Taking a Closer Look at Alpha Centauri's Exoplanets

discovery.com ^ | Elizabeth Howell

[BenLurkin]

While we think of stars as being very distant, there is one star system that is relatively close - Alpha Centauri, just 4.3 light-years away. In 2012, astronomers discovered a planet in that system; it orbited way too close to its parent star to be considered habitable, but it got a lot of attention because the exoplanet was so close to Earth.

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The mission (which is not funded right now) is called Alpha Centauri Exoplanet Satellite, or ACESat, and it would work differently than the famed Kepler telescope that has found more than 1,000 confirmed planets. Kepler looks for planets passing across the face of a star. ACESat would look for planets that are orbiting nearby.

The telescope his group proposes would be a first. It would include a coronograph (a device that blocks out direct light from the star) that makes it easier to spot a star than any one flown before. According to Bendek, it will let researchers see a tiny planet next to a star that is 10 billion times brighter.

Even if the researchers don’t catch a planet during the two-year mission, they could still see signs of a debris disk. But if they do see planets, the lengthy observing time could help them characterize aspects such as the planets’ size, mass and orbits.

Researchers point to the small size of the telescope mirror (as small as 25 centimeters) and its according relatively low cost to launch due to the small weight (less than $175 million) as reasons to give the design a shot. Its primary mission is very narrow, just looking at one star system, but in a proposed one-year extension the telescope would slew to several other bright, relatively nearby stars to look for more planets.

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"In October 1997, 32 years into the future from the perspective of viewers in 1965, the United States is about to launch one of history's great adventures: man's colonization of deep space. The Jupiter 2, a futuristic saucer-shaped spaceship, stands on its launch pad undergoing final preparations.

Its mission is to take a single family on a five-and-a-half-year journey to a planet orbiting the nearby star Alpha Centauri

The pilot episode had referred to the planet itself as Alpha Centauri, which space probes reveal possesses ideal conditions for human life.

The Robinson family, allegedly selected from among two million volunteers for this mission, consisted of Professor John Robinson, played by Guy Williams, his wife, Maureen, played by June Lockhart, their children, Judy (Marta Kristen), Penny (Angela Cartwright), and Will (Billy Mumy). They are accompanied by their pilot, U.S. Space Corps Major Donald West (Mark Goddard), who is trained to fly the ship when the time comes for the eventual landing.

Initially the Robinsons and West will be in freezing tubes for the voyage with the tubes set to open when the spacecraft approached its destination. Unless there was a problem with the ship"s navigation or guidance system during the voyage, West was only to take the controls during the final approach to and landing on the destination planet while the Robinsons were to strap themselves into contour couches on the lower deck for the landing.

Other nations are racing to colonize space, and they would stop at nothing, not even sabotage, to thwart the United States effort. It turns out that Dr. Zachary Smith (Jonathan Harris), Alpha Control's doctor, and later supposedly a psychologist and environmental control expert, is moonlighting as a foreign secret agent for one of those competing nations. After killing a guard who catches him onboard after hours, Smith reprograms the Jupiter 2"s B-9 environmental control robot, voiced by Dick Tufeld, to destroy critical systems on the spaceship eight hours after launch.

Smith, however, unintentionally traps himself aboard at launch and his extra weight throws the Jupiter 2 off course, causing it to encounter a meteor storm. This, plus the robot"s Smith-programmed rampage causing the ship to prematurely engage its hyperdrive, causes the expedition to become hopelessly lost in the infinite depths of outer space."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Space#Plot

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[BenLurkin]

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[Squawk 8888]

Pinging the Professor.