I'm going to need to take some time off, a decision prompted by responsibilities outside the interstellar community that have grown to the point where I lack the time to maintain a consistent schedule on the site. I'll keep moderating comments as usual, and I have some first-rate essays coming up from other authors, but my own writing is going to have to be sporadic for the time being. Long-term, I plan to keep Centauri Dreams active for a long time, so bear with me. As soon as I can do it, I will get back to a more consistent schedule. For now, though, expect a slower pace of new posts from me.
Arrokoth: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
We're in that earliest phase of interstellar exploration that is all about nudging outward from our system into the local interstellar medium. That has already involved the Voyagers, but my plan is to keep checking in on both the Interstellar Probe concept at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the SGL probe study steadily maturing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These are absorbing ventures as scientists figure out ways to do propulsion, in-flight maintenance (and in the case of SGL, in-flight assembly) and data return on timescales the Voyager team wasn't imagining when those doughty craft were launched in 1977. Nudging outward. Let's check in a bit with New Horizons, because here we have a Kuiper Belt explorer that is fully operational, and with instruments specifically designed for the environment it explores, now some 54 AU from the Sun. It's striking to think that the Juno mission is ten times closer to our star than New Horizons. The Pluto/Charon flyby seems a...
Tuning Up for Europa
The new Jupiter photos from JWST's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) are unusual, enough so that I decided to fold one into today's post. It's a pretty good fit because I had already put together most of the material I was going to use about Europa. It would have been an additional plus if Europa showed up in the image below, but even without it, note that we can see moons as small as Adrasta here. Imke de Pater (UC-Berkeley), who led the observations, noted that both tiny satellites and distant galaxies show up in the same image. And here's Thierry Fouchet, a professor at the Paris Observatory, who likewise worked on the observing effort: "This image illustrates the sensitivity and dynamic range of JWST's NIRCam instrument. It reveals the bright waves, swirls and vortices in Jupiter's atmosphere and simultaneously captures the dark ring system, 1 million times fainter than the planet, as well as the moons Amalthea and Adrastea, which are roughly 200 and 20 kilometers across,...
Mapping Out Interstellar Clouds
Although I've written on a number of occasions about the project called Interstellar Probe, the effort to create what we might call a next-generation Voyager equipped to study space beyond the heliosphere, it's always been in terms of looking back toward the Solar System. What is the shape of the heliosphere once we see it from outside, and how does it interact with the local interstellar medium? The Voyagers have given us priceless clues, but they were never designed for this environment and in any case will soon exhaust their energies. Pontus Brandt (JHU/APL), who is project scientist for the Interstellar Probe effort, takes us beyond these heliosphere-centric ideas as he talks to Richard Stone in a fine article about the mission called The Long Shot that ran recently in Science. Because when you launch something moving faster than Solar System escape velocity, you just keep going, and while 1000 AU is often cited as a target for this mission, it's really only a milestone marker...
Laser Communications: A Step at a Time to Deep Space
My last look at laser communications inside the NASA playbook was a year ago, and for a variety of reasons it's time to catch up with the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), which launched in late 2021, and the projects that will follow. LCRD has now been certified for its mission of shaking out laser systems in terms of effectiveness and potential for relay operations. Ideally, we’d like to receive data from other missions and relay to the ground in a seamless optical network. How close are we to such a result? Image: The Laser Communications Relay Demonstration payload. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. LCRD is now in geosynchronous orbit almost 36,000 kilometers above the equator, poised for its two year mission, but before we proceed, note this. The voice is that of Rick Butler, project lead for the LCRD experimenters program at NASA GSFC: “We will start receiving some experiment results almost immediately, while others are long-term and will take time for...
Musings on Art, Brown Dwarfs & Galactic Disks
I was getting ready to start writing a story with implications for brown dwarfs and the galaxy’s ‘thick disk’ (as opposed to its ‘thin disk,’ about which more in a moment) when I ran across the artwork below. This is the work of French artist and astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot (1827-1895), whose careful astronomical observations were rendered into illustrations and pastel drawings in the era before astrophotography. I learned from Maria Popova’s The Marginalian that Trouvelot produced 50 scientific papers, but almost 7000 works of art based on what he saw. Thus the study of part of the Milky Way below, evidently created somewhere between 1874 and 1876. Trouvelot’s work caught the attention of the director of the Harvard Observatory, who invited him to join its staff in 1872. The concept of his art was to get across to those without the privilege of seeing these objects through a telescope just how they looked to a trained scientist. He przed the value of human rendering over...
CNEOS 2014-01-08: Sampling the Interstellar Meteor
How unusual that the study of an interstellar object should receive a boost from the United States Space Command, which is responsible for US military operations off-planet. But that’s part of the story of CNEOS 2014-01-08, which is described in its discovery paper as “a meteor of interstellar origin.” The 2019 finding came from Harvard’s Avi Loeb, working with then undergraduate student Amir Siraj. Loeb had been examining a catalog containing data on meteors over the last three decades in terms of the strength of their fireball, prompted by a 2018 fireball off the Kamchatka peninsula. The Kamchatka meteor produced a blast with ten times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb, leading Loeb to put Siraj to work on calculating the past trajectories of the fastest meteors in the CNEOS catalog – CNEOS is NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. In an email yesterday morning, Loeb explained that numerous factors went into the study. Siraj was able to work with the position and velocity of...
Ross 508 b: What We Can Learn from a Red Dwarf Super-Earth
The discovery of a super-Earth around the M-dwarf Ross 508 gives us an interesting new world close to, if not sometimes within, the inner edge of the star’s habitable zone. This is noteworthy not simply because of the inherent interest of the planet, but because the method used to detect it was Doppler spectroscopy. In other words, radial velocity methods in which we study shifts in the spectrum of the star are here being applied to a late M-dwarf that emits most of its energies in the near-infrared (NIR). I usually think about transits in relation to M-dwarf planets, because our space-based observatories, from CoRoT to Kepler and now TESS, have demonstrated the power of these techniques in finding exoplanets. M-dwarfs are made to order for transits because they’re small enough to offer deep transits – the signature of the planet in the star’s lightcurve is more pronounced than a transit across a larger star. From a radial velocity perspective, planets in an M-dwarf habitable zone...
Interstellar Deceleration: Can We Ride the ‘Bow Shock’?
Interesting things happen at the edge of the Solar System. Or perhaps I should say, at the boundary of the heliosphere, since the Solar System itself conceivably extends (in terms of possible planets) further out than the 100 or so AU that marks the heliosphere's boundary at its closest. The fact that the heliosphere is pliable and reacts among other things to the solar cycle in turns means that the boundary is a moving target. It would be useful if we could get something like JHU/APL's Interstellar Probe mission out well beyond the heliosphere to help us understand this morphology better. But let's think about the heliosphere's boundaries from the standpoint of incoming spacecraft. Because deceleration at the destination system is a huge problem for starship mission planning. A future crew, human or robotic, could deploy a solar sail to slow down, but a magsail seems better, as its effects kick in earlier on the approach. Looking at the image below, however, suggests another...