Centauri Dreams
Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration
Pale Red Dot: Proxima Centauri Campaign Begins
A new observational campaign for Proxima Centauri, coordinated by Guillem Anglada-Escudé (Queen Mary University, London), is about to begin, an effort operating under the name Pale Red Dot. You’ll recall Dr. Anglada-Escudé’s name from his essay Doppler Worlds and M-Dwarf Planets, which ran here in the spring of last year, as well as from Centauri Dreams reports on his work on Gliese 667C, among other exoplanet projects. Pale Red Dot is a unique undertaking that brings the public into an ongoing campaign from the outset, one whose observations at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory begin today.
The closest star to our Sun, Proxima Centauri was discovered just over 100 years ago by the Scottish astronomer Robert Innes. A search through the archives here will reveal numerous articles about the red dwarf and the previous attempts to find planets orbiting it. I’ll point you to a round-up of exoplanet work on Proxima thus far next week, when my essay ‘Intensifying the Proxima Centauri Planet Hunt’ will run as part of Pale Red Dot’s outreach campaign. For now, the short summary is that we can rule out various planet scenarios around Proxima, but the possibility of a rocky world in the habitable zone is definitely still in the mix.
Image: First images of Proxima from the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile.
Pale Red Dot today begins a two and a half month campaign that will run through April using the HARPS spectrograph at ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla (Chile). The method here is radial velocity, looking for those infinitesimal Doppler signals showing the star’s motion as affected by planetary companions. These RV studies thus add to the earlier work done by Michael Endl (UT-Austin) and Martin Kürster (Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie), who studied Proxima using the UVES spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope in Paranal.
But Pale Red Dot’s HARPS data will be complemented by robotic telescopes around the globe, including the Burst Optical Observer and Transient Exploring System (BOOTES) and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT). These automated installations will measure the brightness of Proxima each night during the observing campaign, helping to clarify whether any RV ‘wobbles’ of the star are caused by a planet or by events on the stellar surface. After thorough data analysis, the results will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.
The public outreach aspect of Pale Red Dot is compelling. Anglada-Escudé explains:
“We are taking a risk to involve the public before we even know what the observations will be telling us — we cannot analyse the data and draw conclusions in real time. Once we publish the paper summarising the findings it’s entirely possible that we will have to say that we have not been able to find evidence for the presence of an Earth-like exoplanet around Proxima Centauri. But the fact that we can search for such small objects with such extreme precision is simply mind-boggling.
“We want to share the excitement of the search with people and show them how science works behind the scenes, the trial and error process and the continued efforts that are necessary for the discoveries that people normally hear about in the news. By doing so, we hope to encourage more people towards STEM subjects and science in general.”
To communicate the process, Pale Red Dot will use blog posts and social media, with essays from astronomers, scientists, engineers and science writers on the site’s blog. To keep up with the social media updates, use @Pale_red_dot on Twitter for the project account, and you’ll probably want to check the hashtag #PaleRedDot as well. I also want to mention (and this will be in my article next week) that David Kipping’s transit studies of Proxima using the Canadian MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars) space telescope are continuing, and beyond this we have another gravitational microlensing possibility as the star occults a 19.5-magnitude background star this February. Proxima Centauri, 2016 looks to be your year, and perhaps it’s also the year we find out for sure whether there is a planetary system so close to our own.
KIC 8462852: A Century Long Fade?
I hadn’t expected a new paper on KIC 8462852 quite this fast, but hard on the heels of yesterday’s article on the star comes “KIC 8462852 Faded at an Average Rate of 0.165±0.013 Magnitudes Per Century From 1890 To 1989,” from Bradley Schaefer (Louisiana State University). Schaefer takes a hard look at this F3 main sequence star in the original Kepler field not only via the Kepler data but by using a collection of roughly 500,000 sky photographs in the archives of Harvard College Observatory, covering the period from 1890 to 1989.
The Harvard collection is vast, but Schaefer could take advantage of a program called Digital Access to a Sky Century@Harvard (DASCH), which has currently digitized about 15 percent of the archives. Fortunately for us, this 15 percent covers all the plates containing the Cygnus/Lyra starfield, which is what the Kepler instrument focused on. Some 1581 of these plates cover the region of sky where KIC 8462852 is found. What Schaefer discovers is a secular dimming at an average rate of 0.165±0.013 magnitudes per century. For the period in question, ending in the late 1980s, KIC 8462852 has faded by 0.193±0.030 mag. From the paper:
The KIC 8462852 light curve from 1890 to 1989 shows a highly significant secular trend in fading over 100 years, with this being completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star. Such stars should be very stable in brightness, with evolution making for changes only on time scales of many millions of years. So the Harvard data alone prove that KIC 8462852 has unique and large-amplitude photometric variations.
That’s useful information, especially given the possible objection to the Kepler findings that they might be traceable to a problem with the Kepler spacecraft itself. Evidently not:
Previously, the only evidence that KIC 8462852 was unusual in any way was a few dips in magnitude as observed by one satellite, so inevitably we have to wonder whether the whole story is just some problem with Kepler. Boyajian et al. (2015) had already made a convincing case that the dips were not caused by any data or analysis artifacts, and their case is strong. Nevertheless, it is comforting to know from two independent sources that KIC 8462852 is displaying unique and inexplicable photometric variations.
As Schaefer notes, KIC 8462852 can now be seen to show two unique episodes involving dimming — the dips described here yesterday for the Kepler spacecraft, and the fading in the Harvard data. The assumption that both come from the same cause is reasonable, as it would be hard to see how the same star could experience two distinct mechanisms that make its starlight dim by amounts like these. The timescales of the dimming obviously vary, and the assumption would be that if the day-long dips are caused by circumstellar dust, then the much longer fading that Schaefer has detected would be caused by the same mechanism.
Image: KIC 8462852 as photographed from Aguadilla, Puerto Rico by Efraín Morales, of the Astronomical Society of the Caribbean (SAC).
Thus we come to the comet hypothesis as a way of explaining the KIC 8462852 light curves. Incorporating the fading Schaefer has discovered, a cometary solution would require some mind-boggling numbers, as derived in the paper. From the summary:
With 36 giant-comets required to make the one 20% Kepler dip, and all of these along one orbit, we would need 648,000 giant-comets to create the century-long fading. For these 200 km diameter giant-comets having a density of 1 gm cm?3, each will have a mass of 4 × 1021 gm, and the total will have a mass of 0.4 M?. This can be compared to the largest known comet in our own Solar System (Comet Hale-Bopp) with a diameter of 60 km. This can also be compared to the entire mass of the Kuiper Belt at around 0.1 M? (Gladman et al. 2001). I do not see how it is possible for something like 648,000 giant-comets to exist around one star, nor to have their orbits orchestrated so as to all pass in front of the star within the last century. So I take this century-long dimming as a strong argument against the comet-family hypothesis to explain the Kepler dips.
If Schaefer’s work holds up, the cometary hypothesis to explain KIC 8462852 is deeply compromised. We seem to be looking at the author calls “an ongoing process with continuous effects” around the star. Moreover, it is a process that requires 104 to 107 times as much dust as would be required for the deepest of the Kepler light dips. And you can see in the quotation above Schaefer’s estimate for the number of giant comets this would require, all of them having to pass in front of the star in the last century.
The paper is Schaefer, “KIC 8462852 Faded at an Average Rate of 0.165+-0.013 Magnitudes Per Century From 1890 To 1989,” submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters (abstract).
Following Up KIC 8462852
As I sat down to write yesterday morning, I realized there was a natural segue between the 1977 ‘Wow!’ signal, and the idea that it had been caused by two comets, and KIC 8462852, the enigmatic star that has produced such an interesting series of light curves. What I had planned to start with today was: “Are comets becoming the explanation du jour for SETI?” But Centauri Dreams reader H. Floyd beat me to the punch, commenting yesterday: “Comets are quickly earning the David Drumlin Award for biggest SETI buzzkill.”
As played by Tom Skeritt, David Drumlin is Ellie Arroway’s nemesis in the film Contact, willing to knock down the very notion of SETI and then, in a startling bit of reverse engineering, turning into its champion as he claims credit for a SETI detection. And of course you remember controversial KIC 8462852 as the subject of numerous media stories first playing up the idea of alien mega-engineering, and then as quickly declaring the problem solved by a disrupted family of comets that moved between us and the star in their orbit.
