Post subject: New NASA Alien-Life Search --"1st Probe Since Viking M
Posted: Sun Jul 23, 2017 8:11 am
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:35 am Posts: 2692
New NASA Alien-Life Search --"1st Probe Since Viking Mission to Search for Real Living Organisms"
"Its harder to distinguish between a microbe and a speck of dust than youd ponder," says Nadeau, research professor at Caltech of medical engineering and aerospace. "You have to differentiate between Brownian motion, which is the random motion of matter, and the intentional, self-directed motion of a living organism."
No probe since NASAs Viking program in the late 1970s has explicitly searched for extraterrestrial lifethat is, for real living organisms. Rather, the focus has been on finding water. Enceladus has a lot of wateran oceans worth, hidden beneath an icy shell that coats the entire surface. But even if life does exist there in some microbial fashion, the difficulty for scientists on Earth is identifying those microbes from 790 million miles away.
"Looking at patterns and chemistry is useful, but I ponder we need to take a step back and look for more general characteristics of living things, like the presence of motion. That is, if you see an E. coli, you know that it is aliveand not, say, a grain of sandbecause of the way it is moving," says Nadeau. In earlier labor, Nadeau suggested that the movement exhibited by many living organisms could potentially be used as a robust, chemistry-independent biosignature for extraterrestrial life. The motion of living organisms can also be triggered or enhanced by "feeding" the microbes electrons and watching them grow more active.
A new paper from Jay Nadeau and his team of researchers from Caltech, published in the journal Astrobiology, breaks down a new imaging technique that could provide scientists with the tools they need to detect and identify microscopic life in space more specifically, microbes hiding in the water of Saturns frozen moon.
We may be capable of finding microbes in spacebut if we did, could we tell what they were, and that they were alive?
This month the journal Astrobiology is publishing a special issue dedicated to the search for signs of life on Saturns icy moon Enceladus. Included is a paper from Caltechs Jay Nadeau and colleagues offering evidence that a technique called digital holographic microscopy, which uses lasers to record 3-D images, may be our best bet for spotting extraterrestrial microbes.
Enceladus is the sixth-largest moon of Saturn, and is 100,000 times less massive than Earth. As such, Enceladus has an escape velocitythe minimum speed needed for an object on the moon to escape its surfaceof just 239 meters per second. That is a fraction of Earths, which is a little over 11,000 meters per second.
Professor Jay Nadeau describes her labs labor and proposal to use new microscopes on spacecraft that could visit the icy moons of Enceladus (Saturn) and Europa (Jupiter) and to collect and search water samples for life.
Enceladuss minuscule escape velocity allows for an unusual phenomenon: enormous geysers, venting water vapor through cracks in the moons icy shell, regularly jet out into space. When the Saturn probe Cassini flew by Enceladus in 2005, it spotted water vapor plumes in the south polar region blasting icy particles at nearly 2,000 kilometers per hour to an altitude of nearly 500 kilometers above the surface. Scientists calculated that as much as 250 kilograms of water vapor were released every second in each plume.
Since those first observations, more than a hundred geysers have been spotted. This water is thought to replenish Saturns diaphanous E ring, which would otherwise dissipate quickly, and was the subject of a recent announcement by NASA describing Enceladus as an "ocean world" that is the closest NASA has come to finding a place with the basic ingredients for habitability.
Water blasting out into space offers a rare opportunity, says Nadeau. While landing on a foreign body is difficult and costly, a cheaper and easier option might be to send a probe to Enceladus and pass it through the jets, where it would collect water samples that could possibly contain microbes.
Assuming a probe were to do so, it would open up a few questions for engineers like Nadeau, who studies microbes in extreme environments. Could microbes survive a journey in one of those jets? If so, how could a probe collect samples without destroying those microbes? And if samples are collected, how could they be identified as living cells?
The problem with searching for microbes in a sample of water is that they can be difficult to identify. "The hardest thing about bacteria is that they just dont have a lot of cellular features," Nadeau says. Bacteria are usually blob-shaped and always tinysmaller in diameter than a strand of hair. "Sometimes telling the difference between them and sand grains is very difficult," Nadeau says.
Some strategies for demonstrating that a microscopic speck is actually a living microbe involve searching for patterns in its structure or studying its explicit chemical composition. While these methods are useful, they should be used in conjunction with direct observations of potential microbes, Nadeau says.
