Nasa opens Exoplanet Travel Bureau for the curious

Nasa’s new collection of exoplanet art allows for extra-solar exploration within your imagination

Poster art depicting a visit to the exoplanet lava world 55 Cancri 3e (Nasa)

Booking a private trip to space remains the province of billionaire and millionaires, and that’s just to reach Earth orbit — going to visit, say, a relatively nearby exoplanet is not a trip that money can buy.

Take Trappist 1e, an Earth-like exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of its star just more than 39 light years from Earth. Voyager 1, currently the most distant human-made object and traveling at around 35,000 miles per hour, will take more than 40,000 years to travel less than half that distance.

But you needn’t wait for the advent of warp drive to take a tour of the imagination of exoplanets. Nasa now offers the Exoplanet Travel Bureau, a collection of guided visual tours of Earth-like exoplanets like Trappist 1e, as well as the more exotic worlds, such as the lava planet 55 Cancri e, all of which come with downloadable poster art.

“Skies sparkle above a never-ending ocean of Lava,” the 55 Cancri e poster reads.

You can also download line drawing versions of the poster for coloring in yourself.

Between Nasa’s Kepler and Tess spacecraft, scientists have discovered more than 5,000 worlds beyond our Solar System, some of which might one day prove to be habitable to harbor alien life.

Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope, the first images from which will be made public on 12 July, will give scientists the tools they need to begin studying some of these worlds in more detail, getting us closer to answering the question of weather Earth life is alone in the universe.