pale blue dot
In the Chinese science fiction film The Wandering Earth, recently released on Netflix, humanity attempts to change the Earth’s orbit using enormous thrusters in order to escape the expanding sun – and prevent a collision with Jupiter. The scenario may one day come true. In five billion years, the sun will run out of fuel …
Continue reading “Wandering Earth: rocket scientist explains how we could move our planet”
The exoplanet J1407b is simply “Super Saturn”. If you read Isaac Asimov‘s 1986 novel “Foundation and Earth”, you’ll remember how the main characters of the book (Councilman Golan Trevize, historian Janov Pelorat, and Gaian Bliss) were amazed by Saturn’s rings. They were thinking the gas giant with preeminent rings in old stories was just a …
For eons, skywatchers have been fascinated by the pale red dot that not only unpredictably moves backward in the night sky but also shines a compelling blood-red. Its color, indeed, is one of the first features we notice about Mars. It seizes our attention, and its compelling ambiguity has evoked a deep visceral reaction from …
Will we ever visit other stars? Maybe, in the distant future, if humans won’t become extinct, our grand grand grand … (insert a hundred or a thousand “grand” here) children can stand on an exoplanet’s surface someday. But, we don’t have to wait. NASA has opened a new web page, an “Exoplanet Travel Bureau”, and we can, …
Continue reading “Exoplanet Travel Bureau by NASA – Interactive 3D Images”
A great short science fiction film, “Others Will Follow”, created and directed by Andrew Finch and published on Vimeo, tells the story of a crewed Mars mission. An accident occurs and the spacecraft breaks apart, the last survivor (we don’t see what happens to the rest of the crew, but presumably they have died) manages …
The billionaire founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk has revealed a new plan to colonize Moon and Mars with giant reusable spaceships. He provided an update on their Mars colonization plan at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC, see notes 1) in Adelaide, Australia this week. Musk plans to send 1 million people to Mars using BFR (see …
Continue reading ““Making Life Multiplanetary”: Musk reveals a new plan to colonize Mars”
Proxima Centauri b, the Earth-like planet orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri may have oceans, scientists say. The planet was discovered in August 2016 and caused excitement because it’s in the habitable zone of its star, and it’s rocky. And it’s in the Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to us! Researches from France’s National …
Can a planet have three suns? In March 2016, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered a Jupiter-sized hot planet orbiting three stars. The system is 680 light-years away from us.
April 8, 2016, was a historical day that marks a new milestone on humanity’s space adventure: after delivering CRS-8 cargo on its way to the International Space Station, SpaceX Falcon 9 Flight 23, the third flight of the full-thrust version landed vertically on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You over the Atlantic …
Continue reading “SpaceX Falcon 9 lands on a barge (and the Science Fiction saw the future again!)”