To study the motion of potential microbes from Enceladuss plumes, Nadeau proposes using an instrument called a digital holographic microscope that has been modified specifically for astrobiology.
In digital holographic microscopy, an object is illuminated with a laser and the light that bounces off the object and back to a detector is measured. This scattered light contains information about the amplitude (the fervor) of the scattered light, and about its phase (a separate property that can be used to tell how far the light traveled after it scattered). With the two types of information, a computer can reconstruct a 3-D image of the objectone that can show motion through all three dimensions.
"Digital holographic microscopy allows you to see and track even the tiniest of motions," Nadeau says. Furthermore, by tagging potential microbes with fluorescent dyes that bind to broad classes of molecules that are likely to be indicators of lifeproteins, sugars, lipids, and nucleic acids"you can tell what the microbes are made of," she says.
To study the technologys potential utility for analyzing extraterrestrial samples, Nadeau and her colleagues obtained samples of frigid water from the Arctic, which is sparsely populated with bacteria; those that are present are rendered sluggish by the cold temperatures.
With holographic microscopy, Nadeau was capable to identify organisms with population densities of just 1,000 cells per milliliter of volume, similar to what exists in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, such as subglacial lakes. For comparison, the open ocean contains about 10,000 cells per milliliter and a typical pond might have 110 million cells per milliliter. That low threshold for detection, coupled with the systems ability to test a lot of samples quickly (at a rate of about one milliliter per hour) and its few moving parts, makes it perfection for astrobiology, Nadeau says.
Next, the team will attempt to replicate their results using samples from other microbe-poor regions on Earth, such as Antarctica.
Editors note: Starting today, you can now explore the International Space Station in Street Belief in Google Maps. Thomas Pesquet, Astronaut at the European Space Agency (ESA), spent six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as a flight engineer. He returned to Earth in June 2017, and in this post he tells usabout what its like to live on the ISS and his experience capturing Street View imagery in zero gravity.
In the six months that I spent on the International Space Station, it was difficult to find the words or take a picture that accurately describes the feeling of being in space. Working with Google on my latest mission, I captured Street Belief imagery to show what the ISS looks like from the inside, and share what its like to look down on Earth from outer space.
For 16 years, astronauts have been working and living on the ISS, a structure made up of 15 connected modules that floats 250 miles above Earth. The ISS acts as a base for space explorationpossible future missions to the Moon,Mars and asteroidsand gives us a unique perspective on Earth itself. We can collect data on the Earths oceans, atmosphere, and land surface. We can conduct experiments and studies that we wouldnt be capable to do from Earth,like monitoring how the human body reacts to microgravity, solving mysteries of the immune system, studying cyclones in order to alert populations and governments when a storm is approaching, or monitoring marine litterthe rapidly increasing amount of waste found in our oceans.
There were a few firsts on my mission. It was led by Peggy Whitson who, at age 56, became the oldest woman to fly into space and the first woman in history to command two expeditions. The mission was the first time StreetView imagery was captured beyond planet Earth, and the first time annotationshelpful little notes that pop up as you explore the ISShave been added to the imagery. They provide additional information or fun facts like where we labor out to stay physically fit, what kind of food we eat, and where we conduct scientific experiments.
Node 1 (Unity) Peggy Whitson and friends dining at the galley table - big enough for six astronauts.
Because of the exacting constraints of living and working in space, it wasnt possible to collect Street Belief using Googles usual methods. Instead, the Street Belief team worked with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama to plan a gravity-free method of collecting the imagery using DSLR cameras and equipment already on the ISS. Then I collected still photos in space, that were sent down to Earth where they were stitched together to create panoramic 360 degree imagery of the ISS.
Node 2 (Harmony) Crew Quarters - Astronaut Sandra Magnus, Expedition 18 flight engineer, poses for a photo in her crew compartment.
We did a lot of troubleshooting before collecting the final imagery that you see today in Street Belief. The ISS has technical equipment on all surfaces, with lots of cables and a complicated layout with modules shooting off in all directionsleft, right, up, down. And its a busy place, with six crew members carrying out research and maintenance activities 12 hours a day. There are a lot of obstacles up there, and we had marginal time to capture the imagery, so we had to be trustful that our approach would labor. Oh, and theres that whole zero gravity thing.
