Busy Week At ISS Alpha
This next week will be busy for the International Space Station Alpha (ISS Alpha as I’ll try and call it from now on.) Friday evening, the European Space Agency launched Jules Verne, the first Automated Transfer Vehicle (or ATV) launched by the space agency. Sitting on top of an Ariane 5 rocket, it launched from the French Guiana spaceport in Kourou. It won’t arrive at station until early April, but it does represent a significant milestone in the history of ISS Alpha. This will be the first time that a new vehicle will be supplying the station. Currently only the Russian Soyuz and Progress vehicles and the American Space Shuttle are the only vehicles that have routinely supplied the station. There stands a good possibility that this won’t be the last new ship to take on this task. Following the retirement of the Shuttle in 2010, NASA will use privately contracted spacecraft to maintain a presence on the station.
The Space Shuttle Endeavour is on track to launch early on Tuesday morning with the first portion of the Japanese space agency’s (JAXA) Kibo module. It will be the largest module yet to be added onto ISS Alpha. Another robotic arm is to be added to the station as well.
Search For Life: Mars and Alpha Centauri
Mars
Recent imagesfrom Mars orbit have revealed a crater that has clear evidence of having some sort of lake filling its basin at one point in the past. Much of the visual evidence indicates that the liquid that was present was in fact water. What is perhaps most amazing about this is that you can see where the water level of the lake was as time progressed. As anyone who has walked along the shore of a lake may notice, there is a distinguishing line between where the water currently is and where it has been recently, leaving a patch of mud and debris exposed.
The crater that the lake once resided in, Holden Crater, is being looked at as a potential landing site for future NASA missions to the planet. Most likely, it will be the target of the Mars Science Laboratory that will be launched next year. The MSL as it is called, is a rover about the size of a hummer and dwarfs anything that has been previously launched to Mars. (An avalanche of dust was also photographed on Mars, and I’ve included that picture below.)
The layers seen in the right hand corner is the debris left from the lake’s shoreline.
This was taken from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Alpha Centauri
After a recent study conducted by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, it has been determined that it is likely that a small, Earth sized world could exist around one of our nearest stellar neighbors: Alpha Centauri. If a planet were to exist (no evidence exists to support this), it would be among the closest yet discovered outside the Solar System, only 4 light years away. A light year is the distance it takes like to travel in one year, or about 5.8 trillion miles.
So what would happen if an Earth sized planet were discovered in the so-called ‘Goldilocks Zone’ around Alpha Centauri, that is the zone where life is most likely to develop?
What would likely happen is telescopes both on land and in space would train their eyes on the planet to take a direct picture of it. From those pictures, measurements of the light being emitted could determine the composition of the atmosphere to determine if it is habitable for anything that we would consider to be life as we know it. If enough evidence is gathered to support claims of life on the new world, a mission could be mounted to launch a spacecraft towards the planet. This might not be as far fetched as it may seem.
Studies were conducted early on in the space race to determine the feasibility of using nuclear powered engines. The primary use of these vehicles would be to get humans to Mars, but modified versions were designed that could deliver probes to nearby stars. The most notable project designed for Alpha Centauri would take 100 years to get there using a nuclear-powered fuel source.
The probe would merely flyby the planet and deploy smaller probes to land or flyby at a lower altitude. An additional 4 years would pass before any data arrives at Earth. It’s a long shot, but finding life even that close to our own world would be the scientific discovery of the century(s).
