July 17, 2019
With yesterday being the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon launch, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has set the goal of going beyond the moon and planting an American flag on the red planet. Mars or bust!
Not only is this blanket designed with actual constellation shapes, it also includes their names for those interested in these celestial patterns. And it helps you to identify them when you actually see them in the night sky.
Learn about this and more interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
*-- NASA chief: 'Moon is the proving ground, Mars is the destination' --*
President Donald Trump has implored NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to talk less about the moon and more about Mars. On the week of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, it's a tall task, but Bridenstine is trying.
During a press conference Monday, Bridenstine said he and the president are on the same page regarding NASA's primary objectives.
"Mars is the goal, the president has been clear, we want to plant an American flag on Mars," the head of NASA said during his opening remarks at Monday's press conference.
"The moon is the proving ground, but Mars is the destination," Bridenstine added later, while fielding questions from reporters.
Trump may want NASA officials to publicly emphasize the goal of putting an astronaut on the moon, but Space Policy Directive 1, which the president signed shortly after taking office, calls on NASA to first return to the moon.
"The president said to go to the moon sustainably, in other words, to stay," Bridenstine repeated Monday. "And the president said to go with commercial partners, to go with international partners, and to utilize the resources on the moon for future space exploration."
The president has also called on Bridenstine and his agency to go faster in order to eliminate political risk -- the risk of programs being terminated and objectives changing as political winds shift and administrations turn over.
"If it wasn't for the political risk, we would be on the moon right now," Bridenstine said Monday. "We would probably be on Mars right now."
With the added pressure of an accelerated timeline for the agency's return to the moon, Bridenstine recently decided to shake up NASA leadership, reassigning William Gerstenmaier, the longtime associate administrator for human exploration.
During Monday's press conference, Bridenstine said that the leadership change was his decision and his decision alone. He told reporters that he had not spoken with the president or vice president about the change.
Despite the president's clear directives for NASA, there remains much uncertainty at the agency -- like who will replace Gerstenmaier and how much it will ultimately cost to return astronauts to the moon by 2024.
Bridentstine has previously said he thinks it will cost between $20 billion and $30 billion, but on Monday, the administrator said the total could be considerably less than that if NASA can continue to work out cost-saving relationships with commercial partners.
Bridenstine said he is continuing to drum up bipartisan support for NASA's moon and Mars missions among the nation's lawmakers. He is hoping a renewed focus on the Artemis mission will help him do that -- a mission, he said, that will exemplify NASA's commitment to diversity.
"In the Apollo era, all of the astronauts came from backgrounds that included either fighter pilots or test pilots, which back then included no opportunities for women," Bridenstine said. "Here we are, today, a generation later, ready to go back to the moon sustainability with a very diverse, highly qualified astronaut corps that includes a dozen women, with a program named after the twin sister of Apollo, Artemis."
In previous remarks, Bridenstine has said that he and his colleagues at NASA will continue to elaborate, in the coming months, on the ways the Artemis mission and a return to the moon will help the agency ultimately put an astronaut on the surface of Mars.
"We are working right now to putting together a comprehensive plan for how we would go about planning a Mars mission," he said.
When asked whether NASA had moved on from a potential target date of 2033 for a Mars mission, Bridenstine said he wasn't in agreement with all of the assumptions made in a recent report suggesting such a date was unrealistic.
"I'm not willing to rule out a 2033 date," he said.
*-- Scientists want to use gravitational waves to find faraway exoplanets --*
 The more than 4,000 exoplanets so-far discovered by astronomers have been spotted through the analysis of electromagnetic radiation. Now, a group of researchers claim gravitational waves can help astronomers find even more hard-to-spot exoplanets -- smaller alien worlds, far far away.
"We propose a method which uses gravitational waves to find exoplanets that orbit binary white dwarf stars," Nicola Tamanini, a researcher with the Albert Einstein Institute at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, said in a news release.
White dwarfs are stellar core remnants, the dense, cool remains of aging sun-like stars. The soon-to-be-launched Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, developed by the European Space Agency, will help scientists study these unique stars and their gravitational wave emissions, disturbances in the curvature of spacetime.
"LISA will measure gravitational waves from thousands of white dwarf binaries," Tamanini said. "When a planet is orbiting such a pair of white dwarfs, the observed gravitational-wave pattern will look different compared to the one of a binary without a planet. This characteristic change in the gravitational wave forms will enable us to discover exoplanets."
According to the new study, published this week in the journal Nature Communications, exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs should cause a Doppler shift modulation -- a slight wobble -- in the star system's gravitational-wave signal.
Stellar activity can interfere with search methods that rely on electromagnetic radiation, but gravitational wave techniques are immune to such interference.
In the newly published paper, scientists claim LISA will be able to locate exoplanets with Jupiter-level mass around white dwarf binaries anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy. LISA's observations could even help astronomers find the first exoplanet outside the Milky Way, in a neighboring galaxy.
"LISA is going to target an exoplanet population yet completely unprobed," said Tamanini. "From a theoretical perspective nothing prevents the presence of exoplanets around compact binary white dwarfs."
While the prospect of finding an exoplanet in another galaxy is exciting, astronomers will have to make due with exoplanet discovery methods that use electromagnetic radiation for a while longer. LISA isn't scheduled to launch until 2034.
|