Mike Shara Discusses Next 50 Years of Space Flight
Thursday, September 30 12:05 pm
Museum Curator Mike Shara of the Department of Astrophysics will lead SciCafe: The Next 50 Years of Space Flight at the Museum on Wednesday, October 6. He recently answered some questions about his upcoming discussion.
Where do you see our space program in 10, 20, and 50 years into the future?
Suborbital space tourism will almost certainly be a reality in 10 years, and orbiting hotels are quite possible in 20 years. The Chinese are likely to have a lunar base in 20 years. Humans will have landed on Mars, and perhaps set up a science base in 50 years. We will know with certainty, by then, if there is microbial life on Mars and Europa.
Where would you like to see NASA send a manned mission next: the Moon, Mars, or an asteroid?
All three. There is much valuable science to be done at each.
What do you see in the future for suborbital tourism?
Falling costs and rising numbers of tourists. Dozens the first year, hundreds the third year, then tens of thousands of people annually. I can hardly wait.
You’ve undertaken a survey to inventory all 10,000 presupernova stars in the Milky Way. Why?
This is a test of stellar evolution theory, something as basic to astrophysics as Darwinian evolution is to biology. This theory predicts that “Wolf-Rayet” stars, which are so luminous that they are evaporating themselves, must give rise to supernova explosions. By finding every one of these stars in the Milky Way — and in nearby galaxies, too — and by getting a spectrum of every one of them (i.e., their “DNA”), we will know, when the next supernova explodes, if our evolution theory has predictive power or if it must be modified.
What have you learned from this?
That searching for a needle in a field full of haystacks is hard. There are 100,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way. Only one in 10 million is a presupernova star. But we’ve got a list of 400 confirmed stars and thousands more candidates.
What is a stellar collision and what have you learned about them?
Stars actually crash into other stars in the centers of the densest star clusters. These collisions can be destructive or amalgamative and make some of the rarest stars in the universe.
