Technically Speaking

NIAC (NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts), is looking into te possibility of a superconducting magnetic radiation shielding system to supplement (or replace) traditional passive shielding. Jeffery Hoffman, a former astronaut, is heading up the research funded by NASA.

The idea of using a magnetic field to shield a craft from radiation is not new; as Dr. Hoffman points out “the Earth has been doing it for billions of years!” Using magnetic shielding was proposed in the late 1960’s, but not pursued after plans for further space exporation were scrapped.

Two types of radiation need to be addressed, according to William S. Higgins, an engineering physicist who works on radiation safety at Fermilab, the particle accelerator near Chicago, IL:

* Solar flare protons (which would come in bursts following a solar flare)
* Galactic cosmic rays (a continuous background radiation)

The easiest way to protect against this radiation is to absorb it. However, such shielding can be massive, and cosmic rays can interact with the shielding and create secondary charged particles, worsening the situation. The primary benefit of using magnetic shielding is to save on the mass required for traditional absorption technologies. The mass of the spacecraft, which must be lifted off from the Earth and placed in orbit, directly drives the cost of space systems. Reducing the amount of mass would make space exploration more affordable and therefore more sustainable over the long term.

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The Earth naturally protects us through the same method so logically the idea should work. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS),is scheduled to be tested at the ISS, results will give insight as to what it will take to maintain a magnetic field of considerable strength and the near-absolute zero temperatures.

The project will be tackled in two phases.

Phase I research studies the shielding efficiency of the baseline design, and would begin conceptual systems design. Phase II would provide a detailed comparison of magnetic shielding with traditional passive absorption technologies, and detail how to integrate the magnetic shield into a spacecraft.

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NASA was just delivered its new comet exploring spacecraft named Deep Impact. This vessel will be launched on Dec. 30 of this year and if all goes well it will rendevouz with the comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. The spacecraft is designed to deliver a 820-lb hunk of copper, dubbed “hammer”, the size of a bathtub, to the commet at a velocity of 23,000 mph. The “hammer” is to expose the inner most materials of the comet so that scientists can discover the composition of it and also hopefully predict the comet’s past and origins.

If all goes well, an 820-pound copper “hammer” the size of a bathtub will separate from its mother ship and, 24 hours later, smash into the comet’s icy nucleus at about 23,000 mph.

“It’s bound to be a blast,” said Lucy McFadden, a University of Maryland astronomer and member of the Deep Impact team.

The high-speed impact will wallop the pickle-shaped comet with energy equivalent to 4.8 tons of TNT, said Michael A’Hearn, another UM astronomer and principal investigator on the $311 million mission.

Nobody’s sure what will happen next. There’s a small chance the impactor will blow the 2-½-mile-long comet to smithereens, or simply bore through it like a bullet through a snowball. More likely, scientists say, it will blast open a crater the size of a football stadium. It all depends on what Tempel 1 is made of, and how sturdily it is composed.

Which is exactly what scientists hope to learn.

The blast also will reveal the comet’s interior chemistry and nail down more precisely what conditions were like when it formed at the solar system’s birth more than 4.5 billion years ago.

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The European Space Agency has successfully navigated a ion propulsion vehicle into orbit around the moon. This is the first craft of such type to accomplish the feat.

The s-called SMART-1 spacecraft blasted off from Kourou, French Guiana, Sept. 27, 2003, on top of an Ariane 5 rocket, the Washington Post reported.

Since then its ion propulsion engine has been slowly moving the spacecraft by expelling positively charged atoms, or ions, of the gas xenon, accelerated by an electrical field inside the spacecraft’s engine.

The engine does not combust fuel; rather it splits atoms with electricity to get ions, accelerates them at high speed, and then ejects them, driving the spacecraft forward. SMART-1 generates its electricity by converting sunlight with outsize solar arrays that give the spacecraft a 45-foot wingspan.

Although ion propulsion does not generate much thrust, nothing slows it down in space so it constantly accelerates. Now that it has entered Moon orbit it will use the ion engine to slow down and study the lunar surface.

