ralph.ewig

Rock Hounds - NASA has released an animation depicting a human mission to capture an asteroid. The idea is to robotically capture a small asteroid, and bring it to a stable near Earth orbit where astronauts can visit and explore the planetoid. The goal is ambitious, the funding however is not (or very much so, depending on how you look at it) with a mere $105 million US dollars allocated in the 2014 budget cycle.

NASA’s FY2014 budget proposal includes a plan to robotically capture a small near-Earth asteroid and redirect it safely to a stable orbit in the Earth-moon system where astronauts can visit and explore it.

When astronauts don their spacesuits and venture out for a spacewalk on the surface of an asteroid, how they move and take samples of it will be based on years of knowledge built by NASA scientists and engineers who have assembled and operated the International Space Station, evaluated exploration mission concepts, sent scientific spacecraft to characterize near-Earth objects and performed ground-based analog missions.

I’d love to see it happen, but am willing to bet private industry will get there first. Companies like Planetary Resources of Deep Space Industries are more focused and thus likely more effective in enabling the exploration of space resources.

Habitable Exoplanets - the distance to nearest human habitable planet is now estimated at 7 light years. While that is still outside our current abilities of space travel, it is tantalizingly close. In a new study which focused on smaller (M-class) stars, results indicate that alternate Earth’s are much closer than previously thought.

“We now estimate that if we were to look at 10 of the nearest small stars we would find about four potentially habitable planets, give or take,” said Ravi Kopparapu, a post-doctoral researcher in geosciences. “That is a conservative estimate,” he added. “There could be more.” They recalculated the commonness of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of low-mass stars, also known as cool stars or M-dwarfs.

Scientists focus on M-dwarfs for several reasons, he explained. The orbit of planets around M-dwarfs is very short, which allows scientists to gather data on a greater number of orbits in a shorter period of time than can be gathered on Sun-like stars, which have larger habitable zones. M-dwarfs are also more common than stars like the Earth’s Sun, which means more of them can be observed.

Fermi’s Paradox Explained - check out these 11 unusual attempts to explain the lack of alien encounters to date, offering interesting solutions to Fermi’s paradox. From the idea to us living in a galactic zoo, to our universe just being an elaborate computer simulation, these are pretty far out there indeed.

There’s no shortage of solutions to the Fermi Paradox. The standard ones are fairly well known, and we’re not going to examine them here, but they include the Rare Earth Hypothesis (the suggestion that life is exceptionally rare), the notion that space travel is too difficult, or the distances too vast, the Great Filter Hypothesis (the idea that all sufficiently advanced civilizations destroy themselves before going intergalactic), or that we’re simply not interesting enough.

But for the purposes of this discussion, we’re going to look at some of the more bizarre and arcane solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Because sometimes it takes a weird explanation to answer a weird question. So, as Enrico Fermi famously asked, “Where is everybody?”