Lockheed Martin’s Mars Base Camp would stage Mars surface missions

Lockheed Martin shared more information about its Mars Base Camp (MBC) architecture and operation plans at this year’s International Astronautical Congress, as reported by Space.

The concept images shared by Lockheed reveal a platform from which large interplanetary ships, as well as surface landers which can ferry passengers back and forth from the station.

The Mars Base Camp plan isn’t new, but we are learning more about it, including how it would act a staging ground for longer missions to Mars’ surface, but first would focus primarily on short trips for small crews, before graduating to multi-week missions with larger, four-person crews. A reusable lanyard called the Mars Ascent/Descent Vehicle (MADV) would bring cargo and personnel to and from the MBC to the red planet.

Lockheed Martin also described a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellant system which would source fuel from water sources within reach, including frozen ice found on asteroids, after exhausting an initial supply brought from Earth. The water would be brought to the station using another purpose-built craft, called a “Water Delivery Vehicle” (WDV), which would be run by a separate company. Lockheed definitely sticks to the basics when it comes to its naming practices

Lockheed would start with the design used for NASA’s Orion deep space crew capsule when creating the MADV’s interior space, and getting to and from the MBC would also make use of the Space Launch System currently being developed by NASA to propel astronauts into space for further out exploration. It would also work with NASA’s planned Deep Space Gateway, which is designed to be a station orbiting the moon, and which could act as a waypoint en route to Mars.

Astronauts and researchers working from the MBC itself could also have direct access to Mars via rovers and other vehicles and sensors on the planet’s surface, increasing their ability to study and cutting down on work time and degraded data.

Elon Musk is also set to reveal additional details about SpaceX’s plan to get to and eventually colonize Mars and make humans an interplanetary species, so it’ll be interesting to see how the two approaches from either company compare. We’ll have updates on the SpaceX announcements available on TechCrunch later this evening.

What Would a Martian Colony Look Like?

If and when human beings settle on Mars, a number of things need to be addressed beforehand; not the least of which are food, water, housing, protection and transportation.

There is no shortage of people today who have an opinion on whether or not humans should colonize Mars. On the pro side, there are those who think that a Martian settlement will serve as a "backup location" for humanity in case some cataclysmic event happens here on Earth.

On the con side, there are those who feel that focusing on Mars will steal focus away from efforts to save planet Earth. There are also those think the natural hazards make it a bad idea, while people on the flip side think it is these very things that make it an exciting challenge.

But when you look past the arguments for and against colonization, there is the inevitable question of if we can settle on Mars and what that settlement would look like. The question goes beyond mere aesthetics and embraces everything from architecture and construction to food, transportation, and general health.

So what exactly would a colony on Mars look like and how would it operate?Making a Go of Life on Mars:

To be fair, there is no shortage of ideas for how human beings might establish a colony on the Red Planet. They are also quite detailed, ranging from different kinds of structures that could be built, how they would be built, what they would be built from, and how they would be protected from the elements.

Then again, they would have to be in order to address the many challenges that living on Mars would present. These include (but are not necessarily limited to):

• Extreme Distance from Earth
• Unbreathable Atmosphere
• Extreme Temperatures
• Increased Exposure to Radiation
• Planet-Wide Dust Storms

Taking all of this into account, it becomes clear that any efforts to build a civilization on Mars will have to take into account a lot of specific needs. And meeting these will necessitate that colonists rely pretty heavily on some pretty advanced technology.

Habitats will need to be sealed and pressurized, heavily-insulated and heated, shielded against solar and cosmic radiation, self-sufficient in terms of water, power and other essentials, and built (as much as possible) using local resources - aka. In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU).

Getting to Mars:

Using current methods, the journey to Mars is long and potentially dangerous and can take place only when Earth and Mars are at the closest point in their orbit to each other. This is what is known as a "Mars Opposition", were Mars and the Sun are on directly opposite sides of Earth. These occur every 26 months, and every 15 or 17 years, an opposition will coincide with Mars being at the closest point in its orbit with the Sun (aka. perihelion).

On average, Mars and Earth orbit at an average distance of 225 million km (140 million mi). But during an Opposition, the distance between Earth and Mars can drop to as little as 55 million km (34 million mi). However, since it is not exactly a direct flight, the travel time involved is not a simple matter of calculating the distance divided by average velocityThis is because both Earth and Mars are orbiting around the Sun, which means you can’t point a rocket directly at Mars, launch, and expect to hit it. Instead, spacecraft launched from Earth need to account for the moving nature of its target be pointed at where Mars is going to be, a method known as ballistic capture.

Another factor to consider is fuel. Again, if you had an unlimited amount of fuel, you’d point your spacecraft at Mars, fire your rockets to the halfway point of the journey, then turn around and decelerate for the last half of the journey. You could cut your travel time down to a fraction of the current rate – but you would need an impossible amount of fuel

Because of this, a mission to Mars can take between 150 and 300 days (five to ten months) to reach the Red Planet. This all depends on the speed of the launch, the alignment of Earth and Mars, and whether or not the spacecraft will have the benefit of slingshotting around a large body to pick up a boost in velocity (aka. a gravity-assist).

Regardless, crewed missions invariably require spacecraft that are larger and heavier than robotic spacecraft. This is necessary since human beings require amenities while in space, not to mention the amount of supplies and equipment they'll need to carry out a mission

Martian Housing:

The challenges posed by long distance and natural hazards on Mars has led to some creative suggestions of how to build habitats that will shield against the environment and can be built in-situ. Many of these ideas have been proposed as part of an incentive challenge sponsored by NASA and other organizations. Some examples include

The MakerBot Mars Base Challenge:

This joint competition, which ran from May 30th to July 12th, 2014, was hosted by NASA JPL and MakerBot Thingiverse - a Brooklyn-based 3-D printing company. For the sake of the competition, entrants were given access to MakerBot 3-D printers and tasked with designing bases that were utilitarian, capable of withstanding the elements and providing all the amenities of home.

