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Defining the Future of Robotics

by Paul Gilster | Oct 6, 2004 | Autonomy and Robotics | 0 Comments

Carnegie Mellon University is about to host the 25th anniversary celebration of its Robotics Institute. A four-day symposium will begin October 11 to discuss the grand challenges of robotics and the commercialization of robotics research. October 13's lineup is particularly stellar: Vernor Vinge, professor emeritus, University of California, Davis, known for his science fiction, including True Names and Marooned in Realtime, speaking on "Robotics and the Technical Singularity." Robin Murphy, professor, University of South Florida, an expert in search-and-rescue robotics, speaking on "Up from the Rubble." Bob Full, Chancellor's Professor, University of California, Berkeley, speaking on "Bipedal Bugs, Galloping Ghosts and Gripping Geckos: BioInspiration in the Age of Integration." Mitsuo Kawato, director of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratories of the Advanced Telecommunications Research International, whose approach is that "we construct a brain in order to understand the...

Neither Star Nor Planet

by Paul Gilster | Oct 5, 2004 | Exoplanetary Science | 0 Comments

And it's not a brown dwarf, either. That's the verdict of astronomers using the Keck II and Gemini North telescopes (supported by observations at Kitt Peak National Observatory), who have been studying a binary system with a difference. One of the stars involved has lost huge amounts of mass, enough that it no longer qualifies as a star. We do not, in fact, know what to call it. "Like the classic line about the aggrieved partner in a romantic relationship, the smaller donor star gave, and gave, and gave some more until it had nothing left to give," says Steve B. Howell, an astronomer with Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO (WIYN) telescope and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, AZ. "Now the donor star has reached a dead end - it is far too massive to be considered a super-planet, its composition does not match known brown dwarfs, and it is far too low in mass to be a star. There's no true category for an object in such limbo." Image: EF Eridanus 500 Million Years Ago. Onset...

Of H.G. Wells, Burt Rutan and the World of Tomorrow

by Paul Gilster | Oct 4, 2004 | Culture and Society | 0 Comments

SpaceShipOne's splendid achievments have me re-visiting the days of my youth, when the most remarkable video I had ever seen was the jerky footage taken from a modified V-2 rocket as it lifted off some time after the war -- Walter Kronkite used this footage as the introduction to the CBS documentary series 'Twentieth Century.' You would see the launching pad dwindling below, then the scrub desert not all that far from where SpaceShipOne flew, and as the flight progressed, just a glimpse of a stunningly curved horizon that told you how far into the unfathomable black you had traveled. How exciting the future looked in those days, as I followed the flights of the X-15, a rocket vehicle whose altitude record SpaceShipOne exceeded today. I began to puzzle over the question of nostalgia for a future that never happened, an odd notion that makes me think of all the dreams we as a culture have assigned to the future at different times in our history. Then along comes a fine essay called...

NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts — New Studies

by Paul Gilster | Oct 2, 2004 | Communications and Navigation, Exoplanetary Science, Sail Concepts | 0 Comments

NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts announced twelve awards for Phase I studies in late September. Phase I typically means six-month studies funded to the tune of $75,000, aimed at validating new concepts and identifying the technologies that must be mastered to make them a reality. The most promising Phase I studies can go on to more robust Phase II funding of $400,000 in a two-year study window. You can see the complete list of Phase I awards on this Goddard Space Flight Center page. Among the most interesting for interstellar theorists are, in addition to Webster Cash's New Worlds Imager (discussed here yesterday), the following: A Deep-Field Infrared Observatory near the Lunar Pole (Principal Investigator (PI): Dr. Roger J. Angel, University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.) Wide-Bandwidth Deep-Space Quantum Communications (PI: Ricky Morgan, Morgan Optics Corporation, San Diego) and in particular, Magnetized Beamed Plasma Propulsion (PI: Dr. Robert M. Winglee of the University of...

