that other currently ubiquitous news topic) to not have noticed that yesterday’s launch and re-entry of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule went off exactly according to plan. So when – if? – the Wikiwars die down a bit, expect a lot of pondering from all sides about the future of commercial space exploration, unfettered (well, kind of… or rather not really) by the capricious politics and budgeting of nation-states. Hell knows I’ll be waffling about it a fair bit… but then you probably knew that already.

The sceptical among you may be wondering what’s going to convince profit-motivated businesses to clamber up the gravity well. Well, Centauri Dreams has a pretty good run-through of a paper entitled “Space Colonization: A Study of Supply and Demand”, which suggests that there may well be gold platinum in them thar lunar hills…

Lunar prospecting, then, is a first step in determining the existence of asteroidal metal containing nickel, cobalt and platinum-group metals on the surface. We have much to learn, including not just the quality and location of ores, but also the location of volatiles like water. We also need to learn what happens when asteroidal nickel/iron is made into metal products, and to what extent we will have to rely on engineered alloys to get the desired result. At present, of course, we cannot test the processes we might use on the lunar surface, requiring a preliminary manned base there to work through these contingencies.

Andrews works out a simple cost model exploring mining, processing and shipping operations, comparing these to existing costs. With platinum, for example, selling at close to $40,000 per kilogram, a price that is itself escalating, the case for lunar mining is clearer than that for more plentiful products like cobalt.

How will the mining be accomplished? That’s left for someone else to write a paper about… but how we might get there and back again gets a look-in.

Andrews proposes a lunar sling for launching metal products to Earth, but goes into greater detail on what any space infrastructure requires going out of the gate: A simple and inexpensive way to get to Earth orbit, what he calls FRETOS — Fully Reusable Earth-to-Orbit Systems. A fleet of five launchers supporting a flight rate of 1000 launches per year using four tethers is at the heart of the proposal. On the space side, a Skyhook capture device located at 300 kilometers orbital altitude is part of a picture that also includes a Low Earth Orbit station at 1000 kilometers, a powered winch module at 1700 kilometers and a counter-balance at 2400 kilometers. The total mass of the space segment is estimated at 190 metric tons, including 2100 kilometers of tether lines, high-speed winches, power generation arrays, counter balances and station-keeping components, all to be launched separately and docked together for assembly.

All hypothetical at this point, of course, but the space where possible and plausible overlap is a nice place to hang out… that’s why I read science fiction, at any rate. 🙂