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what is Cosmic neighborhood #tech581

Earth’s cosmic neighborhood encompasses eight planets, more than 150 moons, and countless dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets. With such fascinating places to explore, who wouldn’t be curious about what’s around the next corner? NASA’s mission is to explore what’s beyond our planet. Michelle Thaller, a scientist and communicator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says this includes finding out whether we have any “neighbors.” If so, finding them will not be easy.



“One of the basic, major scientific priorities of NASA is the search for life elsewhere,” she says.

Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe. Satisfying natural curiosity is one motivation for this search, but there are practical reasons too, even if we don’t find life.


“The better we understand our larger environment in the solar system, the better we will understand our planet, our own biology,” says Thaller. “The Earth is constantly changing and the changes that are occurring on other planets and in other ecosystems will help us better understand what changes we can expect.”

Planetary bodies in the solar system offer an important historical record with clues as to how Earth was formed. They might also provide examples of how life evolved billions of years ago. But in our solar system, moons – not other planets – are most likely to have or have had the conditions for supporting life (See Distant Encounters). The best candidates are Titan and Enceladus, two of Saturn’s moons, and Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.

A coronal mass ejection (CME) erupted from just around the edge of the Sun in May of 2013, in a gigantic rolling wave. CMEs can shoot over a billion tons of particles into space at over a million miles per hour. NASA needs to equip deep spacecraft to handle such events. (Image Credit: NASA Goddard)

Getting to these distant moons will take a lot longer and require more sophisticated technology than it takes to get to our Moon. The spacecraft and robotic landers must survive a longer trip through the hostile environment of space, and advances are needed to help them send back all the information they gather when they get there (See Dragon Flying).


The Sun’s radiation contains hazards from which we on Earth are largely shielded by the atmosphere and the planet’s magnetic field. “The corona – the outer area of the Sun that you see during an eclipse – is solar material that actually gets accelerated as it moves away from the Sun,” explains Nicola Fox. “It affects all of the planets.”


As director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, Fox is an expert on space weather. She and other heliophysicists study the physical connections between the Sun and the environment of the solar system. Understanding solar activity will make predicting some aspects of space weather a bit easier.


More information about the variations in solar activity will make it possible to design spacecraft and scientific instruments that will withstand the journey. The solar wind, a continuous flow of low-energy-charged particles from the Sun, is just one type of solar radiation engineers must contend with.


NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is flying closer to the Sun than any other craft, and data from its solar encounters are already improving our understanding of space conditions, according to Fox........

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