Carnival of Space 297

The Carnival of Space 297 is up at Dear Astronomer

The Meridiani Nournal reports New space telescope will continue search for Earth-like worlds

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a project of MIT, was selected by NASA as part of its Explorer Program to launch in 2017 and will be funded by a $200 million grant. It will use wide-field cameras to search for planets, both small and large, orbiting the brightest stars near the sun.

So how does it differ from Kepler and other previous planet-hunting space telescopes? According to principal investigator George Ricker, “TESS will carry out the first space-borne all-sky transit survey, covering 400 times as much sky as any previous mission. It will identify thousands of new planets in the solar neighborhood, with a special focus on planets comparable in size to the Earth.”

It will have the capability of measuring the orbits, sizes, masses, densities and atmospheres of the planets it finds. This includes rocky planets like Earth orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars.

Artist’s conception of TESS. Credit: Chet Beals / MIT Lincoln Lab

SpaceX planning test of flyback stage for Falcon 9

Nextbigfuture predicted that there would be a permanent base established on Mars by 2037. This is a prediction where NBF padded the date to allow for various real life problems to slow down the development.

I believe the manned fly by of Mars will happen in 2018. Elon Musk’s estimate for a manned mission to Mars is 2024-2027. Elon said that Spacex would be able to send people to Mars around 2024-2027. This is different to saying that they would send people to Mars at that time. He is saying the capability would be there. If Dennis Tito is successful with the Mars flyby in 2018 then it will make it more than 60% likely there would be a human landing on Mars in 2025-2030. However, if the 2018 window is missed the next free return from Mars would be 2031. Therefore, I predicted a Mars colony by 2037. Current technology takes about 250 days to go one way to Mars. The capability will be there by 2027. The manned landing would be by 2024-2033. The base would be by 2028-2035.

Nextbigfuture predicts that permanent human base on Mars and fusion power for energy generation and space propulsion willl happen sooner than the BBC recently predicted

With tne news that one of the bloggers who is part of Carnival, Andrew Fraknoi, has won the Michael Faraday Award of the National Science Teachers’ Association, given each year for a lifetime of contributions to the public understanding of science.

Universe Today – Check out this eye-catching infographic of This Week in Space Pictures

Universe Today – With its 180 degree views of Earth and space, the ISS’s cupola is the perfect place for photography. But Austrian researchers want to use the unique and panoramic platform to test the limits of “spooky action at distance” in hopes of creating a new quantum communications network.

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