• NASA Kepler Space Telescope

    By Posted on 11.19.2009 10 Comments

    You’d be hard-pressed to get a NASA scientist to come out and say that the Kepler space telescope is designed to find aliens. Put it this way, though: The goal of the probe, which was launched in March, is to find planets much like our own in distant star systems—Earth-size bodies orbiting their stars in the sweet spot where the temperature is appropriate to support, just maybe, alien life. Using a photometer that’s more than three feet in diameter, Kepler is now continuously observing some 100,000 stars located between 600 and 3,000 light-years away.

    11.19.2009 at 02:31pm - Comment by Solomon13

    Someone said 100 years ago to Mr.Faraday : Why do you waste time with this thing you call electricity? Where would we be if he had not.

  • Technology

    A Conversation With Robert Zubrin

    By Posted on 12.2.2008 9 Comments

    If you've ever fantasized about going to Mars, you've no doubt thought about how you'd get there, how long it would take, and how you'd survive the planet's frigid temperatures. But you probably never considered things like how to invest your money on Mars, how to have a social life, and where to get a job there. In his new book, How to Live on Mars, Dr. Robert Zubrin moves beyond the idea of humans taking a brief exploratory mission to Mars, and considers what it would take to actually live there. Zubrin is the founder and president of the Mars Society and president of Pioneer Astronautics, an aerospace research and development company in Colorado. Popular Science correspondent Laurie Schmidt recently sat down with Zubrin to discuss his new book and his philosophy about the prospect of humans settling Mars.

    12.3.2008 at 09:15pm - Comment by Solomon13

    Mr. Cook must be talking of a future when we'll have a reusable Endeavour with an ion engine that half way to Mars does a 180 spin to reduce its speed. I was thinking that by having such ship we could use it to play billiards with comets and meteorites by using nukes to bombard Mars to accelerate its terraforming, I saw something like this in the Discovery channel. Well, I was wondering what would happen to Mars after colliding with something big and filled with water like Europa the moon of Jupiter, would it become more like the earth?



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December 2009: Best of What's New

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