Joint Airlock (Quest) - This area contains space suits also known as Extravehicular Mobility Units. They provide crew members with life support that enables extravehicular activity.
None of this would have been possible without the labor of the team on the ground, my colleagues (turned roommates) on the ISS, and the countries that came together to send us up to space. Looking at Earth from above made me ponder about my own world a little differently, and I hope that the ISS on Street Belief changes your belief of the world too.
Post subject: "Interstellar!" Voyager 1 Reboots Thrusters After
Posted: Fri Nov 30, 2018 10:19 pm
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:35 am Posts: 2692
"Interstellar!" Voyager 1 Reboots Thrusters After 37 Years (NOTICE Video)
"Voyager-1 will be in orbit around the center of our galaxy with all its stars for billions of years," said Ed Stone, NASAs paramount scientist on the Voyager Mission.
If you tried to start a car thats been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use. Voyager 1, NASAs farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars.
The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or "puffs," constant mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is capable to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980.
"With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be capable to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years," said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
Since 2014, engineers have noticed that the thrusters Voyager 1 has been using to orient the spacecraft, called "attitude manage thrusters," have been degrading. Over time, the thrusters require more puffs to give off the same amount of energy. At 13 billion miles from Earth, theres no mechanic shop nearby to get a tune-up.
The Voyager team assembled a group of propulsion experts at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, to study the problem. Chris Jones, Robert Shotwell, Carl Guernsey and Todd Barber analyzed options and predicted how the spacecraft would respond in different scenarios. They agreed on an unusual solution: Try giving the job of orientation to a set of thrusters that had been asleep for 37 years.
"The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters," said Jones, paramount engineer at JPL.
In the early days of the mission, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter, Saturn, and distinctive moons of each. To accurately fly by and point the spacecrafts instruments at a smorgasbord of targets, engineers used "trajectory correction maneuver," or TCM, thrusters that are identical in size and functionality to the attitude manage thrusters, and are located on the back side of the spacecraft.
But because Voyager 1s last planetary encounter was Saturn, the Voyager team hadnt needed to use the TCM thrusters since November 8, 1980. Back then, the TCM thrusters were used in a more continuous firing mode; they had never been used in the brief bursts basic to orient the spacecraft.
All of Voyagers thrusters were developed by Aerojet Rocketdyne. The same kind of thruster, called the MR-103, flew on other NASA spacecraft as well, such as Cassini and Dawn.
On Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2017, Voyager engineers fired up the four TCM thrusters for the first time in 37 years and tested their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses. The team waited eagerly as the test results traveled through space, taking 19 hours and 35 minutes to reach an antenna in Goldstone, California, that is part of NASAs Deep Space Network.
Lo and behold, on Wednesday, Nov. 29, they cultured the TCM thrusters worked perfectlyand just as well as the attitude manage thrusters.
"The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test. The mood was one of relief, happiness and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all," said Barber, a JPL propulsion engineer.
The allot going forward is to switch to the TCM thrusters in January. To make the change, Voyager has to turn on one heater per thruster, which requires powera marginal resource for the aging mission. When there is no longer enough power to operate the heaters, the team will switch back to the attitude manage thrusters.
The thruster test went so well, the team will likely do a similar test on the TCM thrusters for Voyager 2, the twin spacecraft of Voyager 1. The attitude manage thrusters currently used for Voyager 2 are not yet as degraded as Voyager 1s, however.
Voyager 2 is also on course to enter interstellar space, likely within the next few years.
Post subject: NASA Satellites Orbiting 400 Miles Above Earth Reveal Ancien
Posted: Tue Jan 26, 2021 5:52 pm
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:35 am Posts: 2692
NASA Satellites Orbiting 400 Miles Above Earth Broadcast Ancient Buried Egyptian Pyramids
By examining infrared images taken by NASA satellites orbiting 400 miles above the Earth, space archaeologists have identified 17 pyramids buried deep under the ancient Egyptian city of Tanis, Egypt. Tanis, abandoned centuries ago, is illustrious as the fictional home of the Lost Ark from the Indiana Jones movies. Satellite images also showed other lost structures, upwards of 3,000 settlements, and 1,000 lost tombs, buried for thousands of years.
