Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we’d see from Earth.

More than four billion miles from home and speeding toward interstellar space, NASA’s New Horizons has traveled so far that it now has a unique view of the nearest stars. “It’s fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “And that has allowed us to do something that had never been accomplished before — to see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth.”

On April 22–23, the spacecraft turned its long-range telescopic camera to a pair of the “closest” stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, showing just how they appear in different places than we see from Earth. Scientists have long used this “parallax effect” – how a star appears to shift against its background when seen from different locations — to measure distances to stars.

Pleased to have been the guest on this most recent episode of Javier Ideami’s Beyond podcast. We discuss everything from #spaceexploration to #astrobiology!

In this episode, we travel from Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage to the first mission to Mars with Bruce Dorminey. Bruce is a science journalist and author who primarily covers aerospace, astronomy and astrophysics. He is a regular contributor to Astronomy magazine and since 2012, he has written a regular tech column for Forbes magazine. He is also a correspondent for Renewable Energy World. Writer of “Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System”, he was a 1998 winner in the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards (AJOYA) as well as a founding team member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Science Communication Focus Group.

Continue reading “From Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage to the first mission to Mars” »

Detecting extrasolar rocky planets capable of hosting life will depend in part on decoding their surface reflectivity and colors.

Microbial life is likely fairly ubiquitous in the cosmos, new statistical models indicate. But extraterrestrial intelligence? Not so much.

Researchers use energy from a next-generation particle accelerator to probe microfossils inside ancient Earth rocks.

Will we ever live on Mars?

Since the dawn of the Space Age, the planet Mars has been the focus of two ambitious projects. One is the search for life forms native to the planet; the other is human colonization.

Continue reading “Life on Mars? Will we find it? Will we colonize the Red Planet?” »

Professor Sara Seager from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believes astronomers should broaden their horizons as they scan the cosmos for life.

She said: ‘Microbes can survive and grow in a 100 percent hydrogen atmosphere. We should expand the types of planets we consider worth searching.’

Continue reading “Alien life might thrive on ‘super-Earths’ made of pure hydrogen” »

Cornell astronomers plot how to take spectra from extrasolar earths trapped in orbits around dying white dwarfs.

On Earth, there are organisms that resist radiation, heat, cold, and drying, even to the point of being able to live in the space vacuum.

Genetic biotechnology is usually discussed in the context of current and emerging applications here on Earth, and rightly so, since we still live exclusively in our planetary cradle. But as humanity looks outward, we ponder what kind of life we ought to take with us to support outposts and eventually colonies off the Earth.

Continue reading “Deep-space travel, colonization may rely on genetically engineered life forms” »