Widening the Red Dwarf Habitable Zone
Updated: 2011-10-31 15:32:51
Home About Centauri Dreams Errata Contact Tau Zero Foundation Subscribe Centauri Dreams The News Forum of the Tau Zero Foundation Widening the Red Dwarf Habitable Zone by Paul Gilster on October 31, 2011 Long-time Centauri Dreams readers will be familiar with the work of Manoj Joshi and Robert Haberle . Back in the 1990s when both were at NASA Ames Joshi is now at the University of Reading the scientists went to work on the question of whether planets around red dwarf stars could be habitable , given the problem of close orbits and tidal lock . Simulating the atmosphere of such a planet , they found even a thin atmosphere would circulate globally , moving enough heat to prevent the air on the darkside from freezing out . The prospect of a planet with oceans and a climate mild enough to
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, , Home Blogs Discussion About This blog Site Sign In Home Author Contact 31 October 2011 Lasers , Lunar Landings , and LRO Posted by Ryan Here’s another guest post from Seth Humphries about the amazing achievement that was the Apollo program , and the LRO photos of some of the landing . sites As a grad student , I spent a lot of time in hay fields with lasers . Using a tunable laser I built the Differential Absorption Measurement DAM Instrument to measure concentrations of carbon dioxide in the air above sequestration sites , oil wells injected with CO2. During this time , sometime in 2007, I bumped into a friend and he introduced me to an acquaintance of his , a young man about 20. The three of us talked for quite a while and the conversation turned to my work . The young man was very
Some interesting new additions to the exoplanet family were announced last week by astronomers from Penn State University. While finding exoplanets these days may be considered “just another day at the office,” astronomers discovered three very unique planets and an additional “mystery” object. What’s unique about these planets is the fact that the stars they [...]
Curiosity’s clamshell has been closed. And it won’t open up again until a few minutes after she blasts off for the Red Planet in just a little more than 3 weeks from now on Nov. 25, 2011 – the day after Thanksgiving celebrations in America. The two halves of the payload fairing serve to protect [...]
Yesterday, October 30, 2011, the Russian space agency Roscosmos successfully launched a new Progress spacecraft on a Soyuz rocket, the same kind of rocket that failed in August and caused such worry. This means it looks like the Russians have indeed figured out what went wrong in the previous launch and fixed the issue. I’ll [...]
skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home Timeslide View Flipcard October 30, 2011 Aviation Week lists potential technologies in Imagining the Future Aviation Weeks lists 16 technologies in an Imagining the Future . special Orbitec is working on vortex and electric propulsion heating vortex plasmas with microwaves and using water vapor as propellant . They are working on rocket engines whose thrust chambers are made entirely of electromagnetism , whose nozzles are magnetic lines of force and whose exhaust is plasma hotter than the . Sun ORBITEC is developing the Dual-Mode Water Rocket Propulsion system , a flexible in-space propulsion system that relies on water as propellant feedstock for both chemical and electric propulsion modes . Both propulsion modes rely on solar-derived electric .
, skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home Timeslide View Flipcard October 30, 2011 Waste heat recovery of superheated steam improves fuel consumption by 4-12 for rail , marine and other large engine applications Founded in 1867, Voith employs almost 40 000 people , generates 5.2 billion in sales , operates in about 50 countries around the world and is today one of the biggest family-owned companies in . Europe According to Voith calculations , the SteamTrac , which is connected to one of the two engines , generates an additional input power of 24 kW . Initial measuring trips already came up with an additional power of 19 kW . The extra output has a positive impact on fuel consumption and therefore CO2 emissions . On average , reductions of at least 4 up to a maximum of 12 can be achieved
Video caption: Liftoff of unmanned Russian Progress craft atop Soyuz booster on Oct. 30, 2011 from Baikonur Cosmodrome. Credit: NASA TV/Roscosmos. Photos and rocket rollout video below The very future of the International Space Station was on the line this morning as the Russian Progress 45 cargo ship successfully launched this morning from the Baikonur [...]
On November 8, an asteroid 400 meters across will pass by the Earth, missing us by the very comfortable margin of about 320,000 kilometers (200,000 miles). Named 2005 YU55, it’s been known for some time that this pass will occur, and astronomers are jumping on the chance to observe it. First off, it’s no danger [...]
, , , skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home Timeslide View Flipcard October 28, 2011 In 5-10 years , how will people get things done at work , at home , and on the go Microsoft Answers Microsoft offers a glimpse into what they see as the future of productivity in 2016-2021. H T KurzweilAI All of the ideas in the video are based on real technology . Some of the capabilities , such as speech recognition , real time collaboration and data visualization already exist today . Others are not yet available in specific products , but represent active research and development happening at Microsoft and other . companies Watch this video to see how we see technology moving from a passive tool to a more active assistant , helping us get things done , and strengthening our interactions with one
skip to main skip to sidebar Pages Home Timeslide View Flipcard October 27, 2011 MIT Energy Series complains about nuclear power plant concrete but Wind Power four times more concrete per megawatt MIT Energy Initiative has a five-part series of articles that takes a broad view of the likely scalable energy . candidates The article on wind talked about the economics , the intermittent nature of wind power and prospects for . scaling The MIT article on nuclear power stated Nuclear power is often thought of as zero-emissions , Prinn points out that it has an energy cost there’s a huge amount of construction with a huge amount of concrete , 8221 which is a significant source of greenhouse . gases Per Peterson analyzed that wind and solar use more steel and concrete than nuclear to generate the
Take four moons, some rings, a schoolbus-sized spacecraft, and mix them together. What do you get? Magnificence. That stunning shot is from the Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn. The big moon is Titan, and by big, I mean bigger than the planet Mercury. Big enough to have a thick nitrogen atmosphere, clearly visible in this picture. [...]
There’s cold water vapor orbiting the star TW Hydrae… and a lot of it. Enough to fill the Earth’s oceans thousands of times over! TW Hydrae is a star located pretty close by, about 175 light years away. It’s lower mass than the Sun, so it glows an orange-red, but it’s also very young, less [...]
Space Shuttle astronaut Ron Garan should be familiar to regular BA readers; I’ve featured a lot of the photos he’s taken from space here on the blog. He’s been posting more of them on Google+, and he just put up this gorgeous shot of the Moon over the limb of the Earth: Spectacular! [Click to [...]
The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program has issued a grant to John Mankins of Artemis Innovation Management Solutions for a study of space solar power. SPS-ALPHA (Solar Power Satellite via Arbitrarily Large Phased Array) is a novel, bio-mimetic approach to the challenge of space solar power. If successful, this project will make possible the [...]
Humanity’s most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), has officially opened for astronomers at its 16,500-feet elevation site in northern Chile.
Detailed views of star-formation in the Antennae Galaxies are the first astronomical test images released to the public from ALMA, confirming that this new telescope has surpassed all others of [...]