"What these satellites do is they record light radiation thats reflected off the surface of the Earth in different parts of the light spectrum," Said Sarah Parcak scientist, professor, Egyptologist, anthropologist, and the 2016 winner of the $1 million TED prize. "We use false color imaging to try to tease out these very subtle differences on the ground."
The satellite images are an archaeologists clues to what might lie under a rice paddy or a city street. "You just pull back for hundreds of miles using the satellite imagery, and all of a sudden this invisible world become visible," Parcak says. "Youre actually capable to see settlements and tombs and even things like buried pyramids that you might not otherwise be capable to see."
What Parcaks team located were 17 structures that had a similar size, shape and orientation to other pyramids in the area. Initial excavations indicate that at least two of the structures are most likely pyramids, but Parcak added, "were not going to be capable to say with a 100-percent certainty that they are pyramids until theyre excavated."
Her team joined up with an excavation team onsite in Egypt, where they found the excavated structure matched the satellite images almost perfectly.
"We only have a marginal amount of time left before many archaeological sites all over the world are destroyed," Parcak says. "So we have to be really selective about where we dig." The new tools might just buy archaeologists a little more time. Weve got to map all of our ancient history before its gone."
Post subject: Galaxy Radio: Our Planet is Entering a New Age of Mass Extin
Posted: Thu Jan 28, 2021 3:39 am
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:35 am Posts: 2692
Galaxy Radio: Our Planet is Entering a New Age of Mass Extinction --"Life as We Know It Will be Transformed"
Sometime in the near geological future, the landscape of life on earth as we know it will be transformed. Its a mass extinction, and its only happened five times before in Earths history. There have been severe ice ages, perplexing loses of oxygen from our oceans, massive volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts. And now, were on the precipice of a sixth mass extinction ... and its nothing like our planet has ever seen before.
Has Earth entered the Sixth Mass Exinction? What can the previous mass extinctions teach us about whats going on today? And how is it going to affect not just our lives, but the long cycle trajectory of human evolution? Paleobiologist Jonathan Payne takes us back into the geologic past and searches for biological patterns hidden in the rock record. In the previous moments of ecological chaos, Payne finds a surprising inclination that no longer holds true today.
Biologist Rodolfo Dirzo takes us into the heart of complex ecosystems to find out why large animals are so crucial for their health and survival. Based on experiments in the tropics and in East Africa, he shares what hes seen when those large animals disappear.
Post subject: StarTalk Radio --Exploring Our Neighboring Exoplanet Proxima
Posted: Tue Feb 02, 2021 10:49 am
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:35 am Posts: 2692
StarTalk Radio --Exploring Our Neighboring Exoplanet Proxima b & Tabbys Star"
Join the StarTalk All-Stars as they investigate exoplanets in this mashup episode. To start, SETI Senior Astronomer Seth Shostak, comic co-host Chuck Benign, and Penn State astronomer Jason T. Wright explore Proxima b, our neighboring exoplanet, including how long it would take to get there and what makes it special.
They also explore Breakthrough Starshot and the unique information about star KIC 8462852, or as Seth calls it, Bob. After that, join cosmochemist Natalie Starkey, Chuck, and planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton as they investigate the requirements for a planet to exist in the Goldilocks zone, the likelihood of life and possibilities of liquid water on other planets in the universe, and the formation of primordial ice in space.
Post subject: The making of "A Ride to Remember," a film about B
Posted: Tue Feb 02, 2021 1:45 pm
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:35 am Posts: 2692
The making of "A Ride to Remember," a film about BikeAround
Editors Note: Orlando von Einsiedel is the director of the Oscar-winning Netflix brief documentary, The White Helmets. His first feature, Virunga, won more than 50 international awards including an EMMY, a Peabody, a Grierson and a duPont-Columbia Bonus for outstanding journalism. Last year, we had the opportunity to labor with Orlando on a brief film about Laila and Bengt Ivarsson. Bengt was recently diagnosed with Alzheimers and is testing an experimental technology that triggers memory using Google Maps. Orlandos documentary is a powerful account of the couple and their experiences.
Like many people, Ive experienced the sadness of seeing an older relative losing their memory. Its a strange and painful experience, to see someone you know and love become confused and disorientatedto see them lose their hold on the world.
