MOON POLITICS
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in 1961 put Yuri Gagarin into space. Why was this greatest achievement a flop ? Let's explain it . Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman told USA TODAY recently.“The Apollo program wasn’t designed to be a great scientific venture or means of exploration. It was a battle of the Cold War,” he said. “We were in a desperate battle with the Soviets, and that’s why we were pressing.”Borman, whose lunar orbiting mission in December 1968 paved the way for the Apollo 11 moonwalk seven months later, believes winning the race changed history on Earth. If the Soviets had landed on the moon first, “it might have changed the whole nature of the post-World War landscape,” he said. “I’m not certain we would have had the dissolution of the Soviet empire. I’d like to think that the success of the Apollo program was an important first step in the end of the Soviets.” (3)>>Why, then, go to the moon? To this, the US president was rhetorical: Why, for instance, climb the highest mountain or fly the Atlantic? 'Why does Rice play Texas?' The aim was clear: do the hard thing, rather than the necessarily good, ethical or 'easy' thing. Going to the moon would 'organise and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too'.The rosily romantic reminiscences that have flooded television screens ignore a fabulous propaganda exercise that began in the immediate aftermath of July 1969. A moon landing amnesia was imposed. In the US, selling the moon mission through the 1960s proved unpopular, with polls showing a majority disapproving of the venture. The skepticism and doubts about the merits of a moon landing were marshalled with much industry in a work that has been all but forgotten. This largely unanswered string of Soviet space successes had already left Americans with chilling visions of nuclear bombs raining down on them from orbit, maybe even the moon. Then, just a few weeks before the Nov. 1962 Kennedy-Webb meeting, a national near-death experience -- the Cuban Missile Crisis -- solidified beating the Soviets to the moon as an absolute necessity in the hearts and minds of the American people.Why we NEVER went back to the Moon = Nixon .The Apollo 13 accident in April 1970 led to calls to end lunar missions. The widespread desire to end Apollo after a successful flight and to counter Soviet claims that robotic lunar exploration was safer, cheaper, and more effective than human lunar exploration helped to prolong the program. President Nixon perhaps was two of the US Presidents that hurt NASA , second only to Obama which I explain later. In December 1972, as (4)>>Apollo 17 was returning to Earth, Nixon issued a statement saying, “This may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the Moon.”Nixon was apparently deeply affected by the near tragic events of Apollo 13, and felt very connected to the crew during their ordeal. As a result, Nixon proposed to cancel Apollo 16 and 17 ahead of the 1972 election, for fear that something could go wrong with one of the missions and impact his re-election bid. Also quoting polling data, suggests that Americans by and large opposed spending money on flights to the moon. The exception occurred during the flight of Apollo 11, when 53 percent favored lunar exploration. On the other hand, roughly 1 million people came to what was then called Cape Kennedy to witness the departure of Apollo 11. The dichotomy will likely be debated by historians for the foreseeable future. Since Nixon came to office just in time to preside over the Apollo 11 lunar mission. At that time, the space program was a national priority due to the Kennedy goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. However by the time Neil Armstrong made that first footstep, public support for large-scale space projects had diminished. Nixon, therefore, made a number of policy decisions that redound to this very day. They don't even credit him with ending Apollo though he had some say in what final missions flew or didn't. What they credit him with is the basic policies and strategies NASA has followed for the last forty years as well as it's current status as yet another domestic program. Why we NEVER went back to the Moon = Obama. In 2004, for example, the Bush administration tasked NASA with coming up with a way to replace the space shuttle, which was set to retire, and also return to the moon. The agency came up with the Constellation program to land astronauts on the moon using a rocket called Ares and a spaceship called Orion. NASA spent $9 billion over five years designing, building, and testing hardware for that human-spaceflight program. (5)>>Yet after President Barack Obama took office — and the Government Accountability Office released a report about NASA's inability to estimate Constellation's cost — Obama pushed to scrap the program and signed off on the SLS rocket instead. For the Obama administration, which was not shy about spending money in areas that it cared about, this price tag was too dear to bear. The results of these private deliberations were rolled out in the 2011 budget request that was released in February 2010. Project Constellation would be canceled, root and branch. Instead, NASA would conduct studies of heavy-lift rockets, deep-space propulsion, and other technologies that it was said, in the fullness of time, would make exploring space cheaper and easier.Congress, which had not been consulted, reacted with bipartisan fury. The Obama administration made two critical errors. It had not consulted with Congress or anyone else when it developed its plans to kill Constellation. The White House also blatantly pulled a bureaucratic dodge that was apparent even to a first-term member of the House from the sticks. To kill a popular program, one studies it to death. Nowhere in the Obama plan was there a commitment to send astronauts anywhere. Clearly, the White House had no intention of doing space exploration. President Obama had expressed an antipathy to American exceptionalism, and nothing speaks to that quality than American astronauts exploring other worlds. President Obama subverted this mission to concentrate on global warming extremism, Muslim outreach, missions to nowhere, and a future almost devoid of the giant leaps and planetary probes that rightly awed us for decades and advanced America’s competitiveness in high technology. This Whitehouse had no intention of space exploration of any kind. Three of the most prominent astronauts in American history, Neil Armstrong, Gene Ceman, and Jim Lovell sent a letter condemning the cancellation of Constellation, and Obama knew he had a problem on his hands. What did he do? Took Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin as a political pawn to Kennedy Space Center to make his big space announcement. We’d go to Mars sometime in the next thirty years. The journey to Mars was set so far in the future, it was meaningless, just as he wanted it to be.
