Various accounts of what happened to Japan's Akatsuki Venus orbiter continue to come in, but it seems clear that the craft failed to achieve orbit. Sky & Telescope has been keeping a close eye on things and reports that errant thruster firings evidently caused an unexpected rotation that resulted in an on-board computer putting the vehicle into standby mode. The result: Too short a burn to ensure orbital capture, with Akatsuki now in a solar orbit that won't take it back to Venus for another seven years. Are course changes possible for another go then? We'll see. Supply, Demand and Near-Earth Space In an unaccustomed way, the Venus news has me in an inner system mode this morning, which means it's probably a good time to talk about Dana Andrews' thoughts on supply and demand when it comes to space colonization. Andrews (Andrews Space, Seattle) and colleagues Gordon Woodcock (Space America Inc.) and Brian Bloudek have been putting together a scenario for near-term commercialization of...

Long before I knew what ideas for interstellar flight were out there in the literature, I always saw the idea of a trip between the stars in Homeric terms. It would be an epic journey that, like that of Odysseus, would resonate throughout human history and become the stuff of legend, even myth. In back of all that was the belief that any vehicle we could design that could carry people and not just instruments to the stars would be a 'generation ship,' in which the crew were born, raised their families, lived their lives and died while the ship, moving at maybe 1 percent of light speed, pressed on to destination. That familiar science fiction trope still has a ring of truth about it, because if for some reason we as a species decided we absolutely had to get a few human beings to Alpha Centauri, about the only option we would have for the near-term is a solar sail and a close-pass gravity assist by the Sun, and even in the best case scenario, that still works out to around a thousand...

Is NASA going to start pushing back into the realm of truly innovative ideas? Maybe so, to judge from what Robert Braun continues to say. Braun, who joined the agency in February, is now NASA chief technologist, a recently revived office that coordinates mission-specific technologies at the ten NASA centers. This story in IEEE Spectrum notes that Braun is soliciting 'disruptive technologies' through a series of 'grand challenges.' Most of these relate to short-term space activities such as Earth observation missions, but enhancing robotics and pushing new ideas in space propulsion has obvious implications for deep space operations. From Susan Karlin's story at the IEEE Spectrum site: The grand challenges address three areas: accessing space more routinely, managing space as a natural resource, and future quests. Achieving these goals mostly boils down to improvements in spacecraft propulsion, energy use, and safety; advances in astronaut health, communication technology, and...

It's fascinating to watch the development of online preprint services from curiosity (which is what the arXiv site was when Paul Ginsparg developed it in 1991) to today's e-print options, hosted at Cornell and with mirrors not just at the original Los Alamos National Laboratory site but all around the world. Then, too, the arXiv is changing in character, becoming an early forum for discussion and debate, as witness Ian Crawford's comments on Jean Schneider's Astrobiology paper. We looked at Crawford's criticisms of Schneider yesterday. Today we examine Schneider's response, likewise a preprint, and published online in a fast-paced digital dialogue. Schneider (Paris Observatory) focuses here on nuclear fusion and antimatter by way of making the case that interstellar flight will be a long and incredibly difficult undertaking. A bit of context: Schneider's real point in the original Astrobiology piece wasn't to offer a critique of interstellar flight ideas, but to call attention to the...

I want to run through the particulars on the upcoming 2010 Advanced Space Propulsion Workshop at the University of Colorado in a moment, as the deadline for abstracts is still three weeks away for those who are thinking of submitting papers. But looking through the presentations at conferences like this one -- it's sponsored by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the US Air Force Research Laboratory and Glenn Research Center's In-Space Propulsion Technology Project -- I always think about where we stand in terms of long-term goals. And something Caleb Scharf said in a recent post on Life, Unbounded resonated in those terms. Scharf (Columbia University) had been discussing the list of Mars launches, going all the way back to 1960 with the failed Soviet Marsnik 1, subsequent Sputnik 22, Zond and Cosmos launches, various Mariner attempts, and, of course, the eventual Viking Landers. It's a list of failures interspersed with triumphs like the current rovers and orbital vehicles like Mars...

by Larry Klaes Larry Klaes wraps up his two-part essay on our attitudes towards extraterrestrials by looking at how the subject has been treated in the past, and speculating on the scenarios that might bring disaster. Do Earth-shattering depictions of space invasion reflect what people really believe, or are they merely a form of escapism? Either way, they tell us something about ourselves as we confront the possibility of contact. For those who may still wonder and question just how much weight the words of the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking hold for the concept of alien intelligences and their potential reactions to encountering humanity, consider this: A new science fiction film coming out this November titled Skyline has recently premiered its theatrical trailer, which you can view here. The trailer begins with the line: "On August 28th, 2009, NASA sent a message into space farther than we ever thought possible... in an effort to reach extraterrestrial life." Now it is true...

