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from the search-for-alien-life-is...looking-up dept.
New Report Urges NASA to Intensify Search for Exoplanets and Aliens
A new Congressionally mandated report says NASA should refine its strategy and improve its tools to foster the study of exoplanetary systems and expedite the search for alien life.
The new consensus study report, authored by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, highlights several strategic priorities that, if implemented, will go a long way in ensuring that scientists have the resources they need to study exoplanets (planets in orbit around other stars). It's called the Exoplanet Science Strategy, and it identifies specific research priorities while making recommendations on how NASA should invest its efforts.
"Over the past decade, exoplanet science has yielded many remarkable discoveries, from the direct imaging of young gas-giant exoplanets to the detection of molecules and clouds within the atmospheres of more than a hundred worlds," write the authors in the new report. "However, our knowledge of the full range of exoplanet characteristics, and that of their local environments, remains substantially incomplete."
[...] Looking ahead to the next 10 years or more of astronomical discovery, the authors are asking NASA to develop an advanced space telescope to enable direct imaging of distant exoplanets, with a particular focus on detecting Earth-like planets in orbit around stars similar to our Sun. In addition, NASA should invest in ground-based astronomy, the report says. Two future observatories, the Giant Magellan telescope (GMT) and the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), will offer advances in the imaging and spectroscopy (measuring the absorption and emission of light) of entire planetary systems. These observatories will also be able to detect molecules, such as oxygen, within the atmospheres of far away planets. The GMT is currently under construction, but the TMT has yet to be approved.
(Score: 1) by Sulla on Monday September 10 2018, @08:21PM
Right now the general population lacks the incentive to put the iron to the feet of the politicians on both sides. If the Soviets had been able to keep up with us without collapsing think of where we would be technologically wise today, we only got to where we are because of the competition. I would like to see billions wasted on space instead of war, but we need an incentive to do it. People like to fall for the grass is always greener meme, think about what the population would do if Mars were unpopulated (or sparsely populated) and covered in flora? We are a curious and aggressive species, we would want to possess it and be able to possess it as soon as possible.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam