Eduardo Bendek’s ACEsat, conceived at NASA Ames by Bendek and Ruslan Belikov, seemed to change the paradigm for planet discovery around the nearest stellar system. The beauty of Alpha Centauri is that the two primary stars present large habitable zones as seen from Earth, simply because the system is so close to us. The downside, in terms of G-class Centauri A and K-class Centauri B, is that their binary nature makes filtering out starlight a major challenge.
Image: The Alpha Centauri system. The combined light of Centauri A (G-class) and Centauri B (K-class) appears here as a single overwhelmingly bright ‘star.’ Proxima Centauri can be seen circled at bottom right. Credit: European Southern Observatory.
If we attack the problem from the ground, ever bigger instruments seem called for, like the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in conjunction with the VISIR instrument (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared) that Breakthrough Initiatives is now working with the ESO to enhance. Or perhaps one of the extremely large telescopes now in the works, like the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii, or the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile.
And if we did this from space, surely it would be an expensive platform. Except that ACEsat wasn’t expensive, nor was it large. It was designed to do just one thing and do it well.
While NASA turned down Bendek and Belikov’s idea for Small Explorer funding, the striking thing is that it would have fit that category’s definition. ACEsat was designed as a 30 to 45 cm space telescope (you can see a Belikov presentation on the instrument here, or for that matter, read Ashley Baldwin’s ACEsat: Alpha Centauri and Direct Imaging). The small instrument now being proposed by an initiative called Project Blue builds on many of the ACEsat concepts. It would run perhaps $50 million even though the original ACEsat was a $175 million design.
In other words, compared to the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, Project Blue’s instrument is almost inexpensive enough to be a rounding error. A privately funded initiative out of the Boldly Go Institute, in partnership with the SETI Institute, Mission Centaur, and UMass Lowell, the telescope shows its pedigree both in its low cost and big scientific return. It seems the ACEsat concept is just too good to go away.
So now we have Project Blue, which is all about seeing the blue of an Earth-like world around one or even both of the Sun-like stars of the Alpha Centauri system. No one discounts the value of the planet already discovered around Proxima Centauri, but the project hopes to find an Earth 2.0, a rocky planet in a habitable zone orbit around a star like our own. That would mean no tidal locking, no small red dwarf primary, and a year measured in months rather than days.
Image: An Earth-like planet around one of the primary Alpha Centauri stars, as simulated by Project Blue.
The project’s new Indiegogo campaign has been set up to raise $175,000 to help establish mission requirements, including the design of an initial system architecture to which computer simulations can be applied by way of testing ideas and simulating outcomes. The launch goal of 2021 is ambitious indeed, as is the low $50 million budget profile, but the project’s backers believe their work can leverage advances in the small satellite industry and imaging systems to pull it off. An explicit goal is to engage the public while tapping the original NASA work.
The project’s connection to NASA is in the form of a cooperative agreement explained on the Indiegogo site:
The BoldlyGo Institute and NASA have signed a Space Act Agreement to cooperate on Project Blue, a mission to search for potentially habitable Earth-size planets in the Alpha Centauri system using a specially designed space telescope. The agreement allows NASA employees – scientists and engineers – to interact with the Project Blue team through its mission development phases to help review mission design plans and to share scientific results on Alpha Centauri and exoplanets along with the latest technology tests being undertaken at NASA facilities. The agreement also calls for the raw and processed data from Project Blue to be made available to NASA within one year of its acquisition on orbit via a publicly accessible online data archive. The Project Blue team has been planning such an archive for broadly sharing the data with the global astronomical community and for enabling citizen scientist participation.
And I notice that Eduardo Bendek is among the ranks of an advisory committee (available here) that includes the likes of exoplanet hunters Olivier Guyon, Debra Fischer, Jim Kasting and Maggie Turnbull. But have a look at the advisor page; every one of these scientists is playing a significant role in our discovery and evaluation of new exoplanetary systems.
Thus we can say that ACEsat lives on in this new incarnation that will benefit from the input of its original designers. The spacecraft would spend two years in low Earth orbit accumulating thousands of images with the help of an onboard coronagraph to remove light from the twin stars, along with a deformable mirror, low-order wavefront sensors, and control algorithms to manage incoming light, enhancing image contrast with software processing methods.
Unlike the major observatories we’re soon to be launching — not just the James Webb Space Telescope but the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) — the Project Blue observatory will be dedicated to a single target, with no other observational duties.
A photograph of an Earth-like planet 40 trillion kilometers away gives us a sense of the changes in scale that have occurred since Voyager 1’s ‘pale blue dot’ photograph. But we already knew that Earth was inhabited. Now, gaining spectral information about a blue and green world around a nearby star would allow us to determine whether biosignature gases could be found in its atmosphere, potential signs of life that would mark a breakthrough in our science. The degree of public involvement assumed in the project makes the quest all the more tantalizing.
Breakthrough Starshot, the research and engineering effort to lay the groundwork for the launch of nanocraft to Alpha Centauri within a generation, is now investing in an attempt to learn a great deal more about possible planets around these stars. We already know about Proxima b, the highly interesting world orbiting the red dwarf in the system, but we also have a K- and G-class star here, either of which might have planets of its own.
Image: The Alpha Centauri system. The combined light of Centauri A (G-class) and Centauri B (K-class) appears here as a single overwhelmingly bright ‘star.’ Proxima Centauri can be seen circled at bottom right. Credit: European Southern Observatory.
To learn more, Breakthrough Initiatives is working with the European Southern Observatory on modifications to the VISIR instrument (VLT Imager and Spectrometer for mid-Infrared) mounted at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Observing in the infrared has advantages for detecting an exoplanet because the contrast between the light of the star and the light of the planet is diminished at these wavelengths, although the star is still millions of times brighter.
To surmount the problem, VISIR will be fitted out for adaptive optics. In addition, Kampf Telescope Optics of Munich will deliver a wavefront sensor and calibration device, while the University of Liège (Belgium) and Uppsala University (Sweden) will jointly develop a coronagraph that will mask the light of the star enough to reveal terrestrial planets.
Image: Paranal at sunset. This panoramic photograph captures the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) as twilight comes to Cerro Paranal. The enclosures of the VLT stand out in the picture as the telescopes in them are readied for the night. The VLT is the world’s most powerful advanced optical telescope, consisting of four Unit Telescopes with primary mirrors 8.2 metres in diameter and four movable 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs), which can be seen in the left corner of the image. Credit: ESO.
According to the agreement signed by Breakthrough Initiatives executive director Pete Worden and European Southern Observatory director general Tim de Zeeuw, Breakthrough Initiatives will pay for a large part of the technology and development costs for the VISIR modifications. Meanwhile, the ESO will provide the necessary telescope time for a search program that will be conducted in 2019. The VISIR work, according to this ESO news release, should provide a proof of concept for the METIS instrument (Mid-infrared E-ELT Imager and Spectrograph), the third instrument on the upcoming European Extremely Large Telescope.
In early December the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics offered as part of its fall colloquium series a talk by Harvard’s Avi Loeb, fortunately captured on YouTube as Project Starshot: Visiting the Nearest Star Within Our Lifetime. We’ve looked at Breakthrough Starshot in many posts on Centauri Dreams, including my reports from the last set of meetings in Palo Alto, but for those new to the concept of using a laser array to send small, instrumented sails to the Alpha Centauri stars, this video is a fine introduction.
You’ll recall that yesterday I talked about Robert Austin’s futuristic Asteroid Belt Astronomical Telescope, with an illustration of what such an instrument might see of the exoplanet Gliese 832c. If Starshot can achieve its goals, it will be able to make out continent sized features on the surface of Proxima b, or perhaps a planet around Centauri A or B. It would achieve, in other words, what it would take a near-Earth space-based telescope 300 kilometers wide to equal.
Image: What we can see today. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has given us this stunning view of the bright Alpha Centauri A (on the left) and Alpha Centauri B (on the right), shining like huge cosmic headlamps in the dark. The image was captured by the Wide-Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). WFPC2 was Hubble’s most used instrument for the first 13 years of the space telescope’s life, being replaced in 2009 by Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) during Servicing Mission 4. This portrait of Alpha Centauri was produced by observations carried out at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. Credit: ESA/NASA.
Starshot envisions sending swarms of sails to its target stars, each moving at 20 percent of the speed of light. Each four-meter square lightsail would itself be used as the transmitter dish to beam data back to Earth showing us images of the planet, with each sail sending 100 images over the course of its observations. The time frames are interesting: If all goes without a hitch (and it’s hard to conceive of there being no hitches in a plan this ambitious), it will take several decades to build a beamer and create the actual sails and payload.
Then we have a launch, which takes place in a timeframe of minutes, as a mothership in a highly elliptical orbit releases a sail that is then under the beam for an intense 60,000 g ride. You can imagine all the stresses this puts on the sail, and again, we’ve talked about most of these in previous posts, but Avi Loeb’s presentation offers an excellent refresher, covering factors like sail stability under the beam, sail materials and interstellar dust encounters.
The launch phase ends in minutes and a 20 year cruise phase begins. In the Proxima Centauri system after the journey, each sail now faces an encounter time measured in hours. Thus the pattern: Hurry up and wait. For after the flyby, we face more time, a 4.24 year wait for the first images of the planet to come back to Earth. Interestingly, despite moving at relativistic speed, the planet’s image will remain circular thanks to so-called Terrell rotation.
Loeb mentions as a driver for investigation of Proxima Centauri in particular the fact that M-dwarfs make up a huge percentage of all the stars in the galaxy, and they can live for trillions of years. If we learn that life exists around this kind of star, we learn that living things will have incredibly long timeframes to continue to evolve. We also learn that the kind of environments found around red dwarfs are far more common than what we find around our own familiar G-class star. In many respects, we may wind up being the outliers.
Facets of the Journey
Yesterday I asked what effect being able to see images of planets like Proxima b from telescopes in our own Solar System would have on our thinking. Some would argue that we’ll reach the point where we can learn enough about exoplanets in such observations and will not need to build probes to other stars. My own view is that the two prospects work together. I think any images of a living, Earth-like world around a nearby star are going to focus interest in getting a payload into that system in order to make close up imagery and data possible.
On that score, you’ll recall Project Blue, the attempt to build a small space telescope explicitly designed to detect possible planets in the habitable zones around Centauri A and B (see Project Blue: Imaging Alpha Centauri Planets). Documentary filmmakers who are supporting Project Blue bring Debra Fischer (Yale University), one of its key players, into their new short video Traveling to Alpha Centauri? which explores the same terrain.
Although the video suggests antimatter rather than laser-beamed sails as a solution to the propulsion problem, Fischer’s comments go to the question of what the information we gain from our telescopes can motivate us to do.
If we discover an Earth-like planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, this is really going to drive a whole new era in science, an explosion, to finally go out into the galaxy and to start exploring other worlds.
Fischer goes on to speak of a ‘new wave within humanity to begin taking our steps out of our Solar System’ as a part of achieving the destiny of our species. I’m in agreement, and not just at the level of Project Blue. We could know within a decade or so about possible planets in the habitable zones of the two primary Centauri stars, and we may be able not long afterward to begin analyzing their atmospheres. I believe that hints of life on such worlds will ignite the imagination of the general public in support of projects to explore them up close. To me, Breakthrough Starshot and Project Blue, so different in their scale and conception, are nonetheless two sides of the same coin. An exploring species watches, learns and goes.
We know about an extremely interesting planet around Proxima Centauri, and there are even plans afoot (Breakthrough Starshot) to get probes into the Alpha Centauri system later in this century. But last April, when Breakthrough Initiatives held a conference at Stanford to talk about this and numerous other matters, the question of what we could see came up. For in Alpha Centauri, we’re dealing with three stars that are closer to us than any other. If there are planets around Centauri A and/or Centauri B, are there ways we could image them?
This gets interesting in the context of Project Blue, a consortium of space organizations looking into exoplanetary imaging technologies. This morning Project Blue drew on the work of some of those present at Stanford, launching a campaign to fund a telescope that could obtain the first image of an Earth-like planet outside our Solar System, perhaps by as early as the end of the decade. The idea here is to ignite a Kickstarter effort aimed at raising $1 million to support needed telescope design studies. A $4 million ‘stretch goal’ would allow testing of the coronagraph, completion of telescope design and the beginning of manufacturing.
Project Blue thinks it can bring this mission home — i.e., launch the telescope and carry out its mission — at a final cost of $50 million (the original ACEsat was a $175 million design). The figure is modest enough when you consider that Kepler, which has transformed our view of exoplanets, cost $600 million, while the James Webb Space Telescope weighs in at $8 billion. About a quarter of the total cost, according to the project, goes into getting the telescope into orbit, which will involve partnering with various providers to lower costs.
