Outer Solar System

After Curiosity (whew!), Thoughts on Enceladus

August 6, 2012

At $2.5 billion, NASA’s Curiosity rover didn’t cost quite as much as Cassini ($3 billion), but what a relief to Solar System exploration both near and far to have it safely down at Gale Crater. This Reuters story tells me that 79 different pyrotechnic detonations were needed to release ballast weights, open the parachute, separate [...]

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Pluto: Moons, Debris and New Horizons

July 13, 2012

When I was a boy, I became fascinated early on with the outer planets. The further out, the better as far as I was concerned, and as you might imagine, I had a special fascination with Pluto. In the summer, I used to haunt the library in the nearby suburb of Kirkwood (in St. Louis, [...]

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Voyager 1 Nearing Interstellar Space

June 18, 2012

It should come as no surprise to anyone who follows Centauri Dreams that I am a great admirer of Ed Stone, the former director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (from 1991 to 2001) and more than any single scientist, the public face of many of our missions to the outer Solar System. Stone’s work on [...]

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Titan’s Lakes and the Drive to Explore

June 15, 2012

What is it that makes us want the stars? Surely there are philosophical reasons that push us into the universe, and in his book Quest: The Essence of Humanity (2004), Charles Pasternak delves into ‘questing’ as a drive embedded in the species. But alongside a need to explore I can see two other drivers. One [...]

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Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer

May 8, 2012

Mars has always been a tempting destination because of the possibility of life. Thus the fascination of Schiaparelli’s ‘canals,’ and Percival Lowell’s fixation on chimerical lines in the sand. But look what’s happened to the question of life elsewhere in the Solar System. We’ve gone from invaders from Mars and a possibly tropical Venus — [...]

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Our First Galactic Ambassador

April 30, 2012

by Larry Klaes Larry Klaes is a long-time Centauri Dreams contributor, a practitioner of the Tau Zero Foundation and a serious devotee of space exploration and its history. Here he gives us a look at the Pioneer probes that first took us to the outer Solar System, journeys that foreshadowed the later exploits of the [...]

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Titan’s Atmosphere Under Scrutiny

April 26, 2012

Of all the probe targets in the outer Solar System, Titan is in many ways the most provocative. Not long ago we looked at two concepts — Titan Mare Explorer (TiME) and AVIATR — that would get instruments back into Titan’s atmosphere and, in the case of TiME, onto one of its northern seas. The [...]

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Splashdown on Titan?

April 10, 2012

Getting to the stars may involve a sudden breakthrough — we can’t rule out disruptive technologies, nor can we predict them — but my guess is that interstellar flight is going to be a longer, more gradual process. I can see a sort of tidal expansion into the outer system, forays to Mars, for example, [...]

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Reasons for a Human Future in Space

April 9, 2012

I closed last week with two posts about the AVIATR mission, an unmanned airplane that could be sent to Titan to roam its skies for a year of aerial research. It’s a measure of Titan’s desirability as a destination that it has elicited so many mission proposals, and I want to get into the Titan [...]

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A Closer Look at the Titan Airplane

April 6, 2012

Yesterday’s discussion of the AVIATR mission to Titan inevitably brought up another prominent Titan mission concept: Titan Mare Explorer (TiME). I’ll have more to say about this one next week, as today I want to continue talking about AVIATR, but you can once again see how Titan enthralls us with its ‘Earth-like’ aspects. Need a [...]

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