Io - The Volcanic Moon

Should NASA Send New Horizons To A Nearby Star For Its Final Mission?

“Over the next million years, the Voyagers and Pioneers will approach numerous stars, but only at relatively large separations. The closest will be Pioneer 10, encountering HIP 1177795 in ~90,000 years from 0.75 light-years away. But New Horizons, unlike the others, still has significant fuel remaining. After encountering Pluto and Arrokoth, it may yet target another object in the outer Kuiper belt. Subsequently, it will eventually enter interstellar space, but can be boosted to approach future stellar targets.”

In the 1970s, four spacecraft were launched with speeds large enough that they would eventually escape the Solar System: Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2. In the 2000s, New Horizons became the fifth spacecraft that will leave the Solar System and enter interstellar space. But unlike the other four, it still has fuel remaining and could boost itself to alter its trajectory. In the aftermath of the ESA’s Gaia mission, we now can predict where more than a billion stars in the Milky Way will be located up to a million years in the future, raising the possibility that we could alter New Horizon’s trajectory to encounter another solar system in the distant future.

Should we do it? Of course we should! Come learn about this fascinating possibility today.

Charon, moon of Pluto, observed by NASA’s New Horizons probe on this day in 2015.

Image of Saturn taken by Cassini spacecraft in October 28, 2016.

Credit: NASA/JPL 

Curiosity: Sol 3048 via NASA https://ift.tt/3vSSsDz

Jupiter and Europa

Perseverance: Amazing descent & landing video taken by the rover’s EDL cameras.

Our Amazing Solar System!

Just storm in a Canada

Jupiter Descending 

What Separates A Good Scientific Theory From A Bad One?

“It’s why an idea like dark matter is so powerful. By adding just a single new species of particle — something that’s cold, collisionless, and transparent to light and normal matter — you can explain everything from rotating galaxies to the cosmic web, the fluctuations in the microwave background, galaxy correlations, colliding galaxy clusters, and much, much more. It’s why ideas with a huge number of free parameters that must be tuned to get the right results are less satisfying and less predictively powerful. If we can model dark energy, for instance, with just one constant, why would we invent multi-field models with many parameters that are no more successful?”

You’ve often heard, when discussing competing scientific ideas, of appealing to Occam’s razor. Often paraphrased as “all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually best,” it seems to open the door for people to argue over which explanation is simplest. This should not, however, be a point of contention: the explanation that’s simplest is the one that introduces the fewest number of new, additional free parameters. And when it comes to all things being equal, the things in question ought to be the number of new phenomena the novel idea can explain, along with the number of discernible predictions as compared with the old, prevailing idea. The best scientific ideas are the ones that explain the most by adding the least, while the worst ones unnecessarily add additional parameters on top of what we observe for no good reason other than personal bias. Ideas may be a dime-a-dozen, but a good idea is hard to find.

The next time you encounter an interesting, wild idea that someone throws out there, use this criteria to evaluate it. You just might be surprised at how quickly you can tell whether an idea is good or bad!