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Space Planets

Let’s Talk Space

I guess most people know by now the International Space Station has Water Bears on it. These creatures are also known as Tardigrades. What is interesting to me is the fact they can survive not only without air but in intense radiation. It does make one wonder if something could be learned from them about how to protect ourselves in a radioactive environment. It also makes one wonder what else we might find out there. The scientists are saying these creatures came from earth, but do we really know that? Maybe there are colonies of them in space and that is how they got to earth and to the space station. As I often say, every possibility should be considered. It is also interesting how we have begun to find more meteors with signs of microscopic life, which once may have lived in them. To my knowledge so far we have only found these remnants in meteors from Mars, but as we examine more meteors and pieces of asteroids, who knows what we might find?

Supernova
Image Source: Ken, About Facts

Since I am talking about space, I would like to mention the fact NASA says it had found a class of stars it named “zombie stars.” These are stars which went supernova and survived the explosion. The material which is left behind, if the star isn’t completely destroyed, is what NASA is referring to. They call these types of supernova weak supernova. Don’t take this title too seriously, any type of supernova is a monumental explosion, it is just that some are even more so. The weak supernova is called a Type lax and the bright one a Type la. NASA was lucky in this case, because the Hubble telescope had taken pictures of the area where the supernova had taken place years before it happened, so they can now see the difference in the area. They said they have to wait until 2015 when the nova dims sufficiently to get more observations of the area.

We can all see how popular quadcopters are becoming. These are the same devices some companies want to use to deliver packages to us. They are flying drones which have one copter blade in each of four corners.Β  Well a new use has been proposed for these devices and it is exploration. NASA is considering using quadcopters to explore the largest of Saturn’s moons known as Titan. This is not a bad idea actually. Instead of those slow ground traveling rovers being the only machines on a planet or moon, we could use the much faster quadcopters if the atmospheres could support such machines. We could not do away with the rovers yet because they are really laboratories, digging into the soil and conducting all sorts of experiments. The quadcopters would not only aid them, but small rovers might be able to be lifted to promising areas by these flying machines. There has been plenty of talk lately about using miniature machines to explore planets and moons and these would be easy for the drones to carry.

NASA is talking about a change in procedure. The usual mission to explore a planet starts with a probe being sent which takes photos and does other tests from space. Years later, if we are lucky, a rover might be sent. I am using the moon and Mars as an example here. Now NASA is talking about sending a probe to explore and if anything interesting is found it would release its cargo of even smaller probes which would go down to the find and examine it. This would eliminate the years of waiting between probe and rover. If NASA wanted to they could eventually send rovers, but they might not be necessary in some cases. We are talking about secondary probes which may not be as large as a human fingernail.

Cubesats are getting even more popular. The shrinking size of electronics has made them very capable. A cubesat is a box with a volume of 1.0 liters which can be filled with any electronics and loaded onto a rocket to conduct experiments. They have become very popular with universities. NASA allows some universities room on their rockets for one or more of these miniature satellites. Since space on a rocket is precious the shrinking of electronics has become a welcome event. If things keep shrinking in the electronics world, someday even the electronics in the cubesats might fit into a thimble.
There are quite a few stellar cannibals out in space. One type is stars which form solar systems with planets only to eventually eat those planets. These is how it is said to work, if the inner planets are rocky and the outer ones gas giants. After some gas giants are fully formed they may begin to creep inward pulling and tugging on the inner rocky planets and breaking them loose and sending them into their sun. Β As far as our solar system goes there are conflicting reports of Jupiter moving closer and moving further away.

Science has just found out the theory of how supernovas are caused is either incomplete or incorrect. They found this out when they were examining the spectra of a supernova blast and found a radioactive metal inside the star which never should have been there. On further examination there were also other elements which should not have been indicated in the spectra. If scientists are wrong about supernovas, it certainly won’t be a first. Scientific theory is constantly evolving. You first need a theory to build on then it gets refined and sometimes gets dismissed when a better one comes along.