(6)>>Trump's "SPACE FORCE" back to the Moon and UFO Disclosure ? .Fast forward 50 years. NASA is embarked on its third attempt to send Americans back to the moon, called Project Artemis. Noting a sense of urgency, President Trump has ordered the space agency to land the “first woman and the next man” on the lunar surface by 2024. Meeting the deadline will be daunting, from a technical, fiscal and political standpoint. Then again, a number of media talking heads back in the 1960s thought that landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth by the end of the decade was unrealistic, too. The Trump administration wants to return Americans to the moon, a place they haven’t been since 1972, in five years—during President Donald Trump’s second term, if he is reelected. Right now, the agency doesn’t have the money to make it happen. In May, the White House asked Congress for an extra $1.6 billion in NASA’s next budget to start funding this effort, which would cost $20 billion to $30 billion and, unlike the Apollo program, rely heavily on technology bought from private companies. Astronauts would land near the south pole this time, where they could theoretically make use of water frozen in the surface. (7)>>And the crew would include, for the first time, a woman. A mission to Mars—the focal objective of the Obama administration—will come later, after astronauts show they can safely live and work on the moon. BUT RECENTLY , President Trump said NASA should not be focused on going to the moon despite his own administration's support for the effort, saying the agency should instead prioritize "much bigger things," like going to Mars. "For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon — We did that 50 years ago," the president tweeted from aboard Air Force One while flying back to the U.S. from a week in Europe."They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!" he added. (8)>>MARS APPEARS to be the real goal of the American nation , since the 1970s , the United States has sent numerous space orbiters , and lander / rovers. The BIGGEST QUESTION is searching for Life on Mars After officials finally convinced a crestfallen Trump that they couldn’t put a man on Mars by 2020 just for him, he distractedly strode over to a bathroom mirror, looked at his reflection, and muttered, “Space Station, this is your President,” according to Sims, former White House communications official Cliff Sims in his new book, Team of Vipers, and reported by the Daily Intelligencer. Trump asked, “Tell me, Mars — what do you see a timing for actually sending humans?” Whitson said that, “Well, I think as your bill directed, it would be in the 2030s. Unfortunately, spaceflight takes a lot of time and money, so getting there will take some international cooperation.” BUT The CRAZY ZEAL of America today is a return to Space supremacy of decades ago seems again more political than scientific , with the space shuttle gone , the nation hitching a ride in Russian rockets , our nation is behind in the new space race . BUT BAFFLING as it is , Vice President Mike Pence announced along with President Trump a new Department like the Army ,Navy and Air Force . Drum rolling : THE SPACE FORCE!Critics mocked the idea as “ridiculous,” “stupid” and part of an “imaginary space war.” “There’s no threat in space! Who are we fighting?” asked Stephen Colbert. Vox wondered if the Space Force would carry lightsabers. It was easy to miss that the idea is not uniquely Trumpian—and poses a real threat. For all intents and purposes, a space force already exists in the form of the Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), a 36,000-person division of the Air Force that’s been operating since 1982. I MUST SAY IT MUST BE ABOUT ALIENS !!!! , or Russians ? What may be the most puzzling part about the Space Force is about a top secret project that has come to light over the last two years . The spacecraft, which the Air Force said is modeled after NASA’s X-37 program, passed 717 days, 20 hours and 42 minutes in space the morning of Aug. 26 —
Secret Space Plane may doing more
than we are officially told .