But KIC 8462852 doesn’t yield to instant analysis, and it’s good to see a more measured piece now appearing on New York University’s ScienceLine site. The title, Tabby’s Mystery, is a nod to Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale University who noticed that the dips in light in Kepler data from the star were unusual. We have the Planet Hunters group to thank for putting Boyajian on the case, and a productive one it has turned out to be. As writer Sandy Ong notes, KIC 8462852 produced non-periodic dips in the star’s light that in one case reached 15 percent, and in another 22 percent.
Image: Yale’s Tabetha Boyajian, whose work examines possible causes for the unusual light curves detected at KIC 8462852.
‘Tabby’s star’ is one name KIC 8462852 has acquired, the other being the ‘WTF star’, doubtless standing for ‘where’s the flux,’ given the erratic changes to the light from the object. I’ve written a number of articles on this F3-class star and its light curves, noting not only the size of the two largest dips but also the fact that the dips, unlike those of a transiting planet, are not at all symmetric. Ong quotes Boyajian as saying: “The first one is a single dip that shows a very gradual decrease in brightness, then a sharp increase… The second dip has more structure to it with lots of ups and downs.” For more, see KIC 8462852: Cometary Origin of an Unusual Light Curve? and search the archives here, where five or six other articles on the matter are available.
Comets come into the mix because in Boyajian’s paper on KIC 8462852, they are named as a possibility. To refresh all our memories, let’s go back to the paper:
…we could be seeing material close to the pericenter of a highly eccentric orbit, reminiscent of comets seen in the inner Solar System at pericenter. We therefore envision a scenario in which the dimming events are caused by the passage of a series of chunks of a broken-up comet. These would have to have since spread around the orbit, and may be continuing to fragment to cause the erratic nature of the observed dips.
Comets moving close to the parent star would be given to thermal stresses, and could also be disrupted by close encounters with planets in the inner system. For that matter, tidal disruption by the star itself is a possibility. Boyajian and co-authors point out that a comet like Halley would break apart because of tidal forces if approaching as close as 0.02 to 0.05 AU.
We have WISE data from 2010 showing us that KIC 8462852 lacks the infrared signature a debris disk should produce. But the unusual light curves from Kepler began in the spring of 2011, so for a brief window between the two, there was the possibility of a planetary catastrophe, perhaps a collision between a planet and an asteroid, that would explain what Kepler saw. But Spitzer Space Telescope observations in 2015, analyzed by Massimo Marengo (Iowa State) and colleagues, found no trace of infrared excess at the later date, which seems to rule out a collision between large bodies and leaves the hypothesis of a family of comets still intact. See No Catastrophic Collision at KIC 8462852 for a discussion of Marengo’s work.
Image: Montage of flux time series for KIC 8462852 showing different portions of the 4-year Kepler observations with different vertical scalings. Panel ‘(c)’ is a blowup of the dip near day 793, (D800). The remaining three panels, ‘(d)’, ‘(e)’, and ‘(f)’, explore the dips which occur during the 90-day interval from day 1490 to day 1580 (D1500). Credit: Boyajian et al., 2015.
Perhaps we’re seeing a natural phenomenon we can’t yet identify. Ong cites Eric Korpela (UC-Berkeley) on the matter:
“I like the comet explanation although ‘comet’ might not be the right word,” says Eric Korpela, another astronomer from the Berkeley SETI Research Center. That’s because the core of such an object would have to be as large as Pluto in order to generate this kind of light, he explains.
Korpela and other astronomers believe the dimming may be due to some kind of natural phenomenon we haven’t yet seen anywhere in the universe. “We just haven’t looked at enough stars to know what’s out there,” he says.
What we saw yesterday with relation to the ‘Wow!’ signal is that we will soon have two chances to monitor the comets involved in Antonio Paris’ hypothesis for generating the signal. In like manner, we’ll have further observations of KIC 8462852. Ong notes that the Green Bank instrument in West Virginia is involved, as are the MINERVA array in Arizona, the MEarth project (Arizona and Chile), the LOFAR telescope in the Netherlands, and amateur observations from the American Association of Variable Star Observers, who will bring their own instruments to bear.
