Gizmos & Gadgets: 10 Days Left to Fund a Space Telescope to Find Another Earth

December 10, 2016

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December 10, 2016 – The target planet is the newly discovered one circling our nearest stellar neighbours, Alpha Centauri A and B and their nearby companion Proxima Centauri. A consortium of space research organizations launched a Kickstarter campaign named Project Blue to raise $1 million U.S. by December 20. The money is to be used for analysis, design and simulations associated with construction of the space telescope. University of Massachusetts Lowell, the SETI Institute, Mission Centaru and BoldlyGo formed the non-profit Project Blue, referencing Carl Sagan’s description of Earth photographed by Voyager 1 in 1990 from 6.5 billion kilometers (over 4 billion miles) away.

States Jon Morse, Mission Executive for Project Blue, “we’re at an incredible moment in history, where for the first time, we have the technology to actually find another Earth.” In going to crowdfunding on Kickstarter it demonstrates a growing trend for community-backed scientific research.

Nick Yulman, of Kickstarter says this is new territory for the crowdfunding site remarking that “groundbreaking campaigns like this give backers a chance to play a central role in the democratization of scientific discovery and an opportunity to learn directly from the creators driving innovation.”

Crowdfunding science is not new. When the Australian government back in 2013 dismantled its Climate Commission focused on climate change research a crowdfunding effort established the Climate Council, a not-for-profit that raised $730,000 U.S. in three days. Today as government-funded research dries up more and more fundamental research is going the crowdfunding route.

Project Blue is built on the foundational discovery work of the Kepler space telescope which in its survey of stars has identified thousands of exoplanets from gas giants to super Earths and smaller. The space telescope that the non-profit consortium hopes to develop with crowdfunding money will be integrated into a satellite no bigger than a washing machine. It will have a 45-50 centimeter aperture and be capable of seeing and imaging planets 20 billion times dimmer than their host stars. It will include a coronagraph to block the starlight from Alpha Centauri, a deformable mirror, on board wavefront sensors and software algorithms to control incoming light, and post-processing enhanced imaging capability. The wavefront technology is a NASA-proposed method of blocking starlight to allow for detection of orbiting planets.

The Kickstarter campaign has raised over $188,000 so far from 1,270 plus backers. If you are into becoming part of a mission that could be the first to find a second Earth, then give Project Blue an early Christmas present by pledging $10 or more. For your $10 you will receive regular mission updates, launch footage, behind-the-scenes video, acknowledgement on the website, and a mission laptop sticker. Make it $25 and you get all of the $10 stuff plus official membership and a Project Blue mission patch. $40 adds a Project Blue canvas tote bag. $65 in addition gives you a 1 centimeter square patch of the thermal shielding to be used on board the spacecraft. $100 adds in a mission t-shirt plus raw data imagery of the Alpha Centauri system. To find out more visit the Kickstarter site.