breaking the last record set by the X-37B’s previous mission.The US military has launched five uncrewed X-37B spaceplanes into orbit over the past decade, and each flight has been longer than its predecessor.The X-37B program tends to attract public interest because of that secrecy: The Air Force does not share the locations of the X-37B planes while they're in orbit, although amateur astronomers have made a sport out of spotting the spacecraft with telescopes. Now what we are being told is The spacecraft are also designed to carry out "experiments" that "can be returned to, and examined, on Earth" after the mission is over, according to Russell, the Air Force spokesman. The nature of those experiments are — you guessed it — also top secret. BUT HERE is the what I suspect , The X-37B flew to the Moon by remote control . It spent 700 days in outer space It's objective is to (9)>>identify the source of Advanced Aerial Phenomena ie UFOs , it flew over sensitive areas around China , Russia as a unmanned space reusable vehicle that can launch other probes into space . While publicly said , this reusable space plane could also be a precursor to a manned space plane in the works . Being an UNMANNED drone it flew to the moon and orbited it for a period of nearly 2 years before it remotely returned to Earth orbit and landed at the Groom Lake Base which all of us know it as AREA 51 . BUT it not just for science , it is also a spy space drone . Obviously our government is testing top secret new technologies for our defence . The next subject is out of this world . Incredible as it is Advanced Aerial Phenomena ie UFOs seemed part of the latest
disclosure to the American public that there are strange vehicles flying , doing advanced maneuver's that cant't be explained by the Air Force , or Navy for example . U.S. Navy →pilots and sailors won’t be considered crazy for reporting unidentified flying objects, under new rules meant to encourage them to keep track of what they see. Yet just a few years ago, the Pentagon reportedly shut down another official program that investigated UFO sightings. What has changed? Is the U.S. military finally coming around to the idea that alien spacecraft are visiting our planet? The Defense Department reportedly briefed Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., along with two other senators as part of what appeared to be heightened efforts to inform politicians about naval encounters with unidentified aircraft. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who requested the Pentagon's program investigating the matter, pushed, in a interview, for Congress to learn more about the issue."They would be surprised how the American public would accept it," he said, referring to the military. With out QUESTION UFO Disclosure is vary important , is it so top secret to keep above top secret ? There is a "theory" if you can think X-FILES and the Cigarette Smoking man [ Government official] that there exists a DEEP STATE that would do anything to cover up criminal wrongdoing , to spread misinformation to the American public . It sounds exactly what has been going on on the last two decades since September 11th 2001 . (10)>>And if there are aliens , or if life exists on other planets the search for it should consume the whole world and notjust one nation .The FUTURE 2020 to 2040 AD.
Just Imagine that you have a Time Machine of sorts and you just jump into the next decade . Just what will the news paper say regarding the next step in space exploration . What I have to say is not exactly what the government agency NASA says regarding its time line when America will send a manned crew to Mars , or the MOON. I personally don't believe that the United States has the technically know how to get to Mars right now . First the current technology is not going to get anyone to Mars. NASA is considering moving the Orion spacecraft that was to fly on the first Space Launch System mission to a commercial rocket to keep that mission on schedule for mid-2020. The Trump administration’s stated goal for deep space human exploration is to go to the Moon. The very first space policy directive that Trump signed in December of 2017 was to send people back to the Moon to establish a sustainable presence there. “Beginning with missions beyond low-Earth orbit, the United States will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations,” the directive states. There are lots of good reasons to send humans to Mars., but you first need a interplanetary space ship. A one-way trip to Mars takes between seven and nine months (far longer than a three-day trip to the Moon!), and astronauts need to be kept safe and healthy the entire way.Its a dangerous trip. But the reality is that the UNITED STATES is no longer ahead in technology anymore. So I don't expect an American walking on the moon again too soon in five years, but I can see that (10.2)>>China and Russia might beat us to the moon by 2024.It going to be vary hard to escape the fact that in order to achieve any kind of space objective it's not going alone to plant a flag on some far away celestial object . Its going to take an international team to make it to Mars , the rockets like Orion and Constellation might be a stepping stone to the Moon . Going to Mars is going to require a real spaceship, built in low orbit , big enough to carry fuel and food , its an interplanetary space craft , it going to have to be built by America , Russia , China and EU . (11)>>Fast forward 2020 AD. If the Trump administration succeeds in landing astronauts back on to the moon in 2024, that would come at the tail end of what could be Trump's second term, if he gets reelected. However the nation is going to face some serious economic strains in the next decade of 2020 to 2030 , which is going to challenge our American space program . If ONE SMALL STEP FOR MANKIND is going to happen , it's going to require that the world's most powerful nations stop making atomic bombs , train their ways to build spaceships in order to reach the FINAL FRONTIER .
