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China fired up the largest radio telescope in the world earlier this week. The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is virtually double the size of the Arecibo observatory, and they didn't end at that place. Far from creating a radio repose zone that people could all the same live in, like nosotros did in West Virginia, government staked out a 5km radius of radio silence and displaced some 8,000 people for the "protection" of the telescope. Construction started in 2022 on the massive observatory, nicknamed Tianyan: the Heart of Sky.

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Nosotros found out that Mercury is shrinking. Stress wrinkles in its surface, called scarps, show the states where the planet'due south surface is cracking and settling fastest. Frankly, this is generally important because information technology proves the null hypothesis: that Earth is not the only planet in the universe that has geological (Mercurological?) activeness. Non that our planet isn't a lovely and unique place, but it isn't special, in the sense that it isn't an exception.

There's some newly discovered stuff going on with Europa, too: patently it has cryovolcanoes like Enceladus. Why care most cryovolcanoes? Because they give us admission to whatever'due south below Europa'southward surface, which we call up is a global subsurface bounding main. Drilling through miles and miles of crust isn't really plausible because it takes too long. Certain would be nice to take an Artesian well so we could become some skilful readings without working besides hard. You know, harder than sending a probe to Europa to begin with.

A Cassini image of Enceladus, showing the plumes thrown into space by cryovolcanoes

A Cassini paradigm of Enceladus, showing the plumes thrown into space past cryovolcanoes

There's a saying: if you want something done fast, requite it to a decorated man. Elon Musk has certainly been a busy homo, and fast ± fire seems to be his thing lately. SpaceX peeled the plastic off their brandy-spankin'-new methane rocket, the Raptor: the one that could take humans to Mars. Mach diamonds, a visible standing wave in the exhaust plume, are like shooting fish in a barrel to see in the Raptor's fiery tail.  Information technology's a marsh gas rocket because marsh gas is easier to make with what there is on Mars; the idea is that the ship would tank up on Mars for the ride home.

Musk has a plan to become to Mars: He wants to starting time inside the side by side twelvemonth or two, and then take a flight to Mars for every launch window between now and the 2022s — whereupon SpaceX should be set up to field the Interplanetary Transport Arrangement. This is all with an explicit intent to colonize Mars within our lifetime.

Raptor-TestFire

Mach diamonds.

All these things brand me wonder, though: why are nosotros looking to other planets when there'south and then much to bargain with right here? Why Mars? Plumes or no plumes, why Europa? I don't claim to know the listen of Elon Musk. But the argument for looking to Mars is to believe space travel is and should be the futurity of humanity, whether for reasons of escape or considering we're ready to outgrow the premises of our home world. Information technology'due south part of the aforementioned schoolhouse of idea that wants to plow over every rock and look nether it, just because at that place might be something worth knowing under it. How would we always know if we didn't await?