But Project Blue also hopes to build a public community around the mission to support design and research activities. Jon Morse is mission executive for the project:
“We’re at an incredible moment in history, where for the first time, we have the technology to actually find another Earth,” said Morse. “Just as exciting — thanks to the power of crowdfunding — we can open this mission to everyone. With the Project Blue consortium, we are bringing together the technical experts who can build and launch this telescope. Now we want to bring along everyone else as well. This is a new kind of space initiative — to achieve cutting-edge science for low cost in just a few years, and it empowers us all to participate in this moment of human discovery.”
I go back to last April because it was at Stanford that I saw Eduardo Bendek’s model of a small space telescope called ACEsat, which was conceived at NASA Ames by Ruslan Belikov and Eduardo Bendek and submitted (unsuccessfully) for NASA Small Explorer funding. Belikov had gone on to present the work at the American Astronomical Society meeting in 2015 (see “How to Directly Image a Habitable Planet Around Alpha Centauri with a ~30-45cm Space Telescope,” available here). You’ll recall that Ashley Baldwin wrote up the concept in superb detail on this site in December of that year as ACEsat: Alpha Centauri and Direct Imaging.
Now we have Project Blue, which has connections to the BoldlyGo Institute, its offshoot Mission Centaur, the SETI Institute and the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The aim is to launch a space telescope with a 45-50 centimeter aperture, looking for potentially habitable planets from 0.5 to 1.5 AU within the habitable zones of both Centauri A and B. The ultimate hope, then, is to ‘see blue’ — meaning oceans and atmosphere, a world on which life could emerge. This is Sagan’s ‘pale blue dot,’ only now it’s not our own planet but an Earth 2.0.
The Project Blue space telescope would spend two years in low Earth orbit accumulating image after image — hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands — as a way of teasing out its faint targets. When it comes to ‘another Earth,’ Centauri A and B up the ante on Proxima Centauri. The Proxima planet may well be habitable, but a true Earth analog is not going to be tidally locked to its star, as Proxima b probably is, and it’s not going to orbit a red dwarf.
Neither Belikov or deputy principal investigator Eduardo Bendek are formally connected to Project Blue, but their work in the form of papers and conference presentations feeds directly into the concept driving the project. The original mission now cedes the floor to the private sector, whose job it will be to raise enough cash to support the development of the needed coronagraph to filter out the light of two very close stars, along with other key flight hardware elements. The next step, though, long before building flight hardware, is to finalize the telescope design.
The new Kickstarter campaign will pay for analysis, design, and simulations, but Project Blue has an eye on other partnerships as well as wealthy donors and foundations. Usefully, the project should be able to test coronagraph technologies similar to those being considered on much larger space instruments currently under study by the major space agencies, thus providing a useful testbed for such designs. To make this work, everything must fall into place — the coronagraph for starlight suppression, a deformable mirror to feed the coronagraph and rock-solid stability. No aspect can be allowed to fail if the mission is to achieve its goal.
If the Project Blue planners are correct, we can solve the attendant problems and get this mission into space is as little as 4 to 6 years. The goal is hugely ambitious but it also opens the door to citizen-science, with private donors contributing to an instrument that will not be the result of a government program or a for-profit commercial space effort. The initial Kickstarter campaign is designed to bolster the technical groundwork needed for the telescope, but stretch goals could see publicly funded flight component manufacturing.
Looking for Earth-like planets around other stars is like looking for bioluminescent algae next to a lighthouse. But I keep coming back to that Breakthrough Discuss meeting in Stanford, because I remember Ruslan Belikov telling his audience that the key advantage of Alpha Centauri is how large the habitable zones around its component stars appear in terms of angular size. We would need a significantly larger instrument to attempt something similar around other nearby stars. The Alpha Centauri stars are nature’s gift, and it’s one we would do well to exploit. Check the Kickstarter page for more on this low cost, high impact idea.
For more on the technical background of the ACEsat concept, see Belikov et al., “How to Directly Image a Habitable Planet Around Alpha Centauri with a ~30-45cm Space Telescope” (preprint) and Bendek et al., “Space telescope design to directly image the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri” (preprint).
Heading for the hotel lobby the first night of the Breakthrough Discuss meeting, I thought about a major theme of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative: Making things smaller. Robert Forward wrote about sails hundreds of kilometers in diameter, and vast lenses deep in the Solar System to collimate a laser beam that would drive them. But Breakthrough Starshot is looking at a sail four meters across, carrying a payload more like a smartphone than a cargo ship. That big lens in the outer system? No longer needed if we can power up the sail close to home.
