NASA Releases Retro-Style Travel Posters for Exoplanets

NASA it seems is getting very creative/artistic in their public outreach efforts. I've talked about some of these worlds on this forum before. Now have a look at what the space agency posted on their PlanetQuest site today:





Here's the direct link to the page with more information about them.

Guess we're going to need the the warp drive that was explained here.

More interesting news:
Excerpt from TampaBay.com

As the ranks of these planets grow, astronomers are beginning to plan the next step in the quest to end cosmic loneliness, gauging which hold the greatest promise for life and what tools will be needed to learn about them.

On Monday, another group of astronomers said they had managed to weigh a set of small planets and found that their densities and compositions almost exactly matched those of Earth. Both groups announced their findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

Reviewing the history of exoplanets (those that orbit a star that is not our sun), Debra Fischer, a Yale astronomer, recalled that the first planet found orbiting another sunlike star, a Jupiterlike giant, was discovered 20 years ago. She termed the progress in the last two decades "incredibly moving."

So far, Kepler has discovered 4,175 potential planets, and 1,004 of them have been confirmed as real, according to Michele Johnson, a spokeswoman at NASA's Ames Research Center, which operates Kepler. Most of them, however, including the new ones announced Tuesday, are hundreds of light-years away, too far for detailed study.

"We can count as many as we like," said Sara Seager, a planet theorist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the new work, "but until we can observe the atmospheres and assess their greenhouse gas power, we don't really know what the surface temperatures are like."

a reply to: JadeStar

So cool! I love the retro looking posters as I've always enjoyed that art form. When I looked at the posters for the first time I imagined a future where humans are space faring and colonizing other planets in a marvel comics type of universe haha..anyways rambling on..good post

I think we'll eventually find Earth like planets to be somewhat of a rarity for harboring a habitable space and turn to moons which will hold much better odds for the right atmospheric conditions conducive for our exploration, perhaps we would map routes to star systems by jumping moon port to moon port with interstellar ports created with robotics along the way.

Yay... NASA'a old administration would never have done this fun bit of whimsy.

I'm glad they're embracing the human portion of the sciences and trying for a more approachable demeanor. I think it's a good approach.

Looking at the travel posters, I was struck with how little of the Earth I'd actually seen... and I've done my share of traveling. Well, humans like to move and experience novelty... the interesting ones, anyway. We weren't evolved with roots, after all.

I was hoping for a more accessible solar system by this time... if not interstellar jaunts. Ah... misplaced priorities and resources... the tragedy of history.

how do they know the grass is redder on keplar? they must be hiding something.