Oct 182010
Keep in mind that while we’ve not sent a human past the moon, we now not only have indirect evidence of hundreds of planets around other stars, we have *photos* of some of them. Imagine what we’d see if we had had an actual space program for the past forty years!
Slideshow of exoplanet photos: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/10/18/gallery-of-exoplanets-real-pictures-of-alien-worlds/
9 Responses to “Photos of exoplanets”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
When I was in jr high/high school in the late 60s/early 70s, I remember being told and/or reading, that we would never be able to resolve the stars as disks, much less seeing planets around them. Awesome!
Well, until we bend the laws of physics or break them, no human is ever going to get to one of those planets. Having a space programme won’t get you out of the solar system, so trying to link it to interstellar exploration seems rather pointless.
Wow. What an amazingly short-sighted point of view.
Short sighted or realistic? You won’t see another planet outside the solar system except perhaps though a telescope (of some kind). So, while interesting, it is rather immaterial to the value of a “space programme”, don’t you think? There are more than enough reasons, within the solar system to justify one, without talking about extra-solar planets.
> it is rather immaterial to the value of a “space programme”
No. A dead universe is kinda dull. A universe that can be shown to be full of even the *promise* of life is a whole different thing. Mankind will, so long as we don;t destroy ourselves or mire ourselves with Luddism, will one day move on to the stars. Who cares if we don;t even come close to the speed of light? We will colonize Mars. Then the asteroids. Then the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Then those or Uranus and Neptune, then the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. And by that point, the Sun will be virtually just another star in the sky. The move on to the other stars will be a natural course of human migration, even if done at only one tenth of one percent the speed of light.
Mankind, as long as it doesn’t fuck up its own planet to the point of no return because as a species we’re too stupid to realise we are affecting our own environment, might reach the end of the solar system and survive there. I hope, for the sake of the rest of the universe we don’t get beyond it. Whether there are other planets is an interesting pub trivia question, nothing else IMO.
All these planets have been found by either ground-based observations or unmanned space telescopes, so really don’t have any relation to manned space exploration.
In fact the Shuttle and ISS have eaten up a huge amount of funds that could have been used to build unmanned space telescopes and giant ground-based ones that could have found out considerably more about extrasolar planets than we now know.
The new Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12742-giant-telescope-in-race-to-become-worlds-largest.html
…will use seven 8.4 meter primary mirrors to generate the resoulution of a single 24.5 meter mirror, giving it resolution about ten times that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Total cost of the GMT is going to be around $550 million, which is also about the cost of a single Shuttle flight.
So every time you launch a Shuttle to haul some crap up to the ISS, you are tossing a telescope of those capabilities away.
> I hope, for the sake of the rest of the universe we don’t get beyond it.
There’s no understanding you.
Given that you angrily disagree with the purpose of this blog on politics, on space flight and even on something as trivial as a movie, and make no contribution re: aerospace or even cats, I gotta wonder why you’re even here, since you hate the joint so much. Most reasonable conclusion: troll.
As I’ve other things pressing now, I’ll waste no further time on you.
> So every time you launch a Shuttle to haul some crap up to the ISS, you are tossing a telescope of those capabilities away.
The Space Shuttle has been operated to let the Space Station get built and serviced. The Space Station has been built to give the Shuttle somewhere to go. There has been no effort to reduce the cost of space transport.