Distant Planet Imaging Project Gets More Funding 264
It doesn't come easy writes "NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts has chosen a proposal by the University of Colorado (UC) at Boulder to image distant planets around other stars for a second round of funding. Known as the New Worlds Observer, the UC project is for an orbiting, soccer-field sized "starshade" shaped like a daisy that would funnel light from distant planets between its petals to a second spacecraft trailing 50,000 miles behind. If the concept proves feasible, it could 'identify planetary features like oceans, continents, polar caps and cloud banks, and even detect biomarkers like methane, water, oxygen and ozone [...]'"
Re:How will the religious establishment react? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:How will the religious establishment react? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, this does seem a little bit like getting a map of China when you don't even have the means of transportation to get past the 7-11 at the end of your street.
Re:How will the religious establishment react? (Score:5, Insightful)
If there is an all powerful deity, surely it's within the power of such deity to create more than one earth.
Genesis specifies how this earth was created. It says nothing of the existance or non-existance of others.
It's kind of like how physics neither requires nor rules out any deity.
Steerable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Very cool. However, there's one little problem --- how the hell do you turn it? If the sensor's got to be 50'000km away from the lens, then to turn it 90 degrees (why does Slashdot block Unicode?) you're going to have to move the sensor some 70'000km, which means a lot of hydrazine.
Or do they have something more cunning up their sleeves?
Re:How will the religious establishment react? (Score:2, Insightful)
Either :
1: Lock the person up.
2: Deny that the observation is real.
3: Make up a fake observation to counteract the real one.
4: Invade the plannet in the name of good wiping out evil.
5: Pray they don't come and invade us, but put a few draconian laws in place just in case they do.
Re:How will the religious establishment react? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, thanks for that well thought-out analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, why did you even bother typing?
Just guessing here... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's probably shaped that way because to get it into space you have to fold it up into a shape that will fit into a launch vehicle fairing. A BIG fairing only gives you about a 5 meter diameter, so a lot of folding is required. Some kind of unfolding truss would make sense to me.
Re:How will the religious establishment react? (Score:2, Insightful)
Probably more like 200-300 years. The technical obstacles to interstellar flight are enormous. We not only don't know how to do it, we don't know how to get to the point where we know how to do it.
But I think we will. Future technology is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
Re:How will the religious establishment react? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also within his power to create purple giraffes with opposable thumbs. Many people however just don't like to believe that the Earth is NOT the center of their God's universe. Earth would then be demoted to the status of YAP (yet another planet).
The existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe calls into question our own place in it. If we are just one of billions of intelligent races, what does that mean for our own importance? Especially if some of these races are millions of years old, and were building starships before our solar system was even formed.
Long ago, Earth was the center of the universe, with everything orbiting it. Then the Sun was the center, and we orbited it. Now, we recognize that the Earth (and Sol) is not anything like the center of anything. The next big epiphany that awaits us (maybe) is that we are not alone in the universe, and that we have to reconcile our planet's religions and stories of origin with this fact. That or go crazy. ("No, there is no alien from Alpha Centauri calling me on the radio! God's just testing my faith!! HA. HAHA. HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!")
Evolution? That's NOTHING compared to ET landing on the White House lawn.
Re:How will the religious establishment react? (Score:1, Insightful)
As for "any true American" caring...I think your focus is far too narrow. If you fear that information about extraterrestrial life will be somehow censored by a bunch of religious extremists in this country, you should be absolutely petrified by the censorship that will take place in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia.
For that matter, it may not only be the religious extremists to worry about. The folks on the other end of the political spectrum may feel that the common people may be too stupid or ignorant to properly deal with the weight of such an announcement. These self-appointed "custodians of the masses" may feel that some well-intentioned censorship will prevent riots, panic, and all-out chaos.
Then again, maybe all this concern about extreme groups reacting is pointless. The truth, after all, will eventually become known. Furthermore, considering the immense distances between us and even the closest possible source of extraterrestrial life, there are no short- (or even medium-) term consequences of any possible (and as of yet, purely speculative) censorship.
Re:Sounds cool... (Score:2, Insightful)
You haven't answered his question. Why must it be shaped like a flower rather than a funnel? Not being a sophisticated equipment designer myself (I must have missed that requirement when I signed up for /. sorry) I'd like to know.
You might have simply said, "Why, I don't know," rather than attacking the questioner's intelligence.
Imaging is the Hard Part (Score:5, Insightful)
Imaging the surfaces will be tougher. You'll need a damn wide apeture (long integration don't help and the resolving power goes linearly with apeture). Remember, we've only imaged a few stars so far, and most of those are larger (in angular size) than these planets. Crud, look at Cassini: we're only getting good images of moons in our own solar system now because we have a spacecraft flying close to them.