New Earth-like planets discovered...

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bernomatic
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#11 Re: New Earth-like planets discovered...

Post by bernomatic »

I received an e-mail from NASA on this, and of course Google has a design on their search page, besides the post on YORF. The speculation is running rampant. However, at 40 light years distance, it will be some time before someone from here actually goes there.
The value of such a discovery is more in the incentive it gives for more research and the dreams it evokes more so than in any real benefit.

It's sad to say that even those benefits will've short lived unless we get a mover and shaker like Werner von Braun.Someone who will push for a goal and then lead in its attainment.

Enough of my sour puss attitude. Let's dream.
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luke strawwalker
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#12 Re: New Earth-like planets discovered...

Post by luke strawwalker »

Yeah, the neat thing about the Trappist planetary system is, if you had a "wormhole" and could transplant yourself there "instantly" in say an Apollo with a long duration capability and maybe a hab module equipped to support you for a year or two, along with a nuclear engine for propulsion and plenty of fuel, you could theoretically just bounce from planet to planet and visit every planet in the system... they're so close together that you could fly from one to the next in a matter of days even with our present chemical or potential nuclear propulsion. If you dropped one of those Mars mission vehicles I posted about over the past several days into the Trappist system, it could literally fly from planet to planet in turn, with enough fuel that is, and probably visit the every planet in the system in a year or so, with a mapping stay in orbit for a few days or week or so at each one. They orbit so quickly (due to their close proximity) that calculating departure times and the trip time between the planets would only be a probably around a week or so, at most, since they're not but about half again as far from each other as the Earth and Moon. They pass each other so frequently you could stay as long as you liked at one planet and then pretty much leave within a couple days of whenever you decided to go, at most, in order to inject your spacecraft on a trajectory to the next planet. It would be a spacefarer's dream! So long as the oxygen, water, food, and fuel held out, you could just jaunt all over that planetary system in a single spacecraft!

Course, landing would be something else-- like landing on Earth, a capsule could do the trick, just like Apollo... taking off again-- that would require you have a rocket similar to one on Earth to climb back out of the gravity well again... BUT, you COULD land rovers or scientific instrument platforms, or flying drone planes or even drone boats onto the surfaces of those planets with no more difficulty than landing on Mars or landing a Dragon capsule here on Earth, and you could teleoperate your rover/drone/plane/boat from orbit... Land a Dragon equipped with sampling equipment and a high powered sounding rocket, and you could even theoretically do a sample return mission (if your sounding rocket can reach orbital speed). Wouldn't bring back tons of rocks or air or water samples, but it could send back small ones. Landing a fully fueled "Falcon 9" or something like it on the planet would be a huge undertaking for larger samples...

Kinda fun to think about...

But, alas, we're bacteria on a grain of sand on a California Beach, and Trappist 1's planetary system is a few grains of sand stuck together on a beach in Japan... getting from here to there is the "impossible" part...

Later! OL J R :)
My MUNIFICENCE is BOUNDLESS, Mr. Bond...
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