This is another initiative to
gather data from the sun and it will be the closest visit yet.
We also know that in the next two
to three years, that the cost of lift will be dropping dramatically and this is
now opening the door to an exponential expansion of exploration work and an
equal expansion of participants. It will
no longer be mostly governments out there trying their hand.
Also engineering has become
increasingly fool proof and we are seeing far less incidents of failure.
My guess is that we will soon see
a lot of devices landing on the moon to properly evaluate what is actually
there. The availability of water and of usable
fuel in the form of He3 makes it far and away the easiest target available to
us. It can actually be supported
realistically from Earth which is certainly not a present option for Mars.
Just returning loads of He3 as
reactor fuel could easily defray the costs of a large installation on the Moon.
The present reality is that Space
investment has been steadily gathering momentum.
By Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News
The probe will orbit closer to the Sun than any previous spacecraft
Known as Solar Orbiter, the probe will have to operate a mere 42
million km from our star - closer than any spacecraft to date.
The mission proposal was formally adopted by European Space Agency
(Esa) member states on Tuesday.
Solar Orbiter is expected to launch in 2017 and will cost close to a
billion euros.
Nasa (the US
The Esa delegates, who were meeting in Paris
Scientists are convinced that these phenomena dominate and shape the Universe
but their nature has so far eluded any satisfactory explanation. The discovery
in the late 1990s of dark energy and its influence on cosmic expansion was recognised with a
Nobel Prize earlier in the day for three scientists.
The Euclid
Like Solar Orbiter, Euclid
"They are both exciting missions, and it was really good to hear
today that the physics Nobel Prize was awarded to research on the accelerating
Universe, which is of course linked to Euclid," said Alvaro Gimenez, Esa's
director of science.
"And I'm really looking forward to Solar Orbiter, which will
become the reference for solar physics in the years to come," he told BBC
News.
The two missions have emerged from Esa's Cosmic Vision exercise, which
is planning missions up to 2025.
They were selected after four years of debate and definition involving
researchers and engineers from across Europe .
The pair had to argue their case in direct competition with other
compelling mission ideas, including at the final stage of selection a proposal
for a planet-hunting telescope called Plato.
Esa itself will be investing about 500-600m euros in each venture, with
individual member states paying for the instruments that will be carried on the
spacecraft. National governments will also fund their own scientists to process
and interpret the data returned by the missions.
Solar Orbiter was always regarded as something of a favourite in the
race. The concept had been in development since the 1990s, and so the
technologies it requires were perhaps better understood than many of its
rivals.
Its mission will certainly be challenging as it attempts to acquire
measurements of the energetic particles and magnetic fields found close by our
star.
The spacecraft will provide remarkable views of the Sun's polar regions
and farside. Its elliptical orbit will be tuned such that it can follow the
star's rotation, enabling it to observe one specific area for much longer than
is currently possible.
Throughout, Solar Orbiter will be staring into the "furnace".
The main workings of the spacecraft will have to hide behind a shield to
protect it against temperatures higher than 500 degrees; its instruments will
need to peek through small slots.
"Solar Orbiter is not so much about taking high-resolution
pictures of the Sun, although we'll get those; it's about getting close and
joining up what happens on the Sun with what happens in space," explained
Tim Horbury from Imperial College London and one of Solar Orbiter's lead
scientists.
"The solar wind and coronal mass ejections - these big releases of
material coming off the Sun; we don't know precisely where they're coming from,
and precisely how they're generated. Solar Orbiter can help us understand
that."
Tuesday's meeting of Esa's Science Policy Committee sanctioned a memorandum
of understanding (MOU) with Nasa for its contributions to Solar Orbiter.
Delegates also approved a multilateral agreement (MLA) with the national
agencies in Europe that will be providing the
payload instruments.
Its optical and infrared detectors will look deep into space to see how
the light from far-distant galaxies has been subtly distorted by intervening
unseen, or dark, matter.
It will also map the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies. The
patterns in the great voids that exist between these galaxies can be used as a
kind of "yardstick" to probe the expansion of the cosmos through time
- an expansion which appears to be accelerating as a consequence of some
unknown property of space itself referred to by scientists as dark energy.
Dark energy and dark matter mysteries
Gravity acting across vast distances does not seem to explain what
astronomers see
Galaxies, for example, should fly apart; some other mass must be there
holding them together
Astrophysicists have thus postulated "dark matter" -
invisible to us but clearly acting on galactic scales
At the greatest distances, as the Nobel laureates found, the Universe's
expansion is accelerating
Thus we have also "dark energy" which acts to drive the
expansion, in opposition to gravity
The current theory holds that 70% of the Universe is dark energy, 25%
is dark matter, and just 5% the kind of matter we know well
"Euclid will give us an insight
into how structures in the Universe are growing and whether they are growing at
the rate we expect from General Relativity (our theory of gravity on large
scales)," said Bob Nichol, a Euclid
scientist from Portsmouth
University
"But aside from all that, Euclid Euclid
It may not remain that way for long, however.
The Americans are desperate to run a similar mission they call WFirst
(Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope). But budget pressures mean this
spacecraft is unlikely to be built until after Euclid has flown, giving Europe
a clear lead in one of the most important fields of modern astrophysics.
Esa has in the past offered Nasa the opportunity to take a 20% partnership
in Euclid
"The door is always open to the Americans, and we are ready to
co-operate with them if they come with a reasonable proposal," said Dr
Gimenez.
Co-operation with Nasa on Euclid
Then comes Turkey, once a sotto voce ally of Israel;
but since
the ascent of its Islamist government led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, a development which you seem not to have noticed, given your
assertion that Turkey is “…Israel’s most important friend in the region” (but
don’t feel too bad, our own Secretary of Defense, Leon
Panetta seems also not to have noticed), it hasofficially
declared war on Israel by announcing that it will send Turkish
warships into Israel’s coastal waters to support flotillas of wannabe
blockade-busters heading for the Gaza Strip.
The tragic and bitter reality is that the so-called Palestinian
national movement is the only one of its kind in the entire world and across
all of world history whose only operative paradigm is terrorism, and whose
unique and unrepentant goal is the destruction of a sovereign state and the
genocide of its Jews. If these terrorists would lay down their weapons,
there would be no more violence. If Israel
would lay down her weapons, there would be no more Israel
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