Giant Freakin Robot

As our advancing technology allows us to look deeper and deeper into space, and to do so with ever better resolution and detail, we continue to find other solar systems that contain planets. Scientists believe the planets we’ve found so far are a tiny percentage of how many are actually out there, so the optimistic amongst us believe that there simply must be alien life out there somewhere. But if there is, how many other civilizations might there be?

A very cool new interactive infographic has been posted by the BBC, which allows us to calculate several different estimates of how many alien civilizations might exist, both within our galaxy and within the universe. It begins with the Drake Equation, created in 1961 by astronomer Frank Drake to estimate how many “detectable civilizations” could exist in our galaxy. The Drake Equation’s estimates are the first option to use on the infographic, which walks you through each step of the math before arriving at a total: an estimated 18,750,00 communicating civilizations (broadcasting signals that we could theoretically detect) within the Milky Way, and a staggering 2,812,500,000 bn within the entire universe.

The sad truth we must face is that most of us will probably never get to set foot on the moon. You never know, it might surprise me and the exploration of space may begin to advance faster than it has in decades, but even then, for most of us, it’s just a fond daydream. But a daydream can still be something special, especially when aided by this frankly gorgeous video that takes us on a flyby tour of the surface of the moon.

Created in 1958, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) has been a huge part of robotic missions outside of Earth’s orbit. The collection of antennas and communication facilities from Spain, Australia, and the US has the important responsibility of tracking robotic spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit and has even been used to track important craft closer to home, like the Apollo missions. As important as the DSN is, though, it’s starting to show its age as space traffic seems to be growing rapidly. Now an engineer has put forth an idea that might take the load off of the current DSN while expanding its capacity. And the best part is, it provides a really good reason for going back to the moon.

In a presentation to the AIAA Space Conference last week, Ouliang Chang, from USC, presented a plan to bring the DSN into the modern age, not by upgrading the existing network, but by installing a supercomputer on the moon. According to New Scientist, Chang believes that by putting a supercomputer and some accompanying dishes in a crater near the poles of the moon’s far side, it would be able to tap into lunar ice for cooling. The lunar supercomputer would not only drastically reduce traffic on the current DSN, but it could also provide computational power for the first lunar base and even be used in conjunction with the current network to perform long-baseline interferometry, and combine multiple radio telescopes into one large telescope. With such a complicated and important piece of machinery in place on the surface of the moon, it seems like a no-brainer that a lunar base would soon follow in order to at least maintain and upgrade the equipment if for no other reason.

Even though NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has already departed Vesta and is on its way to its next target, there is still a lot of science to be done with the pictures it took during its year-long survey of the asteroid. NASA is now seeking the help of citizen scientists to map the craters on Vesta’s surface in an effort to speed up the study. It’s called Asteroid Mappers, and not only does it sound like an old Atari game, but it’s your first chance to contribute to the Dawn mission.

Many online citizen science projects use older NASA data to explore and study, but what makes Asteroid Mappers so special is that it gives you the chance to go through fairly recent and unreleased pics of the Dawn mission. This means that you could conceivably be the first person outside of NASA to see some of these pictures if you choose to join in Dawn’s mission to explore the asteroid belt. According to Universe Today, the project’s purpose is to identify craters, boulders, and other features on the asteroid’s surface. By helping to map these new pics of Vesta you will be playing an active role in Dawn’s mission and helping the mission scientists better understand its surface features.