‘Space’ Archives
Can the Pioneer Anomaly Be Explained by Inertia Modification?
by Richard Obousy Physicist Richard Obousy here takes a look at an intriguing new paper by Mike McCulloch, a researcher at the University of Exeter. In addition to his work in theoretical physics and warp drive possibilities, Obousy is current project leader and primary propulsion design lead for Project Icarus, a joint venture between the [...]
Statites: Hovering Over the Pole
Robert Forward’s Indistinguishable from Magic is a genial and absorbing read, a collection of essays and fiction illustrating some of the scientist’s most memorable ideas. And while gigantic lightsails driven by laser beam to other stars always come to mind when Forward’s name is mentioned, it’s fascinating to page through [...]
New Planets Highlight Orbital Resonance
We’re learning a lot more about how planets interact with each other gravitationally. ‘Resonance’ is the operative term here. When planets are locked in a 2:1 orbital resonance, the outer planet orbits the host star once for every two orbits of the inner planet. A 3:2 resonance occurs when the outer planet orbits the star twice for every [...]
Solar Sailing’s ‘Gossamer Road’
With more attention now being focused on possible missions to an asteroid, we should keep in mind that DLR, the German Aerospace Center, has been looking into an asteroid mission via solar sail for some time now. One 2006 paper from DLR’s Institute of Space Simulation pondered a 70-meter sail for use in a projected mission to the Near-Earth [...]
Time Travel: Ways Around Paradox
Time travel holds such perennial fascination that even though its relationship with interstellar issues is slim, I can’t resist reporting on new ideas about it. John Cramer’s time experiments seem stuck in limbo, but now we have new work from Seth Lloyd (MIT) and colleagues about one way out of the paradoxes time travel seemingly [...]
Sasselov: Planets ‘Like Earth’ in Kepler Data
Dimitar Sasselov, a co-investigator on the Kepler mission, said in a TED Talk just posted that Kepler had uncovered numerous terrestrial planet candidates in its early data. Have a look at the video below (around the 8-minute mark). “Small planets dominate the picture,” says Sasselov, showing a chart of planet candidates. A great deal [...]
The Solar Sail in Context
The final day of the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing (ISSS 2010) kicks off this morning with Roman Kezerashvili (City University of New York) discussing solar sail missions as a way of testing fundamental physics. Last year in Aosta I listened with fascination as Kezerashvili discussed close solar passes (‘Sundiver’ [...]
A New View of Ontario Lacus
Before I move into today’s story on Titan, I want to mention that those of us who weren’t able to attend the ongoing Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing (ISSS 2010) can take heart in the fact that selected papers from the proceedings have been quickly published online. Conferences vary tremendously in the resources they [...]
Musings on Sails and Stars
Solar Sails in Brooklyn I should probably clean out my office, and would, if I could find the time, but things keep happening in the deep space community and I keep writing about them. I had the program for ISSS 2010 (the Second International Symposium on Solar Sailing) right beside me when I started to write yesterday’s entry, and by the [...]
Notes & Queries 7/19/10
WISE Completes First Full Survey The WISE mission completed its first survey of the entire sky on July 17, generating more than a million images, of which one of the most beautiful is surely the image of the Pleiades cluster below. We’re looking in the infrared at a mosaic of several hundred image frames with the combined light of [...]