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Via Space.com, Astronomers have discovered another black hole near the center of the Milky Way. This finding proves earlier speculation that black holes come in three sizes, small, medium and large. This new one, named GCIRS 13E, happens to be a medium size black hole.

Intermediate mass black holes ought to exist, some theorists say, because they should have been the building blocks of supermassive black holes. A few should be left scattered around any respectable galaxy. But attempts to discover them — data suggest two others exist in our galaxy — have so far proved inconclusive.

Black holes can’t be seen, because everything that falls into them, including light, is trapped. But the swift motions of gas and stars near an otherwise invisible object allows astronomers to calculate that it’s a black hole and even to estimate its mass.

If the newfound object, catalogued as GCIRS 13E, is indeed a middleweight black hole, it is likely a rare variety, perhaps one of kind, that formed farther out and has been lured to the galactic center. It is now less than 1.5 light-years from the fringes of the known supermassive black hole. That’s much closer than our Sun is to the next nearest star.

Orbiting the presumed middleweight are seven stars, each of which in its prime was more than 40 times the mass of the Sun. Even as corpses they contain five to 10 solar masses. The whole setup is racing around the galactic center at 626,300 mph (280 kilometers per second).

Theory holds that these stars could not have formed in their present location, because the gravity of the nearby supermassive black hole wouldn’t have allowed a gas cloud to contract into a star, says study leader Jean-Pierre Maillard of the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris.

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Privately built and owned SpaceShipOne flew into suborbital space, yesterday, for the second time in five days, securing the $10 million Ansari X Prize. This time the craft was piloted by Brian Binnie, one of the four possible pilots for SpaceShipOne. (Brian Binnie·Mike Melvill·Doug Shane·Peter Siebold)

With pilot Brian Binnie at the controls, SpaceShipOne rocketed to a winning height of 367,442 feet (112 kilometers), setting a new altitude record for the craft and proving that private industry can build a viable vehicle for sending paying passengers to space.

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The X-Prize may forever change the way that we look at space travel and because of the competition, many creative space travel ideas have come about. So for this reason, the X-Prize will continue on as a yearly event called the X-Prize Cup

The X Prize, offered to the first team to get into space twice in a 14-day span, will now evolve into a regular competition called the X Prize Cup. In May, organizers selected New Mexico to permanently host the X Prize Cup.

More than two-dozen teams worldwide began projects in hopes of winning the original X Prize, and prize founder Peter Diamandis said the purpose of the Cup competition is to keep such groups going with a “grand prix of space.”

The first X Prize Cup will be held in 2005-06 at New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, a vast military installation. It will then move to an area 30 miles north of Las Cruces, where a facility dubbed the Southwest Regional Spaceport will be built.

Teams will compete in five different categories to win the overall cup: Fastest turnaround time between the first launch and second landing, maximum number of passengers per launch, total number of passengers during the competition, maximum altitude and fastest flight time.

Diamandis said it is envisioned that prizes will grow to the multimillion-dollar range. Organizers hope it becomes one of the largest space-related events on the calendar, drawing hundreds of thousands of people to cheer for their favorite team.

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As you all already know, SpaceShipOne reached space on its qualifying flight for the X-Prize, Wednesday. During that flight, SPaceShipOne was observed in nearly 2 dozen rolls during its ascent. The rolls initially concerned the ground crew but then they were merely downplayed as no special issue. Burt Rutan explains…

The first roll of SpaceShipOne occurred at a high true speed, about Mach 2.7 (2.7 times the speed of sound), Rutan advised. The aerodynamic loads on the vessel were quite low and were decreasing rapidly, “so the ship never saw any significant structural stresses.”

“The reason that there were so many rolls was because shortly after they started, Mike was approaching the extremities of the atmosphere,” Rutan stated. Nearly all of the 29 rolls were done in continuous fashion without aerodynamic damping — as opposed to how an aerobatic airplane performs rolls at a much lower altitude and within a much thicker atmosphere.

