Slava G. Turyshev and his team are on their phase III NASA NIAC project to develop a solar gravitational lens telescope. At optical or near-optical wavelengths, the amplification of light is on the order of 200 billion times and with equally impressive angular resolution. If we can reach this region beginning at 550 AU from …
A NASA NIAC Phase III is developing and plans to fly a 2022 TDM (Technology Demonstration Mission) to prove the SGLF’s (Solar Gravitational Lens Focus) mission architecture. They will then prepare a near-term (by 2024), low-cost (less than $40M) mission to fly through the solar system faster than any spacecraft ever ~7 AU/year, capable of …
Ocean covered exoplanets that are up to 2.6 times bigger than Earth should have microbial life which the James Webb Space Telescope should detect. The James Webb should launch this year. Planets of this size dominate the known exoplanet population, although they have not been studied in nearly as much detail as super-Earths. Hycean worlds …
ESA’s exoplanet mission Ariel, scheduled for launch in 2029, has moved from study to implementation phase, following which an industrial contractor will be selected to build the spacecraft. Ariel, the Atmospheric remote-sensing infrared exoplanet large-survey mission, addresses one of the key themes of ESA’s Cosmic Vision programme: What are the conditions for planet formation and …
Washington State University researchers have identified 24 top contenders for super habitable exoplanets that would be better at supporting life than the Earth. The exoplanets are all over 100 light-years away. There is now a database of 4500 exoplanets from the ongoing surveys of other stars. Superhabitable exoplanets have the following features: * are in …
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope or WFIRST) is a NASA infrared space observatory that will launch in 2025. The funding for this and all NASA projects is precarious. NASA’s ability to execute on large, multi-year science project has also been less than reliable. Roman uses an existing 2.4-meter wide …
Other solar system could have as many as seven Earth-like planets, when those solar systems do not have a gas giant planet like Jupiter. The team created a model system in which they simulated planets of various sizes orbiting their stars. An algorithm accounted for gravitational forces and helped test how the planets interacted with …
We will be able to take megapixel images of exoplanets by putting telescopes in zones that are 600 to 2000 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun. Getting to 600 times as far away from the Sun we can observe exoplanets in other solar systems when we go the exact opposite direction. We …
A meter-class telescope with a coronagraph to block solar light, placed in the strong interference region of the solar gravitational lens (SGL), is capable of imaging an exoplanet at a distance of up to 30 parsecs with a few 10 km-scale resolution on its surface. The picture shows results of a simulation of the effects …
There may be as many as one Earth-like planet for every five Sun-like stars in the Milky way Galaxy, according to new estimates by University of British Columbia astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission. To be considered Earth-like, a planet must be rocky, roughly Earth-sized and orbiting Sun-like (G-type) stars. It also has to …
The cumulative number of exoplanets that have been discovered has been following power law scaling for the past 25 years and if this continued to 2050 then we would find about 100 million exoplanets. 20,000 exoplanets should be found from the past primary Kepler mission and the completed K2 mission and from the Transiting Exoplanet …
