Title: Final Project - Part 4
Course: ASTRON103: The Evolving Universe: Stars, Galaxies, and Cosmology (001) DHH SU18 > Section: Week 8

Hunt for a New Home

The time has come for us to begin making the steps to leave our beloved Earth. We must find a new planet around another star that can host a new colony of humans and life!

For this project, you will go through the steps of planning for a new exoplanet colony, starting from identifying an ideal stellar type, analyzing their light curves for transiting planets, determining properties of these planets to find a suitable Earth-like counterpart, and planning a journey of first explorers.

This project is slightly different from your previous two in that each week, you will have to complete and submit one new element. In total there will be 4 parts to this project spread out over 4 weeks.

Part 4

This part of the project is due at the end of Week 8 on Sunday, August 12th at 11:59PM.

You've now reached the final stage of this final project. You have hopefully determined that the planet around the G2 V Star, Niav, hosts a planet that exists within the habitable zone for that star!

In reality, the planet you have found is actually a real exoplanet called Kepler-452b.

You should take a look at this press release < https://www.nasa.gov/keplerbriefing0723 > or this wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-452b > for some more information on this real exoplanet that was discovered in 2015.

This week, your writing assignment and discussion will be closely tied to your project. You will be putting together a travel plan, brainstorming how you might get a colony to this planet and how long it will take for your writing assignment. You will put together an initial crew that will compose the starting colony for your discussion. And you will design a travel pamphlet / brochure to advertise this planet and show off its potential as a new home for humans.

Tasks

1. Research the Kepler-452 system, and in particular, the Kepler-452b exoplanet.
  1. To do this, look over the press release linked above first, then try looking for other resources on the internet.
2. Submit your writing assignment
3. Participate in this week's discussion
4. Create a creative pamphlet or brochure to advertise this exoplanet.
  1. This is meant to be a free-form, creative assignment so there is no template provided. One option is to use powerpoint/google slides to create your pamphlet on.
  2. Your pamphlet should have some images or drawings, the name of the planet and star, and some kind of catchy slogan or phrase about this planet.
  3. As inspiration, here are a few posters that were made by NASA to advertise some exoplanets in the past. You don't need to make a professional piece like these, but we want you to get as creative as possible and design something fun!
    1. https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worlds/exoplanet-travel-bureau/