“In other words, they were more like space flight than they were like airplane flight. Thus, Mike could not damp the motions with his aerodynamic flight controls,” Rutan said.

Rutan said that pilot Melvill elected to wait until he feathered the boom-tail in space — a large tail section of the craft used to slow down during reentry — before using the reaction control system thrusters (RCS) to take out the roll rate of the vehicle.

“When he finally started to damp the rates he did so successfully and promptly. The RCS damping, to a stable attitude without significant angular rates was complete well before the ship reached apogee (337,600 feet, or 103 kilometers),” Rutan stated.

“That gave Mike time to relax, note his peak altitude, and then pick up a digital high-resolution camera and take some great photos out the windows. Those photos are now being considered for publication by a major magazine,” Rutan added.

“While we did not plan the rolls, we did get valuable engineering data on how well our RCS system works in space to damp high angular rates,” Rutan said. “We also got a further evaluation of our ‘Care-free Reentry’ capability, under a challenging test condition.”

Videos of the flight clearly show that the SpaceShipOne righted itself quickly and accurately without pilot input as it fell straight into the atmosphere, Rutan said. No other winged, horizontal-landing spaceship — the X-15, the Russian Buran, nor the Space Shuttle — has this capability, he said.

The report that Melvill defied a ground request to shut down the motor and let it run a few more seconds in order to reach the 100 kilometer altitude is not true, Rutan advised.

“While a Mission Control aerodynamist did discuss a possible abort a few seconds earlier, Mike immediately shut down the motor on the first advisory call over the radio. Mike himself was monitoring the apogee predictor during the initial rolls and was in the process of going for the thrust termination switch as he heard the advisory call,” Rutan said.

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SpaceShipOne is planned to make its second flight Monday morning. According to the SpaceShipOne team, no adjustments or tweaks are necessary, the craft is ready to fly.

After a successful first flight for clinching the X-prize, SpaceShipOne will make its second and prize winning flight Monday. Mike Melvill flew to a height of 103km (64 miles) on Wednesday’s trip experiencing one slight problem in navigation.

Leaving the craft, Mr Melvill told the relieved crowd that the flight had been “fun” and that he felt he had really “nailed it”.

Downplaying the dramatic flight, he said the craft had surprised him with its “little victory roll”, and he had shut down the engines 11 seconds prematurely as a result.

The craft rolled several times as it travelled nearly three times the speed of sound.

“Did I plan the roll? I’d like to say I did but I didn’t,” Mr Melvill explained.

“You’re extremely busy at that point. Probably I stepped on something too quickly and caused the roll but it’s nice to do a roll at the top of the climb.”

He also revealed that Burt Rutan, the aviation pioneer who designed the craft and who leads the SpaceShipOne team, had asked him to shut down the engine earlier.

But Mr Melvill had held on until he knew the craft would reach the required altitude for the X-Prize.

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SpaceShipOne’s second attempt takes place at California’s Mojave Airport at 0700PDT (1400GMT).

The moment we all have been waiting for, the SpaceShipOne team will make the first flight of two to meet the requirements of the X-Prize challenge. If all goes well, the event will be a single contributing factor to the revolutionizing of space travel. 1300GMT is the time to watch.

By focussing the efforts of private entrepreneurs, the X-Prize aims to break the monopoly of government organisations and jumpstart space tourism.

It appears the prize may have succeeded in this goal, with news on Monday that Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson would be offering commercial space flights in about three years using the technology employed by Rutan on SpaceShipOne.

The X-Prize will be give[sic] to the first team to send a three-person craft over 100km, and repeat the feat in the same ship within two weeks.

Rutan says he plans to make the two qualifying flights within four to seven days of each other. High winds are his major concern and could lead to delays.

A rival team, the Toronto-based GoldenPalace.com Space Program, which was formerly called the daVinci project, has put back its stab at the prize. The team had been scheduled for a first launch on 2 October.

