NASA Launches Series of Exoplanet Tourism Posters

Posted on January 8, 2015

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has launched an Exoplanet Travel Series. The series features fantastical posters that illustrate what space tourism to some of the exoplanets might be like. The posters come from the PlanetQuest division of NASA's JPL.

There are three posters in the series to date. They cover the exoplanets Kepler-186f, HD 40307g and Kepler-16b. Hopefully, NASA will create more of the entertaining posters for other exoplanets.

The poster for Kepler-186f (top poster) says the grass is always redder on the other site. NASA says that if there is life on Kepler-186f its its photosynthesis could have been influenced by the star's red-wavelength photons. This would make life with a much different color palette than the greens we find in many plants here on Earth.

The poster for HD 40307g (pictured above) shows a space tourist in a special suit experiencing the gravity of a Super Earth. NASA says the planet actually straddles the line between a Super-Earth and a Super-Neptune. It would have a much stronger gravitational pull on space tourists than Earth as it has eight times the mass of the Earth.

The poster for Kepler-16b has the tagline "Relax on Kepler-16b. Where your shadow always has company." The planet orbits a pair of stars like Tatooine in Star Wars. NASA says prospects for life (as we know it) on Kepler-16b are not good because the temperature is similar to that of dry ice. NASA also says the discovery of Kepler-16b "indicates that the movie's iconic double-sunset is anything but science fiction."

The posters come as the number of exoplanets discovered with the Kepler Space Telescope has passed the 1,000 mark. Eight of the planet so far are in their star's habitable zone and less than twice the size of Earth. NASA's PlanetQuest also says that a total of 4,988 exoplanets have been discovered. 3,199 of these are candidates and 1,789 exoplanets have been confirmed.



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