‘Space’ Archives
Three Views of Icarus
Two versions of Icarus are on my mind today. Well, actually three. The first is the Japanese solar sail/solar cell hybrid called IKAROS, scheduled for launch today but scrubbed because of the weather at Tanegashima. The new launch date is Thursday May 20 at 2158 UTC (1758 EDT). IKAROS will piggyback aboard the JAXA H-2A booster with the Venus [...]
Life’s Adaptations Among the Stars
Gliese 581 d seems to be emerging as the exoplanet to talk about in terms of possible life, at least for now. You’ll recall that the initial furor was all about Gl 581 c, but that world now looks to be more Venus-like than anything else, while Gl 581 d may just skirt the outer region of the habitable zone in this interesting system. Thus [...]
Restoring Earth: The Space Imperative
I’ve heard of Dyson spheres and Dyson swarms, but what exactly are Dyson ‘dots’? As coined by Greg Matloff, C Bangs and Les Johnson in their book Paradise Regained, the term refers to a type of solar sail. These sails are not meant for moving things around the Solar System, but for reducing the amount of solar radiation hitting [...]
Clues to Missing Matter
We’d better get familiar with WHIM, the Warm-Hot Intergalactic Medium. According to some cosmologists, this sparse gas exists in the spaces between the galaxies, accounting for up to fifty percent of the normal matter found in today’s universe. That would explain a conundrum. By ‘normal matter,’ I mean baryons, the protons [...]
Warm ‘Saturns’ and Their Moons
Recent work from the Lick-Carnegie team has found that the M-dwarf HIP 57050 is orbited by a Saturn-mass world with an orbital period of 41.4 days. What catches the eye about this exoplanet is its temperature, some 230 kelvin or -43 degrees Celsius, warm enough to place it in the habitable zone of the star. Based on our knowledge of the gas giants [...]
Voyager 2: The Art of Deep Space Repair
The fastest moving spacecraft in our Solar System is currently Voyager 1, which is moving at 61,419 kilometers per hour, a figure that works out to 17.06 kilometers per second. It’s always interesting to weigh such speeds against the hypothetical upper limits we would get from certain kinds of propulsion. Geoffrey Landis told me years ago, [...]
Project Icarus Update
Is Jupiter the best place to collect massive amounts of helium-3? The Project Daedalus designers thought so. Back in the 1970s, members of the British Interplanetary Society set out to design a starship that would use pulsed fusion propulsion, with deuterium and helium-3 as fuel. Daedalus had mind-bending requirements, for the plan was to drive it [...]
Finding Titan on Earth
Finding life on a world in the outer Solar System — think Enceladus or Titan for starters — would be an extraordinary step forward. Martian microbes, if they exist, might be evidence of contamination, or we might be evidence of ancient contamination from Mars, given the ready exchange of materials between our planets in the last [...]
Artificial Intelligence Among the Stars
Talk of a ’singularity’ in which artificial intelligence reaches such levels that it moves beyond human capability and comprehension plays inevitably into the realm of interstellar studies. Some have speculated, as Paul Davies does in The Eerie Silence, that any civilization we make contact with will likely be made up of intelligent [...]
SETI: Handling a Detection
The Stephen Hawking controversy continues to bubble, with discussion on the Larry King show and the appearance of David Brin’s essay The Other Kind of Aliens. It’s all to the good to get such discussions widely circulated, even if it can be dismaying to find that so many respondents believe the answers about how alien cultures will [...]
