Recent tests of a 'wafer-craft', an early prototype for what may one day be the 'starchip' envisioned by scientists involved with the Breakthrough Starshot project, have been successful. The work grows out of a NASA-funded effort led by Philip Lubin (UC Santa Barbara), whose investigations into large scale directed energy systems began in 2009. Lubin went on to perform multiple studies for NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program developing the idea that would become known as DEEP-IN (Directed Energy Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration). His NIAC Phase 1 report studied as one option beamed propulsion driving a wafer-scale spacecraft. Renamed Starlight, the proposal went on to Phase II funding as well as support from the private sector. A subsequent review by Breakthrough Initiatives led to endorsement of the concept within its Breakthrough Starshot effort. Breakthrough is devoting $100 million to studying the viability of sending a 'starchip' to a nearby star such as Proxima...

The exuberance of images like the one below captures the drama of Solar System exploration. Scenes like this are emblematic of the early reconnaissance of the Solar System. We saw similar enthusiasm with missions near and far -- I'm thinking back, for example, not just to Voyager, but the Viking landings on Mars, and I'm sure Russian controllers were equally jubilant when their Venera craft touched down on Venus. Space is indeed the 'final frontier,' as James T. Kirk reminded us on Star Trek, and it's a frontier that goes on without end. Image: Celebration in full swing as scientists react to the view from New Horizons after the Ultima Thule flyby. Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / Henry Throop. Let's keep in mind, then, that New Horizons is not just returning Ultima Thule data, but continuing to push into the Kuiper Belt doing good science. In terms of future missions, we need to learn as much as we can about radiation, gas and dust as we assess the environment. New Horizons will get...

We've just learned that New Horizons is intact and functional, with a 'phone home' message at about 1530 UTC that checked off subsystem by subsystem -- all nominal -- amidst snatches of applause at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. The solid state recorders (SSR) are full, with pointers indicating that flyby information is there for the sending, even as the spacecraft continues with outbound science. New Horizons will pass behind the Sun in early January, giving us a break in communications for a few days this weekend. Over the next 20 months we will get the entire package from Ultima Thule. Patience will be in order. Here's the approach image that was released yesterday. Image: Just over 24 hours before its closest approach to Kuiper Belt object Ultima Thule, the New Horizons spacecraft has sent back the first images that begin to reveal Ultima's shape. The original images have a pixel size of 10 kilometers (6 miles), not much smaller than Ultima's estimated size of 30...

Despite the various governmental breakdowns attendant to the event, the New Horizons flyby of Ultima Thule is happening as scheduled, the laws of physics having their own inevitability. Fortunately, NASA TV and numerous social media outlets are operational despite the partial shutdown, and you'll want to keep an eye on the schedule of televised events as well as the New Horizons website and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory YouTube channel. Image: New Horizons' path through the solar system. The green segment shows where New Horizons has traveled since launch; the red indicates the spacecraft's future path. The yellow names denote the Kuiper Belt objects New Horizons has observed or will observe from a long distance. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI). We're close enough now, with flyby scheduled for 0533 UTC on January 1, that the mission's navigation team has been tightening up its estimates of Ultima Thule's position relative to the spacecraft, key information when it comes to the...

Voyager 2 has now gone interstellar, making it not only NASA's single longest-running mission but one of only two spacecraft that have crossed over from the heliosphere to true interstellar space, what scientists call the Local Interstellar Medium (LISM). On that note, it's interesting to put the Solar System in context. Depending on how you define the term, the Solar System takes in a great deal of interstellar space. Many astronomers put its outer edge at the outer Oort Cloud, perhaps 100,000 AU away, and both Voyagers have yet to reach the inner Oort. At an estimated 1,000 AU, the inner boundary of the Oort Cloud is where the vast cometary cloud around our star becomes apparent, housing in its entirety trillions of comets and extending about 40 percent of the way to the Alpha Centauri stars. The Voyagers will keep going, of course, and will reach the inner Oort in perhaps 300 years, though without working instrumentation. The steady diminishment of power from the crafts'...

I never saw the 2008 film WALL·E, which was all the rage not long after its release. A computer animated science fiction movie, WALL·E won a slew of awards including a Golden Globe for best animated feature, a Nebula for best script, and an Academy Award, as well as making Time's list of best movies of the decade. Bringing it to mind this morning, though, is the recent success of the InSight mission at landing on Mars, and the support technologies that flew with it. Thus the image below, which in its own way is iconic. It's from a craft nicknamed WALL·E after the star of the film, a CubeSat no larger than a briefcase that flew all the way to Mars in a seven month journey that demonstrated what miniaturized technologies can do. WALL·E is formally known as MARCO-B, the partner to MARCO-A (nicknamed EVE, another star of the film). Both these craft proved successful at their mission, which was to offer Earthside engineers the opportunity to monitor the InSight landing in ways that hadn't...