Of the over 200 ideas that were submitted to the competition, two were selected as the contest winners. These included the Mars Pyramid, a design that was inspired by the Pyramid of Giza. This particular structure was designed to withstand the worst of the elements while also being configured for science and engineering activities and experiments.

The sides of the pyramid would be composed of solar panels to collect energy and provide the inhabitants with vistas to combat feelings of isolation. A nuclear generator would provide backup power, water would be stored near the main power center and heated as needed, and food would be grown with a sustainable aquaponics system at the top of the pyramid.

The second winner was the MarsAcropolis, a futuristic design that incorporated carbon fiber, stainless steel, aluminum, and titanium into the main structure while a combination of concrete, steel, and Martian soil formed the outer protective wall. The main structure would consist of a foundation and three levels that accommodated different functions and facilities.On the ground level, decompression chambers would protect against a loss of air pressure while a series of greenhouses would produce food and help filter the air and produce oxygen. Level one would house the water purifier while level two is where the living quarters, labs, and a landing dock would be placed.

Meanwhile, level three would act as the nerve center, with flight operators and observation posts and the colony's water reservoir. This reservoir would be situated at the very top of the settlement where it could collect atmospheric water, condense it for use by the inhabitants, and use the sun's energy to warm it.

Journey to Mars Challenge:

Announced in May 2015, this NASA-sponsored incentive competition sought to inspire creative ideas from the public that would allow for continuous habitation on Mars. According to the guidelines, NASA was looking for ideas that would address issues of "shelter, food, water, breathable air, communication, exercise, social interactions, and medicine."

In addition, all of the submissions needed to focus on resource efficiency, feasibility, comprehensiveness, and scalability in order to facilitate missions that are longer in duration and greater in distance from Earth, eventually approaching “Earth independence”. A total prize purse of $15,000 was awarded to the three concepts that best met all of these criteria. By October 2015, the winners of the competition were announced.

They included the Mars Igloo: An ISRU Habitat, which was submitted by aerospace engineer Arthur Ruff of Toronto; the Starch from the Micro-Algae Chlorella as the Main Food Source for a Self-Sustaining Martian Colony, submitted by Keck Graduate Institute alumnist Pierre Blosse from Iowa; and the Mars Settlement Concepts, submitted by chemical engineer Aaron Aliaga and geophysicist Maleen Kidiwela of California and Texas (respectively).

The 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge:

This competition was a joint venture between NASA's Centennial Challenges, the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (aka. America Makes) and Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. It was divided into three phases, each of which had their own prize purse that would be divided among the three winning teams.

In Phase I, the Design Competition, teams were required to submit architectural renderings. This phase was completed in 2015 and a prize purse of $50,000 was rewarded. The winning entries for this phase included the Mars Ice House by Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch) and Clouds Architecture Office (Clouds AO).

The concept was inspired by recent missions that have shown just how prevalent water ice is in our Solar System, especially on Mars. This particular design relies on the abundance of water and the perennially cold temperatures in Mars’ northern latitudes to create a habitation for explorers

The construction would be handled by autonomous robots that would harvest ice on site and combine it with water, fiber and aerogel, which would then be printed as layered rings. This method and choice of building materials would provide insulation, radiation shielding, and a view of the surrounding environment to potential Martian settlers.

Regolith Additive Manufacturing (RAM) by Team Gamma, which also won the People's Choice Award. This concept calls for the use of three inflatable dodecahedral modules to form the basic shape of the habitat while a series of semi-autonomous robots then use microwaves to melt and distribute regolith (aka. "sintering") over these to form the habitat's protective outer layer.

Third place went to the Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) concept, which was submitted by Team LavaHive. Their design called for the use of repurposed spacecraft components and a technique known as "lava-casting" to create the connecting corridors and sub-habitats around a main inflatable sectionIn Phase II, the Structural Member Competition, focused on material technologies, requiring teams to create structural components. It was completed in August of 2017 with a prize of purse of $1.1 million.

This phase was divided into three levels, where teams were tasked with printing samples of their structure, subjecting them to compression and bending tests, and then printing scale models of their concepts.

In Phase III, the On-Site Habitat Competition was also divided into levels, where each team was subjected to a series of tests designed to measure their ability to autonomously construct a habitat. This phase culminated in a head-to-head habitat print in April 2019, with a $2 million prize purse awarded.

Throughout this phase, several teams stood out for their creative conceptswhich merged ISRU and unique architectural designs to fashion highly-functional habitats out of the Martian environment. But in the end, the top prizes went to team AI. SpaceFactory of New York for their MARSHA habitat.

According to the team, their cone-shaped design is not only the ideal pressure environment but also maximizes the amount of usable space while taking up less surface space. It also allows for a structure that is vertically-divided based on different types of activity and is well-suited to 3-D printing thanks to its bottom-up designThe team’s also designed their habitat as a flanged shell that moves on sliding bearings at its foundation, the purpose of which was to deal with temperature changes on Mars (which are significant).

The structure is also a double shell, consisting of an inner and outer layer that are completely separate, which optimizes airflow and allows for light to filter in from above to the entire habitat.

Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (aka. Hi-SEAS):

Using an analog for a habitat on Mars, located on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii, this NASA-funded program conducts research missions designed to simulate crewed missions to Mars. At an elevation of 2,500 meters (8,200 feet) above sea level, the analog site is situated in a dry, rocky environment that is very cold and subject to very little precipitation.

Once there, crews live in a habitat where they carry out tasks that would be similar to a Mars mission, which includes research, missions to the surface (in spacesuits), and being as self-sufficient as possible. The habitat itself is central to the simulated mission, consisting of a dome that is 11 m (36 ft) in diameter and has a living area of about 93 m² (1000 ft²).

The dome itself is airtight and has a second level that is loftlike, providing a high-ceiling to combat feelings of claustrophobia. The six people in a crew sleep in pie-slice-shaped staterooms that contain a mattress, a desk, and a stool.

Composting toilets turn their feces into a potential source of fertilizer for the next mission, an exercise station provides for regular workouts, and communications conducted via email with a simulate the time lag.

Other ideas include the Mars Ice Home, an idea put forth by NASA Langley Research Center in conjunction with SEArch and Clouds AO. After winning the Mars Centennial Challenge, NASA partnered with these architecture and design firms to help expand on their prize-winning proposal.