Oh to have a healthy Kepler in its original configuration returning new data on KIC 8462852! But despite the outstanding work being performed by the K2 ‘Second Light’ mission, the instrument is now working on different targets, and our ground-based telescopes have to do the job. What we need to know is if and when ‘Tabby’s star’ starts producing further light curves, and just what they look like. SETI observations have already been attempted using the Allen Telescope Array (see SETI: No Signal Detected from KIC 8462852) looking for interesting microwave emissions. None were found. Expect this enigmatic star to remain in the news for some time to come.
The Boyajian paper is Boyajian et al., “Planet Hunters X. KIC 8462852 – Where’s the Flux?” submitted to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (preprint). The Marengo paper is Marengo et al., “KIC 8462852 – The Infrared Flux,” Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 814, No. 1 (abstract / preprint). Jason Wright and colleagues discuss KIC 8462852 in the context of SETI signatures in Wright et al., “The ? Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies. IV. The Signatures and Information Content of Transiting Megastructures,” submitted to The Astrophysical Journal (preprint).
Return to ‘Wow!’
The famous Wow! signal, picked up on August 15, 1977 at the Big Ear radio telescope (Ohio State University) is back in the news, with a new theory suggesting a source for the signal right here in the Solar System. Antonio Paris (St. Petersburg College, FL) asks us to consider a cometary origin for the signal, generated as two comets released hydrogen as they passed near the Big Ear’s search field. The now-dismantled telescope had a fixed field of view, so a bright signature at 21 centimeters — the hydrogen line — would have appeared short-lived.
Specifically, 21-cm refers to the line in the spectrum of neutral hydrogen atoms, a wavelength corresponding to 1420 megahertz associated with the most common element in the universe. It was back in 1959 that both Philip Morrison and Frank Drake fixed on the hydrogen line as a rational place to look for interstellar beacons, the assumption being that any civilization trying to reach another would choose a wavelength associated with some sort of universal constant.
Project Ozma grew out of this as Drake studied the nearby stars Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani at this wavelength, while Morrison, working with Giuseppe Cocconi, wrote the most famous paper in the history of SETI, “Searching for Interstellar Communications,” which appeared in Nature in 1959 and is a fascinating read to this day (available online). Hence the interest of Jerry Ehman at Ohio State’s Big Ear, and the enthusiasm with which he wrote “Wow!” on the printout of the signal detected that day in 1977. Had we found an interstellar beacon?
The Cometary Hypothesis
We do know that the ‘Wow!’ signal’s intensity rose and fell over the same 72-second interval that the Big Ear itself could keep an object in its view — with a fixed field of view, the Earth’s rotation governed this. Hence Ehman could assume the signal had an origin in space, and Antonio Paris makes the same assumption. Scheduled to appear in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, the paper notes that the size of a comet’s hydrogen cloud is determined by the size of the comet, extending for as much as 100 million kilometers in width. The cloud increases significantly as the comet approaches the Sun. From the paper:
Since the rate of hydrogen production from the comet’s nucleus and coma has been calculated at 5 x 1029 atoms of hydrogen every second, the hydrogen cloud is the largest part of the comet. Moreover, due to two closely spaced energy levels in the ground state of the hydrogen atom, the neutral hydrogen cloud enveloping the comet will release photons and emit electromagnetic radiation at a frequency along the hydrogen line (1420.40575177 MHz).
Two comets are of interest. Looking back to 1977, Paris found that from July 27 to August 15, the Jupiter-family comets 266P/Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) were transiting near the Chi Sagittarii star group, placing them close to the source of the “Wow!” signal. Back to the paper:
Of significance to this investigation, the purported source of the “Wow” signal was fixed between the right ascension and declination values… of comets 266P/Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs). On their orbital plane, moreover, 266P/Christensen was 3.8055 AU from Earth and moving at a radial velocity of +13.379 km/s; and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) was 4.406 AU from Earth and moving at a radial velocity of +19.641 km/s…
If the cometary hypothesis is correct, this would explain why subsequent searches using the Very Large Array and the Ohio State University Radio Observatory between 1995 and 1999 found nothing, for neither comet would then have been near the right ascension and declination values of the original signal. Paris suggests that the period of 266P/Christensen (6.63 years) and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) (6.8 years) can explain why the signal was never again detected.
