Space

This is a talk I gave last summer to a small conference "The Search for Extraterrestrial Life - Europa&Enceladus" in Oxford, summer 2015. It's about the idea that when searching for life in our solar system, we could find something that's a "super positive" outcome of overwhelming value for us and future generations. And that if so we need to take great care we don't lose the opportunity or destroy it by introducing Earth life by mistake. (or watch on youtube) (note, that's not the final version of the recording, I uploaded the wrong one by mistake, but there's not much to fix, just…

Back in January, Bradley Schaefer published a finding that promised to be a bombshell: KIC 8462852 had been dimming at a rate of nearly 20% per century since 1890 (Schaefer, 2016). The finding was widely reported as refutation of the comet family hypothesis, and further evidence that KIC 8462852 might be home to a Type 2 alien civilization.  Data analysis is not always convincing, for all sorts of reasons.  DASCH archival data — which Schaefer used in his work — is noisy, and apparently requires substantial know-how to process adequately. Schaefer's findings…

Mars is Earth like in some ways, but in other ways it's very different with its global dust storms every two years, its thick sheets of dry ice at its ice caps in winter. Any fresh water is close to its very low boiling point in the near vacuum. And the eccentric orbit also has a big impact on its seasons. So how do its seasons work exactly and what effect does this have on its climate? I was asked this on Quora, and I can't find a page anywhere that explains the Mars seasons really clearly in one place. Lots of information about bits and pieces of it, but hard to find the whole picture…

Yes, a thousand of them indeed. The asteroid belt, and Near Earth Asteroids. I don't mean living on them like the little prince: The Little Prince That's not very practical without an atmosphere. Nor living inside them as some suggest. But rather, using materials from the asteroid belt and first, from the close Near Earth Asteroids, to build large habitats following the Stanford Torus design and others. Fly through of the Stanford Torus design. There are many other suggested ways of making habitats in space. This was one of the first. There's enough material there for a thousand times…

Yes, a thousand of them indeed. The asteroid belt, and Near Earth Asteroids. I don't mean living on them like the little prince: The Little Prince That's not very practical without an atmosphere. Nor living inside them as some suggest. But rather, using the materials from the asteroid belt and first, from Near Earth Asteroids, to build Stanford Torus type habitats (for instance). Fly through of the Stanford Torus design. There are many other suggested ways of making habitats in space. This was one of the first. There's enough material there for a thousand Earths - a thousand times the…

NASA currently has Mars sample return as their priority flagship mission not just for this decade but for the next one as well. They were recommended to do this in the 2012 decadal review. It is good for geology, nobody doubts that. But it is motivated mainly by the search for ancient life on Mars. Some exobiologists have warned that it is likely to be no more conclusive than the Mars meteorites we already have. They regard it as is little more than a technology demo for the search for life. If you haven't come across this before I think you will find their reasons an interesting, and…

The longest time anyone has spent in space is just over fourteen months. So far, astronauts have recovered surprisingly quickly, even after the longest duration spaceflights. Within a few weeks they are almost back to normal health. There are some longer term effects, on load bearing bones, which may take a couple of years to clear up, and very rarely, permanent effects on the eyes. But what about longer periods in space than that? Their condition continually deteriorates for as long as they are in space and so far nobody has spent as long as two years in space; the record is fourteen months…

On February 15th, 2013, as the approach of asteroid (367943) Duende was being closely monitored,  something far more alarming happened. Duende approached the Earth was expected to pass nearly 27,700 km above the Earth's surface, well inside the boundaries of the ring of geosynchronous satellites but nearly perpendicular to it, but then the Chelyabinsk superbolide entry occurred, followed by the explosion and the fall of the large meteorite in the Russian Lake Chebarkul.  It caused damage to hundreds of buildings and injuries to nearly 1,500 people.  What was its origin? Three…

The Ordnance Survey (national mapping agency for the UK) has just released their first map of a region on another planet. It's a high resolution relief shaded contour map, and includes the area of Mars where ExoMars will land in 2018. Here is a close up view of it with the ESA landing ellipse in Oxia Planum superimposed.  Preview of the full map - low resolution, again with landing ellipse. The full resolution image of the map plus landing ellipse is here. I've jpeg compressed it from 67.2 megabytes to under 20 megabytes for easier download - but with no jpeg artifacts as far as…

September 14th 2015, 09:50 GMT. A far spread out distortion of space crossed earth's path. The distortion had traveled at the speed of light for more than a billion years, all along the way spreading out spherically and diluting its energy density inversely proportional to the spherical area covered. Still, when distorting the space occupied by earth, it did so with a peak power equal to the total electrical power consumption of human mankind. Earth responded by undulating, expanding in one direction, shrinking in a perpendicular direction, and then reversing. And reversing. The frequency of…