The updated concept relies on an inflatable dome and detachable decompression chamber, which are lightweight and can be transported and deployed with simple robotics. The dome is then filled with locally-harvested water to form the protective main structure.

The Ice Home also doubles as a storage tank that can be refilled for the next crew. It can also be potentially converted to rocket fuel at the end of the mission if needed.

Population:

One of the more difficult questions to answer about Martian settlement has to do with the number of people involved. In short, what is the maximum number of people that could be sustained in a single colony? And if these people were effectively cut off from Earth, how many would there need to be to keep a self-sustaining population going?

In this case, we are indebted to a series of studies conducted by Dr. Frederic Marin of the Astronomical Observatory of Strasbourg. Using custom-made numerical code software (known as HERITAGE), Marin and his colleagues managed to ascertain how large a multi-generational spaceship crew would need to be.

What they determined was that a minimum of 98 people would be needed in order to sustain a healthy population where the risks of genetic disorders and other negative effects associated with inter-marrying would be minimized. At the same time, they tackled the question of how much land would be needed to sustain them.

Given that dried food stocks would not be a viable option since they would deteriorate and decay during the centuries that the ship was in transit, the ship and crew would have to be equipped to grow their own food.

Here, they found that for a maximum population of 500 people, at least 0.45 km² (0.17 mi²) of artificial land would be needed. From this amount of land, the crew would be able to grow all the necessary food using a combination of aeroponics and conventional farming.

These calculations can be applied to a Martian settlement very easily since most of the same considerations apply. On Mars, much as with a spacecraft, the issue is how to ensure sustainability and self-sufficiency over long periods of time.

Knowing how many people can be supported using a certain amount of land is also invaluable since it allows planners to place constraints on how large a settlement can (or needs) to be.

Transportation:

The issue of transportation is another big one and applies to both getting to Mars (spacecraft) and getting around once you are there (infrastructure). In the case of the former, there are a few neat ideas that have been floated, plus some really interesting concepts that are being developed.

On the public side of things, NASA is developing a new breed of heavy-launch rockets and spacecraft for the sake of it's proposed "Journey to Mars". The first step in that is the development of the Space Launch System (SLS), which will launch astronauts to cislunar space (around the Moon) in the coming years.

Once there, they will rendezvous with an orbiting station known as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway (LOP-G). Attached to this station will be the Deep Space Transport (DST), a vessel that relies on Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) to make the months-long journey to Mars when it is at opposition.

Once the DST reaches Mars orbit, it will rendezvous with the Mars Base Camp, another space station that will provide access to the surface via a reusable lander (the Mars Lander). Once crewed missions to Mars have been completed, this transportation infrastructure could be retooled for civilian use.Provided people have a way of getting to cislunar space, the DST could ferry people from the Earth-Moon system to Mars every two years, allowing for a gradual buildup. That's where private industry comes could into play.

For instance, crews could be transported to cislunar space using any number of private launch providers. A good example is the New Glenn rocket, a heavy-launch vehicle under development by private aerospace company Blue Origin.

As indicated by CEO Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), this rocket will allow for the commercialization and settlement of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). But with its heavy-lift capabilities, it could also send people on the first leg of their journey to Mars.

In a different vein, SpaceX and its founder Elon Musk have been pursuing the development of a super-heavy rocket and spacecraft known as the Super Heavy and Starship. Once complete, this system will allow for direct missions to Mars, which Musk has indicated will culminate in the creation of a Martian settlement (Mars Base Alpha).

As for transportation on the Red Planet, there are numerous possibilities, ranging from rovers to mass transit. In the case of the latter, a possible solution was suggested by Elon Musk in 2016 during the first Hyperloop Pod Competition.

It was at this time that Musk expressed how this concept for a "fifth form of transportation" would work even better on Mars than on Earth. Ordinarily, the Hyperloop would depend on low-pressure tubing to allow it to reach the very speeds of up to 1,200 km/hour (760 mph).

But on Mars, where the air pressure is naturally less than 1% of what it is on Earth, a high-speed train like the Hyperloop would not need any low-pressure tubes at all. Using magnetic levitation tracks that transport people to and from different settlements in very little time could criss-cross the planet

Radiation Shielding:

Of course, any habitat or settlement on Mars has to take into account the very real threat posed by radiation. Due to its thin atmosphere and lack of a protective magnetosphere, the surface of Mars is exposed to considerably more radiation than Earth is. Over long periods, this increased exposure could result in health risks among settlers.

On Earth, human beings in developed nations are exposed to an average of 0.62 rads (6.2 mSv) per year. Because Mars has a very thin atmosphere and no protective magnetosphere, its surface receives about 24.45 rads (244.5 mSV) per year - more when a solar event occurs. As such, any settlement on the Red Planet will either need to be hardened against radiation or have active shielding in place.

A few concepts for how to do this have been suggested over the years. For the most part, these have taken the form of either building settlements underground or constructing shelters with thick walls fashioned from local regolith (i.e. 3D-printed, "sintered" shells).

Beyond that, the ideas get a little more fanciful and a lot more technologically advanced. For example, at the 2018 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SPACE and Astronautics Forum and Exposition, civil engineer Marco Peroni proposed a design for a modular Martian base (and spacecraft that would transport it to Mars) that would provide artificial magnetic shielding.

The settlement would consist of hexagonal modules arranged in a spherical configuration under a toroid-shaped apparatus. This apparatus would be made of high-voltage electric cables that generate an external magnetic field of 4/5 Tesla to shield the modules from cosmic and solar radiation.

Peroni's plan also called for a vessel with sphere-shaped core measuring about 300 meters (984 ft) in diameter - known as the "traveling sphere" - which would transport the settlement to Mars. The hexagonal base modules would be arranged around this sphere, or alternately housed within a cylindrical core.

This spaceship would transport the modules to Mars and would be protected by the same type of artificial magnetic shield used to protect the colony. During the journey, the spaceship would provide artificial gravity by rotating around its central axis at a rate of 1.5 rpm, creating a force of gravity of about 0.8 g (thus preventing the degenerative effects of exposure to microgravity).

