Wes Kelly has pursued a lifetime interest in flight through the air, in orbit and even to the stars. Known on Centauri Dreams as 'wdk,' Wes runs a small aerospace company in Houston (Triton Systems,LLC), founded for the purpose of developing a partially reusable HTOL launch vehicle for delivering small satellites to space. The company also provides aerospace engineering services to NASA and other customers, starting with contracts in the 1990s. Kelly studied aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan after service in the US Air Force, and went on to do graduate work at the University of Washington. He has been involved with early design and development of the Space Shuttle, expendable launch systems, solar electric propulsion systems and a succession of preliminary vehicle designs. With the International Space Station, he worked both as engineer and a translator or interpreter in meetings with Russian engineering teams on areas such as propulsion, guidance and control. In...

In a few short months, New Horizons will be almost 8 billion kilometers out, a distance that still boggles the mind until we remember that Voyager 1 has reached 22.2 billion kilometers (over 148 AU). Then, of course, we're humbled again with the thought that the inner Oort Cloud is thought to be between 2,000 and 5,000 AU from the Sun, with an outer edge that could extend as far as halfway to the nearest star. That star, Proxima Centauri, is 268,770 AU from us. As New Horizons hunts Kuiper Belt objects for the next flyby, the spacecraft is now being used to perform parallax studies to detect the apparent 'shift' in the relative position of nearby stars as compared with what we see on Earth. Earth's orbit is about 300 million kilometers in diameter, so we see that apparent shift by comparing observations taken half a year apart. That's a pretty decent baseline, but if we extend the baseline, as now with New Horizons, we can see better parallax effects, and thus tighten the distance...

Farewell to Spitzer after more than 16 years of infrared observations of the universe. We've recently looked at the observatory's accomplishments (see Looking Back at the Spitzer Space Telescope), but I want to run the photo below to celebrate the team that managed it. Image: Spitzer Project Manager Joseph Hunt stands in Mission Control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on Jan. 30, 2020, declaring the spacecraft decommissioned and the Spitzer mission concluded. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Meanwhile, we have the good news that the European Space Agency's CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite), which was launched from Kourou (French Guiana) on December 18, has completed its early orbit phase, involving instrument tests and calibration, and has now opened its telescope cover, exposing the focal plane to starlight. The space observatory carries a 95-cm long baffle that shields its telescope from stray light and minimizes light contamination from sources like...

Cataclysmic variable stars (CVs) are binary phenomena, usually consisting of a white dwarf that is accreting material out of a nearby companion star. As you would imagine, a wide range of CVs in various stages of accretion and subsequent outburst can be detected. When the accretion disk around the white dwarf becomes unstable, we get what is known as a dwarf nova (DN), and in systems with orbital periods less than two hours, there can be much more violent outbursts, feeding off orbital resonances in the orbit of the two stars. Now we have a newly discovered cataclysmic variable (KSN:BS-C11a) in an interesting configuration, a white dwarf apparently feeding off a brown dwarf companion that is about 10 times less massive. The 'super-outburst' from the dwarf nova turned up in data from the decommissioned Kepler Space Telescope. Grad student Ryan Ridden-Harper (Australian National Observatory), lead author of the paper on this work, likes to refer to this cataclysmic variable as 'a...

Yesterday's post on the Spitzer Space Telescope leads naturally to the targets it produced for its successor. For when Spitzer's mission ends on January 30, we have the far more powerful James Webb Space Telescope, also operating at infrared wavelengths, in queue for a 2021 launch. In many ways, Spitzer has been the necessary precursor for JWST, for it was the need to operate a telescope at extremely low temperatures in order to maximize infrared sensitivity that drove Spitzer design. JWST must maintain its gold-coated beryllium mirror at similarly precise temperatures. With over 8,700 scientific papers published based on Spitzer findings, a number that will continue to grow for many years, a path has been charted that JWST will follow in the form of observations early in its mission. Consider WASP-18b, a gas giant of ten times Jupiter mass in a tight orbit around its star. Data from both Spitzer and Hubble showed in 2017 that the planet is laden with carbon monoxide and all but...

The Spitzer Space Telescope, which is to end its mission on January 30, has a special place in my memory. I was making a trip to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as part of the research for my Centauri Dreams book when I noticed on a monitor a countdown -- still in days -- for the launch of Spitzer, then known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF). The observatory was launched on the 25th of August, 2003. I remember hot Pasadena weather, a conversation with aerospace legend Adrian Hooke (he was a member of the Kennedy Space Center launch team for Apollo 9, 10, 11 and 12, among much else), a rousing talk with Humphrey "Hoppy" Price about interstellar possibilities. So many good conversations, some serious interviews, and a growing enthusiasm for interstellar flight. But Spitzer had my attention because it was the next mission, one of the Great Observatory missions which included the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and...