A growing interest in JPL's Solar Gravitational Lens mission here takes Wes Kelly on an odyssey into the past. A long-time Centauri Dreams contributor, Wes looks at the discovery of gravitational lensing, which takes us back not only to Einstein but to a putative...
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...
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...
Ongoing projects like JHU/APL’s Interstellar Probe pose the question of just how we define an ‘interstellar’ journey. Does reaching the local interstellar medium outside the heliosphere qualify? JPL thinks so, which is why when you check on the latest news from the...
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...
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...
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...
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...
We started finding a lot of 'hot Jupiters' in the early days of planet hunting simply because, although their existence was not widely predicted, they were the most likely planetary types to trigger our radial velocity detection methods. These star-hugging worlds...
As we begin the New Year, I want to be sure to catch up with the recent announcement of a discovery regarding 'rogue' planets, those interesting worlds that orbit no central star but wander through interstellar space alone (or, conceivably, with moons). Conceivably...