Inter-stellxr-blog - Lost Among The Stars

A Quadruple Sky Over Great Salt Lake

The giant pink lady is going to beat the boy on the floor with the fat puffy thing while the clear pointy-nosed thing guards him with an umbrella.

Someone who hasn’t seen Steven universe yet try to explain this scenario

Andromeda Rising over the Alps

What’s Enceladus?

Before we tell you about Enceladus, let’s first talk about our Cassini spacecraft…

Our Cassini mission to Saturn is one of the most ambitious efforts in planetary space exploration ever mounted. Cassini is a sophisticated robotic spacecraft orbiting the ringed planet and studying the Saturnian system in detail.

Cassini completed its initial four-year mission to explore the Saturn System in June 2008. It has also completed its first mission extension in September 2010. Now, the health spacecraft is making exciting new discoveries in a second extension mission!

Enceladus

Enceladus is one of Saturn’s many moons, and is one of the brightest objects in our solar system. This moon is about as wide as Arizona, and displays at least five different types of terrain. The surface is believed to be geologically “young”, possibly less than 100 million years old.

Cassini first discovered continually-erupting fountains of icy material on Enceladus in 2005. Since then, the Saturn moon has become one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for present-day habitable environments.  

Scientists found that hydrothermal activity may be occurring on the seafloor of the moon’s underground ocean. In September, it was announced that its ocean –previously thought to only be a regional sea – was global!

Since Cassini is nearing the end of its mission, we are able to make a series of three close encounters with Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.

Close Encounters

On Oct. 14, Cassini performed a mid-range flyby of Enceladus, but the main event will take place on Oct. 28, when Cassini will come dizzyingly close to the icy moon. During this flyby, the spacecraft will pass a mere 30 miles above the moon’s south polar region!

This will be the deepest-ever dive through the moon’s plume of icy spray, where Cassini can collect images and valuable data about what’s going on beneath the frozen surface.

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Integrated Space Plan, a 100-year plan to take mankind out of the solar system, has been updated.

The original Integrated Space Plan, created in 1989 >>

Kennedy Space Center | by North Sky Photography

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ISS Symphony

The first structural test article of Orion’s Service Module arrived at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio yesterday (November 9). Manufactured by Airbus Defense and Space in Europe, (the same company who built the Automated Transfer Vehicle), the European Service Module will provide Orion’s electrical, propulsion and umbilical capabilities during flight. A single Orbital Maneuvering System engine leftover from the Space Shuttle program will power the spacecraft, and four 11-kilowatt solar panels will generate electrical power. The STA will be used for fit checks and other engineering tests at NASA’s Plumb Brook facility, which is a sub-facility of Glenn. An Antonov-124 aircraft, the second largest cargo plane in the world delivered the ESM STA to Cleveland International Airport November 9.

There’s been a rather startling decision today amongst the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) researchers.

Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, announced to his peers at a conference today that it’s time to begin what’s known as ‘active SETI’.

This is when we actively broadcast and effectively ‘alert’ potential neighbors to our presence.

Needless to say, this was a very polarizing conference.

People from Stephen Hawking all the way to science fiction writer David Brin have spoken out against broadcasting our presence into interstellar space.

They both have made comparisons to what happened when industrial civilizations first encountered indigenous peoples. Things never went well for the locals.

David Brin spoke at the conference and said, “The arrogance of shouting into the cosmos without any proper risk assessment defies belief.  It is a course that would put our grandchildren at risk.”

I was initially sidelined by the idea. SETI Institute has never broadcasted into space in an attempt to make humanity’s presence obvious to alien observers. I hadn’t therefore really considered the topic much and shared the same worries as David Brin initially.

In my opinion though Dr. Shostak put an end to that worry:

“I don’t see why the aliens would have any incentive to do that.

Beyond that, we have been telling them willy-nilly that we are here for 70 years now. They are not very interesting messages but the early TV broadcasts, the early radio, the radar from the Second World War - all that has leaked off the Earth.

Any society that could come here and ruin our whole day by incinerating the planet already knows we are here.”

The point is if there’s a hostile and capable alien presence nearby, they would already know about us. The technology required to get to Earth even from the nearest star system is far more advanced than anything we can even dream up at the moment. Detecting our presence at that point is a cake walk.

Active SETI, would be a redundant risk as we’re clearly visible to those significantly advanced civilizations already (if there are any). That we’re here at all still suggests there are none.

To any nearby neighbors stuck on their home planets or solar systems, we are now going to be actively broadcasting messages.

The search is on.

Read more about today’s meeting at BBC World News.

(Image credit: ESO)

Solar System: Top 5 Things to Know This Week

It’s only Tuesday and this week is already filled with news about our solar system. Here are the top five things to know this week:

1) Mars!

With five spacecraft in orbit and two rovers exploring the ground, there’s always something new and interesting about the Red Planet. Yesterday things got even more exciting when we released the most compelling evidence yet that liquid water sometimes flows on Mars today.

2) HTV-5 Cargo Ship

On Monday, the HTV-5 cargo ship was released from the International Space Station to burn up as it reenters Earth’s atmosphere. The HTV-5 carried a variety of experiments and supplies to the space station, and was docked for five weeks.

3) Pluto Continues to Excite

If you haven’t been keeping up with the weekly releases of newly downloaded pictures from our New Horizons spacecraft, you are definitely missing out. But don’t worry, we have you covered. The latest updates can be found HERE, be sure to follow along as new information is released. More images are scheduled to be featured on Oct. 1.

4) Cassini Mission

This week on Sept. 30, our Cassini spacecraft will reach the closest point to Saturn in it’s latest orbit around the planet. Just to put things in perspective, that will be Cassini’s 222nd orbit around Saturn! Learn more about this mission HERE.

5) What Happened to Mars’ Atmosphere?

Believe it or not, the Martian atmosphere we see today used to be much more substantial many years ago. What happened? Our Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft has been in orbit around Mars for one Earth year, searching for the answers. Learn more HERE.

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