Great News for a Mars Colony!

Where there is water we can build off Earth colony's:



"The key to living on the Moon is water -- the same as here on Earth," Daniel Andrews, the project manager of the VIPER mission and director of engineering at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, said in a news release. "Since the confirmation of lunar water-ice ten years ago, the question now is if the Moon could really contain the amount of resources we need to live off-world. This rover will help us answer the many questions we have about where the water is, and how much there is for us to use."
 
Bet China already built dam on it.

This is spot on as a concern though it won't involve damning any rivers. However squatting on the best water sources might be a big deal. The key to the Moon rover work will be to determine how the water ice is distributed on the lunar surface. Is it spread out or is it concentrated into scattered mega deposits? If it's concentrated then it might be possible to claim the best water sources in a given area of the moon.

This would have to same effect as damning rivers and depriving those downstream of the water. And as east points out, just ask Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia what they think of Chinese damns.
 
Photos show evidence of life on Mars, Ohio entomologist claims

As scientists scramble to determine whether there is life on Mars, Ohio University Professor Emeritus William Romoser's research shows that we already have the evidence, courtesy of photographs from various Mars rovers.

Dr. Romoser, who specializes in arbovirology and general/medical entomology, has spent several years studying photographs from the red planet that are available on the Internet. He found numerous examples of insect-like forms, structured similarly to bees, as well as reptile-like forms, both as fossils and living creatures. He presented his findings Tuesday, Nov. 19, at the national meeting of the Entomological Society of America in St. Louis, Missouri.


Ohio University entomologist: Photos show evidence of life on Mars
 
Well that's just great we get to Mars and find out there are Mosquitoes there!

As an aside the "evidence" in that article is pretty slim. A bit like seeing animal figures in clouds if you ask me.
 
Well maybe 2020 will be the year we finally find intelligent extraterrestrial life! Probably not though but here's a good read showing that if we don't find ET it won't be for a lack of trying:



But there are still reasons for intelligent-alien hunters to be excited and optimistic about the coming year. Multiple existing projects will either be expanded or improved in 2020, Shostak said. For example, the SETI Institute will get new receivers for the Allen Telescope Array in northern California, and both the SETI Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, will conduct new searches for possible laser technosignatures.
 
We've now found more planets then we know what to do with!


To date, scientists have discovered 4,104 confirmed exoplanets. But for every confirmed planet that astronomers nail down, there are handfuls of maybe-planets in the data, whispers in the data that might come from stars hiccuping or pairs of stars dancing or would-be stars that didn't quite make the cut. And scientists no longer have the resources to analyze every potential planet's identity crisis.

What seems obvious today was NOT obvious 40 years ago. Sure in hindsight everyone acts like they're not surprised by all the planets we're finding but back in the day some of the best space scientists were worried that planet formation may have been a unique & rare phenomena. This is a nice example of the simple truth that the science of anything is rarely ever settled.

And things are only going to get more complex as the hunt for new planets kicks into a new gear soon!

And the embarrassment of riches will only continue, she said. NASA's next exoplanet-finder, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), may allow scientists to discover 100,000 confirmed exoplanets — which means even more hundreds of thousands of candidates to evaluate.

"Coming up with new statistical ways to deal with this I think will be even more important as a tool going forward," Christiansen said. "We have more planets than we have resources, but that's only going to get worse and much worse, like, exponentially for the next decade."

Now this is a good problem to have.
 
Our descendants are going to love it when we start settling the moons of Jupiter. What a truly amazing planetary system:



Juno spied the newfound maelstrom, which is about as wide as Texas, on Nov. 3, during its most recent close flyby of Jupiter. The storm joins a family of six other cyclones in Jupiter's south polar region, which Juno had spotted on previous passes by the gas giant. (Those encounters also revealed nine cyclones near Jupiter's north pole, by the way.)
 
Here's a great list of some of the coolest exoplanet discoveries of the last year:



This one could be real interesting:

In June 2019, researchers reported that they had found two Earth-like exoplanets circling a red dwarf known as Teegarden's Star, which lies only 12.5 light-years from Earth.

The newfound worlds complete one lap around their host star in just 4.9 and 11.4 Earth days, respectively. Despite these close orbits, they're still thought to reside in the "habitable zone" — the range of distances from a star that can support the existence of liquid water on a world's surface — because Teegarden's star is so dim.

From the data collected so far, scientists believe there might be more exoplanets to find in this system too.
 
New Evidence Reveals that Venus has Active Volcanoes

New research led by Universities Space Research Association (USRA) and published today (January 3, 2020) in Science Advances shows that lava flows on Venus may be only a few years old, suggesting that Venus could be volcanically active today — making it the only planet in our solar system, other than Earth, with recent eruptions.

“If Venus is indeed active today, it would make a great place to visit to better understand the interiors of planets,” says Dr. Justin Filiberto, the study’s lead author and a Universities Space Research Association (USRA) staff scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI). “For example, we could study how planets cool and why the Earth and Venus have active volcanism, but Mars does not. Future missions should be able to see these flows and changes in the surface and provide concrete evidence of its activity.”

 
Now this type of planet would make a cool setting for a science fiction series!



You've heard of hot Jupiters. You've heard of mini-Neptunes. You've heard of super-Earths. But have you heard of Eyeball Planets? Yep - planetary scientists think there might be a type of exoplanet out there that looks disturbingly like a giant eyeball. Just sitting there. Staring.

But it's actually not as weird as it sounds - the appearance of these bodies has to do with tidal locking.

Tidal locking is when an orbiting body rotates at the same rate that it orbits. That means it always has one side facing the body it is orbiting, and the other side always facing away. The Moon, for instance, is tidally locked to Earth, that's why we never see its far side from here.
 
Riding on sails to another star:



Previous research has suggested that "light sailing" might be one of the only technically feasible ways to get a probe to another star within a human lifetime. Although light does not exert much pressure, scientists have long suggested that what little it does apply could have a major effect. Indeed, numerous experiments have shown that "solar sails" can rely on sunlight for propulsion, given a large enough mirror and a lightweight-enough spacecraft.
 
Another one of those weird radio bursts from very far away:


A mysterious radio source located in a galaxy 500 million light years from Earth is pulsing on a 16-day cycle, like clockwork, according to a new study. This marks the first time that scientists have ever detected periodicity in these signals, which are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), and is a major step toward unmasking their sources.

FRBs are one of the most tantalizing puzzles that the universe has thrown at scientists in recent years. First spotted in 2007, these powerful radio bursts are produced by energetic sources, though nobody is sure what those might be. FRBs are also mystifying because they can be either one-offs or “repeaters,” meaning some bursts appear only once in a certain part of the sky, while others emit multiple flashes to Earth.

The thing that always blows my mind about this sort of stuff is that we're picking up something that happened more than 500 million years ago!
 
Scientists eye the Martian underground in search for alien life


The search for present-day life on Mars is heating up. And for good reason: An improved knowledge of Mars' geologic diversity and history, a better appreciation of life in extreme environments here on Earth, and a sharp focus on sensitive life-detection measurement methods are all bolstering the Mars-life hunt, giving scientists more reason to think that they just might find something.

Still, the issue of life on Mars demands new scientific concepts and knowledge concerning where to explore on the Red Planet and what to measure.
 
Scientists eye the Martian underground in search for alien life




I love how they're thinking out of the box on this question:

Caves are some of the most exciting environments in the search for signs of present and past life on Mars, said Kevin Webster, a research scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona.

Webster is studying cave air as a biosignature, looking into the concentration of trace gases in caves he has measured across the United States.

When thinking about caves on Mars, a biological signature might come in the form of the removal of reactive components from the atmosphere, Webster explained. Researchers have found several candidates for lava tube caves on Mars and continue to detect them. The exploration and the measurement of cave air on Mars might be pursued through either remote means or on-the-spot methods, he said.
 
Now this sounds cool:


The spacecraft will travel to a unique metal-rich asteroid named Psyche, which orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers believe that studying this new asteroid will offer new clues about how terrestrial planets like Earth form, according to a statement from NASA.

A Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Feb. 6, 2018. (Image credit: SpaceX)

"The asteroid is considered unique, as it appears to largely be made of the exposed nickel-iron core of an early planet — one of the building blocks of our solar system," NASA officials said in the statement.


And a building block of our industrial civilization.
 
The latest on String Theory.



In the early 1990s, string theory was in a bit of a theoretical pickle. For decades, theorists had poured their hearts and minds into the idea that the fundamental building blocks of reality are tiny, vibrating strings. This was a potentially revolutionary idea, capable of uniting all the forces of nature and all the building blocks of matter into a single, harmonious picture.

The pickle, however, was that there were five independent candidates for string theory, each one looking radically different than the others. Which one was right?
 
Keeping things in perspective - there worse dangers then covid19:

 
^^^Keeping other things in perspective:

The Earth's coronavirus is deadly enough... what happens when we get infected by an unknown super-deadly extraterrestrial pathogen? I'm sure they're out there and humans would have virtually no defense against them. Colonizing other planets or contaminated probes returning from other planets could be very deadly to humans.

If that kind of pandemic happened, imagine the run on toilet paper!
 
NASA discovery of planet remarkably like ours gives hope for 'second Earth'

Kepler-1649c is located 300 light-years from Earth. NASA described it as the "most similar to Earth in size and estimated temperature" out of the thousands of exoplanets discovered by Kepler. The planet is located in its star's habitable zone, a region where it's possible for liquid water to exist.

 
^^^That's great news. It's only about 1,764,000,000,000,000 miles away from Earth! Let's see, if we have a rocket that can travel 25,000 mph (the fastest humans have ever traveled), then we should arrive in just over 8 million YEARS.

Unless anyone knows a shortcut. ?
 
^^^That's great news. It's only about 1,764,000,000,000,000 miles away from Earth! Let's see, if we have a rocket that can travel 25,000 mph (the fastest humans have ever traveled), then we should arrive in just over 8 million YEARS.

Unless anyone knows a shortcut. ?

We won't live to see it but I suspect that there are multiple shortcuts that will allow us to beat the speed of light in getting from point A to point B.
 
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