The idea that the Wow! signal was produced from clouds of neutral hydrogen emanating from the two comets seems quite a stretch, but usefully, Paris offers a way to falsify the hypothesis. We learn that comet 266P/Christensen will again pass through the neighborhood of the “Wow!” signal on January 25, 2017, while comet P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) will be in the area on January 7 of 2018. So we will have the opportunity to test the notion and analyze the hydrogen spectra of the two comets. Shouldn’t the Big Ear have picked up the same cometary signature 24 hours later? We can’t be sure, but scanning the hydrogen signal from each comet sounds like a good idea.
The paper is Paris and Davies, “Hydrogen Clouds from Comets 266/P Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs) are Candidates for the Source of the 1977 “WOW” Signal,” accepted at the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences (abstract).
Solid Results from ‘Second Light’
If they did nothing else for us, space missions might be worth the cost purely for their role in tuning up human ingenuity. Think of rescues like Galileo, where the Jupiter-bound mission lost the use of its high-gain antenna and experienced numerous data recorder issues, yet still managed to return priceless data. Mariner 10 overcame gyroscope problems by using its solar panels for attitude control, as controllers tapped into the momentum imparted by sunlight.
Overcoming obstacles is part of the game, and teasing out additional science through extended missions taps into the same creativity. Now we have news of how successful yet another mission re-purposing has been through results obtained from K2, the Kepler ‘Second Light’ mission that grew out of problems with the critical reaction wheels aboard the spacecraft. It was in November of 2013 that K2 was proposed, with NASA approval in May of the following year.
Kepler needed its reaction wheels to hold it steady, but like Mariner 10, the wounded craft had a useful resource, the light from the Sun. Proper positioning using photon momentum can play against the balance created by the spacecraft’s remaining reaction wheels. As K2, the spacecraft has to switch its field of view every 80 days, but these methods along with refinements to the onboard software have brought new life to the mission. K2, we quickly learned, was still in the exoplanet game, detecting a super-Earth candidate (HIP 116454b) in late 2014 in engineering data that had been taken as part of the run-up to full observations.
Image: NASA’s K2 mission uses the Kepler exoplanet-hunter telescope and reorients it so that it points along the Solar System’s plane. This mission has quickly proven itself with a series of exoplanet finds. Credit: NASA.
Now we learn that K2 has, in its first year of observing, identified more than 100 confirmed exoplanets, including 28 systems with at least two planets and 14 with at least three — the spacecraft has also identified more than 200 unconfirmed candidate planets. Some of the multi-planet systems are described in a new paper from Evan Sinukoff (University of Hawaii at Manoa). Drawn from Campaigns 1 and 2 of the K2 mission, the paper offers a catalog of ten multi-planet systems comprised of 24 planets. Six of these systems have two known planets and four have three known planets, the majority of them being smaller than Neptune.
In general, the K2 planets orbit hotter stars than earlier Kepler discoveries. These are also stars that are closer to Earth than the original Kepler field, making K2 exoplanets useful for study in the near future through missions like the James Webb Space Telescope. From the Sinukoff paper:
Kepler planet catalogs (Borucki et al. 2011; Batalha et al. 2013; Burke et al. 2014; Rowe et al. 2015; Mullally et al. 2015) spawned numerous statistical studies on planet occurrence, the distribution of planet sizes, and the diversity of system architectures. These studies deepened our understanding of planet formation and evolution. Continuing in this pursuit, K2 planet catalogs will provide a wealth of planets around bright stars that are particularly favorable for studying planet compositions—perhaps the best link to their formation histories.
As this article in Nature points out, K2 has already had quite a run. Among its highlights: A system of three super-Earths orbiting a single star (EPIC 201367065, 150 light years out in the constellation Leo) and the discovery of the disintegrating remnants of a planetary system around a white dwarf (WD 1145+017, 570 light years away in Virgo).
Coming up in the spring, K2 begins a three-month period in which it segues from using the transit method to gravitational microlensing, in which the presence of a planet is flagged by the brightening of more distant cosmic objects as star and planet move in front of them. We’ll keep a close eye on this effort, which will be coordinated with other telescopes on the ground. The K2 team believes the campaign will identify between 85 and 120 planets in its short run.