New Worlds Imager: The View Around Epsilon Eridani

by Paul Gilster | Oct 1, 2004 | Exoplanetary Science | 0 Comments

To the left is Epsilon Eridani. At 10.5 light years, it's a relatively nearby star, and we know it has planets. Can we find a way to view those planets, a way that will show us not just pinpoints of light but surface details? Missions like Terrestrial Planet Finder promise great things in this regard, but the technology that will fly on them is still being determined. To my mind, the most promising technique for viewing Earth-like planets around other stars is Webster Cash's New Worlds Imager. Discussed previously in these pages, New Worlds Imager can be described as an enormous pin-hole camera in space. An opaque starshade the size of a football field would contain a single aperture, a hole some 30 feet in diameter. Tens of thousands of miles away, a detector spacecraft would study the resultant light, with the planetary system of the target star spread out widely for study. Cash, a professor in the University of Colorado at Boulder's astrophysical and planetary sciences department,...

The Day of Toutatis

by Paul Gilster | Sep 30, 2004 | Outer Solar System | 1 Comment

The European Southern Observatory labeled yesterday the 'Day of Toutatis,' when the 4.6 kilometer-long asteroid passed Earth at no more than four times the Earth-Moon distance. Discovered in 1989, Toutatis swings close to Earth every four years, but not since 1353 has it come as close as yesterday. Closest approach occurred at roughly 1340 hours GMT (0940 ET). ESO's coverage can be found here. Near-Earth asteroids like Toutatis are a reminder of the space debris that has showered Earth throughout its history. Our future in space is not optional: we'll need the technology to detect and deflect any asteroids that seem likely to make impact (Toutatis does not), and that means building up a space-based infrastructure into the outer Solar System. It is exactly that kind of system-wide presence that will one day allow us to build and send our first interstellar probes. You can read more about Toutatis at NASA's Near Earth Object Program site. Image: Asteroid 4179 Toutatis, November 26,...

The Three Romantic Ages of Spaceflight

by Paul Gilster | Sep 29, 2004 | Culture and Society | 0 Comments

The continuing success of SpaceShipOne -- and other ventures suggestive of future commercial space activities like Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Robert Bigelow's Bigelow Aerospace -- bring me back to Freeman Dyson. It was in 1979, in his book Disturbing the Universe, that Dyson wrote about what he called the three 'romantic ages' of spaceflight. The first, beginning in 1927, was inaugurated by the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, Germany's Society for Space Travel, which met in Breslau that year. The VfR would include such luminaries as a young Wernher von Braun, and would make an enthusiastic contribution to early rocketry before its talents were hijacked by the German military. Dyson's second age was the era of Orion, Ted Taylor's nuclear spaceship. Working on an outrageous but theoretically plausible design that involved enormous shock absorbers cushioning nuclear blasts behind the vehicle, Orion's slogan was 'Saturn by 1970.' When in 1959 the decision was made not to use...

Solar Sail Conference Begins

by Paul Gilster | Sep 28, 2004 | Sail Concepts | 0 Comments

The Solar Sail Technology and Applications Conference, organized by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, has begun in Greenbelt MD and will run through tomorrow. Complete agenda here. Colin McInnes gave the keynote this morning. His book Solar Sailing: Technology, Dynamics and Mission Applications is as indispensable as it is hard to find, though Amazon now seems to have some used copies.

X Prize Attempt Live from the Cockpit

by Paul Gilster | Sep 28, 2004 | Advanced Rocketry | 0 Comments

The X Prize Foundation says it will provide live streaming video from the cockpit of SpaceShipOne tomorrow morning as Scaled Composites makes its first bid for the X Prize. The second, and potentially winning attempt, is scheduled for October 4. Coverage begins here at 9 am ET.

Exercises in Life Detection

by Paul Gilster | Sep 28, 2004 | Astrobiology and SETI | 0 Comments

The science of life detection may get a boost from ongoing work in Chile's remote Atacama Desert. Said to be one of the most arid regions on Earth, the Atacama is a prime testing ground for an automated, solar-powered rover named Zoe, which was developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Molecular Biosensor and Imaging Center. The idea: use the Atacama as an analogue to Mars, drafting the needed protocols for life detection in hostile environments. According to a NASA press release, "Scientists also plan to map the habitats of the area, including its morphology, geology, mineralogy, texture, physical and elemental properties of rocks and soils; document how life modifies its environment; characterize the geo- and biosignatures of microbial organisms and draft science protocols to support a discovery of life." Technology buffs may want to download CMU's EventScope software, which scientists will use to see the Atacama through the 'eyes' of the rover. Eventscope is available here. The...