Even more radical is the idea for an inflatable artificial magnetic shield that would be placed at Mars' L1 Lagrange Point. This location would ensure that the giant magnetic shield would remain in a stable orbit between Mars and the Sun, providing it with artificial magnetic shielding against solar wind and radiation.

The concept was presented at the “Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop“, in 2017 by Jim Green - the Director of NASA's Planetary Science Division - as part of a talk titled "A Future Mars Environment for Science and Exploration".

As Green indicated, with the right kind of advances, a shield capable of generating a magnetic field of 1 or 2 Tesla (or 10,000 to 20,000 Gauss) could be deployed to shield Mars, thickening its atmosphere, raising average temperatures on the surface, and making it safer for future crewed missions.

Dust Storms:

Dust storms are a relatively common occurrence on Mars and take place when the southern hemisphere experiences summer, which coincides with the planet being closer to the Sun in its elliptical orbit. Since the southern polar region is pointed towards the Sun during the Martian summer, carbon dioxide frozen in the polar cap evaporates.

This has the effect of thickening the atmosphere and increasing the air pressure, which enhances the process by helping suspend dust particles in the air. In some cases, the dust clouds can reach up to 100 km (62 mi) in elevation.

Due to increases in temperature, dust particles are lifted higher into the atmosphere, which leads to more wind. The resulting wind kicks up yet more dust, creating a feedback loop that can lead to a planet-wide dust storm when conditions are just right.

These take place every 6 to 8 years (roughly three to four Martian years) and can reach speeds of over 106 km/h (66 mph). When such duststorms hit, they can reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the surface significantly, which can play havoc with solar panels

This is the reason why the Opportunityrover ceased being operational in the summer of 2018. However, the Curiosityrover managed to ride this storm out, owing to the fact that it is powered by a Multi-Mission RadioisotopeThermoelectric Generator (MMRTG)In this respect, any future settlements on Mars should have a backup power option. In the event that dust storms become too prolonged or severe, it would be handy to have nuclear reactors that can service a settlement's power needs until dust storms clear.

Food Production:

Another big issue of living on Mars is the challenge of producing enough food to sustain a colony of humans. Given the distance between Earth and Mars and the fact that supply missions would only be able to arrive once about every two years, there is a strong need for self-sufficiency when it comes to things like water, fuel, and crops.

To date, multiple experiments have been conducted to see if food can grow in Martian soil. In the early 2000s, experiments were conducted by researchers from the University of Florida and NASA's Office of Biological and Physical research. This consisted of seeing how plants would grow when subjected to Martian pressure conditions

Another experiment involved using Earth bacteria to enrich Martian soil - specifically, cyanobacteria Chroococcidiopsis. This bacteria is known to survive in extremely cold and dry conditions on Earth, and could help convert the Martian regolith into soil by creating an organic element.

In 2016, NASA teamed up with the Lima-based International Potato Center to test if potatoes could be cultivated using Martian soil analogs, which were created using Peruvian soil. This experiment was conducted for three reasons: on the one hand, the arid conditions in the region served as a good facsimile for Mars.

In parts of the Andes, precipitation is similarly rare and the soil is extremely dry - just like on Mars. In spite of that, the Andean people have been cultivating potatoes in the region for hundreds of years.

But perhaps the greatest draw was the fact the experiment calls to mind the scenes in The Martian where Matt Damon was forced to grow potatoes in Martian soil. In short, it was a spectacular PR move for NASA at a time when it is looking to drum up support for its proposed "Journey to Mars".

In recent years, MarsOne, the non-profit that recently declared bankruptcy, also conducted experiments to see which crops would grow best in Martian soil. This took place between 2013 and 2015 in the Dutch town of Nergena, where teams from the Wageningen University & Research Center planted crops in simulated Martian and Lunar soil provided by NASA.

Over time, the teams tested different kinds of seeds (along with organic nutrient solution) to see which ones would grow in a Lunar and Martian environment, with the same seeds growing in Earth soil as a control. The team confirmed that rye, radishes, garden cress, peas, tomatoes, and potatoes could all germinate nicely and produce more seed for the next harvest

Conclusion:

From these many proposals and ideas, a picture of Martian settlement begins to appear. This is in keeping with our growing interest in Mars and evolving plans to explore the planet. And while the challenges may be great, the proposed solutions are both innovative and potentially effective.

Whether or not we should colonize Mars, the fact remains that we can, given the right commitment and enough resources. And if and when we do, we already have a pretty good idea of what Martian colonies might look like.

Chinese firm opens Mars base simulator in desert

This aerial photo taken on April 17, 2019 shows "Mars Base 1", a C-Space Project, in the Gobi desert, some 40 km from Jinchang in China's northwest Gansu province | Photo Credit: AFP

The company behind the project, C-Space, plans to allow tourists into the currently educational facility next year

In the middle of China’s Gobi desert sits a Mars base simulator, but instead of housing astronauts training to live on the red planet, the facility is full of teenagers on a school trip.

Surrounded by barren hills in northwestern Gansu province, “Mars Base 1” opened on Wednesday with the aim of exposing teens — and soon tourists — to what life could be like on the planet.

The facility’s unveiling comes as China is making progress in its efforts to catch up to the United States and become a space power, with ambitions of sending humans to the moon someday.

The white-coloured base has a silver dome and nine modules, including living quarters, a control room, a greenhouse and an airlock.

Built at a cost of 50 million yuan, the base was constructed with help from the Astronauts Centre of China and the China Intercontinental Communication Centre, a state television production organisation.

Martian-like landscape

The teenagers go on treks in the desert, where they explore caves in the martian-like landscape. The closest town is Jinchang, some 40 kilometres away.

On Wednesday, over 100 students from a nearby high school walked on the arid Gobi plains, dressed in suits like that of astronauts.

“There are so many things here that I’ve not seen before, I’m very interested in it,” said 12-year old Tang Ruitian.

The company behind the project, C-Space, plans to open the base — currently an educational facility — to tourists in the next year, complete with a themed hotel and restaurant to attract space geeks.

