Maybe life isn't so far away

Where should we look for life? 

Some exoplanets might be very good candidates for life, but why look so far away? There is one celestial body really close by that might hold some of our cousins. Mars is a great option, but only second best to Europa. Together with his three brothers, this Jupiter moon made a very important contribution to modern science. By observing them Galileo Galilei understood that not every celestial body orbited the Earth as was thought in his time. That led to the Heliocentric model and a better perspective of our place in the universe.
The potential of the next big Europa discovery might have a very similar effect as the Heliocentric model, and NASA plans to get us closer to finding life on this natural satellite. Europa holds such high hopes because it most likely has liquid water, and lots of it! Europa is basically an ocean world with a solid rock core an outer ice crust and a middle layer made of H2O, either in 'warm' solid or 'cool' liquid form. Although Europa is pretty far from the sun and thus not in the habitable zone (more on that later on) the gravitational pull of Jupiter together with the slight ellipticity cause the whole moon to expand and contract during its three and a half day orbit around Jupiter. This breathing cycle causes the icy crust to crack, allowing gases (oxygen, for example) to flow in and out from the inner layers, the moon scale 'pulse' also heats its inner areas, thus allowing the temperatures needed for running water. Unlike Earth, Europa has been very environmentally stable for the last 4 billion years, and if life on Earth can withhold 5 great extinction events think what could evolve in such constant living conditions. 

The fascinating tale of Europa was told to us by Dr. Jim Green, the head of NASA's Planetary Science division and basically the guy who decides on NASA's next missions to the solar system. In our discussion we also talked about the possibility of microbial life on Mars thanks to some liquid water the may lay just beneath the surface. We also talked a bit about terraforming some of our close neighbours like Mars or Venus. The second and fourth rocks from the Sun are just outside of our solar system's habitable zone, Venus is a little too close and Mars too far. But, perhaps, mankind could do to them what, for better or worse, we are best at - reforming the environment around us.

Every star has a habitable zone. This ring perimeter is fondly called the Goldilocks area, where the distance from the star is not too close, not too far, but just right to have liquid water. The bigger the star, the hotter it is, the farther away we'd find Goldilocks. The galaxy actually also has it's Goldilocks area, but that is a discussion for another day. As mentioned before M class stars are smaller and more abundant than our G class sun. Their size makes them cooler (4000 vs 5800 Kelvin) and thus puts their habitable zone closer in. This means a habitable planet would have a shorter yearly cycle because of the small orbital radius and thus would transit the star often, allowing transit detector telescopes to find them. But the problem with M class solar systems is that the proximity of the habitable planets to their host stars sets them in a place where they're bombarded with solar radiation, so the life that might be found on these planets would be very immune to radiation. The M class system search is the objective of the K2 'second light' mission, but Kepler's original mission was to find planets, hopefully habitable, around G class stars like our own Sun, and that process takes longer with the transit method because of the longer year cycles. 

So the question arises - what kind of systems should we look for first? And I hope our exoplanet team project would be able to rate the planetary search desirers.          

Another angle I believe we should look at in our exoplanet TP is revisiting planets that have already been found and learning more about them. This will first broaden our planetary knowledge base and secondly help us to improve our exoplanet detection methods, and maybe even find new ones.    