How to Look at Alpha Centauri
Digitization works wonders, and Moore’s Law takes us into ever smaller and more tightly packed realms on silicon chips. The trend affects every aspect of spaceflight and astronomy, as witness ACEsat, a small coronagraph mission with an explicit mission, the search for planets around Alpha Centauri A and B. Ruslan Belikov (NASA Ames), working with Northrop Grumman, led the team that conceived this mission, which was recently submitted for NASA Small Explorer funding. The funding did not come through, but the ACEsat idea persists.
At Breakthrough Discuss, we heard Ruslan Belikov describe the mission. Lead author of a recent paper on the work (“How to directly image a habitable planet around Alpha Centauri with a 30-45cm telescope,” available here), Belikov showed a half-scale model of ACEsat that was small enough to hold in your hand. The mission as currently conceived uses a 35 centimeter by 18 cm optical mirror, fits into a CubeSat, and in the view of its creators, is capable of directly imaging Earth-like planets around Alpha Centauri (see ACEsat: Alpha Centauri and Direct Imaging, Ashley Baldwin’s article from last December, for more).
“Alpha Centauri isn’t the tip of the iceberg,” Belikov told conference attendees during a panel discussion on exoplanet detection. “It is the iceberg. We know that small stars like Barnard’s Star or Proxima Centauri have small habitable zones. But nature has given us Alpha Centauri, a favorable outlier — think about how large its habitable zone appears on the sky in terms of its angular size. We would need a telescope three times larger for other stars.”
Image: Stars in the Alpha Centauri system as compared with the Sun. Credit: David Benbennick. CC BY-SA 3.0.
When asked what surprises we would find around the Alpha Centauri stars, Sara Seager (MIT) suggested that the biggest surprise would be finding a true Earth twin with life on it, and Belikov was quick to agree — “Sara stole my answer,” he said with a laugh. But Seager would go on to talk about future telescopic efforts focusing on just one object, one specialized type of telescope for each type of star. That more specialized approach seems to fit in nicely with Belikov’s ACEsat concept, tuned as it is for not just a specific type of star but a specific stellar system.
Cornell’s Lisa Kaltenegger urged the audience to think about an Earth ‘twin’ being utterly unlike what we might imagine:
“A world like this could meet our conditions for habitability and yet be much different from the Earth. We can imagine a different kind of biota taking over. When you think about an Earth twin, don’t think about the picture you know. Think yellow, think green, whatever color you want. We can look at some of the exotic deep water fish we find in the ocean and realize that they, as strange as they seem, evolved right here. What might wind up evolving around Centauri?”
Kaltenegger’s remarks drew on her work at the Carl Sagan Institute, where she has built a new interdisciplinary research group spanning ten departments. The effort includes a color catalog that examines the differing reflectivity of various planets depending on possible biota. Which gets us to a major point about Breakthrough Starshot. As Kaltenegger mentioned more than once, data return from the nearest stars needs to include more than basic photographic images. Spectroscopic analysis is crucial as we examine planetary atmospheres for biosignatures.
Natalie Batalha (NASA Ames) pointed out that while we all hoped to find planets in the habitable zone of Alpha Centauri, we might consider that a null result there could still leave us with interesting science. We have not resolved the surface features of any main sequence star except for our own Sun. An Alpha Centauri mission gives us the prospect of resolving the surface of three stars, a science windfall that adds to the benefits of the mission.
Image: Exoplanet hunters Sara Seager (left), Lisa Kaltenegger, Natalie Batalha and Debra Fischer during a break at the meeting.
SETI and Its Consequences
The question and answer sessions at Breakthrough Discuss tended to run into our break periods, when many of the issues continued to circulate. A key issue for SETI is that factor in the Drake equation that addresses the lifetime of a technological civilization. Just how long do such entities survive? It’s an issue that lies like morning fog over the SETI landscape as we look at our own problems with the proliferation of powerful weapons systems and ask what happens when small organizations, even individuals, can acquire ever more deadly capabilities.
Here Harvard’s Avi Loeb brought up a point many others had been thinking about, to judge from the ensuing conversations outside. We naturally focus on finding biological life because that is what we are, but the technologies we are discussing remind us off the possibility that life transforms at a certain level of its development into a technological phase that leads to post-biological intelligence. Sara Seager pointed to existing tools like pacemakers and artificial limbs — if life goes post-biological, how do we create a SETI capable of identifying it?
