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Self-Assembly: Reshaping Mission Design

It’s interesting to contemplate the kind of missions we could fly if we develop lightweight smallsats coupled with solar sails, deploying them in Sundiver maneuvers to boost their acceleration. Getting past Voyager 1’s 17.1 kilometers per second would itself be a...

Wolf 1069b: Why System Architecture Matters

Let’s look at a second red dwarf planet in this small series on such, this one being Wolf 1069b. I want to mention it partly because of the prior post on K2-415b, where we had the good fortune to be dealing with a transiting world around an M-dwarf that should be...

The Ethics of Directed Panspermia

Interstellar flight poses no shortage of ethical questions. How to proceed if an intelligent species is discovered is a classic. If the species is primitive in terms of technology, do we announce ourselves to it, or observe from a distance, following some version of...

Interstellar Probe: Prospects for ESA Technologies

The Interstellar Probe concept being developed at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is not alone in the panoply of interstellar studies. We've examined the JHU/APL effort in a series of articles, the most recent being NASA Interstellar Probe: Overview and...

The Great Venusian Bug Hunt

Our recent focus on life detection on nearby worlds concludes with a follow-up to Alex Tolley's June essay on Venus Life Finder. What would the sequence of missions look like that resulted in an unambiguous detection of life in the clouds of Venus? To answer that...

A Habitable Exomoon Target List

Are there limits on how big a moon can be to orbit a given planet? All we have to work with, in the absence of confirmed exomoons, are the satellites of our Solar System’s planets, and here we see what appears to be a correlation between a planet’s mass and the mass...