Over the sound system in the grocery store yesterday, a local radio station was recapping events of the day as I shopped. The newsreader came to an item about the Parker Solar Probe, then misread the text and came out with "The probe skimmed just 15 miles from the Sun's surface." Yipes! I was in the vegetable section but you could hear him all over the store, so I glanced around to see how people had reacted. Nobody as much as raised an eyebrow, which either says people tune out background noise as they shop or they have little knowledge of our star. The correct number is 15 million miles (24,1 million kilometers), and it's still a hugely impressive feat, but I hope the station got the story right later on. I go easy on this kind of thing because it's easy enough to make a mistake when reading radio copy (I've done this myself). Anyway, there is always some listener who calls it in, which I should have but didn't. I was pushed for time that morning, making choices about squash and...

As we continue to track the Voyagers into interstellar space, the spacecraft have become the subject of a new documentary. Associate editor Larry Klaes, a long-time Centauri Dreams essayist and commentator, here looks at The Farthest: Voyager in Space, a compelling film released last year. Larry's deep knowledge of the Voyager mission helps him spot the occasional omission (why no mention of serious problems on the way to Jupiter, or of the historic Voyager 1 photo of Earth and Moon early in the mission?), but he's taken with the interviews, the special effects and, more often than not, with the spirit of the production. That spirit sometimes downplays science but does give the Golden Record plenty of air-time, including much that was new to me, such as the origin of the "Send more Chuck Berry!" quip, John Lennon's role, NASA's ambivalence, and an odd and insulting choice of venue for a key news conference. Read on for what you'll see and what you won't in this film about our longest...

I want to talk about the Voyagers this morning and their continuing interstellar mission, but first, a quick correction. Yesterday in writing about New Horizons' flyby of MU69, I made an inexplicable gaffe, referring to the event as occurring on the 19th rather than the 1st of January (without my morning coffee, I had evidently fixated on the '19' of 2019). Several readers quickly spotted this in the article's penultimate paragraph and I fixed it, but unfortunately the email subscribers received the uncorrected version. So for the record, we can look forward to the New Horizons flyby of MU69 on January 1, 2019 at 0533 UTC. Sorry about the error. Let's turn now to the Voyagers, and the question of how long they will stay alive. I often see 2025 cited as a possible terminus, with each spacecraft capable of communication with Earth and the operation of at least one instrument until then. If we make it to 2025, then Voyager 1 would be 160 AU out, and Voyager 2 will have reached 135 AU or...

Last Monday's article on the Trillion Planet Survey led to an email conversation with Phil Lubin, its founder, in which the topic of Breakthrough Starshot invariably came up. When I've spoken to Dr. Lubin before, it's been at meetings related to Starshot or presentations on his DE-STAR concept. Standing for Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and exploRation, DE-STAR is a phased laser array that could drive a small payload to high velocities. We've often looked in these pages at the rich history of beamed propulsion, but how did the DE-STAR concept evolve in Lubin's work for NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts office, and what was the path that led it to the Breakthrough Starshot team? The timeline below gives the answer, and it's timely because a number of readers have asked me about this connection. Dr. Lubin is a professor of physics at UC-Santa Barbara whose primary research beyond DE-STAR has involved the early universe in millimeter wavelength bands, and a...

The image below intrigues me. It's the first image of the Earth and the Moon together taken from a CubeSat, one of a pair of such tiny spacecraft NASA has despatched to Mars as part of a mission called MarCO (Mars Cube One), which will work in conjunction with the InSight lander. Taken on May 9, the photo was part of the process of testing the CubeSat's high-gain antenna. But to me it's a reminder of how far miniaturized technologies continue to advance. Image: The first image captured by one of NASA's Mars Cube One (MarCO) CubeSats. The image, which shows both the CubeSat's unfolded high-gain antenna at right and the Earth and its moon in the center, was acquired by MarCO-B on May 9. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. As of this morning, we are 66 days away from InSight's landing on Mars, at a distance of 65 million kilometers from Earth and 16 million kilometers to Mars. I don't usually focus on Mars and lunar missions because this site's specialty is deep space, which for our purposes...

Here's another, wider look at New Horizons' view of Ultima Thule (MU69), its next target, which we first saw in late August, though the image was acquired at mid-month. I like this view because it gets across just what a tricky acquisition this was. Look at the background star-field! Consider that Ultima is still 100 times fainter than Pluto as seen from Earth, making it about a million times fainter than a naked eye object. LORRI, the spacecraft's Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, once again demonstrates its key role in the mission. Image: New Horizons spotted Ultima Thule for the first time on August 16, near the center of the red circle in this LORRI image of the dense Milky Way star field where Ultima lies. Credit: JHU/APL. Getting the image as early as it did was something of a coup for New Horizons, this being the first attempt, made just after the spacecraft transitioned from spin-stabilized mode (during cruise) to pre-flyby mode, which allows its cameras and other instruments...

