"Starshade" technology that could help astronomers find and characterize rocky, Earthlike alien worlds was put to the test earlier this year in the Nevada desert.
A starshade, also dubbed an external occulter, is a precisely shaped screen that flies in far-away formation with a space telescope. The device blocks a star's light to create a high-contrast shadow, so that only light from an orbiting exoplanet enters the telescope for detailed study.
While a starshade to hunt alien planets has not been flown before, researchers studying the technique are drawing upon a track record of success in fielding large, deployable antennas in space. Some designs foresee a fully deployed starshade measuring some 110 feet (34 meters) in diameter, with a 65-foot (20 m) inner disk and 28 outstretched flowerlike petals, each over 22 feet (7 m) in length.
Read the entire article:
http://www.space.com/27765-starshade-tech-alien-planet-search.html
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Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Saturday, February 22, 2014
With Simple, Homemade Telescopes, You Can Explore the Stars
One of my greatest joys in amateur astronomy has been in building my own equipment. The great Clyde Tombaugh originally inspired me to do this — a Kansas farmer's son, Tombaugh's plans for attending college were frustrated when a hailstorm ruined his family's crops. With no money for college, Tombaugh was devastated. His family was in survival mode, putting the young man's astronomy and mathematics intentions indefinitely on hold.
Tombaugh was not one to quit, however, so in 1926, he built several telescopes with lenses and mirrors he ground himself — on a fence post! From broken farm equipment, he built his own equatorial mount so his telescope could move with the rotation of the Earth. Tombaugh had no camera, but he was able to make highly detailed drawings at the eyepiece. The amateur astronomer recorded images of Jupiter and Mars in this way, and sent them to the Lowell Observatory, so impressing the astronomers there that they offered him a job. Tombaugh worked at the observatory from 1929 to 1945.
While there, he became involved in the search for Planet X — what we know today as the minor planet, Pluto.
To make the discovery, Tombaugh used a blink comparator to compare his photographic plates of the same star field taken at different times. With a blink comparator, if an object in the field moves back and forth it is something other than a star — an asteroid or comet, perhaps, or in this case, a newly discovered planet.
Read the entire article:
http://www.space.com/24740-simple-homemade-telescopes.html
Tombaugh was not one to quit, however, so in 1926, he built several telescopes with lenses and mirrors he ground himself — on a fence post! From broken farm equipment, he built his own equatorial mount so his telescope could move with the rotation of the Earth. Tombaugh had no camera, but he was able to make highly detailed drawings at the eyepiece. The amateur astronomer recorded images of Jupiter and Mars in this way, and sent them to the Lowell Observatory, so impressing the astronomers there that they offered him a job. Tombaugh worked at the observatory from 1929 to 1945.
While there, he became involved in the search for Planet X — what we know today as the minor planet, Pluto.
To make the discovery, Tombaugh used a blink comparator to compare his photographic plates of the same star field taken at different times. With a blink comparator, if an object in the field moves back and forth it is something other than a star — an asteroid or comet, perhaps, or in this case, a newly discovered planet.
Read the entire article:
http://www.space.com/24740-simple-homemade-telescopes.html
Monday, October 7, 2013
Incredible Technology: How to Use 'Shells' to Terraform a Planet
One day, humans could re-make a world in Earth's image.
Engineering an inhospitable world into a livable one, a process known as terraforming, could be a successful way to colonize another world after a long, interstellar journey, said Ken Roy, an engineer and presenter at last week's Starship Congress in Dallas, Tex.
Roy's terraforming vision hinges upon what he calls "shell worlds." Upon arrival at an ideal planet, humans would literally encase the alien world inside of a protective shell made from Kevlar, dirt and steel. [Photos: Visions of Future Space Habitats & Artificial Ecosystems]
"We have a central world. We put an atmosphere on it," Roy said. We can have the "composition, temperature, pressure of our choosing. Let's assume we want 'Earth-normal,' and we put a shell around the central world to contain this atmosphere. The atmosphere then exists between the shell and the central world. The outer part of the shell is essentially a vacuum."
Engineering an inhospitable world into a livable one, a process known as terraforming, could be a successful way to colonize another world after a long, interstellar journey, said Ken Roy, an engineer and presenter at last week's Starship Congress in Dallas, Tex.
Roy's terraforming vision hinges upon what he calls "shell worlds." Upon arrival at an ideal planet, humans would literally encase the alien world inside of a protective shell made from Kevlar, dirt and steel. [Photos: Visions of Future Space Habitats & Artificial Ecosystems]
"We have a central world. We put an atmosphere on it," Roy said. We can have the "composition, temperature, pressure of our choosing. Let's assume we want 'Earth-normal,' and we put a shell around the central world to contain this atmosphere. The atmosphere then exists between the shell and the central world. The outer part of the shell is essentially a vacuum."
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