Video: “Bringing Nuclear Power to Mars” – Dr. Frank H. Shu, UCB

Here is a SETI Institute seminar by Dr. Frank H. Shu, professor emeritus of UC Berkeley, on Bringing Nuclear Power to Mars

Establishing a lunar base is probably a wise first first step to colonizing Mars, and colonizing Mars will be a giant leap forward for humankind to travel to the stars. We begin our discussion by noting that the bare minimum for sustaining life on the Moon exists in the water brought by comets to the bottoms of some lunar craters. Electrolysis of this dirty water can produce clean oxygen (and hydrogen) for the lunar base, A reliable source of primary energy is needed for such tasks, but anywhere on the surface of the Moon, there is no sunlight two weeks out of four, and no wind whatsoever. Nuclear power is the default option, just as is the case of naval submarines where the crews need to live and work in closed environments submerged under the water of the ocean for months at a time. However, the light water reactors of naval submarines are not a good choice for environments that lack large bodies of water, and we argue, as first realized by a former NASA Engineer, Kirk Sorensen, that molten salt reactors, of the type invented by Oak Ridge National Lab in the 1960s, are much better suited for a lunar base, or for that matter, a Mars colony.

Dr. Shu will then discuss his patented design for the best possible two-fluid molten-salt breeder-reactor (2F-MSBR) that one could build, using thorium that can be mined locally without requiring shipments from mother Earth. He will close by considering two spin-off applications:

(1) saving civilization on Earth from the worst ravages of climate change by scaled-up 2F-MSBRs;
(2) using the fission fragments of related nuclear fission reactions for ion-propulsion that produces rockets two to three orders of magnitude faster than achievable with chemical rockets, making possible, perhaps, a first generation of starships.

Video: Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition shortlists finalists

The annual Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year Competition, which is run by the Royal Museums Greenwich, had over 4500 entries this year from amateur and professional astrophotographers from around the world. The RMG just announced this week that they have shortlisted the entries from which the final winners will be announced on September 15th:

Here is a video about the 2016 competition:

Here is last year’s winning image in the aurora category was Silk Skies©  by Jamen Percy:

CPLNI8yWUAAA2Q8[1]

Video: Studying exoplanets individually and in ensembles

Below is a video of Sarah Ballard of MIT giving a recent SETI Institute talk titled, Exoplanets: Under a Microscope, and Through a Wide-field Lens –

The Solar System furnishes the most familiar planetary architecture: many planets, orbiting nearly coplanar to one another. We can examine the composition and atmospheres of the Solar System planets in detail, even occasionally in situ. Studies of planets orbiting other stars (exoplanets), in contrast, only begin to approach the precision of humanity’s knowledge of Earth five hundred years ago. I will describe a two-pronged approach to the study of exoplanets.

One approach involves time-intensive investigations of individual planets to eke out bulk density or single molecules in the planetary atmosphere.

Another involves studies of the ensemble properties of planetary systems, and addresses the question of a “typical” planetary system in the Milky Way. In an era with thousands of exoplanet discoveries in hand and thousands more to follow in short order, a judicious combination of these approaches is emerging.

I’ll showcase some of my own detailed findings of other worlds (placing Earth in context), in addition to wider-field studies of typical planet occurrence and formation.

I’ll close with an opportunity, using an existing data set, to make inroads into the singular question driving much of exoplanetary science: the detectability of signatures of life.