Small and Useful

Yesterday I learnt that on the 11th of January they didn't just send the small Pandora Satellite into space, NASA also sent up two smaller cube satellites that are just 30cm across; they would literally fit into a shopping bag. 

Not only did they get the size of the space probes down, they got the transport costs down. They approached spaceX to build a reusable space rocket. SpaceX built the falcon space rockets, they go up to space, then the rocket parts land safely on docking stations to be reused again. NASA wisely approached private companies to make space vehicles so they can get the cost down. 

The pandora space probe is smaller than a person but it is capable of looking at stars when their planets transit between us and them and working out what light rays are from the planet's atmosphere and what parts are from the star. The point of pandora is to help make decisions for the James Webb space telescope because it is so busy, it is hard to decide what places to look into and what areas to neglect. If the chemicals in the planets atmosphere are interesting, they will get the very busy James Webb telescope to take a closer look. 

The two smaller cube satellites are Blackcat and sparks, they will look at black holes and also study solar flares of low mass stars. 

Pandora Box Iran

There is a lot of chaos going on in Iran right now, when a catastrophe like that happens in the world, some of the good news gets fogged out of sight. This is certainly true of the new NASA mission that just started called Pandora. 

The pandora space probe was launched last week on the falcon 9 spaceX rocket. That is the way they're heading these days, they like to contract private companies to make the space vehicles for them, they don't want to develop it themselves; I call it space privatisation. 

The pandora space probe has been fine tuned to look at the atmospheres of planets outside of our solar system to see if there are volatile gases present. Chemicals that don't persist without being renewed by an ongoing reaction. Here on earth we have oxygen in our atmosphere, life forms need to top it up all the time because it reacts with other chemicals so it won't persist in its form.  The same is true of ammonia and things like that. They don't persist, they need to be topped up by processes or life forms. It will be interesting to see what they find. 

I like the fact that a lot of the discoveries they make are open to the public. Ordinary people like myself can look at their findings for free and learn something new every day.