P1000170

I’m just in from an early morning walk around the streets of Aosta, enjoying a brisk spring morning. The streets at this hour are largely empty and the Sun lights the nearby peaks. We have a heavy session of papers on this last day of the conference, and we had an even longer day yesterday, followed by my public lecture at the Aosta town hall last night. Following the talk, Giancarlo Genta, his lovely wife Franca, and Guido Cossard, the assessore of cultural affairs (who turns out to be an astronomy buff and something of an expert on archaeoastronomy), took me on a walk around town looking at medieval and Roman sites. We wound up having a late night beer and I didn’t get in until 1:30.

P1000174

This is a travel day, as I change hotels in preparation for tomorrow’s flight from Milan. So I’m going to hold any of the discussion about the papers yesterday, which were so rich that I’d prefer to get into them when I have more than a few minutes. In particular, the solar sail sessions opened my eyes to a signficant problem in sail missions. Run a sundiver mission near the huge gravity well of our star and you experience effects including frame-dragging and other consequences of General Relativity that can have a serious impact on where your sail winds up going. The effect is particularly noticeable for fast, long missions and hence of interest to us here. More on this when I can — I hope I’ll have a good Internet connection in Milan.