Tuning Up the Hunt for Extrasolar Planets

by Paul Gilster | Sep 27, 2004 | Exoplanetary Science | 0 Comments

The Hubble Space Telescope cost far more to build and launch than the twin telescopes of Hawaii's W.M. Keck Observatory, but Keck gathers twenty times the light and offers four to five times better resolution. Assuming, of course, that we can find a way to cancel out the effects of atmospheric blurring on its images. That's where the science of adaptive optics comes in. By using a bright reference beacon nearby, an observatory like Keck can analyze atmospheric effects even as its observations are being made. That this technique can be used in the hunt for extrasolar planets is clear. The infrared image to the right (credit: Michael Liu, IFA-Hawaii/W. M. Keck Observatory) shows a dust disk surrounding the star AU Microscopii. The image is 100 AU wide, roughly the size of our Solar System; Keck's images are the sharpest ever obtained of a circumstellar disk, with an angular resolution of 1/25 of an arcsecond, about 1/500,000 the diameter of the full moon. But adaptive optics has a...

The Comets of Tau Ceti

by Paul Gilster | Sep 24, 2004 | Exoplanetary Science | 0 Comments

At 12 light years away, Tau Ceti is the nearest Sun-like star, and has long been of high biological interest among possible interstellar probe targets. But a British team using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii (and aided by the world's most sensitive sub-millimeter camera, called SCUBA) has found a disk of cold dust around the star that bodes ill for stability among any planets that may be orbiting there. Says Jane Greaves, lead scientist on the study: "Tau Ceti has more than ten times the number of comets and asteroids that there are in our Solar System. We don't yet know whether there are any planets orbiting Tau Ceti, but if there are, it is likely that they will experience constant bombardment from asteroids of the kind that is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. It is likely that with so many large impacts life would not have the opportunity to evolve." Image: Bombardment of a hypothetical planet around Tau Ceti: bad news for life? Credit: David Hardy. Frank...

Remembering Tau Zero

by Paul Gilster | Sep 23, 2004 | Breakthrough Propulsion, Culture and Society, Sail Concepts | 0 Comments

On the left is the cover of the first paperback edition of Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, published in 1970 (a shorter version called "To Outlive Eternity" appeared in 1967 in Galaxy Science Fiction, though unseen by me, as I was getting ready to leave for college). The first hardcover edition is below. Many of the scientists I talked to in doing the research for Centauri Dreams told me they read science fiction, and most favored the 'hard' SF, scrupulously accurate to science as understood at the time, favored by writers like Anderson. And several said that it had been Tau Zero that got them into physics or engineering in the first place. Here's Anderson's look at a Bussard ramjet as it consumes interstellar hydrogen on a runaway journey that will never end: The ship was not small. Yet she was the barest glint of metal in that vast web of forces which surrounded her. She herself no longer generated them. She had initiated the process when she attained minimum ramjet speed; but it became...

Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter

by Paul Gilster | Sep 22, 2004 | Missions, Outer Solar System | 0 Comments

NASA has just announced that it has selected Northrop Grumman Space Technology as the contractor for co-designing its proposed Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. JIMO will be designed to orbit and explore three of the most interesting Jovian moons: Callisto, Ganymede and Europa. All three may possess water, organic material and a source of energy, leading to the possibility of some form of life evolving there. Image: The surface of Europa as seen by the Galileo orbiter. Note the crustal blocks on the left that seem to have once broken apart, and then 'rafted' into their current positions. They're evidence of what may be a sub-surface ocean. Credit: Planetary Image Research Laboratory, University of Arizona. Studying these moons closely will involve long periods in orbit around each before moving on to the next target. The propulsion system envisioned here is nuclear electric. NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft has already demonstrated the principle, in which electrically charged particles are...

Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter: Reactor Options

by Paul Gilster | Sep 22, 2004 | Missions, Outer Solar System | 0 Comments

Worth noting in relation to the JIMO story above (and for the broader issue of generating power for deep space probes): "A Power Conversion Concept for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter," by Lee S. Mason (Journal of Propulsion and Power Vol. 20 No. 5, 1 September 2004, pp. 902-910). From the abstract: "An analytical study was performed to compare design options for a reactor power system that could be utilized on a Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter mission employing nuclear electric propulsion."

