by Paul Gilster | Aug 14, 2013 | Culture and Society |
Starship Congress, toward which I am headed as you read this, begins on Thursday. In the nine years and counting that I’ve been writing Centauri Dreams, I’ve been happy to see how many conferences have taken to archiving or, even better, streaming their proceedings so that those who can’t attend can follow along. Live streaming from Starship Congress will be available here, according to Icarus Interstellar. And if you’re a Twitter person, the tag for the conference is to be #starshipcon, which should be an active place to watch. Further information here.
I’m posting this automatically because today is a travel day, and another conference brings up the inevitable question about how best to cover it. I’ve tried every method in the book but have learned that so-called ‘live blogging’ just doesn’t work, at least for me. I can crank out constant updates but I wind up with a muddled notion of the big picture and my notes aren’t as detailed as I would like. I tried to tweet my way through the last 100 Year Starship Symposium, but that was worse, leaving me with a series of snippets that were hard to reconstruct into a whole.
So I plan to do in Dallas what I did last February in Huntsville (at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop), namely, to put my time and attention into note-taking to get as accurate and thorough a picture of as many presentations as I can. I’ll then write these up during the week following the event, with notes spread before me and the perspective that an overview brings. If you follow me on Twitter, I’ll still be operating as @centauri_dreams, and if I can post a few photos here on the site I’ll do so, but most of my effort for the rest of the week will be note-taking.
It’s going to be a packed schedule, but I’ll also try to keep up with comment moderation on Centauri Dreams. Looking forward to seeing many of you in Dallas!
by Paul Gilster | Aug 13, 2013 | Uncategorized |
As we saw last week, touching down on Europa is going to be a tricky maneuver, at least based on the surface mapping we have so far, where boulders show up all the way down to the limits of resolution. That’s why we need better imagery from the moon, a major motivation for the proposed Europa Clipper. Titan poses far fewer problems. Its thick atmosphere allowed the Huygens probe to land softly after a long, slow descent by parachute. Proposals for Titan missions have included boats to explore its lakes (Titan Mare Explorer) and airborne laboratories to soar through its skies (AVIATR: Aerial Vehicle for In-situ and Airborne Titan Reconnaissance).
The SETI Institute, working with NASA, has been testing the lake option at Laguna Negra, a lake in the Chilean Andes, in a project called Planetary Lake Lander (PLL). The idea is to develop the kind of autonomous hardware we’ll need to explore Titan from the surface. But PLL is a dual-purpose mission that also studies the watershed of Chile’s Echaurren Glacier, a freshwater source for millions that is rapidly disappearing. The expertise the researchers bring to the lake thus becomes useful not only in modeling a highly changeable environment on Titan but also in providing real-time data on the impact of deglaciation on terrestrial lake habitats and biology.
Image: The NASA Lake Lander robots lands on Titan’s lake in an artist’s imagining. Credit: NASA/JPL.
The prototype robot has been operational since 2011, charting the lake’s depth and making a variety of scientific measurements. A report from Laguna Negra by one of the team members last December describes testing the PLL on a three-kilometer sail across the lake in a journey that took eight hours, with data from the lander being sent to NASA Ames as it would be on a real mission, though via orbiting communications satellites rather than the Deep Space Network. A real mission would also cope with bandwidth restrictions not being mimicked in this work.
This National Geographic article notes that the current PLL unit is too heavy to ever make it into space, but astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol, who leads the lander’s science team, likens the work to where the Mars rover teams were ten to fifteen years ago, when their prototypes were undergoing tests in the desert. PLL has been at Laguna Negra conducting unsupervised operations through the Chilean winter, but the researchers plan to return to work on the robot’s sensors and problem-solving capabilities, crucial in an environment where communications times run in hours in both directions. Autonomous operations are obviously an essential. “We’re not only building a robot, but a new generation of robots,” says Cabrol. “The new generation will not just be sitting around waiting for us to tell them what to do.”
A Titan lake lander would float across the surface of a large Titan lake like Kraken Mare or Ligeia Mare, measuring winds, waves and changes in the weather. Because it is the only other body in the Solar System known to have stable liquid on its surface, Titan’s lake explorations can be readily modeled on Earth. And in terms of getting down safely, it compares well with Mars, as the PLL team noted in a post last year:
The Earth’s surface is shaped by plate tectonics, so we have distinctive low ocean basins and higher terrain on the continents. Mars and Titan are single plate planets, and so have a more uniform distribution of topography. However, Mars, more like Earth, has had a lot of volcanic and tectonic activity, that has formed the tallest volcano in the solar system (Olympus Mons) as well as very deep and large canyons (Valles Marineris). Titan has a lot of erosion from its methane rainfall and little tectonic and volcanic activity, and so has very low topography. Topography is challenge of you are trying to land a rover, so the Curiosity rover had a radar to make sure the landing site was safe. That is certainly an advantage of landing on a lake on Titan- a very flat and safe surface!