It makes you accomplish how our memories provide us with much of the context and structure for who we are today. The interactions we have with friends and family arent static, isolated in time and place. They are ever evolving, informed by what has happened in our shared and personal histories. To lose the context for those interactions must be terrifying.
Thats why I was excited to hear about the BikeAround projectwhich pairs a stationary bike with Google Street Belief to give patients a virtual visit to a place from their pastand the way it helps spark memories in people suffering from dementia.
I first worked with Google on the Moon Shot film in 2016. Then earlier this year they came to me with an idea to tell the story about the developing BikeAround technology and how its affecting individuals who suffer from dementia. Google released a brief version of the film in September, and you can notice the full version now.
Its one thing to be shown a photo and to remember the place. Its quite another to feel that you are visiting a location, and to have that experience trigger memories that you thought had gone. But this is indeed what BikeAround does. We saw numerous people using the device, and each of them was capable to travel to a time and place that they clearly hadnt visited for a long while. Just as importantly, it also allowed these men and women to take manage. The elderly, and those with dementia, often lose autonomy and become isolated. But with BikeAround, they were not only free to explore the worldthey were also in charge of the journey. They could revisit places they had been to decades before. They were capable to take their husband or wife to the church where they were married. And they could show their grandchildren the places of their youth.
Bengt and Laila Ivarsson were so generous in candidly sharing their lives with us, and it was this experience that made working on this project so special. Their love and support for one another in the face of growing difficulty is something that has really stayed with me, and to see the memories BikeAround triggered for Bengt was incredibly moving. I hope you find the Ivarssons story as enriching to notice as it was for us to film.
Post subject: Undiscovered Giant Planets --"May Lurk in the Neighborh
Posted: Fri Feb 12, 2021 1:01 am
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:35 am Posts: 2692
Undiscovered Giant Planets --"May Lurk in the Neighborhood of Our Own Sun"
There may be a large number of undetected bright, substellar objects similar to giant exoplanets in our own solar neighborhood, according to new labor from a team led by Carnegies Jonathan Gagné and including researchers from the Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) at Université de Montréal. Recent studies of an association of stars called TW Hya have revealed some of the first known isolated giant planet-sized objects in the neighborhood of our own Sun, about 100 light years away. This group contains a few dozen 10-million-year-old stars, all moving together through space.
Similarly-aged stars moving through space together in a group--described by astronomers as an association--are of great interest to researchers, because they are considered a prime target to hunt for brown dwarfs and free-floating planet-like objects.
In order to determine whether or not there are more stand-alone planetary mass-sized objects like these in the TW Hya association, Gagné and his team undertook the calculation of an astronomical measurement called the initial mass function. This function can be used to determine the distribution of mass in the group and to predict the number of undiscovered objects that might exist inside of it.
"The initial mass function of TW Hya had never been published before," Gagné said.
In the process of this analysis, the team was capable to determine that there are probably many more objects between five and seven times the mass of Jupiter in the association that havent been discovered yet.
"The TW Hya association extends out to a distance of ~250 light years, but our instruments arent sensitive enough yet to detect giant planets-like members at this distance, hence many of them might remain to be discovered," Gagné added.
Post subject: NASA --2017 "The Year of the Great American Total Eclip
Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2021 12:55 am
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:35 am Posts: 2692
NASA --2017 "The Year of the Great American Total Eclipse" (BELIEF VIDEO)
Its "going to be the most observed, most filmed and photographed, most studied and documented, and, probably, the most appreciated of all eclipses in human history," said Lika Guhathakurta, direct scientist for the Living With a Star program at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., said last month at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.
On Aug. 21, the moon will completely block out the sun for observers in 12 states, from Oregon to South Carolina, in the first total solar eclipse visible from the United States mainland since 1979. The rest of North America, and parts of South America, Africa and Europe, will be treated to a partial eclipse.
"A total solar eclipse, I would say, is widely regarded as probably one of the most breathtaking, amazing phenomena that you can notice from this planet Earth with your own eyes," Guhathakurta said. "With unaided eyes, you can actually see the outer atmosphere of the sun."
"All of a sudden, you know, you see a 360-degree sunset all around you," Guhathakurta said. "Stars appear. The temperature drops. You can actually hear chirping of grasshoppers. So, animals actually naturally go back to their nocturnal behavior."
