China plans to launch space station

It would appear that China has official plans to launch its own space station by 2020.

The People's Republic of China is very ambitious about its space program, using it as a way to establish themselves as one of the world's leading scientific nations.

The space program began in 1956, mainly for military use. It's manned space program began 1968 and sent it's first human in space in 2003, making it the third country to do so.

According to The China Daily newspaper, China's planned space station would be "a small-scale, 20-ton space workshop," quoting Long Lehao, a leading designer of the Long March 3A rocket that carried the Chang'e 1, a lunar probe, into space. The recent lunar probe launch has sparked rivalry between China and Japan's space programs. India is also said to possibly join in on the space race with plans to launch it's own probe in April. Although Chinese officials claim that they would rather work with other countries rather than compete in a space race. They were willing to participate in the International Space Station but the U.S. were uneasy about allowing a communist dictatorship aboard.
















Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_program_of_China
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Technology/WireStory?id=3830131&page=1

Wormholes - Science fiction or science?

You've probably heard of wormholes, shortcuts through spacetime, while watching an episode of Star Trek or some other sci-fi favorite. Well it turns out that wormholes are actually an accepted theory among many astronomers and physicist. The term wormhole was coined in 1957 by an the American physicist John Wheeler although the idea was conceived in 1921 by the German mathematician Hermann Weyl. Wormhole theories range from intra-universe, a passage that connects two points in the same universe, to inter-universe, a passage that connects two different universes. The two main types of wormholes are; Lorentzian wormholes and Euclidean wormholes. The Lorentzian wormholes, also know as Schwarzschild wormholes or Einstein-Rosen bridges, are the most studied because they work within general relativity. In most cases, for wormholes to function there would need to exist exotic matter, which is a theoretical matter which has negative energy density. However exotic matter has not been proven to exist yet. The Morris-Thorne wormhole was the proposed traversable wormhole, a wormhole which one could travel through. It was introduced in 1988 by Kip Thorne and Mike Morris. In this type of wormhole, the opening is held open by a spherical shell of exotic matter. There also have been theories that state that wormhole could be used as a method of time travel as it cuts through space and time.


Reference
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole

Etraterrestrial Life

Have you ever sat under the stars and wondered if there was something else out there? What would they look like? Would they look anything like us? Would they look like Mr. Spock, Yoda or something completely unrecognizable? If we can find so many differences amongst ourselves, what are we going to think if we ever met said aliens?

If you look at our evolution, starting from microscopic organisms to Homo Sapien Sapiens taking millions and millions of years of constant change. If our evolution had only taken a slightly different path that time, we would be completely different. If our evolution is the product of chance and trial and error, the chances that we find a humanoid being that fits our mold of "normal" are very slim. Unless, our evolution was directed by a higher being such as God, Allah, Mother Earth, etc. Maybe evolution was meant to take a certain path and that life on different planets follow similar patterns.

Will we be the first one to venture out in space and discover an unknown planet or will some other species that are just as curious as we are visit our planet? Hopefully one day we'll make first contact and find out.








































This may not have to do much with astronomy but my Blog reminded me a computer game that is coming out soon. The game is called Spore. In Spore you start out as a microorganism and end the game as space a explorers. During the game you experience evolution, the rise of civilization and eventually space travel. The game looks really interesting because during the evolution phase of the game, you are able to adjust your species attributes to make sure it survives, so it's basically like an evolution simulation.

Etraterrestrial Life

Have you ever sat under the stars and wondered if there was something else out there? What would they look like? Would they look anything like us? Would they look like Mr. Spock, Yoda or something completely unrecognizable? If we can find so many differences amongst ourselves, what are we going to think if we ever met said aliens?

If you look at our evolution, starting from microscopic organisms to Homo Sapien Sapiens taking millions and millions of years of constant change. If our evolution had only taken a slightly different path that time, we would be completely different. If our evolution is the product of chance and trial and error, the chances that we find a humanoid being that fits our mold of "normal" are very slim. Unless, our evolution was directed by a higher being such as God, Allah, Mother Earth, etc. Maybe evolution was meant to take a certain path and that life on different planets follow similar patterns.

