Tag Archives: technology

Terraforming Mars

Everyone seems so caught up on finding extraterrestrial life. I think rather than focus on finding others, carving out our own “space footprint” seems so much more exciting. If you’ve seen the 2013 Superman reboot Man of Steel, you would have been introduced to the concept of terraforming. The remnants of the Kryptonian race wish […] Continue reading

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Faster-than-light Travel

Many different propulsion methods have been proposed for interstellar travel. One of the most intriguing is hypothetical faster-than-light travel. Most sci-fi movies contain this in some form, whether it be the Millennium Falcon traveling through hyperspace or the Endurance traveling through a wormhole in Interstellar. A few different methods have been postulated for faster-than-light travel. […] Continue reading

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Hubble Telescope’s 25th Birthday

On April 24th, 2015, Hubble celebrated its 25th anniversary. It celebrated its birthday by taking some amazing images of some giant star clusters. The image above is one of Westerlund 2 which is a giant cluster of stars and dust – a breeding area for new stars. The dust pillars are the main areas where […] Continue reading

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Voyager 2

Today Voyager 1 was on Earth just 38 years and now it’s more than 130 AU away. It is venturing into deep space and exploring areas of the Universe that we have never seen before. On September 12, 2013, the spacecraft left the Solar System. The spacecraft is unique and fascinating in many ways. We […] Continue reading

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The Golden Record

Regardless of whether or not life beyond Earth actually does exist, it is fascinating to consider how extraterrestrial life might view Earth and Earthlings. Most of the time, people tend to focus on how humans on Earth would respond to aliens, should they come into contact, However, during lecture the other day, I was intrigued […] Continue reading

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Liquid Confidence

“I believe we are going to have strong indications of life beyond Earth in the next decade and definitive evidence in the next 10 to 20 years,” Ellen Stofan, chief scientist for NASA. “It’s definitely not an if, it’s a when,” said Jeffery Newmark, one of Stofan’s colleagues. NASA made these bold claims at a […] Continue reading

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New Horizons

Exploring Pluto Pluto, the small icy body at the edge of our planetary system, has been under scrutiny in scientific …

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Explore Vesta with Vesta Trek

Today, NASA released Vesta Trek, a free web-based application that provides a detailed visualization of Vesta, one of the largest asteroids in the Solar System. This was made possible by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, which studied Vesta from July 2011 to September 2012. This application includes interactive maps, the ability to print Vesta in a 3-D printer, […] Continue reading

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A trip to Venus?

video from phys.org It seems like all of the talk in the field of space travel these days has been too focused on a trip to one single location…Mars.  But noticing while studying these past few chapters that Venus is actually a bit closer to Earth than Mars, that brought up a question in my […] Continue reading

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Space Movies – Fact or Fiction?

Our in class discussion about some space movies had me venturing down a rabbit hole about Hollywood’s misconceptions about space. The most entertaining aspect for me is how movies portray character deaths in space. Movies always find creative and dramatic ways for their characters to die in space – none of which are accurate. In […] Continue reading

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