The Sinukoff paper is “Ten Multi-planet Systems from K2 Campaigns 1 & 2 and the Masses of Two Hot Super-Earths,” submitted to The Astrophysical Journal (preprint). For more on EPIC 201367065 and habitability questions, see
Andrew LePage’s Habitable Planet Reality Check: Kepler’s New K2 Finds.
Space Habitats Beyond LEO: A Short Step Towards the Stars
Building a space infrastructure is doubtless a prerequisite for interstellar flight. But the questions we need to answer in the near-term are vital. Even to get to Mars, we subject our astronauts to radiation and prolonged weightlessness. For that matter, can humans live in Mars’ light gravity long enough to build sustainable colonies without suffering long-term physical problems? Gregory Matloff has some thoughts on how to get answers, involving the kind of space facility we can build with our current technologies. The author of The Starflight Handbook (Wiley, 1989) and numerous other books including Solar Sails (Copernicus 2008) and Deep Space Probes (Springer, 2005), Greg has played a major role in the development of interstellar propulsion concepts. His latest title is Starlight, Starbright (Curtis, 2015).
by Gregory Matloff
The recent demonstrations of successful rocket recovery by Blue Origin and SpaceX herald a new era of space exploration and development. We can expect, as rocket stages routinely return for reuse from the fringes of space, that the cost of space travel will fall dramatically.
Some in the astronautics community would like to settle the Moon; others have their eyes set on Mars. Many would rather commit to the construction of solar power satellites, efforts to mine and/or divert Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs), or construct enormous cities in space such as the O’Neill Lagrange Point colonies.
But before we can begin any or all of these endeavors, we need to answer some fundamental questions regarding human life beyond the confines of our home planet. Will humans thrive under lunar or martian gravity? Can children be conceived in extraterrestrial environments? What is the safe threshold for human exposure to high-Z galactic cosmic rays (GCRs)?
To address these issues we might require a dedicated facility in Earth orbit. Such a facility should be in a higher orbit than the International Space Station (ISS) so that frequent reboosting to compensate for atmospheric drag is not required. It should be within the ionosphere so that electrodynamic tethers (ETs) can be used for occasional reboosting without the use of propellant. An orbit should be chosen to optimize partial GCR-shielding by Earth’s physical bulk. Ideally, the orbit selected should provide near-continuous sunlight so that the station’s solar panels are nearly always illuminated and experiments with closed-environment agriculture can be conducted without the inconvenience of the 90 minute day/night cycle of equatorial Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Initial crews of this venture should be trained astronauts. But before humans begin the colonization of the solar system, provision should be made for ordinary mortals to live aboard the station, at least for visits of a few months’ duration.
Another advantage of such a “proto-colony” is proximity to the Earth. Resupply is comparatively easy and not overly expensive in the developing era of booster reuse. In case of medical emergency, return to Earth is possible in a few hours. That’s a lot less than a 3-day return from the Moon or L5 or a ~1-year return from Mars.
A Possible Orbital Location
An interesting orbit for this application has been analyzed in a 2004 Carleton University study conducted in conjunction with planning for the Canadian Aegis satellite project [1]. This is a Sun-synchronous orbit mission with an inclination of 98.19 degrees and a (circular) optimum orbital height of 699 km. At this altitude, atmospheric drag would have a minimal effect during the planned 3-year satellite life. In fact, the orbital lifetime was calculated as 110 years. The mission could still be performed for an orbital height as low as 600 km. The satellite would follow the Earth’s terminator in a “dawn-to-dusk” orbit. In such an orbit, the solar panels of a spacecraft would almost always be illuminated.
For a long-term human-occupied research facility in or near such an orbit, a number of factors must be considered. These include cosmic radiation and space debris. It is also useful to consider upper-atmosphere density variation during the solar cycle.
The Cosmic Ray Environment
From a comprehensive study by Susan McKenna-Lawlor and colleagues of the deep space radiation environment [2], the one-year radiation dose limits for 30, 40, 50, and 60 year old female astronauts are respectively 0.6, 0.7, 0.82, and 0.98 Sv. Dose limits for men are about 0.18 Sv higher than for women. At a 95% confidence level, such exposures are predicted not to increase the risk of exposure-related fatal cancers by more than 3%.
