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Written by Klaus
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Friday, 09 March 2007 |
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Searching for extrasolar planets was coined with failures and disappointments a long time. The technical challenge or just simple observation errors made the announced discoveries disappear again quite quickly. First of all we should look what a planet is. At an interstellar distance we surely won’t have to distinguish between smaller objects like Pluto in our solar system (we couldn’t them detect anyway) and full sized planets. But there is an upper boundary concerning its mass. Normally extrasolar planet masses are listed in parts of Jupiter masses. That has its reasons. Not only that Jupiter is the largest planet in our system and therefore the easiest to detect at interstellar distances, its mass make it also unique. Basically planets are nothing else than stars contemplating their composition. A more ore less large solid core is encased by a gaseous shell. So if you would blow up Jupiter’s mass to a certain level, Jupiter would start a nuclear fusion process and become a star. This would happen at about 84 times the mass of Jupiter. |
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Written by Klaus
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Saturday, 03 March 2007 |
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With the Space Shuttle nearing its end of life, the task to resupply the International Space Station ISS comes again into focus. What can be done and what is planned, we will cover in a future part. Now let’s first look back into history. In the beginnings of crewed spaceflight no or little supplies were needed at all as the flights took several hours at the best. With the increasing flight duration however, the task of getting enough supplies into the small capsules got challenging. Another severe problem was the waste management. You can pack e.g. a meal on Earth quite small but after your dinner you will have a lot of waste that you won’t be able to get so small in volume as before. Especially the long duration Gemini flights faced that problem. |
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Written by Klaus
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Friday, 02 March 2007 |
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The search for other planets than the Earth accompanied mankind since the beginning of their existence. The first, so to say western, concept was the geocentric view of Ptolemeus shortly after the turn of ages after Jesus Christ: the Earth stands in the middle of the universe. The Inka, Maya and Aztec may have had other views. Several hundred years later at around 1500, Nikolaus Copernicus set the sun into the middle of the cosmos for his heliocentric view and developed a system of circular paths for the planets. Only about 100 years later, Johannes Kepler discovered the real nature of the universe. The solar system is not the center of the universe and the planets, more exactly every celestial object, orbits another on elliptical curves.
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Written by Klaus
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Thursday, 02 February 2006 |
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In 1952, the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) announced the International Geophysical Year (IGY), a time span between July 1957 to December 1958. This period was to be filled with numerous scientific experiments and studies about Earth. It was in 1955 that the Soviet Union surprised the world by announcing the plan to orbit a satellite in the International Geophysical Year. As this was the time of great rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, US President Eisenhower promised that the United States would orbit a satellite in this period themselves. This was the start of the Space Race. |
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Written by Klaus
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Wednesday, 25 January 2006 |
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With the upcoming private space flight, the governmental owned launch centers have to open up to the public and to new forms of services. Back in the 1940s and 50s as the first rockets were launched, it was an all military matter. Therefore the launch areas were military area and the security accordingly and understandably extremely tight. This type of procedures remained during the next centuries as space flight became a more civil affair. Outsiders were seen as nearly enemies and it was not possible to think about new kinds of operation. This remained practically until today that way. |
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