For that matter, what do we do if it’s non-biological, as Denise Herzing (Florida Atlantic University) asked. Researching dolphin communication through the Wild Dolphin Project, Herzing wonders what the signatures of a non-technological species might be. We are only beginning to understand the complexity of dolphin communication. What if a Breakthrough Starshot mission encounters a world with an intelligent, non-technologial species in charge? Is there any way we could identify it?
The SETI session itself, led by Jill Tarter, focused on optical SETI and the new directions it opens to scrutiny. Again, the issue seems timely given the nature of the Starshot initiative, for as we conceive of technologies here on Earth, we then must ask whether equivalent technologies would be visible to us. Breakthrough Starshot envisions using phased laser arrays scaling up to the 100 GW level. As we learn how to create such ‘beamers,’ we have to ask whether the most common SETI signature in the optical might not be transient pulses that are the byproducts of other activities rather than intentional efforts to communicate with us.
Image: Jill Tarter takes the podium to begin the SETI session.
Puzzlingly, Jim Benford’s paper on that very idea was put into the session on using the Sun as a gravitational lens, but the methods Benford is discussing are very much part of the optical SETI landscape. Centauri Dreams readers already know Benford’s findings: Depending on the use of the beamed energy technology, we would indeed be able to detect transient signals from another star with equipment existing today (see Quantifying KIC 8462852 Power Beaming for background). See also “Power Beaming Leakage Radiation as a SETI Observable,” available here).
Moreover, there does exist a communications dimension, as Benford explained:
“SETI messages may be found on power beaming leakage. That leakage is more powerful than any beacons we’ll ever be likely to build, so we should look at transient signals to see if there is a message embedded on them.”
Beamed energy options for an advanced civilization might involve everything from microwave thermal rockets (beaming to orbit) to orbit boosting to interplanetary and even interstellar missions. With each of these missions, you get progressively higher energy usage. And we can certainly go beyond this list of applications into areas like asteroid deflection, which might one day be necessary to adjust a dangerous trajectory using a high-powered laser. Another possibility: Using a beamer to create a thrust (by evaporation and desorption) of a comet’s surface, which might be a technique one day used in terraforming a planet like Mars.
Benford points out that given their visibility over interstellar distances, many of these uses of beamed energy should make us reconsider optical SETI strategy. Rather than focusing on narrow-band transmissions of the kind likely to be found in a beacon, we should look for more powerful beams with a wider bandwidth. Whereas earlier optical SETI work has involved the 1 ? 10GHz microwave band, we might, considering our atmosphere, want to examine bands where lower oxygen and water vapor allow transmission, which means windows at 35GHz, 70 ? 115GHz, 130 ? 170GHz and 200 ? 320GHz.
The caveat is that power beaming is not isotropic but highly directed. The geometry is not always going to favor detection — the fact that we do not see the beam does not mean that it is not there. An interesting suggestion is to revisit the thousands of transients that have been observed and are now stored in the archives of the SETI@home project.
James Guillochon (Harvard) examined rapid travel in the Solar System via lightsails powered by beamed radiation, underlining some of Benford’s points. A lightsail network in the Solar System is the kind of SETI observable Benford and son Dominic have already addressed in their upcoming paper, the point being that leakage around the edges of the sail cannot be avoided. You may recall that Guillochon, working with Avi Loeb, discussed SETI possibilities in 2015 in “SETI via Leakage from Light Sails in Exoplanetary Systems,” available here).
Image: Beautiful weather and a Palo Alto spring made the occasional break a welcome chance to relax.
But enough for today. More SETI discussion tomorrow, after which we move into the Breakthrough Starshot mission itself as described by former NASA Ames director Pete Worden, and the possibilities of the Sun’s gravitational lens as both a mission target and a mission facilitator.
In Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster looks at peer-reviewed research on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities. For many years this site coordinated its efforts with the Tau Zero Foundation. It now serves as an independent forum for deep space news and ideas. In the logo above, the leftmost star is Alpha Centauri, a triple system closer than any other star, and a primary target for early interstellar probes. To its right is Beta Centauri (not a part of the Alpha Centauri system), with Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon Crucis, stars in the Southern Cross, visible at the far right (image courtesy of Marco Lorenzi).
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