From an astrobiological perspective, a Titan lake lander could tell us much about the complex chemistry on the moon. PLL lead engineer Trey Smith, discussing Titan’s hydrocarbon atmosphere and lakes, adds that interesting organic chemistry is probably happening on the surface: “No living thing we know of on Earth could survive on Titan,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some other exotic form of life there.” Life’s chances at -180 Celsius may be hard to calculate, but that’s one good reason to get an instrument package back to Titan, whether airborne or afloat. Whichever option we use, the views should be spectacular.
by Paul Gilster | Aug 12, 2013 | Culture and Society |
As we approach Starship Congress in Dallas, the Institute for Interstellar Studies has announced the creation of the Alpha Centauri Prize Awards, the first of which will be the ‘Progenitor Award,’ to be bestowed at this year’s Starship Congress on August 18. The winner will receive a certificate and $500 cash award donated by Icarus Interstellar, the organization behind the Dallas meetings. The winner is to be chosen from among those presenting at the Starship Congress.
The Dallas gathering that convenes this Thursday will be the third major interstellar conference so far this year, following conclaves in Huntsville (Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop), San Diego (Starship Century) and preceding September’s 100 Year Starship Symposium. In addition, a conference on The Philosophy of the Starship was held by I4IS in London in May. In that suddenly quickened climate for interstellar studies the judges for the Alpha Centauri Prize Progenitor Award are being asked to make their selections based on originality, direct relevance to interstellar flight, and the potential of the work to be viable both technologically and economically in this century.
Addendum: Kelvin Long writes to tell me that another Starship Century conference will take place in London this October, along with a conference on Project Icarus. More on these when I have further information.
The Progenitor Award is the first of what is to become a series of awards in deep space design. Subsequent awards are, according to an email from I4IS executive director Kelvin Long, to be launched over the next two years. The intent is to provide incentives for design work of relevance to interstellar flight. A recent post on the Institute for Interstellar Studies website offers this:
We will set technical standards for physicists, engineers, biologists and scientists to reach for, harnessing the skills of old, and building the skills of new. We will foster and encourage pathways to new design concepts which solve old problems, and generate insights into new ones…
As explained in the I4IS post, the larger motivation is to adopt the lessons learned in the Ansari X-Prize competition to spur innovation and create technical developments in interstellar research. Here the future competitions become ambitious indeed, encompassing design studies by international teams of 6-10 designers, with each team submitting a final report to a judging panel after a development time of one year, and recurrent competitions taking place every two to three years. The plan is to drive design work in a host of projected technologies:
The Alpha Centauri Prize would be an international competition that has the function of incentivizing research, contributing technical knowledge, developing designer capability whilst inspiring the public towards the vision of interstellar flight. It is one of the best ways to advance the prospects for interstellar travel, and to have separate design studies, which could be derived, iterated and improved. Over time, the concept would be worked upon by future generations and ultimately lead to a direct design blue print for an interstellar probe after several decades of running. Like the BIS/Icarus Interstellar Project Icarus and the soon to be announced I4IS Project Dragonfly, it is the hope that other teams around the world would be assembled to work on specific proposals investigated historically such as NERVA, Starwisp, Vista, Longshot, AIMStar, Orion or one of the many others.
Long and Icarus Interstellar’s Richard Obousy created Project Icarus in 2009 as both a continuation and redefinition of the 1970s era Project Daedalus. The competition foreseen in the Alpha Centauri Prize, unlike Icarus, does not focus on a single propulsion system but considers all options from solar sails to antimatter, eschewing redesigns of historical work to create what the site describes as ‘new and innovative design concepts.’ I4IS envisions competitions taking place every two to three years to increase the technological readiness of different propulsion schemes, with eventual cash prizes in the $10,000 to $100,000 range:
After running the competition for two decades we may find that what may emerge is not a single choice for going to the stars in the coming centuries, but instead a realization that it is a combination of approaches with highly optimized engineering designs that will be the way to go. This may suggest hybrid propulsion schemes and could for example be along the lines of a fusion-based drive with anti-proton catalyzed reactions but using a nuclear electric engine for supplementary power and perhaps a solar sail and MagSail for solar system escape or upon arrival. From the two decades of research will develop reliable engineering studies, practical progress of the technology and several clear front runner designs to focus initially divergent research options towards the proper investment into the clear front runner designs by a process of gradual down select.
