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Episode 108 – NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission

By Gurbir Dated: November 25, 2022 Leave a Comment

The Europa Clipper mission, due for launch in 2024, will arrive and orbit Jupiter in 2030. The third spacecraft to do so after Galileo (in 1995) and Juno (in 2016). The Pioneer and Voyager missions were flybys. The primary objective, as the mission name suggests, is the investigation of Jupiter’s Moon, Europa. Called Europa-Clipper after the 19th-century merchant ships that shuttled between ports at the high-speed then available.

Europa-Clipper will orbit Jupiter, not Europa. This is one of Jupiter’s moons that shows strong evidence of a sub-surface water ocean. During its four-year mission lifetime it will flyby Europa dozens of times looking for conditions suitable for life.

Dr Steven Vance talks about the mission’s goals and current state of readiness. This was recorded in Athens during Cospar 2022. He was the scientific advisor to the 2013 film Europa Report.

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Episode 107 – SETI’s new tool – Technosignatures

By Gurbir Dated: November 18, 2022 Leave a Comment

The Great Wall of China can be seen from space. Actually, it can’t but the idea that a civilisation could build something large on a planetary scale that could be detected from interstellar distances was articulated first by author Olaf Stapledon in 1937 and popularised by Freeman Dyson in the 1960s. Known today as a Dyson Sphere, it is a megastructure built by an alien intelligence that captures almost all the energy emitted by its star. In this episode, Dr Hector Socas-Navarro explains we humans are not there yet but the increasing density of the Earth’s geosynchronous orbit will become detectable in a couple of centuries.

So not yet a Dyson sphere but a ring or a belt, he calls the Clarke-Exobelt may allow alien civilisations to detect humanity’s presence over interstellar distances. In this episode, we discuss the opportunities for SETI to detect artificial structures like this at interstellar distances using the JWST and very large Earth-based telescopes coming online soon.

Links to the resources we discuss are on the episode webpage

Podcast – Museum of Science and the Cosmos of Tenerife
NASA Technosignatures: “Moderately advanced” technologies in transit. Youtube video
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
Museum of Tenerife

Scientific papers

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Astrophotography with a remote telescope

By Gurbir Dated: November 17, 2022 Leave a Comment

Open University’s COAST telescope on Teneriffe

The best location for an astronomical telescope is on the top of a mountain. Remote, cold and a pain to get to. But with an internet connection – you can “work from home”.

During the summer, I signed up for a free Open University course called Astronomy with an online Telescope. With it you get access to a telescope on mount Tiede on the Island of Tenerife for 6 months.

This professional grade telescope COAST (COmpletely Autonomous Survey Telescope) consists of a 17 inch f/6.8 Corrected Dall-Kirkham Astrograph telescope (a PlaneWave CDK17), is equipped with an FLI ProLine KAF-0900 CCD camera, broadband and narrow-band filters, also mounted on a GM4000. You pick which objects you want to image and select filters. A few days later, you receive an email that the image is ready for download.

The OU course is free and explains how to use the telescope as well as the many aspects of basic astronomy. The course is online, free and available right now. Some of my images are below. Click for a larger version.