NASA Goes Big

NASA and space exploration in general are having a good year. We're landing on asteroids, testing rockets that can take us to Mars, and finding new worlds. NASA found a brand new planet recently in fact that is pretty large:

A year and a half after a pointing failure threatened to derail its epochal search for worlds beyond our solar system, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has bagged another planet, astronomers announced on Thursday.

The new planet is 20,000 miles in diameter, about two and a half times the size of Earth, and 12 times as massive, putting it into a category of planets called super-Earths that do not exist in our solar system. It is unlivable, circling a star slightly smaller than the Sun about 180 light-years from here in the constellation Pisces at the roasting distance of only 8.4 million miles, less than a tenth of the distance between us and our star.

While that is a pretty amazing achievement, we're not done there. NASA is starting to take a look not just towards Mars, but towards our other neighbor, Venus:

Get your grey ash plants ready, NASA is planning a cloud city project for Venus, says IFLScience today. The plan, called High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, or HAVOC, would create a floating city above the clouds of the morning star buoyed by dirigibles.

The idea is still in its conceptual stage, but it sounds pretty awesome, obviously. The idea would be to have a continuously inhabited outpost on our sister planetin order to study it, and possibly even colonize it. Venus is remarkably similar to Earth in many ways, including size and gravity. However, it also has the densest atmosphere of any planet, and surface temperatures average around 460°C (860°F). Additionally, the atmosphere is nasty stuff for humans, being 96 percent Carbon Dioxide and includes other gnarly components like hydrogen fluoride and clouds of sulfuric acid.

The plan for the floating city would bypass several of these issues, as it would be about 50 km (30 miles) above the surface. However, it would still be pretty warm up there, with temperatures around 75°C (167°F). The airships would be held aloft by helium gas, and would be solar-powered. Sadly, no adjustable stilts underneath nor outdoor treadmills are planned.

A few short years ago, NASA was being read it's last rights by many. President Bush was mocked for talking about going to Mars. I'd like to introduce you all to the reborn NASA. It's doing great things for human kind.