NASA has launched a new interactive website that will transport you to worlds beyond our solar system.
From the distant Kepler discoveries to the potentially habitable Trappist-1d, the Exoplanet Travel Bureau site offers a stunning virtual tour through planets that sit many light-years away.
The tool allows you to take a 360-degree look around the alien landscapes, revealing blood red skies, towering geologic formations, and double-shadows created by twin suns.
NASA has launched a new interactive website that will transport you to worlds beyond our solar system. The visualization above shows a look around Trappist-1d, with the Trappist-1 star visible to the left, and crescents of Trappist-1b and Trappist-1c seen high in the sky
While spacecraft have not yet come close enough to get a detailed look at an exoplanet’s surface, data from the Kepler and Hubble missions have allowed scientists to piece together a basic understanding of what the conditions may be like on these alien worlds.
Using this information, NASA artists have created stunning visualizations.
The Exoplanet Travel Bureau tool so far offers a glimpse at Trappist-1d, Kepler-16b, and Kepler-186f.
‘Because Kepler-186f and the majority of Kepler-discovered planets are so distant, it is currently impossible to detect their atmospheres – if they exist at all – or characterize their atmospheric properties,’ said Martin Still, program scientist for NASA’s newest space-based planet-hunting observatory, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
‘Consequently, we have limited knowledge about what these distant worlds are really like, but these surface visualizations allow us to imagine some of the possibilities.’
From the distant Kepler discoveries to the potentially habitable Trappist-1d, the Exoplanet Travel Bureau site offers a stunning virtual tour through planets that sit many light-years away. The tool allows you to take a 360-degree look around the alien landscapes, revealing blood red skies, towering geologic formations, and double-shadows created by twin suns
Kepler-186f, for example, is known to orbit a star that is cooler and redder than the sun. But, we don’t know whether or not it has an atmosphere.
The tool allows you to view both options, revealing the hypothetical water that could exist if the planet does have an atmosphere, or the barren landscape that might stand if it does not.
Each interactive visualization works on desktop, mobile, and smartphone-based virtual reality headsets.
NASA has also shared stunning travel posters for the distant worlds, touting the ‘best “hab zone” vacation’ spots and the planet where ‘nightlight never ends.’
While little is known about planets outside of our solar system now, the recently launched TESS mission aims to study these objects in greater detail than ever before.
While spacecraft have not yet come close enough to get a detailed look at an exoplanet’s surface, data from the Kepler and Hubble missions have allowed scientists to piece together a basic understanding of what the conditions may be like on these alien worlds. Using this information, NASA artists have created stunning visualizations
WHAT IS THE TESS SPACECRAFT?
NASA’s new ‘planet hunter,’ set to be Kepler’s successor, is equipped with four cameras that will allow it to view 85 per cent of the entire sky, as it searches exoplanets orbiting stars less than 300 light-years away.
By studying objects much brighter than the Kepler targets, it’s hoped TESS could uncover new clues on the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.
Its four wide-field cameras will view the sky in 26 segments, each of which it will observe one by one.
In its first year of operation, it will map the 13 sectors that make up the southern sky.
Then, the following year, it will scour the northern sectors.
‘We learned from Kepler that there are more planets than stars in our sky, and now TESS will open our eyes to the variety of planets around some of the closest stars,’ said Paul Hertz, Astrophysics Division director at NASA’s Headquarters.
‘TESS will cast a wider net than ever before for enigmatic worlds whose properties can be probed by NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope and other missions.’
Tess is 5 feet (1.5 meters) wide and is shorter than most adults.
The observatory is 4 feet across (1.2 meters), not counting the solar wings, which are folded for launch, and weighs just 800 pounds (362 kilograms).
NASA says it’s somewhere between the size of a refrigerator and a stacked washer and dryer.
Tess will aim for a unique elongated orbit that passes within 45,000 miles of Earth on one end and as far away as the orbit of the moon on the other end.
It will take Tess two weeks to circle Earth.
TESS is equipped with four cameras that will allow it to view 85 percent of the entire sky, as it searches exoplanets orbiting stars less than 300 light-years away.
By studying objects much brighter than the Kepler targets, it’s hoped TESS could uncover new clues on the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.
‘Current and future NASA missions, including TESS and the James Webb Space Telescope, will find the nearest exoplanets to our solar system and characterize their atmospheres, bridging the gap between speculation and what’s really out there,’ Still says.