Even though we’re quite near to the Space News End of the Year post, I thought I could do a little update on what has been going on recently in the sector. As it happens, many things deserve attention, and here I’ll only flag a few.
If We Find Life on Europa or Enceladus, It Will Probably Be a ‘2nd Genesis’. This seems quite a claim but read the article first. To sum it up “some scientists believe that life has hopped from world to world around the solar system, aboard chunks of rock blasted into space by comet or asteroid impacts. Indeed, there’s a school of thought that the life teeming here on Earth is actually native to Mars, which likely boasted habitable conditions earlier than our own planet did. (This rock-riding idea is known as “lithopanspermia,” a subset of the broader panspermia notion, which envisions spread by whatever means, either natural or guided by an intelligent hand.)“
Boeing’ Starliner is getting ready – finally. And if you wonder what’s the big deal, you’d better read this. Yes, it is going to make a difference – opening up the launching sector in a substantial way,
Another Day, Another Exoplanet, and Scientists Just Can’t Keep Up. Is it true – are there now so many exoplanet discoveries that scientists cannot cope with? Maybe.
“It’s gotten to the point that we have so many to choose from now — there’s so many exciting candidates coming in that we actually don’t have to look at every single one and confirm every single one,” Jessie Christiansen, an astronomer at Caltech and NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute, told Space.com. “You really have to prioritize, you have to look at this list of planets that are coming out and say, ‘OK, which one do we really think we’re going to learn the most about?’“
It’s a good problem to have, isn’t it?
I’m not riding anything built by Boeing……
I can’t blame you 🙂
So, in the end, we might be the Martians? 😉