“We are trying to come up with solutions ... the base is still on earth, it’s not on Mars, but we have chosen a landform that matches closest to Mars,” said C-Space founder Bai Fan.

It follows a similar Mars “village” that opened last month in the Qaidam Basin of neighbouring Qinghai — a brutally hot and dry region which is the highest desert in the world, considered the best replica of Mars’ surface conditions.

As budding astronauts explore “Mars” on Earth, China is planning to send a probe to the real red planet next year.

Beijing is pouring billions into its military-run space programme, with hopes of having a crewed space station by 2022.

Earlier this year, it made the first ever soft landing on the far side of the moon, deploying a rover on the surface.

Super-Habitable World May Exist Near Earth

Earth is the only known example of an inhabited planet in the universe, so the search for alien life has focused on Earth-like worlds.

But what if there are alien worlds that are even more habitable than Earth-like planets? These so-called "superhabitable" worlds are intriguing astrobiologists such as René Heller at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, who recently co-published a paper in the Jan. 16 issue of Astrobiology examining the prospects for habitable worlds that are very unlike Earth. One such planet might even exist around the stellar system closest to Earth Alpha Centauri B.

There is life virtually everywhere there is liquid water on Earth. As such, the search for extraterrestrial life has focused on so-called habitable or "Goldilocks" zones — distances around stars at which a planet receives neither too much nor too little heat from its star to possess oceans of liquid water on its surface. (The moons of planets in the habitable zones of stars could potentially host surface water as well, opening up the possibility of inhabited moons.)

Since Earth is the only inhabited world known, this planet has usually been the focus of studies on habitability. For instance, NASA’s Kepler space telescope and the CoRoT satellite from the French National Center for Space Studies and the European Space Agency were aimed at detecting planets roughly the mass and diameter of Earth.

However, Heller reasoned that worlds other than Earth-like ones could offer conditions suitable for life to emerge and evolve. Some planets and moons could be even better than Earth-like planets at offering such conditions

Heller was inspired by this idea after reading a question from his colleague John Armstrong at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, submitted via an online live chat in 2012 at AbGradCon, a conference organized by and for early-career astrobiologists. The query asked what experts thought could make an exoplanet — a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system — an even more habitable planet than Earth.

"It was this question that inspired me to start some research," Heller said.

Instead of looking for rocky planets about the size and mass of Earth in roughly the same orbit as this planet, Heller catalogued a list of properties that could help make a world habitable. He then reasoned what kinds of planets or moons best fit these criteria.

"Our study implies that searches for extrasolar inhabited worlds — planets or moons — should better not focus on the most Earth-like planets," Heller said.

Tidal heating

Past research by Heller and his colleagues found that planets and moons do not have to lie within habitable zones as they are conventionally described to possess surface water, nor do worlds within habitable zones necessarily have surface water. A key factor underlying habitability, besides the amount of light a world receives from its star, is how much that world gets heated by tidal forces.

The tides that Earth experiences are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun. Our tides pale in comparison to what we see elsewhere in the solar system — for instance, the gravitational pull Europa experiences from Jupiter leads to tidal forces roughly a thousand times stronger than what Earth feels from our moon.

Tidal forces not only flex the surface of Europa, but heat it as well. Heller and his colleagues found tidal heating could render other rocky bodies habitable even outside the normal confines of a habitable zone, and make worlds within the conventional definition of a habitable zone uninhabitable.

Room for Life

Heller also considered how much room a planet or moon might have to accommodate life. Other worlds might have more surface area than Earth, possessing a wrinklier surface or larger diameter. Moreover, planets with the same amount of land area as Earth but broken up into smaller continents might be more habitable, while continents that are too large (such as Earth’s past continent Gondwana about 500 million years ago) might have vast, inhospitable deserts in their interiors. In addition, Earth’s shallow waters have a greater biodiversity than its deep oceans, so planets with shallower waters may be superhabitable.

Past research also suggests desert planets much like the world depicted in the science fiction classic "Dune," might also be a more common type of habitable planet in the galaxy, rather than watery planets such as Earth. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that traps heat, and too much water vapor in a planet’s atmosphere can actually render it too hot for life, as was the case with Venus. As such, even worlds with vast deserts could be more hospitable to life than many watery planets, if these desert planets also had many scattered oases of water in their deserts that could support life.

Plate tectonics — the movement of tectonic plates of rock on a world’s surface — are often thought to be essential for life, as they help recycle critical materials from Earth’s interior to its surface. To a certain degree, more massive rocky planets could possess more radioactive material in their innards, generating heat that keeps plate tectonics going longer. Heller thus noted that planets with masses up to twice Earth’s may tend to be superhabitable from a tectonic point of view.

In addition, planets that experience fewer major swings in temperature could also experience fewer mass extinctions by avoiding ice ages and so-called "snowball states," where virtually the entire surface of a planet is covered with ice. For instance, molecules known as clathrates can entrap greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, helping serve as a "climatic thermostat" that moderates global temperatures.

Worlds that are slightly warmer than Earth on a billion-year timescale may be superhabitable, since they could have larger tropical zones that could be more benign for more biodiversity. However, sudden warming can lead to mass extinctions, and worlds that are substantially warmer than Earth could have oxygen-depleted oceans, judging by past periods on Earth.

Other planets could also have atmospheres that favor life more than Earth. For instance, more oxygen in the atmosphere could increase the maximum possible body size that organisms can get. More massive atmospheres could also offer greater shielding to damaging high-energy radiation from space, among other factors.

Recent work suggests that Earth is scraping the very inner edge of the sun’s habitable zone. As such, rocky planets sitting closer to the middle of a star’s habitable zone may be superhabitable.

Furthermore, a star’s ultraviolet radiation can damage DNA and thus hamper the emergence of life. Heller noted that K stars, also known as orange dwarfs — stars a bit cooler and smaller than our sun — may provide more favorable ultraviolet environments than yellow dwarfs like the sun. Orange dwarfs also have longer lifetimes, and worlds that spend more time within their habitable zones could have more time to develop life and accrue biodiversity.