NOTES AND COMMENTS:
(1)>>watched the first moon landing . Live TV coverage made hundreds of millions witnesses to history. They huddled in front of televisions at home and gathered in auditoriums and schoolrooms as the Apollo 11 astronauts ventured onto another world for the first time. It's estimated that between 600-650 million people tuned in around the world to Armstrong and Aldrin's broadcast from the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. People in parts of Europe watched, despite the fact that it was the middle of the night there. It broke the record for the largest television audience in history at the time. It held that viewership record until the wedding of Lady Diana and Prince Charles in 1981. For one, it was a huge engineering accomplishment to get humans to the moon and back. “It took around 400,000 people to land humankind on the moon,” astronaut Michael Collins, Apollo 11’s command module pilot who did not land on the surface of the moon, reminds us in Google’s commemorative Doodle video. Those were engineers, coders, scientists, mechanics, doctors, and so many more professions working in concert to make the mission a success. (2)>>Apollo Program was part of the Space Race . The space race was a series of competitive technology demonstrations between the United States and the Soviet Union, aiming to show superiority in spaceflight. It was an outgrowth of the mid-20th-century Cold War, a tense global conflict that pitted the ideologies of capitalism and communism against one another. Still, for much of the first half of the space race, the Soviet Union was considered to be ahead. Its engineers accomplished many firsts, including the first mission to leave Earth orbit, Luna 1; the first probe to reach the moon, Luna 2; and the first spacecraft to head toward Venus, Venera, which stopped responding a week after its launch. On April 12, 1961, the Soviets obtained another spectacular victory with the successful flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first person to fly in space. After returning to Earth, Gagarin was celebrated as an international hero. Gagarin beat the first American, Alan Shepard, into space by less than a month. Shepard's flight took place on May 5, 1961. Though there were additional American and Soviet missions, after the successes of the Apollo program, the space race was widely believed to have been won by the U.S. Eventually, as the Cold War wound down, both sides agreed to cooperate in space and construct the International Space Station beginning in 1998. (3)>>Why, then, go to the moon?But why? What has suddenly made Earth’s main satellite so popular? After Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s historic mission in July 1969, public and political interest in future human space flight evaporated rapidly. Already bogged down in a vastly expensive war in Vietnam, the US government abandoned its Apollo program. In December 1972, the New York Times asked several dozen philosophers, scientists, writers, and political leaders to reflect on what the Moon missions had meant to humanity and the world. The responses ranged from the anodyne and predictable to the idiosyncratic.(4)>>Apollo 17 was returning to Earth. Richard Nixon was a lunar buzzkill—but at least he was honest about it. During the early years of the space program, Nixon held no political office, which put him on the sidelines for all of the one-man Mercury flights and two-man Gemini flights, as well as the first two flights of the Apollo program. But he assumed the presidency in January of 1969 and was thus the one who got to spike the football in July of that year, phoning the moon from the Oval Office to congratulate the Apollo 11 crew on their historic lunar landing.Not long afterward, the same President canceled the Apollo program—though he held off on making his announcement until after his reelection in 1972 was assured. Over the course of those generations, we’ve made at least one feint at going back to the moon. In 2004, then-President George W. Bush announced a new NASA initiative to return Americans to the lunar surface by 2020. But President Obama scrapped the plan and replaced it with, well, no one is quite certain. There’s a lot of talk about capturing a small asteroid and placing it in lunar orbit so that astronauts can visit it—a mission that is either intriguing, implausible or flat-out risible, depending on whom you talk to. And Mars is on the agenda too—sort of, kind of, sometime in the 2030s.(5)>>Yet after President Barack Obama took office —President Obama doesn't deserve all the credit (or blame, depending on your viewpoint) for such shifts, of course, but they will be part of his legacy. Here's Space.com's admittedly premature look at how space fans may remember the 44th president .According to the Washington Post, Obama will seek to shelve the $81bn Constellation programme, which called for a return to the moon by 2020 and human landings on Mars by the middle of the century. The plans were laid out by his predecessor, George Bush, in 2004.The budget could also spell the end for Nasa's successor to the space shuttle, the Ares 1 rocket, which has already cost billions of dollars to develop. Besides gutting the Moon mission Obama made it impossible for American astronauts to travel to the ISS International Space Station . To solve the problem Obama worked out a deal with the Russians to ferry US Astronaunts on Russian rocakets .NASA is in quite a financial pickle with the Russians.When the agency retired its space shuttle program in 2011, it was banking on commercial carriers — ultimately SpaceX and Boeing— to design, build, and test proven systems to launch its astronauts into space . This leaves the agency with one option for sending astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS) 220 miles above Earth: a Russian spacecraft called the Soyuz.And Russia is taking full advantage of its temporary monopoly.Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, used to charge NASA as little as $21.8 million per seat in 2008 (when the space shuttle was still around).(6)>>Trump's "SPACE FORCE". There’s something childishly comical about the way Donald Trump introduced the "Space Force", After “lock her up!” (referring to defeated presidential election rival Hillary Clinton) and “build that wall!” (his promise to shut out illegal immigrants and make Mexico pay for it), the US president’s fanatical fans are turning wild eyes to the skies and chanting, “Space Force! Space Force!” at cult of Trump campaign rallies these days.(7)>>And the crew would include, for the first time, a woman. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, he called it ‘one small step for man’. The 11 moonwalkers who followed were also men and, 50 years later, there has still been no ‘small step for woman’. UNLESS CHINA or RUSSIA puts a Woman on the MOON first before America . The Big question has been Why has it taken this long to put a woman on the moon? Because we haven’t been to the moon this long - doh. Perhaps the first woman on the moon will be the first suitably-qualified woman chosen by the first commercial enterprise to start building something of significance on the moon. NASA has set an ambitious 2024 goal for landing the first woman and next man on the moon with a crewed mission. (8)>>MARS APPEARS. I wrote about Mars in several posts in this blog , you might enjoy some of "my theories" →https://theun-politics.blogspot.com/search?q=Mars . Going to Mars is extremely dangerous by standards . I can't not imagine that the United Sates would go at it alone . Here I argue that we don't have enough technology as of now for a interplanetary mission[ more above ].(9)>>identify the source of Advanced Aerial Phenomena ie UFOs . Between 2014 and 2015, seasoned pilots in the U.S. Navy experienced a number of harrowing encounters with UFOs during training missions in the U.S. While pilots were mid-flight, their aircraft cameras and radar detected seemingly impossible objects flying at hypersonic speeds at altitudes up to 30,00 feet (9,144 meters); these mysterious UFOs did so with no visible means of propulsion, The New York Times reported on May 26.However, none of the pilots suggest that these perplexing UFOs represent an extraterrestrial invasion, according to The Times, which previously wrote about Navy pilots encountering UFOs in 2004.In total, six pilots who were stationed on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt between 2014 and 2015 told The Times about spotting UFOs during flights along the southeastern coast of the U.S., extending from Virginia to Florida. (10)>>And if there are aliens , or if life exists on other planets. Assuming there are 200 billion stars in the Milky Way, it can be hypothesized that there are 11 billion potentially habitable Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way, rising to 40 billion if planets orbiting the numerous red dwarfs are included. The discovery of exoplanets has intensified interest in the search for extraterrestrial life. There is special interest in planets that orbit in a star's habitable zone, where it is possible for liquid water, a prerequisite for life on Earth, to exist on the surface. The study of planetary habitability also considers a wide range of other factors in determining the suitability of a planet for hosting life.As of 1 September 2019, a total of 4,109 confirmed exoplanets are listed in the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, including a few that were confirmations of controversial claims from the late 1980s.[5] The first published discovery to receive subsequent confirmation was made in 1988 by the Canadian astronomers Bruce Campbell, G. A. H. Walker, and Stephenson Yang of the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia. Although they were cautious about claiming a planetary detection, their radial-velocity observations suggested that a planet orbits the star Gamma Cephei. Partly because the observations were at the very limits of instrumental capabilities at the time, astronomers remained skeptical for several years about this and other similar observations. It was thought some of the apparent planets might instead have been brown dwarfs, objects intermediate in mass between planets and stars. In 1990 additional observations were published that supported the existence of the planet orbiting Gamma Cephei, but subsequent work in 1992 again raised serious doubts. Finally, in 2003, improved techniques allowed the planet's existence to be confirmed. (10.2)>>China and Russia might beat us to the moon by 2024. In the coming decades, boots worn by visitors from these and other nations could add their prints to the lunar dust. China is taking a slow and steady approach, and foresees its astronauts’ first arrival about a quarter of a century in the future. The European Space Agency has put out a concept of an international “moon village” envisioned for sometime around 2050. Russia has also described plans for sending astronauts to the moon by 2030, at last, although many doubt it can afford the cost.For India, reaching the moon would highlight its technological advances. China would establish itself as a world power off planet. For the United States and NASA, the moon is now an obvious stop along the way to Mars.Clearly, U.S. policymakers have decided that China represents the more pressing challenge to American interests, at least when it comes to space policy. (11)>>Fast forward 2020 AD. The Trump administration faces a public skeptical of both destinations. According to a recent poll, 78 percent of respondents have a favorable view of NASA, and a majority say the government is spending too little when they’re told that the agency’s annual funding accounts for half a percent of the national budget. But just 42 percent think NASA should go to the moon in 2024, another recent poll found. A similar proportion of people think neither Mars nor the moon should be a priority. Even the two living Apollo 11 astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, think the United States should head to Mars instead of the moon.
