Showing posts with label space exploration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label space exploration. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

The New York Times was unclear which galaxy contains billions of potentially habitable planets

Galaxy contains billions of potentially habitable planets, say Berkeley, Hawaii astronomers

"Astronomers reported that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable Earth-size planets in the galaxy, based on a new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft," The New York Times is reporting, adding, "One out of every five sunlike stars in the galaxy has a planet the size of Earth circling it in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot, not too cold — where surface temperatures should be compatible with liquid water, according to a herculean three-year calculation based on data from the Kepler spacecraft by Erik Petigura, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley."

Three other weird things about The New York Times article is that it kept referring to "galaxy," when I think that they really mean "universe." Each time they refer to "galaxy," I could not figure out which "galaxy" within the "universe" they meant. Did anybody figure out which "galaxy" the reporter meant ?

Also, it is not explained why the scientific study cited in the article required that the habitable planets being search had to be approximately the size of our planet, earth ? Wouldn't it not matter what size a planet was, so long as the planet had water, breathable air, sufficient atmospheric pressure, and gravity to make life possible ?

What kind of "life" were astronomers thinking that they would find : life that would identically resemble human life ?

Monday, August 27, 2012

Viral Video of Curiosity Descent Down To Mars

From This Is Colossal : New Interpolated HD Video of Curiosity Mars Rover Descent Depicts Real-Time Landing

Using footage provided by NASA, Reddit user Godd2 just spent the last four days on behalf of all humankind creating a stunning interpolated HD version of the descent. In layman’s terms interpolation involves taking a choppy video, in this case NASA’s 4 frames-per-second video, and rendering the “missing” frames in between resulting in an incredibly smooth 25 frames-per-second video. This is, I believe, the closest approximation ever of what it might feel like to land on another planet in real time using actual footage. Amazing.