Robotic Hunt for Earth-like Worlds

by Paul Gilster | Sep 21, 2004 | Exoplanetary Science | 1 Comment

A network of robotic telescopes called RoboNet-1.0 will soon join the hunt for Earth-like planets around other stars. RoboNet will look for the effects of gravitational micro-lensing, where distant light is bent around an unseen foreground object. A star whose light is undergoing such lensing would, if it had a planet, show a blip in its detected light which RoboNet should be able to follow-up. "The network," says a press release from the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, which funded the project, "stands the best chance of any existing facility of actually finding another Earth due to the large size of the telescopes, their excellent sites and sensitive instrumentation." The globally distributed RoboNet offers astronomers the chance to search anywhere in the sky without regard to local light conditions by passing observations from one telescope to the next. The Liverpool Telescope (Canary Islands), Faulkes North (Maui) and Faulkes South (New South Wales) telescopes...

Good News from Saturn

by Paul Gilster | Sep 20, 2004 | Outer Solar System | 0 Comments

The European Space Agency has announced that the Huygens probe has passed its second to last in-flight checkout, in preparation for deployment to Titan in December. The critical Mission Timer Unit is in good health, a must given the fact that Huygens will coast for several weeks after being released by the Cassini Saturn orbiter. The MTU will be charged with waking Huygens up just before entry into Titan's atmosphere. ESA's coverage is here.

The View from Antarctica

by Paul Gilster | Sep 20, 2004 | Deep Sky Astronomy & Telescopes | 0 Comments

A team of Australian researchers has built an unmanned observatory high on an Antarctic plateau that may provide images nearly the equal of Hubble's. That's the word from Nature, where University of New South Wales associate professor Michael Ashley, co-author of the paper, described the capabilities of the new viewing site. The paper's lead author is Dr. Jon S. Lawrence, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales. The location is known as Dome C, 3250 meters above sea level on the Antarctic Plateau, at latitude 75 degrees south. Among its favorable characteristics are low infrared sky emission, dry and extremely cold air, few clouds and low dust and aerosol content. The upshot: much less 'star jitter.' All of these factors make the site, which is 400 meters higher than the South Pole, far better for viewing than the location of instruments currently in place in Chile, Hawaii and the Canary Islands. Having established the superiority of Dome C, the team now argues for...

More Power for Deep Space Missions

by Paul Gilster | Sep 17, 2004 | Communications and Navigation, Missions | 0 Comments

Scottish minister Robert Stirling developed an engine in the 19th Century that used heated air instead of steam as the motive force for a piston engine. Now an acoustical version of the principle has emerged. As described in an article in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters, a joint team from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Northrop Grumman Space Technology have created TASHE -- the "thermoacoustic-Stirling heat engine." The work of LANL scientist Scott Backhaus and Emanuel Tward and Mike Petach from Northrop Grumman, TASHE would be used to generate electricity aboard spacecraft, and would be quite a step up from the thermoelectric devices now used, which convert roughly 7 percent of their heat energy into electricity using heat from the decay of a radioactive fuel. By contrast, TASHE converts up to 18 percent of its heat source energy into usable electricity. The expansion of helium gas inside the engine drives the process, as described in a recent issue of Physics News...

Lasers for Deep Space Communications

by Paul Gilster | Sep 16, 2004 | Communications and Navigation | 0 Comments

Here's an interesting observation from Joss Bland-Hawthorn, who is head of instrument science at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney: "Astronomers are losing vast amounts of data from recent satellite missions to Mars. We collect a hundred times more than we can transmit back." The comment appears in the current issue of New Scientist, in an article by Maggie McKee called "Mars Laser Will Beam Super-fast Data." And the problem identified is one that will plague us more and more the farther we get from Earth. Radio signals are inherently less efficient than lasers, and not only because shorter wavelengths can carry more information in the same unit of time. A laser signal transmitted from a Mars orbiter, says New Scientist, will only spread to a width of a few hundred kilometers by the time it reaches the Earth. A radio signal, by contrast, diffuses rapidly with distance. How rapidly? Well, JPL's James Lesh told me in a telephone interview last year that the Mars Pathfinder...

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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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