Tourists who are bored with the earthly landscapes, will soon be able to try to “walk” on alien worlds by Exoplanet Travel Bureau project. It’s part of the official program of NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program dedicated to the study of planets outside of our solar system. Thanks to the telescope “Kepler” – now astronomers have underlying characteristics of those distant worlds, instead of the bare theory.
However, you should understand – we will show the picture in which artistic more fantasy than reality. Scientists can calculate the length and shape of shadows from the twin suns on the super-the planet Kepler-16b, but they have no idea what sort of mountains and clouds, so they could cast those shadows. Come to the aid of artists and experts in a virtual graph, which will turn a boring streams of astronomical data into a beautiful picture.
Imaging exoplanets will be interactive to allow the user to fly under the blood-red sky TRAPPIST-1d and compare it to the experiences of a red dwarf planet Kepler-186f. You will see sunrises and sunsets there the suns, look at the planet with the atmosphere and without it, to look at someone else’s starry sky. To see something that is hard to describe in words – exoplanet PSO J318.5-22, which floats in the eternal night of interstellar space, because she has no warm and bright stars.
Most of the detected exoplanets so far from us that astronomers do not cherish hopes to see them up close or to measure the atmospheric parameters at any time soon. Such visualisation is a compromise, trying to put the research in a constructive direction. With the introduction of instruments like the James Webb Space telescope will have a chance to find earth-like exoplanets somewhere closer, and by that time we’ll already be mentally prepared for the fact that we will be able to find there.
Source — Exoplanet Travel Bureau