Al Globus and Joe Strout have considered the radiation environment experienced within Earth-orbiting space settlements below the Van Allen radiation belt [3]. This source recommends annual radiation dose limits for the general population and pregnant women respectively at 20 mSv and 6.6 mGy (where “m” stands for milli, “Sv” stands for Sieverts and “Gy” stands for Gray). Conversion of Grays to Sieverts depends upon the type of radiation and the organs exposed. As demonstrated in Table 1 of Ref. 3, serious or fatal health effects begin to affect a developing fetus at about 100 mGy. If pregnant Earth-bound women are exposed to more than the US average 3.1 mSv of background radiation, the rates of spontaneous abortion, major fetal malformations, retardation and genetic disease are estimated respectively at 15%, 2-4%, 4%, and 8-10%. Unfortunately, these figures are not based upon exposure to energetic GCRs [3].
In their Table 5, Globus and Strout present projected habitat-crew radiation levels as functions of orbital inclination and shielding mass density [3]. Crews aboard habitats in high inclination orbits will experience higher dosages than those aboard similar habitats in near equatorial orbits. In a 90-degree inclination orbit, a crew member aboard a habitat shielded by 250 kg/m2 of water will be exposed to about 334 mSv/year. To bring radiation levels in this case below the 20 mSV/year threshold for adults in the general population requires a ~12-fold increase in shielding mass density [3].
But Table 4 of the Globus and Strout preprint demonstrates that, for a 600-km circular equatorial orbit, elimination of all shielding increases radiation dose projections to about 2X that of the habitat equipped with a 250 kg/m2 water shield. If shielding is not included and this scaling can be applied to the high-inclination orbit, expected crew dose rates will be less than 0.8 Sv/year [3]. This is within the annual dose limits for all male astronauts and female astronauts older than about 45 [2].
Early in the operational phase of this high-inclination habitat, astronauts can safely spend about a year aboard. Adults in the general public can safely endure week-long visits. Pregnant women who visit will require garments that provide additional shielding for the fetus. Some of the short-term residents aboard the habitat may be paying “hotel” guests. As discussed below, additional shielding may become available if development of this habitat is a joint private/NASA project.
Is Space Debris an Issue?
According to a 2011 NASA presentation to the United Nations Subcommittee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, space debris is an issue of concern in all orbits below ~2,000 km. About 36% of catalogued debris objects are due to two incidents: the intentional destruction of Fengyun-1C in 2007 and the 2009 accidental collision between Cosmos 2251 and Iridium 33 [4].
The peak orbital height range for space debris density is 700-1,000 km. At the 600-km orbital height of this proposed habitat, the spatial density of known debris objects is about 4X greater than at the ~400 km orbital height of the International Space Station (ISS) [4]. As is the case with the ISS, active collision avoidance will sometimes be necessary.
Atmospheric Drag at 600 km
An on-line version of the Standard Atmosphere has been consulted to evaluate exospheric molecular density at orbital heights [5]. A summary of this tabulation follows:
Atmospheric Density, km/m2 at various solar activity levels
| height | Low | Mean | Extremely High |
|---|---|---|---|
| 400 km | 5.68E-13 | 3.89E-12 | 5.04E-11 |
| 500 | 6.03E-14 | 7.30E-13 | 1.70E-11 |
| 600 | 1.03E-14 | 1.56E-13 | 6.20E-12 |
Note that atmospheric density levels at 600 km are in all cases far below the corresponding levels at the ISS ~400 km orbital height. But orbit adjustment will almost certainly be required during periods of peak solar activity.
Since the proposed 600-km orbital height is within the Earth’s ionosphere, there are a number of orbit-adjustment systems that require little or no expenditure of propellant. One such technology is the Electrodynamic Tether [6].
Habitat Properties and Additional Shielding Possibilities
A number of inflatable space habitats have been studied extensively or are under consideration for future space missions. Two that could be applied to construction of a ~600-km proto-colony are NASA’s Transhab and Bigelow Aerospace’s BA330 (also called B330).
