Neil Armstrong Leaves Earth One Last Time

Thank you for the adventure, Neil.

MSL Curiosity to Land in 20 Days

For those of you who might not have heard, the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity - the most advanced human-made object ever sent to another world - will be landing on Mars Aug 6 2012 at approximately 1:31AM Eastern Daylight Time, or if you prefer, 10:31 pm Aug 5 2012 on the West Coast (or, more appropriately 5:30 am UTC).

While its true that we've been to Mars before, gigantic questions still linger unapologetically in our faces...Questions like, "Did Mars ever have life?" or "Was Mars truly ever a wet planet?" or "Can Mars support Human colonization?" or "What happened to Mars, to its magnetosphere, to turn a perfectly good world into a cold, barren platform for the political maneuvers of the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen?"

The fact is, we know very, very little still about our nearest planetary neighbor. What we can tease out of Mars over the next few years with Curiosity is going to add much to the Search for Life, to our understanding of what is required of a rocky planet to support the creation of life. Mars and Earth are so very similar in many ways, so much so that it appears now, in this pre-Curiosity period, that we are dealing with a kind of Tale of Two Planets. Earth and Mars both seemingly started in the same situation billions of years ago and took two different paths in their planetary lives - Earth headed for the whole teeming-with-life gig while Mars got the Tatooine treatment.

The Kepler Spacecraft

The fixed point of view for the Kepler Spacecraft

There are various ways in which humanity has begun detecting the presence of extrasolar planets, that is to say planets outside of our own solar system. Perhaps one of the most remarkable of these methods is that of the Kepler Observatory Spacecraft. It is a spacecraft like no other. It is a planet hunter. Its only job is to look out into the stars that surround us and detect candidate planets. It has been running for a little over three years now and it has turned up 2,321 candidate planets, 74 of which have been confirmed (as of this post). For most of us, this is difficult to imagine. Only 20 years ago or so, the only planets we knew about were the ones in our home solar system. Now, there are literally thousands of possibilities...planets upon planets out there in the galaxy around us. These happy discoveries still stun us, still excite our senses and the prospect of discovering even more planets in the future is very promising.

Observing these exoplanets is not an easy task. They are not immediately detectable, or even visible, from our star system. The Kepler Observatory uses the Astronomical Transit Method in order to infer an exoplanet's existence. This consists of observing a star's total amount of emitted light, measuring it and watching for changes in that amount of light. Noticeable and perhaps regular fluctuations can be an indication that a planet is passing in front of its star relative to our position in space. This could indicate an orbiting planet, which would block a detectable amount of light in regular intervals. The longer that Kepler observes a star, the greater the chance that a planet will show itself. Naturally, longer observations are better than short ones.