FURTHER SCIENTIFIC NOTES :
The Concept of NASA's [ Elon Musk] Constellation craft .
MARS CONSIDERATIONS :
Elon Musk wants humans to travel to Mars. He just doesn’t want to be the first to go. Because, uh, there’s a very good chance of dying. "The risk of fatality will be high," Musk conceded in the course of describing SpaceX’s absurdly ambitious (and still preliminary) plan to establish a human colony on Mars. "There’s no way around it." But if a study of radiation exposure in mice has any bearing on humans, going to Mars may be much more dangerous than anyone expected. The root problem is cosmic rays, as detailed in a May 2017 Nature study and highlighted by a recent Business Insider video. Astronauts travelling to Mars face a wide manner of dangers but the deadliest of them all could be space radiation. Every single second charged particles travelling at near the speed of light hurl through the vacuum of space. On Earth, the planet’s atmosphere and magnetic field protect us from harmful space radiation punching through our bodies. In space, however, where radiation levels can be 700 times higher than on Earth, there is nothing to protect astronauts. President Donald Trump's NASA budget request for the 2020 fiscal year includes funding for a Mars sample return mission that could launch as soon as 2026. Before NASA or any other nation sends humans to Mars , it's important for a sample return mission to test the soil for exo-biology , or dangers to our kind of Earth life. [ FOR A COMPLETE DISCUSSION REGARDING A SAMPLE RETURN MISSION SEE : https://pubsapp.acs.org/subscribe/archive/ci/31/i08/html/08digregorio.html ]
EXO-PLANET CONSIDERATIONS:
But the ultimate goal of NASA's exoplanet program is to find unmistakable signs of current life. How soon that can happen depends on two unknowns: the prevalence of life in the galaxy and how lucky we get as we take those first, tentative, exploratory steps.Our early planet finding missions, such as NASA’s Kepler and its new incarnation, K2, or the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope, could yield bare bones evidence of the potentially habitable worlds. Perhaps K2’s examination of nearer, brighter stars will stumble across an Earth-sized planet in its star’s habitable zone, close enough for follow ups by other instruments to reveal oceans, blue skies and continents. Or James Webb, designed in part to investigate gas giants and super Earths, might find an outsized version of our planet. Thousands of planets have been discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Kepler, which was launched in 2009 and retired by NASA in 2018 when it exhausted its fuel supply, observed hundreds of thousands of stars and identified planets outside of our solar system -- exoplanets -- by documenting transit events. Transits events occur when a planet's orbit passes between its star and the telescope, blocking some of the star's light so that it appears to dim. By measuring the amount of dimming and the duration between transits and using information about the star's properties astronomers characterize the size of the planet and the distance between the planet and its host star. Our galaxy could be littered with warm, watery planets like Earth.That's the conclusion of researchers at Penn State University, who used data from NASA's Kepler telescope to estimate the number of Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. Their results, published in The Astronomical Journal , suggest that an Earth-like planet orbits one in every four sun-like stars. Totaled up, that means there could be up to 10 billion Earth-like worlds in our home galaxy. NASA’s current exoplanet-seeking eye in the sky is the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which searches for the tell-tale stellar dimming that indicates a planet has passed in front of its star. Its cameras sweep across a majority of the sky, prioritizing nearby solar systems close enough for the Hubble Space Telescope and upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to take a closer look. TESS has already found more than 1,000 potential ("candidate") planets, and NASA expects it to find nearly 20,000 more. Of those, perhaps 500 will be Earth-sized, but almost none will be Earth-like. Astronomers have to spot three dimmings, or transits, to be sure they're looking at an orbiting planet (rather than a random dust cloud or flicker), so TESS's frequent scanning gives it time to find only planets that fly around their star in a matter of days or weeks—not years.
