On Valentine’s Day 1990, from a dark and frozen spot on the outer edges of our solar system, the spacecraft Voyager 1 turned around to take one last photo of the world it left behind.
Viewed from a distance of almost 4 billion miles, Earth was little more than a pixel, a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” in the words of Carl Sagan. Although the space program has produced countless gorgeous photographs of our planet — exquisite images of deep blue oceans and swirling clouds, of the incandescent spider web that is human civilization at night — nothing else has captured so starkly the profound loneliness of this precious, pale blue dot we call home.
Now scientists want to find a companion for that dot.
On Tuesday, a consortium of private research institutions launched a crowdfunding campaign to help build a new space telescope capable of searching for and photographing planets in the star system Alpha Centauri — which holds the closest stars to our sun. They call the mission “Project Blue.”
“We are seeking to take another pale blue-dot image,” said Jon Morse, former director of NASA’s astrophysics division and current chief executive of the BoldlyGo Institute, a research organization that is co-leading Project Blue. “This is the holy grail of exoplanet research.”
Before Dec. 20, Morse and his partner Brett Marty, executive director of the nonprofit Mission Centaur, aim to raise $1 million via
Kickstarter — enough seed funding to get their project going. The rest of their budget will likely come from foundations and wealthy donors. The telescope, which they hope to launch into low Earth orbit in 2019, would be about the size of a dishwasher; its half-meter main mirror could fit on a coffee table.
Kickstarter Link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/projectblue/project-blue-a-space-telescope-to-photograph-anoth?token=359cb0d7Read More:
http://www.isn-news.net/2016/11/scientists-are-building-telescope-to.html