The researchers were uncertain as to how key the rate of a planet’s spin is to its habitability, as well as the level at which a planet’s tilt varies over the course of its orbit — the latter, on Earth, determines its seasons. They were also uncertain how valuable it is to have a mostly stable, circular orbit like Earth; planets with more eccentric, oval-shaped orbits could also provide seasonal variations that spur diversity of life and evolution.

Alpha Centauri B

All in all, the researchers concluded superhabitable worlds will tend to orbit orange dwarfs and be slightly older and two to three times more massive than Earth. This could make orange dwarf Alpha Centauri B, the member of the closest stellar system to the sun, an ideal target for searches of a superhabitable world, especially since it may host an Earth-mass planet.

Scientists estimate the Alpha Centauri Bsystem is slightly older than our 4.6-billion-year old solar system at anywhere from 4.8 billion to 6.5 billion years old. If life on a planet or moon in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri B evolved similarly as it did on Earth, then primitive forms of life could already have flourished there when the young Earth collided with a Mars-sized object, thereby forming the moon.

Just as discoveries of thousands of exoplanets revealed the solar system atypical for planetary systems, Earth could turn out anything but typical for a habitable or even an inhabited world. Indeed, Earth could turn out to be a marginally habitable world, the researchers concluded.

Planetary scientist Ravi Kopparapu at Pennsylvania State University, who did not take part in this research, noted that while this research was noteworthy, many of the aspects of superhabitable planets the researchers outline "are most likely not observable anytime in the near future."

For instance, astronomers cannot yet get details on a world’s plate tectonics or what fraction of its surface is divided into land and oceans. "It is quite possible that these super-Earth planets proposed in this new paper are more habitable, but to remotely know if they indeed are beyond current technology of detection techniques," Kopparapu said.

New space missions could get some data this research pointed out.

"For example, a proposed NASA mission called Terrestrial Planet Finder, which was cancelled due to budgetary reasons, would have given us some data on land-ocean fraction of potential habitable worlds," Kopparapu said. "Attempts are being made to revive this telescope, but obviously we need support from the public and Congress."

'First light' achieved on upgraded planet-finding instrument to search for Earth-like planets in nearest star system

Newly-built planet-finding instrument installed on Very Large Telescope, Chile, begins 100-hour observation of nearby stars 

Alpha Centauri A and B, aiming to be first to directly image a habitable exoplanetBreakthrough Watch, the global astronomical program looking for Earth-like planets around nearby stars, and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Europe's foremost intergovernmental astronomical organisation, today announced "first light" on a newly-built planet-finding instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert, Chile.

The instrument, called NEAR (Near Earths in the AlphaCen Region), is designed to hunt for exoplanets in our neighbouring star system, Alpha Centauri, within the "habitable zones" of its two Sun-like stars, where water could potentially exist in liquid form. 

It has been developed over the last three years and was built in collaboration with the University of Uppsala in Sweden, the University of Liège in Belgium, the California Institute of Technology in the US, and Kampf Telescope Optics in Munich, Germany.

Since 23 May ESO's astronomers at ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) have been conducting a ten-day observing run to establish the presence or absence of one or more planets in the star system. Observations will conclude tomorrow, 11 June. 

Planets in the system (twice the size of Earth or bigger), would be detectable with the upgraded instrumentation. The near- to thermal-infrared range is significant as it corresponds to the heat emitted by a candidate planet, and so enables astronomers to determine whether the planet's temperature allows liquid water.

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our Solar System, at 4.37 light-years (about 25 trillion miles) away. It consists of two Sun-like stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, plus the red dwarf star, Proxima Centauri. Current knowledge of Alpha Centauri's planetary systems is sparse. In 2016, a team using ESO instruments discovered one Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri. 

But Alpha Centauri A and B remain unknown quantities; it is not clear how stable such binary star systems are for Earth-like planets, and the most promising way to establish whether they exist around these nearby stars is to attempt to observe them.

Imaging such planets, however, is a major technical challenge, since the starlight that reflects off them is generally billions of times dimmer than the light coming to us directly from their host stars; resolving a small planet close to its star at a distance of several light-years has been compared to spotting a moth circling a street lamp dozens of miles away. 

To solve this problem, in 2016 Breakthrough Watch and ESO launched a collaboration to build a special instrument called a thermal infrared coronagraph, designed to block out most of the light coming from the star and optimised to capture the infrared light emitted by the warm surface of an orbiting planet, rather than the small amount of starlight it reflects. Just as objects near to the Sun (normally hidden by its glare) can be seen during a total eclipse, 

so the coronagraph creates a kind of artificial eclipse of its target star, blocking its light and allowing much dimmer objects in its vicinity to be detected. This marks a significant advance in observational capabilities.

The coronagraph has been installed on one of the VLT's four 8-metre-aperture telescopes, upgrading and modifying an existing instrument, called VISIR, to optimise its sensitivity to infrared wavelengths associated with potentially habitable exoplanets. 

It will therefore be able to search for heat signatures similar to that of the Earth, which absorbs energy from the Sun and emits it in the thermal infrared wavelength range. NEAR modifies the existing VISIR instrument in three ways, combining several cutting-edge astronomical engineering achievements. First, it adapts the instrument for coronagraphy, enabling it to drastically reduce the light of the target star and thereby reveal the signatures of potential terrestrial planets. Second, 

it uses a technique called adaptive optics to strategically deform the telescope's secondary mirror, compensating for the blur produced by the Earth's atmosphere. Third, it employs novel chopping strategies that also reduce noise, as well as potentially allowing the instrument to switch rapidly between target stars —- as fast as every 100 milliseconds—maximising the available telescope time.

Pete Worden, Executive Director of the Breakthrough Initiatives, said: "We're delighted to collaborate with the ESO in designing, building, installing and now using this innovative new instrument. If there are Earth-like planets around Alpha Centauri A and B, that's huge news for everyone on our planet."

"ESO is glad to bring its expertise, existing infrastructure, and observing time on the Very Large Telescope to the NEAR project," commented ESO project manager Robin Arsenault.

