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...

"I always get the shakes before a drop," wrote Robert Heinlein, the words being those of protagonist Johnny Rico in his novel Starship Troopers. I thought of them again this morning because while I don't tend to get the 'shakes,' I do tend to get nervous before a major launch, and that's what we have today. The image below comes from the TESS mission Twitter account @NASA_TESS (https://twitter.com/NASA_TESS) in a shot just posted as I write. Launch is scheduled for 1832 Eastern time (2332 UTC) and can be seen here. The launch vehicle is a SpaceX Falcon 9, lifting off from Cape Canaveral. Here's a bit of NASA's latest statement: TESS is NASA's next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, known as exoplanets, including those that could support life. The mission is expected to catalog thousands of planet candidates and vastly increase the current number of known exoplanets. TESS will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively nearby stars, giving future...

Gregory Matloff’s contributions to interstellar studies need scant introduction, given their significance to solar-and beamed sail development for decades, and their visibility through books like The Starflight Handbook (1989) and Deep Space Probes (2005). A quick check of the bibliography online will demonstrate just how active Greg continues to be in analyzing the human future in space, as well as his newfound interest in the nature of consciousness (Star Light, Star Bright, 2016). The paper that follows grows out of Greg’s presentation at the 2016 iteration of the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop, where he discussed ways to advance deep space exploration using near term technologies like Falcon Heavy, in conjunction with the solar sail capabilities he has so long championed. Read on for an examination of human factors beyond lunar orbit and a description of a useful near-term mission that could reach an object much closer than Mars relying on both chemical and sail...

On the matter of interstellar visitors, bear in mind that our friend ‘Oumuamua, the subject of yesterday’s post, was discovered at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, using the Pan-STARRS telescope. The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System is located at Haleakala Observatory on Maui, where it has proven adept at finding new asteroids, comets and variable stars. Consider ‘Oumuamua a bonus, and according to a new paper from Greg Laughlin and Darryl Seligman (Yale University), a type of object we’ll be seeing again. Pan-STARRS may find objects like this every few years, but we’ll get a bigger payoff in terms of interstellar wanderers with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), now under construction at Cerro Pachón (Chile). Laughlin and Seligman think that this instrument will up the discovery rate as high as several per year, allowing us to see ‘Oumuamua in context, and also, perhaps, setting up the possibility of an intercept mission with a kinetic...

We're just a little more than a year away from New Horizons' encounter with Kuiper Belt Object MU69. The spacecraft has now made its last trajectory correction of the cruise phase of its journey, following the 2015 flyby of Pluto/Charon, an adjustment performed to optimize science at destination. Both the Hubble instrument and the European Space Agency's Gaia mission have supplied data that is now being used to tighten the parameters of the trajectory. Another course correction is possible in October of 2018 during the MU69 approach phase. Image: The New Horizons spacecraft is about 483 million kilometers from 2014 MU69, the Kuiper Belt object it will encounter on Jan. 1, 2019. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute. This update from JHU/APL tells us that closest approach is now scheduled for 0533 UTC, or 0033 EST on January 1, 2019, which should give many New Year's partygoers something extra to stay up for. The course...

Sometimes it's helpful to look back at the original intent of a space mission. Extending missions is all about continuing to do good science, and it's often a major benefit of missions as successful as Voyager. But consider the Voyager parameters when the two craft launched in 1977. The plan: Study Jupiter and Saturn, as well as their larger moons and Saturn's rings, with spacecraft that were built to last five years. That primary mission, of course, was completed and led on to Voyager 2's flybys of Uranus and Neptune, and Voyager 1's crossing into the interstellar medium, a 40-year mission still returning data. Voyager 2 will make a similar crossing within the next few years. I've said a lot about Voyager in this space and have even advocated a final thruster burn for each when the two craft reach the end of their energy supplies, in a purely symbolic trajectory change that would bring them closer to nearby stars than they otherwise would travel (see Voyager to a Star). This goes...

Now that we have determined that the object now known as 1I/’Oumuamua is indeed interstellar in origin, is there any way we could launch a mission to study it? The study below, written by key players in the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), examines the possibilities. Andreas Hein is Executive as well as Technical Director of i4is, while Nikolas Perakis, a graduate student at the Technical University of Munich, serves as Deputy Technical director. Kelvin Long is president and co-founder of i4is; Adam Crowl, a familiar figure to Centauri Dreams readers, is active in its technical programs. Physicist and radio astronomer Marshall Eubanks is the founder of Asteroid Initiatives; systems engineer Robert Kennedy is president of i4is-US and general chair of the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop. Propulsion scientist Richard Osborne serves as i4is Director of Technology & Strategic Foresight. Their plan for 1I/’Oumuamua follows. For a more in-depth look, view the paper just...

With Voyager on my mind because of its recent anniversary, I had been exploring the Internet landscape for archival footage. But Ioannis Kokkinidis made my search unnecessary with the following essay, which links to abundant resources. The author of several Centauri Dreams posts including Agriculture on Other Worlds, Ioannis holds a Master of Science in Agricultural Engineering from the Department of Natural Resources Management and Agricultural Engineering of the Agricultural University of Athens. He went on to obtain a Mastère Spécialisé Systèmes d'informations localisées pour l'aménagement des territoires (SILAT) from AgroParisTech and AgroMontpellier and a PhD in Geospatial and Environmental Analysis from Virginia Tech. Now a resident of Fresno CA, Ioannis tells us in addition how a lifelong interest in space exploration was fed by the Voyager mission and its continuing data return.  by Ioannis Kokkinidis Introduction Back in the end of August 1989,...

