The Dual Use Exoplanet Telescope (DUET) is a NASA advanced innovative studies breakthrough space telescope design. It would be able to detect exoplanets both indirectly (with radial velocity and astrometry techniques) and directly with advanced spectroscopy. DUET has an annulus gossamer membrane holographic primary objective that has four times the collection area and twice the diameter of the largest planned ground telescopes (40-Meter E-ELT telecope), yet its mass and stowage allow it to be delivered on a single lifter.
Extremely Large Telescope is a 39.3 meter ground telescope which should start working in 2025
Unlike competing exoplanet finders, DUET does not require a coronagraph or starshade. It subtracts the parent star by taking advantage of the differences between the wavelengths of the star and its planets as a function of the distances between them. This is made possible by using a dual dispersion technique first studied by Newton in his famous prism experiment. In this telescope, wavelength is proportional to the distance of an exoplanet from its parent star.
The mission will result in a census of planets on half of all visible stars. In the “neighborhood” of earth, DUET will make spectrographic characterizations. DUET will deliver a positive signal for any water bearing planets using a Rayleigh scattering method in the near UV that in our solar system is unique to earth. Earth may be a “pale blue dot,” but in the near-UV it is luminescent. Such a signal for an exoplanet on an A, F or G class main sequence star would point to Earth 2.0.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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They better! The casinos wouldn’t be able to stay in business were it otherwise.
“Hope springs eternal . . .”
— Alexander Pope, 1732
Then again, Pope goes on to say that “The proper study of man is mankind” and then tells us we are fools for wasting effort on the physical sciences as we can only hope to debase God by so doing.
I’d really like to see that.
As a reminder hydrogen and oxygen are all over in the universe, water is on the moon, on mars, pluto, all planets.. So why would it be big news, its only likely in the godilock zone to find water. All that money for a cover story seams overkill to me.
Assuming that the ocean is liquid, it would likely have solid ice caps at the poles. That is, unless it were tidally locked, in which case, half the planet would be frozen and half of it ocean…this just gets cooler the longer I type :).
Why don’t we have ground telescopes on the moooon?
I think we have to start thinking about the future, now; wherever you are, that’s where you’ll always be…which is what the curvature of spacetime is all about in contrast to di-synchronous time.
By the time this old boy (American Theocracy) reaches into chapter three, he seems almost sure that the future of the United States will be broken up along pre-sentiment, 1861-1865. We have to wonder if this other old boy (It Will Be Done By 2030) is correct about agrarianism, making a stance against AI (or will the future of humanity lay in the arms of artificial intelligence)? My sense is that we better advance cannabinoid research into space ASAP…what do you think?
Cannabis: A Lost History (FULL DOCUMENTARY)
Improbable things occur everyday.
Deservedly so, although I lament over the lack of wonder in so much of the general populace these days.
It would be especially deserved given the recent research indicating that the seemingly unlikely collision that formed the Moon, and was necessary for life on Earth for many reasons, involved an object that was formed in the outer solar system, and was thus able to bring the vast bulk of our water (but not too much water) to a dry, inner system planet.
Although, if we discovered an exoplanet with significant water, it might be rather disappointing to later discover it was covered in, say, an ocean several hundred miles deep.
Maybe, but don’t expect anybody to talk to there. If there was, or is ever going to be, someone there, then, in the 13.8 billion year lifespan of the universe, odds are literally astronomical they either arose more than a few hundred thousand years ago, or will not arise for at least a few hundred thousand years more.
One could raise questions about how long a technologically advanced civilization exists. Personally, I expect that once one arises, and escapes the confines of its own star system, then either it or, more likely, something derived from it, will survive for billions of years or until the end of the universe, if that occurs earlier. There is the fact that, did they already exist, THEY would have been detecting Earth and possibly for billions of years.
Ergo, they aren’t there now and haven’t existed for at least a few billion years. We can conjecture at reasons why they have either never wanted to come here, or never developed the means to travel here, but any and all of these would be a stretch when considering the time scales likely involved.
Perhaps they may show up in some distant future, but I rather doubt it. We would be there long before hand and I rather suspect the first expanding intelligent entities in a galaxy probably precludes the appearance of any more of them, much in the way that a second intelligent species could not evolve and build its own civilizations on Earth while we are here (or at least not without massive assistance from us).
Direct, UV-imaging of an exoplanet with significant water would be front page news.