‘Space’ Archives
Kepler-22b: A ‘Super-Earth’ in the Habitable Zone
It’s fun to see Kepler-22b — an intriguing new world that lies 600 light years from us toward Lyra and Cygnus — being referred to as the ‘Christmas planet’ in the newspapers this morning, the latter a nod to Kepler chief scientist William Borucki, who said he thought of the planet that way, as a seasonal gift to the team. [...]
Terraforming: Enter the ‘Shell World’
If we ever achieve manned missions to the stars, one of the assumptions is that we will find planets much like Earth that we might live on and colonize. But what if the assumption is flawed? There are surely many Earth analogues in the Milky Way, but we don’t know how widely they are spaced, and a near-miss isn’t necessarily helpful, as both [...]
Interstellar Flight: Equations and Art
Les Johnson (MSFC) always says that the coolest job title he ever had in his long career at NASA was Manager of Interstellar Propulsion Research. Think about it — if going to the stars is your passion and you have a title like that, you must feel that you have really arrived. These days he goes by the more prosaic title of Deputy Manager for [...]
Technological Leaps in Perspective
Wednesday is a travel day for me, and one with little chance to do any posting here. I’ll leave you, then, with a quotation, and get back to normal posting tomorrow. Interstellar travel is incredibly difficult, perhaps as difficult to us today as a flight to Mars would have appeared to Christopher Columbus or other would-be transoceanic [...]
Interstellar Workshop in Tennessee
I’m just back from the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Oak Ridge, having made it through the Smokies on a rainy, chilly night that saw fog along the ridges and often down in the valleys. It was a haunting drive in ways, the low ceilings making for slow driving and the sense of being surrounded by unseen peaks and deep gorges that were [...]
Cygnus X-1: A Black Hole Confirmed
Cygnus X-1 is one of the strongest X-ray sources we can detect from Earth and the first widely thought to be a black hole. In fact, when Stephen Hawking bet against X-1 being a black hole back in 1975, he was more or less setting up a hedge, for black holes have been a crucial part of Hawking’s work. Hawking writes about his wager with Kip [...]
Star Maker: The Philosophy of Olaf Stapledon
Kelvin Long and Richard Osborne have seen to it that the British Interplanetary Society’s conference on the highly influential science fiction writer and philosopher Olaf Stapledon has gone off without a hitch. Here is their report from the event, a conference evidently as rife with speculation and far-future musings as anything the author [...]
Reflections on a Mythic Voyager
Voyager 2 received commands in early November to switch to the backup set of thrusters that control the roll of the spacecraft. I keep close tabs on the Voyagers because, still operational, they constitute our first interstellar mission, headed beyond the heliosphere and still returning data. Launched in 1977, they’re an obvious example of [...]
Ranking Exoplanet Habitability
Our notions of habitability are built around environments like our own, which is why the search for planets with temperatures that support liquid water at the surface is such a lively enterprise. But as we saw yesterday, it is not beyond possibility that many places in our Solar System could have sub-surface oceans, even remote objects in the [...]
The Case for Pluto’s Ocean
Sub-surface oceans in the Solar System may be far more common than we’ve realized. We’ve grown used to contemplating water under the ice of Europa, but similar oceans may well exist on Ganymede and Callisto, and there are signs of a possible ocean beneath Titan, not to mention the unusual activity we continue to observe on Enceladus. Where [...]