Team leader Brian Feeney said the delay was necessary to allow more time to work with a pressure vessel for the Wild Fire spacecraft, as well a few other minor components.

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If you are at all curious as to how the Genesis probe will tell us anything about the sun and the solar system, I think I have the answer for you.

By looking at the ratio of oxygen-16, -17 and -18 isotopes in the solar particles, scientists should be able to test theories about how the sun and planets formed. Oxygen-16 is by far the most common. The Earth, moon, Mars and some meteorites all have slightly different ratios of the three isotopes.

The oxygen makeup of the sun, which contains about 99.9 percent of all the mass in the solar system, is much harder to measure. The Genesis spacecraft was built to answer that question by collecting particles blown out from the sun.

In a “Perspectives” article in the Sept. 17 issue of the journal Science, Yin describes new theories about local variations in oxygen isotopes in the vast dust and gas cloud around the young sun. Free oxygen was released when ultraviolet light hit carbon monoxide gas. Because oxygen-16 was so abundant, it was released mostly near the surface of the cloud, but breakdown of carbon monoxide containing less abundant oxygen-17 or -18 continued deeper into the cloud.

Free oxygen and hydrogen formed water that froze onto dust grains and eventually formed into planets, preserving the oxygen-17 and -18 signature, Yin said. The models predict that the Sun itself should have a much lower ratio of oxygen-17 and -18 to oxygen-16 than the rocky planets, a prediction that can be tested by Genesis and future missions.

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According to scientist, the remains of the crashed Genesis probe can still give us much information about the sun. Luckily, the whole mission needn’t be scraped.

SpaceDev, the company that crafted SpaceShipOne’s hybrid rocket engine has been contracted by NASA to build a suborbital craft for them. The proposed craft is called Dream Chaser and it would take off vertically, and carry up to three people to an altitude of 160 km (100 miles). If everything goes well, the spacecraft would be built by 2008, and would demonstrate a set of launch and flight technologies.

Check out the complete story. (more…)

According to the NIDS, sightings of huge, silent-running “Flying Triangles” have been steadily increasing from 1990 to 2004. There is no solid explanation for the sightings but many speculate that our government is behind it. In comparing the sightings to sightings in the past that turned out to be our military testing advanced aircraft, this doesn’t follow suit. Our military traditionally likes to test in relatively low populated areas and these sightings are in very dense population areas.

According to Colm Kelleher, NIDS Administrator, the newly completed quasi “meta-analysis” of Flying Triangles melds three major U.S. databases: NIDS, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and data collected by independent researcher, Larry Hatch, the creator and owner of one of the largest and most comprehensive UFO databases in the world.

Kelleher said, the analysis indicates that deployment of Flying Triangles is open, not covert, and involves low-flying, brightly lit aircraft routinely deployed over populated areas including cities and Interstate highways.

“However, I cannot say whether these are U.S. Air Force aircraft. We simply don’t know,” Kelleher told SPACE.com . “But it does not appear to be consistent with the covert patterns of deployment we saw with the F-117 and B-2 prior to their acknowledgement. This is open, even brazen,” he stated.

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I don’t know what to make of this but the ole guts tell me that it is our military hard at work again.

European scientist discovered a planet 14 times the size of Earth orbiting a star outside of our solar system. The find sets the record for the smallest planet found orbiting a solar type star.

The discovery was made using the highly sensitive Harps spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6m telescope at La Silla.

The planet was found to be orbiting the star mu Arae in the southern constellation of Altar. It is the second planet discovered round the star and completes a full revolution in 9.5 days.

Mu Arae was already known to harbour a Jupiter-sized planet with a 650-day orbital period. Previous observations hinted that the giant planet may have a smaller companion much further away.

According to Francois Bouchy, of the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory, “not only did the Harps measurements confirm what we previously believed to know about this star, but they also showed that an additional planet on a short orbit was present”.

This makes mu Arae a very exciting new planetary system.