I don't usually talk about spacecraft close to our own Sun, but exceptions invariably arise. Centauri Dreams took a close look at the Parker Solar Probe back in June, because its operations close to the Sun (within about 10 solar radii) have implications for how we might build the kind of spacecraft that can perform 'sundiver' maneuvers, approaching the Sun before deploying a solar sail for maximum effect (see Parker Solar Probe: Implications for Sundiver). Sundivers are one way to maximize acceleration for future interstellar missions. And then there's Venus, a planet I've written little about in these pages. The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments (AREE) concept study now being funded by the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program is intriguing because it looks at spacecraft design from a fresh angle, actually one that harkens back to generations of mechanical devices that have had little part in space exploration. At least, until now. For while the environment on Venus...

It's worth thinking about why Voyager 1 and 2, now coming up on their 40th year of operation, are still sending back data. After all, mission longevity becomes increasingly important as we anticipate missions well outside the Solar System, and the Voyagers are giving us a glimpse of what can be done even with 1970's technology. We owe much of their staying power to their encounters with Jupiter, which demanded substantial protection against the giant planet's harsh radiation, a design margin still used in space missions today. The Voyagers were the first spacecraft to be protected against external electrostatic charges and the first with autonomous fault protection, meaning each spacecraft had the ability to detect problems onboard and correct them. We still use the Reed-Solomon code for spacecraft data to reduce data transmission errors, and we all benefited from Voyager's programmable attitude and pointing capabilities during its planetary encounters. Pioneer 6 was a doughty...

If Breakthrough Starshot succeeds in launching a fleet of tiny probes to Proxima Centauri in 30 or 40 years, their payloads will be highly miniaturized and built to specifications far beyond our capabilities today. But the small 'Sprites' launched into low Earth orbit on June 23 give us an idea where the research is heading. Sprites are 'satellites on a chip,' growing out of research performed by Mason Peck and his team at Cornell University, which included Breakthrough Starshot's Zac Manchester, who used a Kickstarter campaign to develop the concept in 2011 (see Sprites: A Chip-Sized Spacecraft Solution for background on the Cornell work). Breakthrough Starshot executive director Pete Worden refers to Sprites as 'a very early version of what we would send to interstellar distances,' a notion that highlights the enormity of the challenge while pointing to the revolutionary changes that may make such payloads possible. The issues multiply the more you think about them -- chip-like...

Back in the 1970s, the British Interplanetary Society conceived the idea of designing a starship. The notion grew into Project Daedalus, often discussed in these pages, producing a final report that summed up what was then known about interstellar possibilities, from fusion propulsion to destination stars. Barnard's Star, 6 light years out, became the target because at the time, it was the only star for which evidence of planets existed, though that evidence later turned out to be the result of error in the instrument being used for the observations (more on this soon, in an essay I've written for the Red Dots campaign. I'll link to it as soon as it runs). The designing of Daedalus, much of it done in London pubs, was a highly significant event. What Alan Bond, Anthony Martin, Bob Parkinson and the rest were doing was not so much putting forth something that our civilization would build as sending us a clear message. Even at this stage of our development, humans could conceive of...

Beamed propulsion concepts are usually conceived in terms of laser or microwave beams pushing a lightsail. But as we've seen over the years, there are other ways of thinking about these things. Clifford Singer went to work back in the 1970s on the concept of pellet streams fired by an accelerator, each pellet a few grams in size. The idea here is to vaporize the pellets when they reach the spacecraft, their energy being redirected as a plasma exhaust. There are enough interesting variations on the idea that I'll probably return to it soon. But over the weekend, an email from Jeff Greason reminded me of Jordin Kare's unusual 'fusion runway' idea, to which he attached the moniker the 'Bussard Buzz Bomb.' Kare is an astrophysicist and space systems consultant with a background in laser technologies. He's been involved in studies of laser launch methods, in which beamed energy is focused on an onboard heat exchanger that converts liquid propellant into a gas to produce thrust. Currently...

If you have questions about beamed energy concepts, James Benford is your man. A plasma physicist who is CEO of Microwave Sciences, Benford has designed high-power microwave systems for the likes of NASA, JPL and Lockheed. Now Chairman of the Sail Subcommittee for Breakthrough Starshot, he is deep into the investigation of sail materials and design, as he explains below. After reading Greg Matloff's Near-Term Interstellar Probes: Some Gentle Suggestions, Jim passed along his comments, which highlight the need for a dedicated laboratory facility to explore the Starshot possibilities. He offers as well his thoughts on where sails stand in the overall propulsion landscape, a position of growing significance. By James Benford My colleague and old friend Greg Matloff has given us a well-informed broad survey of propulsion options for interstellar flight. I'm going to contribute a few comments. Even a century-long flight to Alpha Centauri requires a velocity of ~10,000 km/sec, which...

When Greg Matloff's "Solar Sail Starships: Clipper Ships of the Galaxy" appeared in JBIS in 1981, the science fictional treatments of interstellar sails I had been reading suddenly took on scientific plausibility. Later, I would read Robert Forward's work, and realize that an interstellar community was growing in space agencies, universities and the pages of journals. Since those days, Matloff's contributions to the field have kept coming at a prodigious rate, with valuable papers and books exploring not only how we might reach the stars but what we can do in our own Solar System to ensure a bright future for humanity. In today's essay, Greg looks at interstellar propulsion candidates and ponders the context provided by Breakthrough Starshot, which envisions small sailcraft moving at 20 percent of the speed of light, bound for Proxima Centauri. What can we learn from the effort, and what alternatives should we consider as we ponder the conundrum of interstellar propulsion? by Dr....