‘Space’ Archives
Innovative Interstellar Explorer: A Response to Questions
Ralph McNutt’s recent update on the progress of the Innovative Interstellar Explorer concept elicited plenty of comments, enough that Dr. McNutt wanted to answer them in a new post. Now at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, McNutt is Project Scientist and a Co-Investigator on NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury, [...]
Our Meaning-Stuffed Dreams
Gregory Benford’s work is so widely known that it almost seems absurd to introduce him, but for any Centauri Dreams readers who have somehow missed it, I challenge you to read In the Ocean of Night and not become obsessed with reading this author’s entire output. This week has been a science fictional time for Centauri Dreams, with discussion [...]
Unseen Planets Around a Young Star?
If you want a glimpse of how remarkable technology continues to transform the exoplanet hunt, look no further than the Subaru telescope and its SEEDS project. SEEDS (Strategic Exploration of Exoplanets and Disks with Subaru Telescope/HiCIAO) works with data from the 8.2-meter telescope that the National Observatory of Japan runs on Mauna Kea [...]
A Future History
Predictions about the future of technology are so often wide of the mark, yet for many of us they’re irresistible. They fuel our passion for science fiction and the expansive philosophy of thinkers like Olaf Stapledon. To begin 2012, Tau Zero founder Marc Millis offers up a set of musings about where we may be going, a scenario that, given [...]
100 Year Starship Winner Announced
Congratulations to Icarus Interstellar, which teamed with the Dorothy Jemison Foundation and the Foundation for Enterprise Development to win the 100 Year Starship proposal grant. Mae Jemison, the first African-American astronaut to fly into space, founded DJF in honor of her late mother. We’ll have more on this next week (and technically [...]
Prior Visions of Star Flight
by Marc Millis Here is a holiday gift from Tau Zero as compiled by TZF’s founding architect Marc Millis. It’s part of Marc’s continuing effort to find earlier references to the interstellar concepts — many of them in fiction — that we routinely ponder today. Some of these go back to the early 20th Century and in some cases the [...]
New Work on FTL Neutrinos
A paper in the December 24 issue of Physical Review Letters goes to work on the finding of supposed faster-than-light neutrinos by the OPERA experiment. The FTL story has been popping up ever since OPERA — a collaboration between the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Gran Sasso, Italy and the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva [...]
Complex Molecules on Pluto
I hope everyone is having a happy holiday season and looking forward to the upcoming New Year’s festivities. In the intervening window, let’s look at the outer Solar System. No other spacecraft has ever come as close to Pluto as New Horizons now has, already halfway between the Earth and the distant dwarf planet. It’s also worth [...]
Planets Survive Red Giant Expansion
The most interesting thing about the worlds known as KOI 55.01 and KOI 55.02 is not just the fact that they are — if current thinking holds — the smallest planets yet detected around an active star other than our Sun, but that they are evidently survivors of the most extreme kind of experience. KOI 55, their host star, is of subdwarf B [...]
Kepler Finds Earth-Sized Planets
I’m delighted that we keep finding solar systems so different from our own. The discovery of two new planets that are roughly the size of the Earth just confirms the feeling — in a galaxy of dazzling fecundity, every system we look at has its own peculiarities to instruct and delight us. The system around the star called Kepler-20 (from [...]