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The fabled technology of science fiction has now come to reality, solar sail propulsion. A solar sail is a spacecraft without a rocket engine. It is pushed along directly by light particles from the Sun, reflecting off its giant sails. Because it carries no fuel and keeps accelerating over almost unlimited distances, it is the only technology now in existence that can one day take us to the stars. Yesterday, Aug. 9, Japan used a S-310 rocket fashioned with their thin film sail, 7.5 micrometers thickness, to test the idea. So far, success.

Source: Slashdot & ISAS

The Mercury Messenger probe blasted off for the inner most planet of our solar system, on Aug. 2. It has been more than 30 years since we have sent anything towards that planet. Scientist are hoping to get a better understanding about Mercury and through that hopefully get a better understanding about Earth, Venus, and Mars. One of the lingering questions astronomers have is “Why are the inner most planets so different than the outer most planets. Also of interest is the global magnetic field of Mercury for it is much like Earth’s, and Earth and Mercury are the only inner most planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) that have the global field. I find it fascinating that the planet closest to the sun can have ice with in it.

One of the most intriguing mysteries about Mercury, however, is the apparent presence of ice on its surface.

On a planet where surface temperatures at the equator can reach 450C (about 840F), any ice must stay out of the Sun, inside the shadowy interior of craters at the poles.

Radio telescopes on Earth have detected the signature of ice in craters at some shaded, high latitude regions, where the temperature could remain below -184C (-300F).

But some scientists caution that the “ice” could actually be super-frozen silica or something else.

Mercury Messenger carries seven scientific instruments to characterise the properties of its target planet. It will operate at room temperature behind a screen of heat-resistant ceramic fabric.

The 1.2-tonne spacecraft also carries a heat radiation system and will pass only briefly over the hottest regions of the planet, so limiting exposure to the intense heat bouncing back from Mercury’s broiling surface.

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It looks like we will have to wait at least 7 years before we can have any more data on the outstanding questions about Mercury.

This fall we shall see to X Prize teams go for the $10 million prize. Yesterday, July 27, Burt Rutan, leader of Scaled Composites of Mojave, California, has formally announced that they will make the attempts at the prize September 29. On the same day, Brian Feeney, leader of the Canadian da Vinci Project, reported that they would unveil their craft, a balloon-lofted Wild Fire rocket, to the public August 5, and will make their attempts at the prize this fall. An actual date wasn’t given for the da Vinci Project’s prize attempts but I would speculate that it would have to be on the same day as Scaled Composites’ attempt or pretty damn near it.

The space race is actually turning out to be a race. We should expect to see some exciting things in the near future.

Source: Space.com

NASA has made more archived photos availble for viewing online. There are a few very spectacular shots in the bunch but a majority of the images are only special to the hardcore scientist. There are also some close-ups of the technology that got them to the moon. I know that this was cutting edge technology in the time but now to look at it makes me wonder how they ever made it up there. Do take a look and tell me whether I crazy or not.

NASA’s Apollo Archive Image Gallery

Thanks Slashdot

A new idea has come up for the use of carbon microfibers that may help our abilities to create more efficient spacecraft. LSU Assistant Professor David Young and Professors Phil Adams and Roy Goodrich have found a way to synthesize a layer of superconductor directly onto tiny carbon fibers. With this technique they hope to be able to fashion extremely strong magnets that are comparatively lighter than their iron counterparts.

According to Young, their research attracted the program’s attention because the wires can be wound into a coil to create a large magnetic field.

“If we can make a new magnet that does the same job as a conventional one, they are very interested,” he said. “In space travel, magnets could be used to confine plasma for power generation. Magnets can also be used to expel plasma as a means of propulsion, so the theory is that they could be used to ‘drive’ spacecrafts.”

He explained that the magnets made out of the tiny wire are mostly carbon, and thus very lightweight and easy to get into orbit, while heavier items – such as normal high-power magnets – are much more expensive to send into space.

Young said that the superconductivity of the wires might offer other financial benefits as well.