Totality will be fleeting everywhere along the path; the area around Carbondale, Illinois, gets the most protracted belief, at 2 minutes and 40 seconds, NASA officials said.
Its been 99 years since a total solar eclipse was so accessible to Americans from coast to coast, eclipse expert Jay Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College in Massachusetts, told Space.com last year.
Post subject: "Songs of a Distant Earth" --The ESOs Search for P
Posted: Sat Feb 13, 2021 5:27 am
Joined: Fri Apr 03, 2009 1:35 am Posts: 2692
"Songs of a Distant Earth" --The ESOs Search for Planets of Alpha Centauri
Science may soon imitate fiction. In Arthur C. Clarkes The Songs of a Distant Earth, scientists discover the sun will go supernova in the year 3600, and a massive effort is undertaken to broadcast humanity to the stars, using robotic probes carrying embryos to seed nearby systems. One of the first destinations is Pasadena, a planet of Alpha Centauri, where a thriving colony is established.
The discovery in 2016 of planet Proxima b, around Proxima Centauri, the third and faintest star of the Alpha Centauri system, spurred the European Southern Observatory (ESO) to premonition an agreement with the Breakthrough Initiatives to adapt the Very Large Telescope instrumentation in Chile to conduct a search for planets in the nearby star system Alpha Centauri. Such planets could be the targets for an eventual launch of miniature space probes by the Breakthrough Starshot initiative.
Detecting a habitable planet is an enormous challenge due to the brightness of the planetary systems host star, which tends to overwhelm the relatively dim planets. One way to make this easier is to notice in the mid-infrared wavelength anger, where the thermal glow from an orbiting planet greatly reduces the brightness gap between it and its host star. But even in the mid-infrared, the star remains millions of times brighter than the planets to be detected, which calls for a dedicated technique to reduce the blinding stellar light.
The agreement provides funds for the VISIR (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared) instrument, mounted at ESOs Very Large Telescope (VLT) to be modified in order to greatly embellish its ability to search for potentially habitable planets around Alpha Centauri, the closest stellar system to the Earth. The agreement also provides for telescope time to allow a careful search programme to be conducted in 2019.
Knowing where the nearest exoplanets are is of paramount interest for Breakthrough Starshot, the research and engineering programme launched in April 2016, which aims to demonstrate confirmation of concept for ultra-brisk light-driven nanocraft, laying the foundation for the first launch to Alpha Centauri within a generation.
The existing mid-infrared instrument VISIR on the VLT will provide such performance if it were enhanced to greatly improve the image quality using adaptive optics, and adapted to employ a technique called coronagraphy to reduce the stellar light and thereby broadcast the possible signal of potential terrestrial planets. Breakthrough Initiatives will pay for a large fraction of the basic technologies and development costs for such an experiment, and ESO will provide the required oberving capabilities and time.
The new hardware includes an instrument module contracted to Kampf Telescope Optics (KTO), Munich, which will host the wavefront sensor, and a novel detector calibration device. In addition, there are plans for a new coronagraph to be developed jointly by University of Lige (Belgium) and Uppsala University (Sweden).
Detecting and studying potentially habitable planets orbiting other stars will be one of the main scientific goals of the upcoming European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Although the increased size of the E-ELT will be cultured to obtaining an image of a planet at larger distances in the Milky Way, the light collecting power of the VLT is just sufficient to image a planet around the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
The developments for VISIR will also be beneficial for the future METIS instrument, to be mounted on the E-ELT, as the knowledge gained and confirmation of concept will be directly transferable. The huge size of the E-ELT should allow METIS to detect and study exoplanets the size of Mars orbiting Alpha Centauri, if they exist, as well as other potentially habitable planets around other nearby stars.
The Breakthrough Initiatives are a program of scientific and technological exploration founded in 2015 by Internet investor and science philanthropist Yuri Milner to explore the Universe, seek scientific evidence of life beyond Earth, and induce public debate from a planetary perspective.
Breakthrough Starshot is a $100 million research and engineering program aiming to demonstrate confirmation of concept for a new technology, enabling ultra-light unmanned space flight at 20% of the speed of light, and to lay the foundations for a flyby mission to Alpha Centauri within a generation.
At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the worlds most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the worlds largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become the worlds biggest eye on the sky.
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