The Hertzprung-Russell Diagram mapping star temperature, luminosity and size  

This week also included a discussion on the recent 'Pathway to Exploration' report (abbreviated version). The report deals with the US approach to human space activity in the near future (up to 2050), its goals and destinations. I have not read this 280 page report, but from we've been told it has two main sections, chapters two and three were written by (lower level) policy makers and chapter four was written by scientists and engineers. While the fourth chapter is rather optimistic with its technical description of how mankind (or US-kind) would get to Mars by 2050, the earlier chapters are rather depressing with their explanation of 'why not' and 'why not now'. The main consensus of the panel members was that the current US pathway to Mars throw a manned mission to an near Earth passing asteroid isn't the right one, and that the US should align with the rest of the world's efforts of getting back to the Moon as a scientific and engineering stepping stone to Mars. This report is the latest of a long list of reports that basically say what can be done with a limited amount of public money and what would be the public opinion on the space activity. What I got from this discussion and from smiler ones we has previously is that in order of farther exploring space it takes a lot of politics. Sadly space as a global and national cause isn't as high as some other things, and that is despite the fact that modern life would not exist without some space applications that were initialized by government activity. In regards to commercial space, at the moment the real commercial space is somewhat limited to telecommunications and basically most of the other commercial space activities are services provided to governments. The current state of national investment (which has basically been the same since the last days of the Cold War) is that space activities are not a major part of the budget. I believe that these numbers should increase so we can do what we do best - explore and expand to new frontiers, not just for the scientists and engineers whims, but for progressing instead of stagnating, or even regressing. And I think that the discovery of any kind of life inside or outside of our solar system would change our perspective and turn space exploration to a leading goal for humanity. 

One point about 'why the US?' - There are other space exploring nations, but the US space budgets is much larger than the rest of the world combined and there is some understanding that in the near future the US will take the lead on reaching new frontiers (although, ironically the US does not launch people to space by itself at the present).    

Possible pathways to Mars

In the quote section of this week - Lagrange points are basically nice parking spots in space.

What I learned about our galaxy

Every star has planets!!!
If you don't read this blog any further but get this point I'll still be super happy. This new understanding of our Milky Way is thanks to the Kepler space telescope. Between the years 2009-2013 the telescope's mission was to look at a tiny fraction of our galaxy and try to detect planets orbiting stars. The area surveyed by the telescope has about 160,000 stars in it (a relatively small cone that spreads from our solar system to a distance of 1000 light years) and the estimation that Prof. Jaymie Matthews from the University of British Columbia (and one of Kepler's astronomers) has is that by the time all of Kepler's data is processed the number of systems to have been found with planets would be about 5,000. Given the geometry of the way Kepler looks for planets, when you extrapolate this number you understand that almost every star in our galaxy has planets. Jaymie calls it a census of the galaxy, by looking at this tiny neighbourhood we can now understand how the whole country looks like. And it look alive with planets!

The really cool thing about this understanding is that it changes the calculation previously made with the Drake equation, it increases the number of potential habitable, and even inhabited, planets by a nice factor. It basically says that E.T is closer then ever...

Sadly, after fulfilling its mission, one of Kepler's systems started malfunctioning. The telescope is still operational but the satellite can now longer be controlled in the way necessary to have it survey that small neighbourhood. NASA was about to shut down the mission when the satellite's contractor at Ball Aerospace devised a new mission for the satellite. It will still look for planets orbiting stars, but look much closer and all around us, trying to find planets around the most common star type in the galaxy, the M class star (smaller than our G class sun but 10 times for frequent). The new mission, named K2 or 'Seconed Light', has started earlier this year and I'm very curious about its results.

The Kepler chronicles were given during our Exoplanet TP (team project) experts panel (together with Prof. Matthews were Dr. Hanno Rein from University of Toronto and John Troeltzsch, Kepler's lead engineer from Ball Aerospace). The panel also included a presentation by John Troeltzsch on the B612 Foundation, a foundation looking to privately fund (most by philanthropy) the SENTINEL mission, which purpose is to map medium size asteroids that might hit the Earth. Another important contributor to the search for Exoplanets is the Canadian MOST mission, a small and old work horse that has been providing data about star and planet activity since 2003.

The recent giant leap in planets known to mankind 

Except for really cool Exostuff, we also discussed other subjects and done other things since my last blog. We had a Hawaiian space party, we had our first quiz, we were filmed for the local evening news and in the orbital mechanics lecture we concluded that spacecrafts don't fly, they fall with style.

Christina with R2D2

Montreal Biosphere, haven't been in yet, next weekend

Done with formalities

My mind is blown!

