The DARWIN Mission: Picking the Right Star

by | May 4, 2005 | | 0 Comments

The European Space Agency's DARWIN mission is all about detecting Earth-like planets, as well as analyzing their atmospheres and determining their ability to sustain life. With the mission currently in its 'definition' phase, where parameters are determined and designs weighed, Lisa Kaltenegger (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) has made her Ph.D work in astrophysics available to interested scientists. Written for Karl Franzens University in Graz, Kaltenegger's study presents her work with the DARWIN team at the European Space Agency. Here you'll find an evaluation of alternative designs and mission targets; the section on defining the features of a habitable world alone is worth the download of this enormous PDF file. Scheduled for launch some time after 2014, DARWIN is a space-based interferometer designed to operate by pooling the data from free-flying craft working in tandem. At the heart of Kaltenegger's work is a discussion of target star selection for DARWIN. As...

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Life-Bearing Meteorites?

by | May 3, 2005 | | 1 Comment

The idea that rocks may travel between planets is now widely accepted. But can rocks or other planetary ejecta wander between solar systems? A new paper examines this hypothesis, concluding that rocky materials and even life-bearing meteorites may make their way from one planetary system to the next. But here's the catch: this transfer is only likely between stars in young stellar groups and clusters, where the distances and relative velocities between stars are low. The authors -- the University of Michigan's Fred C. Adams and Princeton's David N. Spergel -- note that most stars occur in binary systems, making the chance of such transfer that much higher. The operative term is 'lithopanspermia,' the notion that life travels between worlds aboard meteorites. It is a variation on the older panspermia theory, which argued that life arrived directly from space. The concept dates back as far as Anaxagoras (5th Century B.C.) and was championed by Lord Kelvin, who declared in 1871, "...we...

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Measuring the Pioneer Anomaly

by | May 2, 2005 | , | 4 Comments

The so-called 'Pioneer Effect' continues to trigger study. Both Pioneer 10 and 11, as discussed in these pages back in November, have shown changes in their expected trajectories since they moved 20 AU beyond the Sun. In fact, since 1980 radio signals from the Pioneers have been slowly shifting to shorter wavelengths, which seems to imply a slight but interesting deceleration. This has led to at least one proposal for a mission to investigate the Pioneer effect. Both Galileo and Ulysses data have been examined for evidence of a similar effect; while Galileo's data were too limited for use, Ulysses did show a provocative, though extremely slight, change to its own acceleration (though at a much smaller distance from the Sun). Now a new paper notes the difficulties in measuring the Pioneer anomaly, and discusses a way of using asteroids and comets to measure gravitational effects in the outer Solar System. The paper is by computer scientists Gary Page and John Wallin (George Mason...

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Charter

In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).

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