"This is a valuable opportunity, as—in addition to its own science goals—the NEAR experiment is also a pathfinder for future planet-hunting instruments for the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope," says Markus Kasper, ESO's lead scientist for NEAR.

"NEAR is the first and (currently) only project that could directly image a habitable exoplanet. It marks an important milestone. Fingers crossed—we are hoping a large habitable planet is orbiting Alpha Cen A or B" commented Olivier Guyon, lead scientist for Breakthrough Watch.

"Human beings are natural explorers," said Yuri Milner, founder of the Breakthrough Initiatives, "It is time we found out what lies beyond the next valley. This telescope will let us gaze across."

Earth-Like Planets Could be Right Next Door

Astronomers estimate that billions of habitable planets are orbiting red dwarf stars. What would it be like to live there?Even in places where skies are dark and the Milky Way seems to fill our view, the night sky is teeming with stars we cannot see. 

These other stars, invisible to the naked eye, are red dwarfs—smaller, cooler, dimmer, and far, far more common in the galaxy than stars like our sun.

Only visible with telescopes, red dwarfs constitute about three-fourths of the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way. Until this year, those billions of stars were generally overlooked by astronomers searching for another class of objects that can’t be seen with the naked eye: exoplanets. 

Now two recent studies have looked exclusively at red dwarf stars, and the estimates are in: More than 50 percent could harbor potentially habitable planets. That enormous probability leads to one more exciting conclusion: Another planet with life could be just a few light-years away. In a galaxy that’s 100,000 light-years across, that’s just down the block from Earth.

Given the challenges of taking a detailed look at a habitable planet orbiting a star like our sun—it will take a new generation of powerful and expensive telescopes, almost certainly in space, to study a small, rocky planet amid a yellow star’s glare—this huge population of red dwarfs offers immense opportunities for discovery. And a chance to open our imaginations to wildly different kinds of life in the universe.

“I think we have a natural tendency to always talk about things that are like what we know,” says Courtney Dressing, a graduate student with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dressing and David Charbonneau, who focuses on finding and characterizing exoplanets, published the first of the two papers that estimated the prevalence of habitable planets orbiting red dwarfs. Their calculation came in on the low end; 

they believe around 15 percent of the red dwarfs are likely to have habitable planets in their thrall, a percentage that amounts to tens of billions of stars. The second study was conducted by Ravi kumar Kopparapu, an exoplanet researcher at Pennsylvania State University. By calculating a larger habitable zone, Kopparapu estimated as many 48 to 61 percent could potentially harbor life.

“We’ve come to realize that the universe is a pretty unusual place, so we don’t always have to find the exact same conditions [as Earth for habitability to be possible],” says Dressing. “We realize now that it’s important to look for potentially habitable planets around smaller types of stars as well.”

Red dwarfs are, on average, one-third the size and 1,000 times dimmer than the sun. For astronomers looking for exoplanets, the smaller size and dimness of red dwarfs mean a lot less glare that could conceal an orbiting planet. 

The difficulty of resolving detail on a planet near a star is particularly acute in the search for planets around red dwarfs, because astronomers estimate that the habitable zone—the region where it’s neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist—around these cooler stars is much closer to the star than even Mercury is to the sun.

Armed with nearly two decades of exoplanet discoveries, astronomers have started to assemble a picture of what a habitable planet might look like, but most have focused on what we know: a planet like Earth orbiting a yellow dwarf star like our sun, 

classified as a G-type, main-sequence star. But what about the smaller, red M-type stars? What might your home be like if it were in red dwarf orbit? The answer is kind of like Earth, and a lot unlike Earth.

From the surface of this imaginary habitable planet, one of the first things we’d notice is that the sun is very big in the sky. It would appear one and a half to three times bigger than Earth’s sun, given the close orbit, 

says John Johnson, an exoplanet researcher and assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. And, as you might infer from the name, this sun is going to appear extremely red, due to its cooler temperature. Red dwarfs are about half as hot as our sun.

So far, this planet on which we stand is a bit foreign compared to Earth, but not shockingly different. This is where any sense of familiarity ends, however, because another consequence of orbiting so close to its star is that the planet could be tidally locked, 

so that one side always faces its sun. Astronomers call this synchronous rotation, when an orbiting body takes the same time to rotate around its axis as it does to revolve around another body, just like our moon does as it orbits Earth.

Or it could be like Mercury, says Jim Kasting, an exoplanet researcher at Pennsylvania State University and the author of How to Find a Habitable Planet. Mercury, he explains, is caught in a “spin- orbit resonance” and rotates three times for every two orbits around the sun. This stable relationship between orbital and rotational periods is caused by the long shape, or eccentricity, 

of Mercury’s orbital path, which in turn is caused by the pull of gravity from the many outer planets—a situation that could also exist for a close-orbiting exoplanet. In other words, it’s possible that on our imaginary planet, we would enjoy only three sunrises every two years.

Let’s say our red dwarf planet is tidally locked. The common assumption is that one side of the planet, in eternal daylight, would be scorched while the side in perpetual night would be frozen solid. But that’s not necessarily true, says Kasting.

Astronomers working with Jill Tarter, the longtime champion of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, have shown how tidally locked planets could support life. Tarter recently stepped down as director of the SETI Institute to lead the funding for the Allen Telescope Array in California (see “Can We Hear Them Now?” July 2007), which will spend time listening for extraterrestrial signals from red dwarf systems.

For many years, says Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, astronomers had ruled out red dwarfs as places to look for Earth-like planets because they believed that being tidally locked would make them uninhabitable. Tarter, among the first to seriously address whether red dwarfs could harbor planets viable for life, convened a workshop to consider the idea, publishing their conclusions in the journal Astrobiology in 2007.

Studies at the time suggested that on a planet with a substantial enough atmosphere, the climate would be dominated by currents that pull up water in the air and toward the surface in oceans on the hotter, 

day side—a process called upwelling. This circulation would result in thick clouds covering the sun-facing side; the clouds would prevent the persistent solar radiation from scorching the surface. The currents would also cause atmospheric churning that would spread warmth around the planet.