Competitions have proven their worth in aviation and aerospace (think Lindbergh and Burt Rutan), but in those cases we were dealing with existing or near-term technology and building hardware. What I4IS intends with the Alpha Centauri Prize is to turn the same principles to work at design studies that will surely out-run present-day engineering. It’s an idea that worked with the volunteer teams that have designed Daedalus and are now designing Project Icarus. With government funding all but non-existent on most of these concepts, it’s heartening to think that philanthropic alternatives can be found to push studies across the spectrum of propulsion options. A torrent of research papers would be a welcome outcome of such competitions.
by Paul Gilster | Aug 9, 2013 | Outer Solar System |
A paper just published online by the journal Astrobiology examines what a Europa lander could accomplish on the surface. It’s part of the process of future mission building even if that future is deeply uncertain — we’re a long way from a Europa lander, and funding even a far less demanding flyby mission is problematic in the current environment. But Robert Pappalardo, lead author of the study at JPL, explains the rationale for a close-up study of the icy world:
“If one day humans send a robotic lander to the surface of Europa, we need to know what to look for and what tools it should carry. There is still a lot of preparation that is needed before we could land on Europa, but studies like these will help us focus on the technologies required to get us there, and on the data needed to help us scout out possible landing locations. Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to have life today, and a landed mission would be the best way to search for signs of life.”
The image below, which offers a pole-to-pole view of Europa by overlaying higher resolution mosaics over a lower resolution global view obtained during Galileo flybys, shows the vivid linear features (lineae) whose color has been enhanced to highlight the red markings associated with many of them. Some of these features may well have biomarkers near them that have reached the surface from the global ocean beneath. Modeling their formation presents the possibility of fracturing caused by processes in the ice shell itself, with some models suggestive of liquids pushing through the fractures to form the numerous ridges we see on the surface. It’s precisely here that we could find exchanges of material between the surface, the icy shell and the ocean.
Image: The terrain in this view stretches from the side of Europa that always trails in its orbit at left (west), to the side that faces away from Jupiter at right (east). In addition to the lineae, the regional-scale images contain many interesting features, including lenticulae (small spots), chaos terrain, maculae (large spots), and the unusual bright band known as Agenor Linea in the south. The mosaic was constructed from individual images obtained by the Solid State Imaging (SSI) system on NASA’s Galileo spacecraft during six flybys of Europa between 1996 and 1999. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona.
Radiation is obviously a factor near Europa, one that will have a huge impact on hardening a lander for survival but also on choosing the most likely landing site. The paper points out that many of the darkest features on the moon also seem to be the youngest and are therefore likely to be less processed by radiation. The team, whose members were drawn from a number of NASA centers and universities, made lower radiation regions a priority for choosing sites where a lander would operate.
Europa’s so-called ‘chaos’ regions — marked by jumbles of ridges, plains and cracks — are the most likely targets because of their apparently young age and their associated dark plains that may consist of frozen fluid from the ocean. The image of suggested landing sites below is drawn from the paper, with associated caption.
Image: Candidate landing sites on Europa. Top: Blue contours show radiation intensity on Europa’s surface, as labeled with the geographic extent to which electrons of a given energy affect the surface and how deeply they penetrate (excluding the effects of secondary particles)… Candidate landing sites are indicated by red circles on the global map and shown in regional scale images at bottom. Left: Dark plains associated with chaos in the Galileo E25 region. Center: The chaos terrains Thera and Thrace Maculae. Right: Dark chaotic terrain in the Galileo E17 regional mosaic. Each candidate site satisfies the criteria of low-albedo, youthful material that appears to have originated from the subsurface and is outside the most intense radiation regions on the satellite. Credit: Pappalardo et al. (full citation below).
Two candidates stand out: “Thera and Thrace Maculae present very attractive targets for exploration on the basis of their low albedo, relatively young age (they have disrupted the preexisting terrain), and likely endogenic origin. It has been suggested that water may exist beneath Thera Macula today.” The problem is that we don’t have a view of Europa’s surface detailed enough to make many further inferences without more data from reconnaissance missions. This is going to be one tough place to touch down on safely, as the paper makes clear:
The highest-resolution images of Europa’s surface currently available are the handful acquired by the Galileo spacecraft with resolutions that range from 6 to 12?m/pixel. These show a surface that is rough down to the pixel level, containing fractures, slopes, and scarps. Most daunting are plates and matrix material resulting from chaos formation…, although these are scientifically very attractive places to explore. Imaging with resolution of 4?m/pixel of very young and active terrain on Saturn’s satellite Enceladus—in a portion of Enceladus that resembles Europa’s surface at comparable (tens of meters) resolution—reveals a landscape with many large ice boulders down to the resolution limit.
All of which puts the focus on existing mission candidates like Europa Clipper. Planetary geologist Philip Horzempa provided a recent update on this concept, which could launch as early as 2021 depending on ever-present budgeting fluctuations. Europa Clipper would not be a lander but a Jupiter orbiter that, over the course of two and a half years, would perform 32 flybys of Europa, the closest as low as 25 kilometers. According to Horzempa, the mission is seen as a precursor to a future lander, with a reconnaissance camera included as part of the package to provide lander-scale characterization of the surface with resolutions down to 0.5 meters.
