(via For Plants On Alien Worlds, It Isn't Easy Being Green - Space - 11 April 2007 - New Scientist)

This is The Smallest Sized EXOPLANET Discovered by NASA's TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVEY SATELLITE so far!

NASA's TESS mission finds its smallest planet yet

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet, called L 98-59b, marks the tiniest discovered by TESS to date.

Two other worlds orbit the same star. While all three planets’ sizes are known, further study with other telescopes will be needed to determine if they have atmospheres and, if so, which gases are present. The L 98-59 worlds nearly double the number of small exoplanets – that is, planets beyond our solar system – that have the best potential for this kind of follow-up.

“The discovery is a great engineering and scientific accomplishment for TESS,” said Veselin Kostov, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. “For atmospheric studies of small planets, you need short orbits around bright stars, but such planets are difficult to detect. This system has the potential for fascinating future studies.”

A paper on the findings, led by Kostov, was published in the June 27 issue of The Astronomical Journal.

Keep reading

Spectroscopic Observations of The Atmospheres and possibly even The Surfaces of Extrasolar Planets and Extrasolar Satellites.

ESA’s next science mission to focus on nature of exoplanets

The nature of planets orbiting stars in other systems will be the focus for ESA’s fourth medium-class science mission, to be launched in mid 2028.

Ariel, the Atmospheric Remote‐sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large‐survey mission, was selected by ESA today as part of its Cosmic Vision plan.

The mission addresses one of the key themes of Cosmic Vision: What are the conditions for planet formation and the emergence of life?

Thousands of exoplanets have already been discovered with a huge range of masses, sizes and orbits, but there is no apparent pattern linking these characteristics to the nature of the parent star. In particular, there is a gap in our knowledge of how the planet’s chemistry is linked to the environment where it formed, or whether the type of host star drives the physics and chemistry of the planet’s evolution.

Ariel will address fundamental questions on what exoplanets are made of and how planetary systems form and evolve by investigating the atmospheres of hundreds of planets orbiting different types of stars, enabling the diversity of properties of both individual planets as well as within populations to be assessed.

Observations of these worlds will give insights into the early stages of planetary and atmospheric formation, and their subsequent evolution, in turn contributing to put our own Solar System in context.

“Ariel is a logical next step in exoplanet science, allowing us to progress on key science questions regarding their formation and evolution, while also helping us to understand Earth’s place in the Universe,” says Günther Hasinger, ESA Director of Science.

“Ariel will allow European scientists to maintain competitiveness in this dynamic field. It will build on the experiences and knowledge gained from previous exoplanet missions.”

The mission will focus on warm and hot planets, ranging from super-Earths to gas giants orbiting close to their parent stars, taking advantage of their well-mixed atmospheres to decipher their bulk composition.

Ariel will measure the chemical fingerprints of the atmospheres as the planet crosses in front of its host star, observing the amount of dimming at a precision level of 10–100 parts per million relative to the star.

As well as detecting signs of well-known ingredients such as water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane, it will also be able to measure more exotic metallic compounds, putting the planet in context of the chemical environment of the host star.

For a select number of planets, Ariel will also perform a deep survey of their cloud systems and study seasonal and daily atmospheric variations.

Ariel’s metre-class telescope will operate at visible and infrared wavelengths. It will be launched on ESA’s new Ariane 6 rocket from Europe’s spaceport in Kourou in mid 2028. It will operate from an orbit around the second Lagrange point, L2, 1.5 million kilometres directly ‘behind’ Earth as viewed from the Sun, on an initial four-year mission.

Following its selection by ESA’s Science Programme Committee, the mission will continue into another round of detailed mission study to define the satellite’s design. This would lead to the ‘adoption’ of the mission – presently planned for 2020 – following which an industrial contractor will be selected to build it.

Ariel was chosen from three candidates, competing against the space plasma physics mission Thor (Turbulence Heating ObserveR) and the high-energy astrophysics mission Xipe (X-ray Imaging Polarimetry Explorer).

Solar Orbiter, Euclid and Plato have already been selected as medium-class missions.

Climate Changes can possibly harm Human Health.

Climate Change Harms Human Health

Climate change is already making people sicker, according to a deep-dive written by Renee Cho for Columbia University's Earth Institute.

Excerpt:

Climate change is already making people sicker, according to a deep-dive written by Renee Cho for Columbia University’s Earth Institute on Monday.

Cho pointed to the example of doctors in Florida who are noticing that their patients run through prescriptions faster as conditions like asthma worsen due to heat waves.

Indeed, Florida doctors have observed enough instances of climate-related health issues that they’ve banded together to form Florida Clinicians for Climate Action, The Miami Herald reported in February.

“Being in Florida especially, you can’t not realize what’s happening to our climate. I see it right now on a day-to-day basis,” Dr. Cheryl Holder, president of the Florida State Medical Association, told The Herald.

Florida doctors have also noticed that heat waves coincide with more hospital visits due to heart failure, Florida Institute for Health Innovation head Roderick King told The Herald. He hopes to fund a study investigating the link.

In the Earth Institute article, Cho also mentioned the spread of diseases like Lyme disease, which have sickened people in Pennsylvania for the first time.

Cho’s analysis comes a week after an article published in Undark examining the spread of Lyme disease into Canada, where there were more than six times the number of Lyme disease cases reported in 2016 compared to 2009.

Flying Cars are Finally Here!

The Age of Flying_Cars is finally ready for Takeoff. https://phys.org/news/2018-03-cars-eye-takeoff-geneva-motor.html

I sure can’t wait until Fully Autonomous (Self_Driving) Cars come to be Commonplace Vehicles someday!  

(via Autonomous Technology: Robo-Cars - DBusiness magazine)

The Search for Evidence of Space_Mining Operations in Other Solar_Systems.

Trees on Extrasolar Habitable Worlds could be Black, Purple or Red as well as Green. 

How to write Computer Code.

http://larouchepac.com/jvideo/24562?size=640x360

Nuclear Fusion Propulsion for Interplanetary Travel.  

According to a recent study, adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) show an atypical amount of increased functional connectivity in brain networks that are crucial for social recognition. A group of researchers from San Diego State University compared the brain networks of 25 individuals...