I've been trying to write this first blog entry for the last three nights and been too busy with everything that has been happening. Just to give a quick review - Saturday and Sunday were welcomes and orientations, Monday was the program outlining and a pretty cool opening ceremony, and on Tuesday (yesterday) all hell broke loose. We straight away started with  the very ideas and concepts of space - what drove man kind to space, the astronauts physiological living environment (from a MD astronaut), space futures (plural) studies, a (whole class, mandatory speaking) debate on manned spaceflight and picking our team projects (and more).

This is about to be an quite an experience...

So as I mentioned, my mind is at the state of being blown at the moment, but I feel that by postponing this (first) blog any more would make writing it even more difficult. So, here are some points I've got so far -  

Some of the program's demographics - Aerospace engineer, Aerospace engineer, Aerospace engineer, Electric engineer, Political studies person, Aerospace engineer, Aerospace engineer, Aerospace engineer, physicist, Architect, Aerospace engineer, Aerospace engineer, Aerospace engineer, Doctor, Business major, and so on. We are around 125 people, about 30 from China, 25 from Canada, 15 US, 8 India, 5 Israelis, 1 Maltasian and many more (mostly Europeans). Everyone has a BA, most a MA, some a PhD and almost all have interesting experience in space work (NASA\ESA\CSA\CNSA folks, two MARS1 candidates, Boeing\Airbus\... workers, and a ton of students). And all are very enthusiastic in making space (engineering\science\applications\exploration) an even bigger part of our lives.

I've just finished supper at an Ethiopian restaurant (with the TP team (explanation soon)) sitting with the Kepler space telescope head engineer and talking with him about the new field of Exoplanets and really cool work done with Kepler (and future(s) work to be done with similar tools). And all of the speaker\lecturers and like that, approachable and happy to exchange ideas.
And forget about the speakers, TAs, lecturers and panellists, talking to fellow participants is really interesting and enriching, their perspectives, their understandings, their experience are just amazing.  

And speaking of Exoplanets. An Exoplanet is just a planet out of our solar system. A few good thousands have been discovered by Kepler and others and the a lot of new, interesting and theory changing things have been found. I'm in the TP team working on Exoplanets (sadly, not literally on them). TP stands for Team Project, we have 4 for the 125 of us, so its a big team. These TP reports have been known to affect policy makers in the past and I'm very excited on getting in to ours (although I might hate it by the 4th week). So the TPs were selected now, and we going to ease in to them gradually (first once\twice a week and in the end full time). Our more specific subject is getting smaller organisation and smaller countries in Exoplanet research by using smaller satellites, and basically except for this title and the formal things needed we have the freedom to do what we want (in a 30+ person group, this is going to be tough).

Last thing I have in mind is something that I find missing - we've already had the talk about educational inspiration using space icons (both astronaut and engineer achievements), but no discussion is scheduled about the way to use the inspiration for teaching and motivating. Luckily (actually, obviously) we're encouraged to organize our own presentations and discussions, so I'm going to try and make that offer.

I think that's enough for now, here's a picture from the opening ceremony that was held in ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) headquarters that are based in Montreal.

Oh, yah, and I'm really looking forward for the weekend so we can tour the city (and maybe rest a bit)...

So, I'm off to space camp

Testing, testing, one, two, three...

So, I'm off to space camp! Actually, it's the International Space University Space Studies Program held this year in Montreal, Canada (ISU SSP14 - https://ssp14.isunet.edu/).
I didn't even think I'll get in, I handed in the application on the last day possible and the same for the Ilan Ramon Scholarship application for the tuition. But somehow, here I am, counting the minutes I still have with Yotam and writing a blog instead of doing something with ourselves (it's ok, he was playing a computer game up until now).

So, I'm off to space camp! I have some idea what to expect, but actually didn't have much time to think about how it's going to be for me. I'm going there to learn about the different space activities done around the world and the processes that lead to these activities, so hopefully one day I'll be able to lead some of them as well. I'm also hoping to meet people from all around the globe that work in space disciplines other than my satellite GNC (Guidance, Navigation & Control). And maybe, have just a bit of fun along the way.

So, I'm off to space camp! And this is my attempt to document my voyage, maybe it will work and maybe I'll give up by week two, who knows.

So, I'm off to space camp! Keep in touch,

Daniel