Furthermore, this thickening of the atmosphere on the dayside would provide an important defense against other radiation dangers as well. Young red dwarfs, in their first few billion years, tend to be very active, emitting flares and ultraviolet radiation. Tarter and her colleagues proposed that the constant cloud cover would help diffuse these violent outbursts—though not totally. 

Indeed, life on a planet orbiting a young red dwarf might be more likely found underwater, taking advantage of even more protective layers.

some planets orbiting red dwarfs, a search for “hidden” water, like the one that has dominated NASA’s exploration of Mars, won’t be necessary. 

The nature of planet formation in these systems could result in some habitable planets being covered in water. One reason, says Kasting, is that Earth-size planets residing in the close-in habitable zone probably formed farther out and migrated inward.

Planets form in a star’s debris disk by sweeping up dust and ice particles in their orbits. A planet with a small orbit generally won’t be able to collect as many particles as one in a longer orbit, so it won’t grow as large (just look at Mercury and Venus, for example, both smaller than Earth). 

Additionally, the closer a planet is to the star, the stronger the star’s gravitational pull is on the planet, and the faster the planet has to travel to keep from getting pulled in. This speed leads to a violent early life. Frequent collisions with other large objects can strip away a young planet’s atmosphere, or keep a sizable planet from forming altogether.

Planets that form farther out might gather up an excess of ice and, once they shimmy into the habitable zone, essentially become water worlds. “Earth’s oceans are an average of three kilometers deep 

if you spread them out over entire surface, but you might have an ocean [on an exoplanet] that’s 300 kilometers deep,” Kasting says. “That might be okay for marine life, but it probably would preclude the presence of continents.” Any visitors are going to need a raincoat in addition to a boat, because the planet’s highly active water cycle, Tarter writes, would produce “intense cloudiness, as well as massive precipitation.”

however, there’s enough water for a cloudy sky and sizable oceans, and currents strong enough to distribute heat, you could very well see our imagined exoplanet having forested continents. But even here things can get a little strange. Nancy Kiang at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York has investigated the color plants might have on a habitable planet orbiting red dwarf stars, and the answer is not green.

Earth plants survive by converting the light our sun gives off into energy through photosynthesis. In most plants, the chlorophyll that enables this process absorbs blue and red light while reflecting the green light. But a red dwarf radiates much less visible light than our sun. A plant on this red dwarf planet might need to absorb as many wavelengths of light as possible to maximize photosynthesis. The plants, reflecting back almost no visible light, would appear black.

In fact, all the life on our imaginary planet might not just look different because of its red dwarf sun, it could be much, much older. Red dwarfs can exist for hundreds of billions of years before they finish the slow depletion of their fuel—indeed, they live for so long that it’s likely no red dwarf that has come into existence since the beginning of the universe has died.

comparison, our sun is about halfway through its 10-billion-year lifespan; the simplest life on Earth developed about 3.8 billion years ago, and Homo sapiens barely more than 100,000 years ago. A red dwarf that was among the first stars that formed, nearly 13 billion years ago, could still be around today, and could theoretically be hosting a planet where life has existed for twice, maybe even three times as long as single-cell bacteria have existed on Earth.

“I’m very confident that within my lifetime—I’m 35 now—we will be able to find biosignatures of potentially habitable planets,” says Penn State’s Ravi kumar Kopparapu. His reported estimate, that as many as 61 percent of red dwarfs might have habitable planets, came from information about Venus and Mars extrapolated from our solar system’s history—that is, 

when water was still present on Venus before it evaporated and when the ice on Mars was liquid. Kopparapu calculated the sun’s brightness on each planet during these times and compared it to the brightness of red dwarfs. When he used this data to put limits on a habitable zone, he found it was larger than the zone Dressing used for her estimate.

Johnson, from Caltech, says speculating about what it’s like on a habitable planet orbiting a red dwarf is clearly an exercise that has just begun. “As for what’s [actually] going on on the surface of those planets, we don’t have the slightest clue, to be honest,” 

he says. Johnson said he’s still blown away by the thought that rocky, potentially habitable exoplanets are common. “I haven’t gotten used to that yet,” he says. “It’s not hunting anymore; it’s gathering. You just reach up into the sky and grab these things. They’re sitting right next door.”

Read more at “I would say it’s the golden age of exoplanet studies,” says Kopparapu. “The best studies are ahead, if we can get together and get missions going. Do we really want to know if we’re alone? I think we can find out, if we’re committed to it.”

Read more at 

TWO EARTH-LIKE PLANETS FOUND NEAR DWARF STAR

TWO EARTH-LIKE PLANETS FOUND NEAR DWARF STAR Its HABITABLE JONES 

Kepler-452b has been for some time now consider Earth's closest cousin in terms of characteristics. It belongs in the Cygnus constellation and is approximately 1400 light-years away from us. 

Now, however, a team of international researchers led by the University of Göttingen has discovered two new Earth-like planets near one of our nearest neighbouring stars. Named Teegarden's Star, it's located approximately 12.5 light years away from us, 2700  degrees Celsius  warm, and roughly ten times lighter than the Sun. It was first discovered in 2003.

The news of the discovery of the two planets was announced in a press releaseby the University of Göttingen. “The two planets resemble the inner planets of our solar system,” comments lead author Mathias Zechmeister of the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Göttingen. 

“They are only slightly heavier than Earth and are located in the so-called habitable zone, where water can be present in liquid form.”

The researchers believe that the two newly discovered planets could in fact be part of a larger system. Teegarden is the smallest star in which researchers have been successful so far in measuring the weight of a planet directly. “This is a great success for the Carmenes project, which was specifically designed to search for planets around the lightest stars,” says Professor Ansgar Reiners of the University of Göttingen, one of the scientific directors of the astronomical project.

The Carmenes project is currently carried out by the universities of Göttingen, Hamburg, Heidelberg, and Madrid, the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie Heidelberg, Institutes Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Barcelona, Granada, and Madrid, Thüringer Landessternwarte, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, and Calar-Alto Observatory. Clearly, Earth has more cousins now and in closer proximity.