Searching for Earthlike Worlds

SPACE WATCH (click on pic below for animation)
NASA – Are we alone?

For centuries, human beings have pondered this question. Medieval scholars speculated that other worlds must exist and that some would harbor other forms of life. In our time, advances in science and technology have brought us to the threshold of finding an answer to this timeless question.

The recent discovery of numerous planets around stars other than the sun confirms that our solar system is not unique. Indeed, these “exoplanets” appear to be common in our galactic neighborhood.

The exoplanets we have discovered so far are giants, like Jupiter and Saturn. They are unlikely to support life as we know it. But some of these planetary systems might also contain smaller, terrestrial planets like Mars and Earth.

Over the next 15 years, NASA is embarking on a bold series of missions to find and characterize new worlds. These will be the most sensitive instruments ever built, capable of reaching beyond the bounds of our own solar system.

The Keck Interferometer combines the light of the world’s largest optical telescopes, extending our vision to new distances. Using a technique known as interferometry, the Keck will study dust clouds around stars where Earthlike planets may be forming.

NASA’s Kepler Mission, scheduled to launch in 2009, will survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to detect and characterize hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets. It will tell us whether planets like Earth are common or rare in our galaxy.

SIM PlanetQuest, to follow Kepler, will measure the distances and positions of stars with unprecedented accuracy. SIM’s precision will allow us to locate planets in the habitable zones around nearby stars.

Finally, the Terrestrial Planet Finder will build upon the legacy of all that have gone before it. With an imaging power 100 times greater than the Hubble Space Telescope, the Terrestrial Planet Finder observatories will provide the first photographs of nearby planetary systems.

We will analyze the atmospheres of these distant worlds, looking for carbon dioxide, water and ozone. The substantial presence of all three gasses would suggest that life is present.

Such a discovery would at last provide convincing evidence that we are not alone. more> http://tinyurl.com/3a2savh

related>

• NASA Survey Suggests Earth-Sized Planets Are Common, NASA http://tinyurl.com/34loxhw

GE Plans Biggest Electric-Vehicle Order in ‘Huge’ Industry Step

By Rachel Layne and Alan Ohnsman – GE, whose power-generation equipment provides a third of the world’s electricity, will order “tens of thousands” of the vehicles in about a week, Jeffrey Immelt said yesterday in a speech in London, without giving a total or identifying a manufacturer.

Expanding the world’s fleet of electric vehicles would bolster GE as it expands so-called clean-energy technology such as car chargers, solar panels and wind turbines. For every dollar of electric-vehicle sales, GE estimates it may get 10 cents in revenue. more> http://tinyurl.com/24v5naq

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• Information Infrastructure for a Smarter Planet
• Smarter Transportation, IBM http://tinyurl.com/3yayyh4

Broadband stimulus flows disproportionately to Commerce Committee members

By Sara Jerome – Over 40 percent of stimulus funds that the Commerce Department doled out for broadband went to or was shared by districts represented by House Energy and Commerce Committee members, according to an analysis by Communications Daily. The committee oversees telecom issues.

That’s despite the fact that these members only make up 14 percent of the House.

The committee members whose districts were awarded the the most funding were Reps. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) with $128 million, Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) with $128 million, George Radanovich (R-Calif.) with $128 million, Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) with $123 million and John Sarbanes (D-Md.) with $115 million, according to the report, which drew from grant descriptions posted on the NTIA website. more> http://tinyurl.com/3628k4q

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• Grants Awarded, NTIA http://tinyurl.com/28n9bqm

U.S. Broadband Plan Author Talks About His Regrets

By David Ramli – The most important thing to understand is that broadband is not important in and of itself. It is important because it is the vehicle of knowledge exchange, which turns out to be an incredibly important driver of economic and job growth and critical for a civic society.

If you think there’s a single factor that measures something, you don’t understand how what you want is a constantly improving platform for knowledge exchange.

The one that’s most wrong is the speed. Speed is the input and use is the output. We should be thinking about how we use it because the real upside is not in increasing speed, it’s in increasing the applications. more> http://tinyurl.com/2chh3ms

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• Network Industry Dynamics

To Stabilize The Economy, Fix The U.S. Dollar

By Reuven Brenner – In 1923 the 10th Annual Report of the Fed stated that “It is the belief of the Board that there is little danger that the credit created and distributed by the Federal Reserve Banks will be in excessive volume if restricted to productive uses.”

John Law’s experiments with issuing money and credit, it became apparent that using land as collateral for issuing bank notes would mistakenly lead to excess credit and inflation. Adam Smith made two corrections to Law’s insights that provided the foundation for modern central banking. more> http://tinyurl.com/3xy75nu