Life In The TRAPPIST_1 System

The Solar System has at least two more planets waiting to be discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto, Spanish and British astronomers say. Beyond Neptune, Pluto was relegated to the status of "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, although it is still championed by some

I sure would like to see this new Propulsion Technology in use for Interplanetary Travel someday!  

Channeling Star Trek: Researchers to Begin Fusion Impulse Engine Experiments

by Michael Keller

Star Trek fans take note: Have a seat before you read the next sentence or prepare to swoon.

University of Alabama-Huntsville (UAH) aerospace engineers working with NASA, Boeing and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are investigating how to build fusion impulse rocket engines for extremely high-speed space travel.

“Star Trek fans love it, especially when we call the concept an impulse drive, which is what it is,” says team member Ross Cortez, an aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate at UAH’s Aerophysics Research Center.

Stay seated Trekkies, because there’s more.

Keep reading

Nice Sci_Fi Scenery!  

Artificial intelligence: don’t fear AI. It’s already on your phone – and useful

See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future

When Joe Weizenbaum found his secretary using a computer program he had created, he was so upset he devoted the rest of his life to warning people not to use its technology. The program was “Eliza”, which gives a passable imitation of a nondirectional psychiatrist; you type sentences such as: “I wonder what I should write,” and it replies :“What answer would please you the most?” (You can try a version at psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych101/Eliza.htm). Weizenbaum’s distress came because he had written Eliza as an experiment, to see whether he could simulate “artificial intelligence” in a question-and-answer system by parsing sentences and throwing relevant bits back at the questioner. But his secretary saw it as real, and asked him not to intrude on “sessions”; Weizenbaum saw this as an omen that we would be too easily fooled into trusting machines.

See on theguardian.com

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

"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

Some Solar_Power Satellites of The Future might be Solar_Powered Blimps that float around in The Stratosphere.  

Solar-Powered Blimps Are the New Satellites

Glass Gem is a unique strain of corn with kernels that look like pieces of rainbow-colored glass. Source

Carl Barnes, an Oklahoma farmer, started growing older corn varieties to connect with his Cherokee heritage. 

He isolated ancestral strains Native American tribes lost in the 1800s when they were relocated to Oklahoma.

Soon he began exchanging ancient corn seed with growers from all over the country, while simultaneously saving and replanting seeds from the most colorful cobs.

This eventually resulted in rainbow-colored corn.

When the rainbow corn mixed with the traditional varieties it created new strains, displaying more vibrant colors and patterns over time.

Glass Gem is a flint corn, so it isn’t really eaten off the cob. It’s usually ground into cornmeal and used in tortillas or grits, but it can also be used to make popcorn.

If you love corn and rainbows, seeds can be purchased online for about $7.95.

I'm glad that NASA's Juno_Mission is already exploring The Jupiter_System by now!

I wonder if The Inner Core of Jupiter is at least as big as Earth?

“JUNO PROBE MAKES HISTORY BY ENTERING JUPITER’S ORBIT AFTER FIVE-YEAR JOURNEY”

Last night, NASA and its Juno probe made history by entering a new probe in orbit around Jupiter. The Juno spacecraft, which had left Earth five years ago, finally entered Jovian orbit after a 35 minute rocket engine manoeuvre to slow down its approach to the planet and get caught by its gravity. Unlike other engine firings in the past, Juno’s manoeuvre was especially dangerous since no previous spacecraft had ever dared to pass so close to Jupiter; its intense radiation belts can destroy unprotected electronics. Luckily, since the probe was built like a tank with titanium shielding, a few minutes later, a sequence of tones transmitted from the spacecraft confirmed the braking manoeuvre had been a smashing success prompting wild cheering at NASA’s mission control in Pasadena, California. “All stations on Juno co-ord, we have the tone for burn cut-off on Delta B,” Juno Mission Control had announced. “Roger Juno, welcome to Jupiter.” Juno’s main objective is to sense Jupiter’s structure and chemistry to gather clues on how the gas giant formed some four-and-a-half-billion years ago. However, much of this observation will not take place until mid-October when Juno performs a second rocket engine burn to tighten its orbit to just 14 days. By then, Juno will be able to answer some interesting questions about the planet including where it formed  in the early Solar System and whether Jupiter has a solid core or a core made of compressed gas. After the mission ends, Juno is scheduled to dive into Jupiter’s atmosphere in February 2018 to ensure that there is no possibility of it crashing into and contaminating any of Jupiter’s large moons.

Read more about this fascinating story on: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36710768

Snow covered House in Winter