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It sounds like you have a startup idea on your hands : )
You've no idea. But for the first step, I need to find one or two very truthful physics grad students / electrical engineers who feel some responsibility for Earth or saving themselves. You wouldn't happen to know someone?
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As far as we know, as long as you don't actually reach light speed (which is currently thought to be impossible anyway) you can pretty much get as close as you want and be fine.
Thanks. It's quite counter intuitive to think about. You'd be going along at 99.99999999999999999999999999999999% and then hit that last bit and poof now I'm photons.
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It'll be in the near-infrared, but the light won't be separated from the star. How they observe the atmosphere is that when the exoplanets transit, they block out different amounts of light at different wavelengths. From that, one can deduce an atmospheric spectrum.
Would using a shield to block out the star be good enough to image the planets? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Worlds_Mission
The concept you link is a "starshade". It's a sister concept to a "coronagraph" -- both use an occulting disk to block out the light from the host star, so that a non-transiting exoplanet can be observed.
One goal is to image exoplanets directly, and another is to gather spectra for characterization. One of two current mission studies doing studies of the two approaches is HabEx (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/habex/). Obviously, the starshade is more complex/cumbersome/expensive.
Using one method or another, you have to achieve a contrast of about 1e10 between the star and the exoplanet. For every 1e10 photons that come in from the host star, your starshade/coronagraph has to let at most one get through to the detector.
No problem, buddy. We've got the best ship in town. If you've got the dough I'm sure me and my buddy Chewy can work something out for ya.
"Due to its mass, the star has the ability to live for up to 4–5 trillion years" So when the rest of the universe cools off and stars start to die, Trappist one keeps on shining and shining... We need to get there. But first, let's get rid of our genocidal tendencies.
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Which begs the question, why haven't we at least even tried to have done anything like this already? Do we really need to repeatedly spend comparable amounts of money on yet another dramatic TV special about humans traveling to Mars, as narrated by a favored celebrity? We really are running out of time. And it almost seems like it's pre-determined to happen. :\
It sounds like you have a startup idea on your hands : )
I mean if I somehow magically become a billionaire I intend to throw money at the problem with no hope of ever making a return because I believe humanity's last hope is an offworld colony, but I doubt I'll convince any VCs to join in.
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Which begs the question, why haven't we at least even tried to have done anything like this already? Do we really need to repeatedly spend comparable amounts of money on yet another dramatic TV special about humans traveling to Mars, as narrated by a favored celebrity? We really are running out of time. And it almost seems like it's pre-determined to happen. :\
NASA is not standing still. Europa just went to the next stage for exploration. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6755 It just takes a lot of time to plan and build ships for space travel.
We've known about climate change for a long time. Since the 60s/70s, no? But nobody has been able to realize what it really is, because scientists do not understand gravity yet. I've been begging people to confirm this for themselves instead of believing what others say about it. If people really knew what global warming was they would have started working on ships decades ago.
My point is, people on stable self-sufficient colony outside of Earth is priority number one. Not sending a probe to Europa. But somehow I get the feeling you have no interest in this reality.