Transhab, which was considered by NASA for application with the ISS and might find use as a habitat module for Mars-bound astronauts, would have a launch mass of about 13,000 kg. Its in-space (post-inflation) diameter would be 8.2 m and its length would be 11 m [7]. Treating this module as a perfect cylinder, its surface area would be about 280 m2. Transhab could comfortably accommodate 6 astronauts.
Image: Cutaway of Transhab Module with Crew members. Credit: NASA.
According to Wikipedia, the BA330 would have a mass of about 20,000 kg. Its length and diameter would be 13.7 m and 6.7 m, respectively. The Bigelow Aerospace website reports that the approximate length of this module would be 9.45 m. It could accommodate 6 astronauts comfortably during its projected 20-year operational life.
Both of these modules are designed for microgravity application. Since the study of the adjustment of humans and other terrestrial life forms to intermediate gravity levels might be one scientific goal of the proposed 600-km habitat, the habitat should consist of two modules arranged in dumbbell configuration connected by a variable-length spar with a hollow, pressurized interior. The rotation rate of the modules around the center could be adjusted to provide various levels of artificial gravity. Visiting spacecraft could dock at the center of the structure. It is possible that the entire disassembled and uninflated structure could be launched by a single Falcon Heavy.
Image: The pressurized volume of a 20 ton B330 is 330m3, compared to the 106m3 of the 15 ton ISS Destiny module; offering 210% more habitable space with an increase of only 33% in mass. Credit: Bigelow Aerospace.
One module could support the crew, which would be rotated every 3-6 months. The other module could accommodate visitors and scientific experiments. It is anticipated that visitors would pay for their week-duration experience to help support the project. Experiments would include studies of the effects of GCR and variable gravity on humans, experimental animals and experiments with in-space agriculture. The fact that the selected orbit provides near-constant exposure to sunlight should add a realistic touch to the agriculture studies. These experiments will hopefully lead to the eventual construction of in-space habitats, hotels, deep-space habitats and other facilities.
The possibility exists for cooperation between the developers of this proposed 600-km habitat and the NASA asteroid retrieval mission. Under consideration for the mid-2020’s, this mission would use the Space Launch System to robotically retrieve a ~7-meter diameter boulder and return it to high lunar orbit for further study [8]. The mass of this object in lunar orbit could exceed half a million kilograms. It is conceivable that much of this material could be used to provide GCR-shielding for Earth-orbiting habitats such as one considered here. As well as reducing on-board radiation levels, such an application would provide valuable experience to designers of deep-space habitats such as the O’Neill space colonies.
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References
1. S. Beaudette, “Carleton University Spacecraft Design Project; 2004 Final Design Report, “Satellite Mission Analysis”, FDR-SAT-2004-3.2.A (April 8, 2004).
2. S. McKenna-Lawlor, A. Bhardwaj, F. Ferrari, N. Kuznetsov, A. K. Lal, Y. Li, A. Nagamatsu, R. Nymmik, M. Panasyuk, V. Petrov, G. Reitz, L. Pinsky, M. Shukor, A. K. Singhvi, U. Strube, L. Tomi, and L. Townsend, “Recommendations to Mitigate Against Human Health Risks Due to Energetic Particle Irradiation Beyond Low Earth Orbit/BLEO”, Acta Astronautica, 109, 182-193 (2015).
3. A. Globus and J. Strout, “Orbital Space Settlement Radiation Shielding”, preprint, issued July 2015 available on-line at space.alglobus.net).
4. NASA, “USA Space Debris Environment, Operations, and Policy Updates”, Presentation to the 48th Session of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee, Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (7-9 February 2011).
5. Physical Properties of U.S. Standard Atmosphere, MSISE-90 Model of Earth’s Upper Atmosphere, www.braeunig.us/space/atmos.htm
6. L. Johnson and M. Herrmann, “International Space Station: Electrodynamic Tether Reboost Study, NASA/TM-1998-208538 (July, 1998).
7. “Transhab Concept” spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/station/transhab
8. M. Wall, “The Evolution of NASA’s Ambitious Asteroid Capture Mission”, www.space.com/28963-nasa-asteroid-capture-mission-history
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