Space

Every Branch of the service has ranks and uniforms which reflect their  history, mission, and culture. A potential space force would not be any different in this regard.  Consider the lineage it would have being mainly influenced by the US Air Force, the US Navy, and NASA.   Each has a rank structure of some kind.    It may be wise to establish a “space force” as a corps not within the Air Force... but within NASA, much as NOAA and NPHS have had for a long time.   Here is my take on how this could or should look.    If you question the…

Space contains a wealth of mineral resources so abundant that it would make money as we now think of it obsolete.  We rely on space borne assets for  very ordinary every day things and will come to rely on them even more. The common sense of this, unlike other (separating families) things (G7 Russia) President Trump does (Covfefe) should be self evident.   However, it has to be noted, that there used to exist a US Space Command and an Air Force space command.  The logical starting point will be to elevate AirForce Space Command into a coequal service branch… probably…

While preparing for another evening of observation of Jupiter's atmosphere with my faithful 16" dobsonian scope, I found out that the satellite Io will disappear behind the Jovian shadow tonight. This is a quite common phenomenon and not a very spectacular one, but still quite interesting to look forward to during a visual observation - the moon takes some time to fully disappear, so it is fun to follow the event.This however got me thinking. A fully eclipsed jovian moon should still be able to reflect back some light picked up from the still lit other satellites - so it should not…

Building blocks of life are not life or even really close, but they are hopeful signs.  NASA has announced that the Curiosity rover has found signs of the building blocks of life, as we know it, on Mars.    These building blocks are common throughout the cosmos.  Even in interstellar clouds.  To have life, as we know it, requires liquid water.  Remember the signs of liquid water found on Mars back in 2011? Since then it has been convincingly argued that they may have just be flows of fine sand grains without water being involved at all.  Further study…

Mars is extraordinarily cold and dry, like our most arid deserts. Harsh but possibly not totally lifeless. There is a chance of life there, hidden away perhaps in thin layers of brines just a couple of centimeters below the surface, or as spores within the dust. Our astronauts will be covered in microbes from Earth too and our habitats filled with life. What happens when life mixes together from these two biospheres? This might be their first meeting for billions of years, or the first time ever, as astrobiologists haven't yet ruled out the possibility that Martian life is independently…

This is a debate hosted by the SETI institute between Robert Zubrin, founder and head of the Mars Society, and one of NASA’s former planetary protection officers, John Rummel. They debate the requirements of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 to protect both Earth and other celestial bodies like Mars from any harmful effects from the exchange of living organisms between the planets on our spacecraft. This treaty is ratified by 105 countries including all space faring nations except the United Arabic Emirates and North Korea.  You can watch the debate here: Robert Zubrin is a space engineer…

Visual observation of the planets of our solar system has always been an appealing pastime for amateur astronomers, but the digital era has taken away a little bit of glamour to this activity. Until 30 years ago you could spot with your eye more detail than was at reach of normal photography even for large telescopes, so amateur astronomers could contribute to planetary science by producing detailed drawings of the surface of Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, and Mars. Nowadays the combination of digital imaging and computer processing has made the art of drawing planet surfaces quite obsolete, so…

I've noted the following about a chained orbital resonance system with base period P: If an observer at ~138° from our vantage point is well-positioned to observe transits pass by at intervals that are multiples of P, then we would see transits pass by at intervals that are approximate multiples of P / 13. More often than not, transits would show up at intervals that are multiples of ~2 × P / 13.This statement is trivially true. What's controversial is (1) the idea that KIC 8462852 has transits that occupy a stable and structured orbital configuration, and (2) that someone would dare…

ESA have just signed a letter of intent to co-operate with NASA on a Mars sample return mission (see Agencies aim to bring back rocks from Mars). I hope this does not mean a change of focus for ESA, from in situ searches, to a sample return. This expensive NASA program is more of a geological sample return and technology demo than an astrobiology mission. It's not likely to resolve any of the central questions in astrobiology. Yet there is so much involved in ensuring that Earth's environment is protected, both legally and technically, that  it is unlikely that they are ready to return…

The reason we know so little about the polar regions is not lack of interest. The polar regions are of great interest, for instance the Martian dry ice geysers in Richardson crater, one of the most interesting dynamic processes on Mars and the polar regions also have astrobiological interest too. There are potential habitats there that might even have fresh liquid water within 7 cms of the surface, beneath clear ice - of all the unexpected things to find on Mars with its near vacuum atmosphere! As far as I know the only these are the only proposals for naturally occuring on or near the…