Space and Planets I heard something funny in a science fiction movie the other day, maybe you heard this also. It had to do with changing the past during time travel and this is how the character reasoned you couldn’t do it. He said if you travel to the past, it is in your future therefore you can’t change anything because it may be the past you see but not your past because you did this in your future. Mull that one over. Great Britain had decided it is time for them to enter the space race in a bigger way. There are many companies starting there to get into the space business. In 2022 the Brits are going to launch their first satellite into orbit from their homeland. The UK Space Agency is spurring on these new companies and rightfully so. The more countries who enter the space race by designing space vehicles the quicker new discoveries will be made which will enable the world to get better and faster spacecraft. Scotland has two spaceports which is being said will beat England in getting a satellite up. Guess we will just have to see. MIT is working on a new type of rover for the moon. It will not have wheels like the other rovers and will be shaped like a saucer. It will float above the surface of the moon using electrostatic repulsion. To many it will look like antigravity but that is not what will be happening. It just so happens since the moon has no atmosphere it is subject to plasma from space and the sun’s rays. This gives the surface a positive electric charge and makes lunar dust levitate sometimes up to a meter above the ground. The saucer rover will take advantage of this. It does make me wonder about something however, and that is could a UFO be somehow creating a positive charge under it and use electrostatic repulsion to fly? Some people are asking why we invested 10 billion dollars in a space telescope which requires such a risky launch, placement and unfurling. There are a few different reasons which make astronomers drool. The first one is the idea of being able to see so far back into the past we will see the first objects. In case you don’t know what I am talking about, light takes time to reach us, so we see the object from when the light first started out. In other words, if the light took 13 billion years to reach earth, we would see the object as it looked 13 billion years ago. The astronomers also want to know why there are so many black holes at the center of galaxies and are hoping the Webb space telescope will supply the answer. So far, we have been able to see the universe as it looked after only 400,000 years using a satellite. In a first, the Perseverance rover on Mars conducted an experiment where it succeeded in producing oxygen. It was able to extract the oxygen from the atmosphere on Mars. It did this using an instrument named MOXIE which was able to heat carbon dioxide to get oxygen. This bodes well for future colonization of the planet. There has been some debate if colonizing Mars will change the humans physically who do it. There was one idea this would speed up evolution of humans on Mars. The idea is the higher radiation along with other factors could mutate humans. This mutation could be advantageous or not. One thing which could be helpful to humans is the lower gravity. It could relieve many of the aches and pains we get on earth as we age. It could make humans on Mars to eventually become physically different from those on earth. It might make visiting earth with the increased gravity harder for the new Martians causing social ties to break. It is turning out some things which we thought were very rare in space may still be, but no where as rare as first thought. I am talking about rogue planets and stars. Scientists have found far more rogue planets than they thought would exist. A rogue planet or rogue star is an object which was knocked out of its orbit and is traveling through space on its own. Some scientists are now wondering if any rogue planets can support life. It is a very interesting idea. Scientists could not believe it when they discovered seventy rouge planets recently in our galaxy and there could be far more. It is now thought there are even rogue planets and stars which have left their galaxies and are traveling between galaxies but are too hard to detect so far. I wonder if the Webb telescope will be able to detect any? Back to Mars. Scientists have discovered huge amounts of water under the Grand Canyon on Mars. It is an incredible amount and that canyon Valles Marineris, compared to our Grand Canyon is at least ten times longer, five times deeper and twenty times wider. Another great thing is the water is not very deep under the canyon. This makes it easier to get to. Scientists claim the subsurface material may be as much as forty percent water. Some scientists want us to think about moons as planets and put Pluto back to being a planet. I like the idea of classifying Pluto as a planet, but I don’t know about calling moons planets, after all they orbit a planet. Many scientists believe water is necessary for life. Others are not so sure. A new report states iron is necessary for the development of life on earth. This raises a question; will we ever find an element which will be necessary to all life whether if be life on earth or life on other worlds? For us nonscientists, it seems strange to think of a metal as being necessary, yet I remember when I was young many people would take something to increase the amount of iron in their blood. They would usually take Geritol. Assuming the Webb space telescope is successfully deployed, will it be able to see planets outside our solar system? This is a question many civilians are asking. One of the main uses of the telescope is to examine the atmospheres of exoplanets. An exoplanet will still only look like a dot due to their distance. We haven’t reached the stage where we could observe continents and oceans yet, let alone any structures which might exist if there was alien life on the exoplanets. We would need a much larger telescope for that.
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