Will we be the first one to venture out in space and discover an unknown planet or will some other species that are just as curious as we are visit our planet? Hopefully one day we'll make first contact and find out.





This may not have to do much with astronomy but my Blog reminded me a computer game that is coming out soon. The game is called Spore. In Spore you start out as a microorganism and end the game as space a explorers. During the game you experience evolution, the rise of civilization and eventually space travel. The game looks really interesting because during the evolution phase of the game, you are able to adjust your species attributes to make sure it survives, so it's basically like an evolution simulation.

Mars: Ice cap found on equator?

Planetary scientist have been scratching their head over weird deposits found Mars' equator because they seem to contain large amounts of water. Of course, Mars already has ice-water on its poles but this new discovery may indicate a possibility that the red planet has water elsewhere also.





















Kenneth Tanaka, an astrogeologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Flagstaff, Arizona, said "It would be like finding evidence of ice caps on Earth at the Equator, It's kind of very strange."

If Mars does have an icy equator, it could indicate a possibility for life on the red planet.

Some experts have suggested that it could volcanic ash porous enough to look like ice. Tanaka argues saying that "The problem was we couldn't find any volcanoes" nearby, he said. "There's a lack of smoking guns."

This new find reinforces the idea that Mars was once like Earth and had its own bodies of water.


source:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/11/071101-mars-ice.html


For more articles on life on Mars: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/070803-phoenix-mars.html

Hubble Telescope is a Star!

Roll out the red carpet, Hubble is making it to the big screen. Warner Bros. Pictures has announced the production of an upcoming 3D film for IMAX. The movie will use footage taken by the STS-125 crew. It is set to release in early 2010.

I'll take this opportunity to talk a bit about the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Telescope is a telescope that orbits Earth, that launched in 1990. The telescope is named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble. Though only launched in 1990, the idea of a space telescope had been around since 1946. The Hubble Space Telescope is a Ritchey-Chretien telescope, also known as an RCT. The diameter of the telescope is 2.4m and its focal length is 57.6m. The telescope has had a very big impact on astronomy.


















http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/news/hst_imax.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Impact_on_astronomy

Interstellar travel

Anyone with a slightly geeky or nerdy side has at least watched Star Trek or Star Wars once or twice. For about 50 years or so people have been fantasizing about space travel. Science fiction novels has us hurtling at light speed through the universe in the far off future. 2001: A Space Odyssey had us traveling to Jupiter by the year 2001.

Interplanetary travel might no be too far off but what is the possibility of Interstellar or intergalactic travel?

Using propulsion methods of our current methods would result in extremely long voyages, it would take hundreds or thousands of years to reach a destination. It would take several generations of crew members to complete the mission. We would need a ship that would be self-sustaining and would hold hundreds of people, a sort of biosphere. Another possibility would be suspended animation, assuming that have perfected it by this time.

Using nuclear, fusion or light sail powered space craft we could reach on the average a speed of 10% of light speed. It would take about 40 years to reach Proxima Centauri, the nearest star. There is also the possibility of antimatter rockets which could theoretically reach a speed near that of light.

Light-speed travel is the most appealing form of travel for obvious reasons. One theory is interstellar travel through transmission, in other words teleportation. If you could transmit matter as information and the reconstruct it at its destination, light-speed would be possible.
According to Einstein's General Relativity, spacetime is curved. One could use the warpdrive concept, as seen in Star Trek, to use curvature in space to take a shortcut from point A to point B. The use of worm holes to move from a point to another has been speculated but it is not know whether possible in practice or not. Generally as far as physically traveling faster than light has been considered impossible according to physics.


One can only hope that humanity will once reach the point of interstellar travel. If we would told people 200 years ago that one day we would were going to walk on the moon they would have laughed us out of the room.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_travel