Administrative

A New Year Awaits

December 31, 2012

I’ve gotten so used to thinking ‘maybe this will be the year when the first Alpha Centauri planet is discovered’ that I almost said it again about 2013. Fortunately, we already have a (still unconfirmed) Centauri B b, and the latest I’ve heard is that it may take five years or so before we can [...]

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Best Wishes for a Stellar Holiday

December 24, 2012

Martin Beech has written a superb summary of Alpha Centauri studies for the Royal Astronomical Society’s journal Astronomy and Geophysics, covering recent work up to and including the discovery of planet candidate Centauri B b. A fine holiday gift! I had been hoping to write it up this morning, but Christmas events, not least of [...]

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Correction re WISE

April 2, 2012

Last week I reported on information from a source on the WISE mission that no new red dwarfs had yet been discovered out to a distance of 10 light years. This past weekend I received an email from my source apologizing for mis-typing. He had meant to say no brown dwarfs — not red dwarfs [...]

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A Break for the Holidays

December 23, 2011

Best holiday wishes to all from Centauri Dreams. I’m now going on an abbreviated schedule, with no post today or on Monday. I’ll follow the same pattern next week as we close in on the New Year. The next regular post, then, will appear Tuesday December 27, and we’ll see what interesting news items accumulate [...]

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A Brief Summer Break

July 18, 2011

It hasn’t escaped my attention that in the past seven years, I’ve taken no more than a couple of days off at a time from writing Centauri Dreams posts. Now that the doldrums of summer are here in the northern hemisphere, it seems a good time to take a somewhat longer break. Not that I’ll [...]

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Deadline Reminders: NASA Solicitations

March 21, 2011

Tau Zero practitioners should be aware that deadlines on the following solicitations are approaching quickly: (1) NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) – Early Stage Innovation DEADLINE for Notices of Intent: 29-March-2011 (Just 7 workdays away) DEADLINE for Proposals: 02-May-2011 (2) NASA Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): Technology Demonstration Missions (TDM) DEADLINE for Notices of Intent: 31-March-2011 [...]

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Holding for Later Today

June 10, 2010

Update: As of 1611 UTC, the IKAROS blog is reporting “IKAROS state has been confirmed to be good.” More images and data are in the works, but we’re not likely to see anything until tomorrow. It’s getting late in Japan (2306 JST as I write, or 1406 UTC), and although a JAXA tweet promised new [...]

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Server Problems Implode Weekend

April 18, 2009

And I thought I was going to more or less take the weekend off, maybe finishing up a second reading of Rare Earth and enjoying some of the delightful spring weather that has taken hold around here. So much for that. Server issues caused this site to be transferred to a new server, which subsequently [...]

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A Brief Delay

September 16, 2008

Several interesting items in the news today but I won’t be able to get to them, try as I might. I’m just coming off surgery yesterday (minor), and although I’m otherwise fine, the pain medication I’m taking makes me so groggy that I hesitate to post. So bear with me until tomorrow, when I should [...]

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New Year’s Greetings

December 31, 2007

Best wishes to all for a wonderful 2008, and thanks beyond the telling to the numerous readers who participated in our discussions in the year past. There will be no post on New Year’s day, but we’ll get back to the normal schedule on the afternoon of January 2. Have a wonderful holiday.

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