When we think about what is usually called 'planetary protection,' we're talking about the probes we send to possibly life-bearing places like Mars or Europa. It would confound our investigations if we couldn't be sure we hadn't contaminated such a place with microorganisms from Earth, unwittingly carried aboard a lander that was not properly stripped of such passengers. Even our Cassini Saturn orbiter was guided into the planet as a way of ensuring that it would not, at some future date, crash into a place as biologically interesting as Enceladus. Yesterday, having looked at an essay by Ethan Siegel, I asked rhetorically whether we should think up some kind of exoplanetary protection policy as well. After all, we're fleshing out an actual mission design through Breakthrough Starshot, aiming to reach nearby stars in coming decades. Siegel (Lewis & Clark College) had expressed his concern that Breakthrough Starshot might inadvertently start an interstellar war. The idea is extreme,...

The first thing I did when I heard about the Parker Solar Probe's successful launch (0731 UTC Sunday) was to double-check the spacecraft's projected velocity when it makes its closest approach to the Sun. I always think in terms of high speed when contemplating operations close to our star, the legacy of the two Helios missions, which at present hold the record as fastest man-made objects. Placed in highly elliptical orbits after their launches in 1974 and 1976, the Helios spacecraft managed a sizzling 70 kilometers per second. The Helios missions were a joint venture between what was then West Germany's space agency and NASA, the craft themselves built by German aerospace firm Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm. Helios 2 flew closer to the Sun by about 3 million kilometers, closing to 0.29 AU (43 million kilometers), which took it inside the orbit of Mercury. The Parker Solar Probe ups the ante considerably, with an eventual closest approach of just 6.1 million kilometers. The spacecraft at...

Chasing New Horizons, by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon. Picador (2018), 320 pp. Early on in Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons, a basic tension within the space community reveals itself. It's one that would haunt the prospect of a mission to Pluto throughout its lengthy gestation, repeatedly slowing and sometimes stopping the mission in its tracks. The authors call it a 'basic disconnect' between how NASA makes decisions on exploration and how the public tends to see the result. 'To boldly go where no one has gone before' is an ideal, but it runs up against scientific reality: ...the committees that assess and rank robotic-mission priorities within NASA's limited available funding are not chartered with seeking the coolest missions to find uncharted places. Rather, they want to know exactly what science is going to be done, what specific high-priority scientific questions are going to be answered, and the gritty details of how each possible mission can advance the...

Breakthrough Starshot held an 'industry day' on Wednesday May 23rd devoted to its lightsail project to take nanocraft to another star, framing the release of a Request for Proposals during its early concepts and analysis phase. The RFP focuses on the sail itself, investigating sail materials and stability under thrust. Step A proposals are due June 22, step B proposals on July 10, with finalists to be notified and contracts awarded this summer. The intent of the RFP is laid out in documents and slides from the meeting that Breakthrough has now placed online. From the RFP itself: The scope of this RFP addresses the Technology Development phase - to explore LightSail concepts, materials, fabrication and measurement methods, with accompanying analysis and simulation that creates advances toward a viable path to a scalable and ultimately deployable LightSail. We've been talking about Breakthrough Starshot in these pages for a long time, as a search through the archives will reveal. The...

I want to be sure to get the first image from TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, into Centauri Dreams, given the importance of the mission and the high hopes riding on it as the next step in exoplanet exploration. Now we move from the Kepler statistical survey methodology to a look at bright, nearby stars, and plenty of them. TESS will cover an area of sky far larger than the amount of sky we see in this image, which looks out along the plane of the galaxy from a perspective that matches southern skies on Earth. Image: This test image from one of the four cameras aboard the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) captures a swath of the southern sky along the plane of our galaxy. TESS is expected to cover more than 400 times the amount of sky shown in this image when using all four of its cameras during science operations. Credits: NASA/MIT/TESS. Showing some 200,000 stars, the image is centered on the southern constellation Centaurus, with a bit of the Coalsack...

The launch of TESS aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 looks to be on track for Wednesday after yesterday's delay, which the company attributed to the need for "additional GNC [guidance, navigation and control] analysis." So we wait just a bit more, knowing that the payoff justifies the caution. We should be identifying planets in the thousands, and around bright, nearby stars. Standing down today to conduct additional GNC analysis, and teams are now working towards a targeted launch of @NASA_TESS on Wednesday, April 18.— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 16, 2018 Principal investigator George Ricker and team have been through the process of designing, building and launching a mission before. It was in 2000 that NASA launched the MIT-built High Energy Transient Explorer 2, or HETE-2, that studied gamma-ray bursts for seven years in Earth orbit. A key technology for HETE-2 was the CCD -- charge-coupled device -- which allowed the satellite's optical and X-ray cameras to record bursts in electronic...