Starshades and Coronagraphs: Essential Technologies for Finding Life in the Universe
17th Oct, 2015
NASA is developing ambitious future missions intended to find signs of life on worlds around other stars. Those clues would be present in the planet’s atmosphere: water vapor indicating an ocean, oxygen from green plans, methane from bacteria. To ac
Constructing the Future in Space: How Engineers Design and Build the Most Ambitious Space Observa...
19th Sep, 2015
Space observatories are among the most challenging and complex machines ever designed and operated, requiring precise operation of complex systems within a very challenging environment at enormous distances from human operators. How has this been don
Future in Space Hangout: Space Astronomy in the 2020's and Beyond
15th Aug, 2015
Are we alone in the Universe? Are other Earth-like worlds common? Do any have signs of life? How did life emerge from a lifeless cosmic beginning? Curious humans have asked these questions for millennia, but for the first time we can foresee actuall
Future In Space Hangout: The Multitude of Planets
18th Jul, 2015
Recent space telescope missions such as Kepler and Spitzer have given us unprecedented data that have shown that there are many, many planets orbiting other stars. Current estimates show that there are enough planets in our galaxy that for every sta