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| Missions Map by Olaf Frohn Note the lower right hand side, with voyager 1 and 2 indicated ' off route' more to come ! |
Hello, I hope 2017 finds you refreshed and raring to go - no? Oh well, straight in with a recent announcement by NASA that they are launching two missions.
The missions are titled Psyche and Lucy - one is to fly to a distant metallic asteroid , which is effectively a drifting core from a puported ' protoplanet '.
The mission, 'Lucy', is a little closer to home, exploring asteroids around the gas giant Jupiter , although the principle is similar - to examine materials dating from the early formation of our solar system..
Further examination of space comes with the IXPE mission selected by NASA , in which telescopes in space will gauge distant x-ray fields emanating from black holes .
This mission is set to launch in 2020.
In other news a series of distant frbs are drawing us to look closer - though at 3 billion light years away, close is a loose term...it seems the main attraction is the sheer power required to output a signal over such a distance - could it be ...
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| image by Shane Graf |
They hope to create interstellar hotels capable of flight - an admirable , progressive concept. Particularly if said hotels utilise solar sails to reach near light speed.
Of course, 80 % of light speed would mean your hotel is travelling at a fair clip , but the distance to the nearest starfield (Alpha Centauri) is so great, that you'd have plenty of time to work out how to drink a cocktail in zero gravity without looking foolish.
On a serious note, back to Bigelow Aerospace - their first working test is the BEAM unit recently added to the ISS.
Personally, I would have issues with a flimsy pod in space, with nothing between myself and the great unknown...
Aside from the unexplored depths of the Mariana trench (but that's for another discussion),
Of course, 80 % of light speed would mean your hotel is travelling at a fair clip , but the distance to the nearest starfield (Alpha Centauri) is so great, that you'd have plenty of time to work out how to drink a cocktail in zero gravity without looking foolish.
On a serious note, back to Bigelow Aerospace - their first working test is the BEAM unit recently added to the ISS.
Personally, I would have issues with a flimsy pod in space, with nothing between myself and the great unknown...
Aside from the unexplored depths of the Mariana trench (but that's for another discussion),
there is no greater unknown than space, so it's just as well that Hubble is being used to map a path for the ongoing journeys of Voyagers 1 and 2, now that they are in unexplored territory - a SatNav for the galaxy...hopefully not too many wrong turns up ahead... this is amazing stuff - we're using an orbiting telescope to create a road map for a pair of explorer craft which are billions of miles away!
The future is now - okay, the map is presently about the chemical makeup of the road ahead, but Hubble is marking a wide swathe of space between the two explorers.
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| pic NASA/ ESA / G Bacon (st/scl) |
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