While Virgin Orbit failed back in April, Virgin Galactic is going strong and planning to start its tourism business in August. But first it has a scientific mission later this month.
While carrying satellites into space is no longer on the menu, bringing scientists to space for work is still part of the plan. But with many individuals willing to pay $450,000 apiece to experience the weightlessness of space, it appears tourism is the winner here.
I am not sure what that says about commercial space stations. Would they be better as floating hotels or casinos? Maybe so, as we learned in an Architectural Digest story late last year titled “A Space Hotel Could Open as Soon as 2025” (see image below).
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the Voyager Station. (Orbital Assembly Corporation)
Astronomers peering into the night sky always talk about exoplanets located in the “Goldilocks Zone,” or “Habitable Zone,” similar to the Earth’s location from the sun. But what if that is too limited? What if we should also be focusing on colder regions as well as exomoons?
The new study released this week based on data from NASA’s spacecraft Cassini has found that Saturn’s moon Enceladus contains the ingredients for life as we know it. The study states:
Saturn’s moon Enceladus harbours a global ice-covered water ocean. The Cassini spacecraft investigated the composition of the ocean by analysis of material ejected into space by the moon’s cryovolcanic plume. The analysis of salt-rich ice grains by Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer enabled inference of major solutes in the ocean water (Na+, K+, Cl–, HCO3–, CO32–) and its alkaline pH. Phosphorus, the least abundant of the bio-essential elements, has not yet been detected in an ocean beyond Earth. Earlier geochemical modelling studies suggest that phosphate might be scarce in the ocean of Enceladus and other icy ocean worlds. However, more recent modelling of mineral solubilities in Enceladus’s ocean indicates that phosphate could be relatively abundant.
Again, this represents the building blocks of life and it is the first time all these ingredients have been discovered in our solar system outside of Earth. We did not find it on Venus or Mars, two other planets in the Goldilocks Zone. No, it was found in a much colder part of the solar system on a tiny moon.
This discovery certainly mixes up the situation and provides a much broader region for life to appear in other solar systems. It’s not a new idea, but it has more credibility now that we know a little more about our own neighborhood.
Maybe Goldilock’s concerns about something being too cold was not such a problem after all.
Note: It seems James Cameron figured this out years ago. The planet visited in the Avatar movies, Pandora, is portrayed as a moon (or exomoon) in the Alpha Centauri System.
Image (Credit): Pandora and its host gas giant Polyphemus from the movie Avatar. (20th Century Fox)
Image (Credit): The ISS before the Sun. (Thierry Legault)
This week’s image was taken by French astrophotographer Thierry Legault. It shows the International Space Station (ISS) transiting the Sun on June 9th. The other three dark objects are sun spots.
At the time this image was taken, two NASA astronauts, Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, were installing a new solar array on the station.
In an earlier posting, I noted that the people at Cool Worlds Lab were planning to create a podcast to further share the Lab’s research. Well, that day has come and you can now listen to the first episode with Professor David Kipping interviewing Rebecca Charbonneau, who is a Janksy Fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). She is a historian of astronomy who is writing a book on the history of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
The conversation covers a number of SETI topics, including a young Carl Sagan’s collaboration with Soviet astronomer I.S. Shklovsky on an English translation of Shklovsky’s book Universe, Life, Intelligence. It was a chance to escape Soviet censors and bring new light to SETI ideas.
It’s a great start to a new series. I look forward to many more podcast episodes in addition to all of the other great media shared by Cool Worlds Labs.
The space agency recently selected a toaster-sized cubesat that will become the much bigger telescope’s tiny, adorable “sidekick,” according to a statement. NASA chose the $8.5 million space mission, called the “Monitoring Activity from Nearby sTars with uv Imaging and Spectroscopy” (MANTIS), which will be designed and built by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder. The diminutive but mighty spacecraft, scheduled to launch sometime in 2026, will make observations of the night sky in the full range of ultraviolet light, including extreme UV (EUV) light, a more energetic form.
Despite the enormous densities, the early universe didn’t collapse into a black hole because, simply put, there was nothing to collapse into…Even though the early universe was incredibly dense, it was also incredibly uniform. The average density throughout the universe was the same from place to place. There weren’t enough differences to trigger the formation of black holes.
In a study published in Nature Communications, scientists assess a new technique which could convert renewable, green energy from outside the Earth’s atmosphere. They are taking advantage of photosynthesis—the chemical process plants undergo every day to create energy—to help the space industry become more sustainable. The research led by the University of Warwick evaluates the use of a special device known as semiconductor to absorb sunlight on moon and Mars. It is hoped that the devices could promote Martian life support systems.
Our Awesome Universe 