“Because it is a superconductor, there is no loss of electricity,” he said. “Therefore, once a current is flowing in a magnet, it doesn’t cost you anything to keep it there.”

A superconductor, Young explained, is a material that, when cooled below some characteristic temperature, can transport an electric current without any loss of energy. In other words, he says, it has no electrical resistance.

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The scientist have so far been able to make a superconductive wire out of a magnesium carbon nickel compound but it doesn’t operate at the ideal temperatures of space. They will try other compounds until they succeed.

Scaled Composites choose Mike Melvill to be the pilot of SpaceShipOne for it first attempt at reaching space tomorrow. By the looks of his flight experience, they made a wise choice.

So far, spectators are already camped out to see SpaceShipOne make history. The White Knight, with SpaceShipOne attached to its underside, will lift off at 6:30 a.m. with hopes of reaching Space, 62 miles above the Earth. If the flight plan is accomplished, this will be the first time a non-governmentally funded project has flown a space craft to space.

If SpaceShipOne is successful, Rutan and his Scaled Composites development company will use the craft to make a run at the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a formal competition intended to spur commercial development of spaceflight.

White Knight, carrying the rocket plane slung under its belly, was to scheduled for a 6:30 a.m. PDT takeoff, followed by a climb to 50,000 feet, where it would release SpaceShipOne about 7:30 a.m.

SpaceShipOne’s pilot, flying solo, would then ignite the rocket and pull up into an 80-second powered climb. After the rocket motor shuts down, the craft is to coast up to a target altitude of 62 miles above the Earth, then re-enter the atmosphere and glide for 15 to 20 minutes to a landing back at Mojave.

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To date, an excess of $20 million have been invested in the SpaceShipOne project, quite a bit more than the prize for winning the X Prize challenge. The real money will come from the contracts to manufacture the winning ships design. In order to win the challenge the contestant must meet a few criteria.

To win the prize, a privately financed spacecraft capable of carrying three people must climb to 62 miles and land safely, then repeat the feat within two weeks.

The three-seat requirement demonstrates the capacity for paying customers, and the quick turnaround between flights demonstrates reusability and reliability.

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This flight will be considered just another test for the stated conditions will not be met. Currently, there is no planned course for the SpaceShipOne team if the test is a success. So if they are successful, then we should expect to see at least two more flights in the upcoming months.

Read more about the X Prize competition. (more…)

Artist rendition of a terraformed Mars. Credit: CalTech

Has our science evolved to the point in which we can start planning to terraform Mars?

Terraforming was once solely the province of science fiction. In the 1930s, Olaf Stapledon wrote of electrolyzing a global sea on Venus in order to prepare it for human habitation in “Last and First Men.” Jack Williamson coined the term “terraforming” in the 1940s in a series of short stories. And in 1951, Arthur C. Clarke gave the concept wide exposure with his novel, “The Sands of Mars.” Kim Stanley Robinson picked up the terraforming torch in the 1990s with his epic trilogy - “Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.”

Scientists began to think seriously about terraforming in the 1960s, when Carl Sagan published several articles dealing with the possibility of terraforming Venus. Terraforming Mars has been the major subject of research of two of our panelists tonight, Dr. Chris McKay and Dr. Jim Kasting, since the 1970s.

So the question is, can we terraform Mars? How would we do it, why would do it, when we do it, and should we do it?

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Two main hurtles will have to be made in order to even start thinking about terraforming Mars; 1.)We need to be able to make oxygen, and 2.) We will have to raise the temperature of the planet from its normal average temperature of about minus sixty degrees Celsius (or minus 166 F). We are experiencing global warming on Earth and we know how to produce that. Creating oxygen would be the hard part, vast amounts of water might be the key ingredient needed to create it.

RedNova’s article has several viewpoints on whether it can be done, as well as if we should even try to do so. Once we run out of room here on Earth, terraforming may be an option, but don’t worry about this until you here it come up on the senate floor. Do read the article though.