‘Space’ Archives
Musings on Impartiality
Marc Millis, Tau Zero’s founding architect, drawing on his experience with NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project and the years of research since, offers us some ideas about impartiality and how scientists can hope to attain it. It’s human nature to want our particular theories to succeed, but when they collide with reality, the [...]
More Evidence for Enceladus Ocean
The latest work involving Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) gives us fresh information about Saturn’s intriguing moon Enceladus and the likelihood of an internal ocean there. You’ll recall that plumes of water vapor and grains of ice have been found spewing from the ‘tiger stripe’ fractures at the moon’s southern pole, feeding [...]
IceHunters.org: Probing for KBOs
New Horizons’ encounter with Pluto/Charon in 2015 is eagerly anticipated, but let’s not forget that the spacecraft will be operational afterwards as it moves deeper into the Kuiper Belt. Fuel will be tight, but there should be enough available for one and possibly a second encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO), assuming we can identify a [...]
A Trio of Black Hole Studies
Big explosions make news, as proven by ubiquitous reports in the popular media about a distant star that wandered too close to the black hole at the center of its galaxy. The beam of energy that resulted from its destruction was composed of high-energy X-rays and gamma rays, and was unusual not only for its brightness but its duration. The event [...]
Analyzing a ‘Hyperactive’ Comet
We’ve certainly gotten our money’s worth out of the spacecraft once called ‘Deep Impact.’ A mission designed for close study of a comet (Tempel 1) winds up making extrasolar planet investigations in an extended mission called EPOCh (Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization), sends back imagery of the Earth and its moon that [...]
A Look Inside the 100 Year Starship Idea
Technology fails at the damnedest times, which is particularly ironic when discussing something as futuristic as a starship. But then, a starship launched in a hundred or more years won’t be worrying about small cassette recorders like my little Olympus, which chewed up the tape on which I was recording the June 16 teleconference held by [...]
100 Year Starship Study: Call for Papers
We’re keeping a close eye on the 100 Year Starship Study, and with the call for papers for its upcoming conference just issued, I want to run this verbatim. DARPA Encourages Individuals and Organizations to Look to the Stars; Issues Call for Papers for 100 Year Starship Study Public Symposium In 1865, Jules Verne put forward a seemingly [...]
100 Year Starship Study Public Symposium
The 100 Year Starship Study being developed through DARPA and NASA Ames now has its Web site up, from which the following: DARPA and NASA are jointly planning the 100 Year Starship Study Symposium that will be held from September 30 through October 2, 2011 in Orlando, FL. The goal of the symposium is to promote discussions that will bring us [...]
Asimov’s Vesta and Ours
With the Dawn spacecraft on its approach to Vesta, I’ve been scouting around for science fiction that involves this interesting asteroid. The one story that stands out is famous for its author more than its quality. It’s “Marooned Off Vesta,” which turns out to be Isaac Asimov’s first published story. John Campbell rejected it at [...]
The Froth at System’s Edge
Our Voyager spacecraft are in a fascinating place indeed, where the stream of charged particles flowing out from the Sun — the solar wind — bumps up against what we might call the ‘interstellar wind,’ the tenuous material expelled from other stars in our neighborhood. We’ve looked at the solar wind’s possibilities for [...]
