ESA’s Solar Orbiter and NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will measure the Sun from every angle up close, providing detailed images and insights of our closest star, to help understand how it creates and controls the giant bubble of plasma that surrounds the entire Solar System.
Over the coming decades, more and more of our space-based infrastructure will be built in space, manufactured out of materials that were mined in space. In order to achieve that space future, engineers and mission planners will need to design and construct the technology that will make this possible. That means testing out new prototypes, technologies and methodologies for mining and space-based manufacturing.
After James Webb Space Telescope, there’s LUVOIR, but what come after? Let’s have our imaginations take flight, out into the Universe, and consider some of the most incredible ideas suggested for telescopes.
Humans to Mars. That’s the plan right? The problem is that sending humans down to the surface of Mars is one of the most complicated and ambitious goals that we can attempt. But there are two places humans can go which are a stepping stone between Earth and Mars. Phobos & Deimos.
With so much attention on Mars, we tend to forget there’s another Earth’s twin. Venus. What’s on the Surface of Venus? More about the history of Venera Program at #365DaysOfAstro
Astronomers working with the NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton have developed a technique to watch quasars and track the expansion of the Universe. More at #365DaysOfAstro
The total number of confirmed exoplanets are more than 4000. So let’s run the clock forward and try to calculate what the future holds for exoplanets. How many worlds will we know about 3 decades from now, in the year 2050?
If spacecraft, rovers or even astronauts make the momentous discovery of life on another world, that’ll just open up new questions. Did it originate all on its own, completely independently from Earth, or are we somehow related?
The European Space Agency announced their plans to build a comet interceptor. A spacecraft that will lurk out at the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, waiting for a long-period comet or interstellar object to pounce on, and give us the first close up view ever.
How humanity will react if we discover life somewhere out there in the Universe, whether it’s bacteria under the surface of Mars, a biosignature of alien life in the atmosphere of another world, or a radio signal from another civilization?