Future Telescopes
* a newly proposed Exo-Earth Imager (EEI) could show astronomers an Amazon-size forest, with its green hint of biology, on an Earth-size planet 30 light years away.
*It's a bold promise, considering that NASA and the European Space Agency are still a dozen years away from even attempting a Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) that could barely see such worlds as tiny specks.
*One NASA concept envisions a spaceborne array of 20 telescopes, each 26 feet in diameter separated by as much as 3,700 miles in space.
*the EEI would use many little mirrors instead of a few big ones, and would rely on a new technique called "densified pupil imaging" to get the most from the meager amount of light reflected from a distant planet.
*It would need 150 telescopes, each 10 feet wide, arranged in three concentric circles, with a baseline of 100 miles or so. It should be able to return snapshots 30 to 40 picture elements (pixels) wide of an Earth-size planet 10 light years away.
List of The Big Bang Theory episodes (season 2)
List of The Big Bang Theory episodes (season 1)
List of The Big Bang Theory episodes (season 5)*Study teams in Europe and the United States will take a close look at the proposal for a scaled-down, 36-telescope version called the Exo-Earth Discoverer to see if it can be adapted for the TPF design
* Building and flying 150 spacecraft in ultra-precise formation is no cheap or easy task.
*the observatory hopes to begin testing the principles of a hyper-telescope with a ground-based array called CARLINA sometime in the near future
Comets, meteoroids, and asteroids
Comets:
*chunks of dirt, rock, ice that orbit the Sun on incredibly large orbits from out beyond Pluto/Neptune
*elongated orbits
*occasionally we see them when they are close to the Sun
*the Sun's radiation vaporizes some of the comet's ices producing observable long flowing tails of and dust particles.
*When far from...