Image: This artist’s concept shows a simulated view from the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Europa’s potentially rough, icy surface, tinged with reddish areas that scientists hope to learn more about, can be seen in the foreground. The giant planet Jupiter looms over the horizon. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
A future team of Europa lander specialists would study a selection of perhaps fifteen potential landing sites to down-select to a primary and a backup. Read Horzempa’s essay for more on the instruments being designed for the mission, which will have to survive intense radiation exposure through the use of 150 kilograms of dedicated radiation shielding. The Clipper team is weighing numerous options including mini-probes (nanosats) that might orbit or even make a hard landing on Europa. As we wait to see what plays out on the funding front (and remember the ongoing cost of the James Webb Space Telescope), work on the Europa Clipper design continues even as we ponder the most effective sites for safe operations and science on the surface.
The paper is Pappalardo et al., “Science Potential from a Europa Lander,” published online by Astrobiology August 7, 2013 (full text). This presentation of the Europa Summer Study Report to the Outer Planets Assessment Group also offers helpful background.
by Paul Gilster | Aug 8, 2013 | Astrobiology and SETI |
Michael Michaud is no stranger to these pages, with a number of prior contributions and a reputation that precedes him in the field of SETI and interstellar research at large. Among his accomplishments are a lengthy career in the U.S. Foreign Service, where he served as Counselor for Science, Technology and Environment at U.S. embassies in Paris and Tokyo, and Director of the State Department’s Office of Advanced Technology. His involvement with SETI is lengthy and includes chairing working groups at the International Academy of Astronautics and numerous articles and papers. His book Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials (Springer, 2007) is an indispensable contribution to the growing body of SETI literature. Today Michael reflects on the life of his friend and colleague John Billingham, who died on August 4 at the age of 83.
by Michael Michaud
One of the true pioneers of SETI has left us. John Billingham played a major role in legitimizing the once far-out idea of searching for and communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence through the technologies of radio astronomy.
Born in England, John won degrees in physiology at Oxford, as well as the equivalent of an American M.D. from Guy’s Hospital in London. He served seven years as a medical officer with the Royal Air Force, specializing in aviation medicine and physiology. A pilot, his interests then lay in flight and manned spaceflight.
Billingham came to the United States in 1963, joining NASA’s Johnson Spaceflight Center. As head of the environmental physiology office, he worked on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, and was involved in the design of spacesuits for astronauts. In 1966 he moved to the NASA Ames research center in California, rising to chief of the biotechnology division, later chief of the extraterrestrial research division, and then chief of the life sciences division.
John was first drawn to SETI by the 1966 Shklovskii/Sagan book Intelligent Life in the Universe. He worked quietly and effectively to establish SETI as a legitimate NASA activity. Patient, polite, but determined, he gave us a model of how to move big ideas to actual programs without bluster. He eventually became Acting Chief of the office for NASA’s short-lived SETI program, cancelled in 1993.
In 1971, Billingham and Bernard Oliver organized a summer study of a system for detecting extraterrestrial technology through radio astronomy. The result was published a year later as Project Cyclops. While that system never was built, some of its concepts strongly influenced subsequent SETI programs.
John and I began exchanging correspondence in 1976, beginning a long collaboration on the social and policy aspects of SETI. As the chairman of the International Academy of Astronautics SETI Committee, he broadened SETI sessions at the annual International Astronautical Congress to include non-scientific and non-technical issues such as how we should organize ourselves for contact and what procedures we should follow after a detection.
As early as 1981, John was raising the questions of whether we should reply, what we should say, and who decides. Discussions at the 1987 Congress led to the drafting of the Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities Following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence (better known as the First SETI Protocol), published in 1989. John was instrumental in organizing workshops on the cultural and social aspects of contact, leading to the publication of Social Implications of the Detection of an Extraterrestrial Civilization in 1994.
Image: SETI investigator John Billingham, whose recent death deprives the field of one of its most supple minds. Credit: SETI League.
After retiring from NASA, Billingham became Senior Scientist at the SETI Institute. He was invited to join the Board of that organization, where his title was Trustee Emeritus.
During the 1990s, Billingham and a few of his allies developed a White Paper on communication with ETI, including principles for a second protocol on transmissions from Earth. This document was presented to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in 2000. Three years later, the new chairman of the Academy’s SETI Study Group began an effort to improve the first SETI Protocol and to formalize the second. Differences over how to address transmissions from Earth intended to attract the attention of other technological civilizations proved unbridgeable. John and I resigned from the group in 2007.
The Active SETI issue remains unresolved. Billingham had commented long before that SETI tugs at beliefs and provokes polarization.
For a time, the California license plate on John’s car read SIR SETI, a token of appreciation from his colleagues. He still is SIR SETI to me.
