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alpha centauri

The Solar Sail in Context

July 22, 2010

The final day of the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing (ISSS 2010) kicks off this morning with Roman Kezerashvili (City University of New York) discussing solar sail missions as a way of testing fundamental physics. Last year in Aosta I listened with fascination as Kezerashvili discussed close solar passes (‘Sundiver’ missions) that could approach [...]

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Terrestrial Planet Hunt: Nulling Out Starlight

June 24, 2010

Combining the assets of multiple telescopes in the technique known as interferometry has a long pedigree. Using a cluster of small telescopes rather than a single gigantic one is a way to achieve high resolution at sharply lower costs. Take a look at this list of astronomical interferometers working from the visible to the infrared [...]

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The Epsilon Eridani Factor

June 17, 2010

When I was a kid, interstellar destinations were sharply defined. It seemed obvious that you didn’t even consider Alpha Centauri, because a double-star primary system surely wouldn’t allow stable planetary orbits. So you looked around for single stars. Moreover, these should be stars a lot like the Sun, so that when Frank Drake began SETI [...]

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Oort Finding: Many Comets From Other Stars

June 11, 2010

Here’s something to put the cap on a scintillating week in space science. It’s from Hal Levison (SwRI), who has led an international team in computer simulations focusing on our Sun’s earliest days. It turns out that our older assumption that the Oort cloud of comets surrounding the Sun came from the Sun’s protoplanetary disk [...]

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Manned Missions to the Outer System

June 3, 2010

Ralph McNutt’s contributions to interstellar mission studies are long-term and ongoing. We’ve looked at the Innovative Interstellar Explorer concept he has been studying at the Applied Physics Laboratory (Johns Hopkins), but IIE itself rose out of earlier design studies for a spacecraft that would penetrate the heliopause to reach true interstellar space. One possibility for [...]

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The Milky Way from Outside

May 27, 2010

We sometimes forget the conditions under which great images get made. A few years back, in one of the earliest posts on his systemic site, Greg Laughlin (UC-Santa Cruz) showed the image you see below, a famous shot made by the Hubble telescope of the ‘Sombrero Galaxy,’ M104. It’s obvious why this image is a [...]

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WISE: First Survey Ends in July

May 26, 2010

What a glorious image WISE has given us. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer has finished three-quarters of its infrared map of the entire sky, with the final images scheduled for July, after which time the spacecraft will spend three months on a second survey before its solid-hydrogen coolant (needed to keep its infrared detectors chilled) [...]

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Three Views of Icarus

May 18, 2010

Two versions of Icarus are on my mind today. Well, actually three. The first is the Japanese solar sail/solar cell hybrid called IKAROS, scheduled for launch today but scrubbed because of the weather at Tanegashima. The new launch date is Thursday May 20 at 2158 UTC (1758 EDT). IKAROS will piggyback aboard the JAXA H-2A [...]

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Life’s Adaptations Among the Stars

May 14, 2010

Gliese 581 d seems to be emerging as the exoplanet to talk about in terms of possible life, at least for now. You’ll recall that the initial furor was all about Gl 581 c, but that world now looks to be more Venus-like than anything else, while Gl 581 d may just skirt the outer [...]

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Warm ‘Saturns’ and Their Moons

May 11, 2010

Recent work from the Lick-Carnegie team has found that the M-dwarf HIP 57050 is orbited by a Saturn-mass world with an orbital period of 41.4 days. What catches the eye about this exoplanet is its temperature, some 230 kelvin or -43 degrees Celsius, warm enough to place it in the habitable zone of the star. [...]

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