By Larry Klaes Just how we would react to the reception of a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization is an increasingly controversial question, and one filled with import as we take the SETI search in proposed new directions. The ongoing Royal Society meeting in Chicheley (UK) probes the issue, with panel discussions on whether or not we should be sending our own broadcasts to the stars, and presentations exploring the import of extraterrestrial life on the future of humanity. It seems a good time, then, for Larry Klaes to have a look at the question in this, the first of a two-part essay that analyzes our attitudes not so much about signals from the stars as their senders. Several months ago, the famous British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking shared his views on extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) with the intelligent beings of the planet Earth. This was done in no small part as a way to gain publicity for his new television science series, Stephen Hawking's...

NASA's Human Research Program is all about risk reduction, finding ways to counter fatigue and mitigate radiation damage, among other potential issues in space travel. But what if a different kind of program had evolved? After all, back in the 1960s the agency was looking into the much broader question of how a human being might be adapted for space. The notion grew out of a 1960 article by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline called "Cyborgs and Space," suggesting that re-creating the environment of Earth aboard a space vehicle was not as useful an option as adapting a human being at least partly to the conditions he or she would face. The idea was a bold one in its day. From the paper (the italics are in the original): The task of adapting man's body to any environment he may choose will be made easier by increased knowledge of homeostatic functioning, the cybernetic aspects of which are just beginning to be understood and investigated. In the past evolution brought about the altering...

by Tibor Pacher My friend Tibor Pacher quotes from Hermann Hesse on the front page of his PI Club site: "To let the possible happen, the impossible must be tried again and again." No one works harder at pushing the boundaries of the possible in terms of public outreach on interstellar topics than Tibor, whose efforts have ranged from the Faces from Earth project (championing messages from humanity on deep space missions) to the MiniSpaceWorld contest (soliciting ideas and designs for space-themed exhibits). In today's essay, Tibor looks back at a memorable evening in his youth, and ponders the sources of inspiration even as he gears up Faces from Earth for a new campaign based on the Voyager missions and the deeper meaning of their 'golden records.' I remember a wonderful starry night at Lake Balaton in Hungary, some forty years ago in my childhood. In those times street light was much more sparse in the evening than today, even in such holiday locations as Balaton. We watched an...

Terraforming is an extreme notion, modifying an entire planet to create a biosphere within which Earth-based live could thrive. But a recent BBC story (thanks to Erik Anderson for the tip) takes on a kind of terraforming that we've already accomplished on the South Atlantic island of Ascension. Up until now, I had always thought of Ascension in terms of the BBC transmitter there -- in my shortwave days, I always knew who had a relay station where and on what frequencies. But the vision I had was solely of high-tech antennae amidst volcanic debris. Now I learn Ascension has its green side. Image: British programmer and traveler Les Smith has made several trips to Ascension Island and has produced a wonderful photo log of his travels. This image shows the view looking down from Green Mountain. Further on in the story is a second image from Smith, this one of a garden showing how verdant some places on the island have become as a once barren landscape takes on new life. David Catling...

by Larry Klaes The Faces from Earth project, run so energetically by Tibor Pacher, is planning its next 'E.T. Are You Out There?' campaign, following a successful campaign in May that introduced interstellar concepts to school children in five countries. In this piece, journalist Larry Klaes looks back at the Voyager spacecraft, which will be the subject of the new Faces from Earth campaign. The Voyagers electrified all of us with the discovery of volcanoes on Io and a possible ocean beneath Europa's ice, and the ensuing stream of images from planets and moons never before seen up close. They also carried golden discs bearing information about their builders. As of this morning (EST), Voyager 1 is 15 hours, 44 minutes, 56 seconds in light-travel time from home, at the edge of the Solar System but, as Larry makes clear, hardly forgotten. In the first decade of the Space Age, humanity succeeded in sending a handful of robotic space probes to Earth's two nearest planetary neighbors,...

WISE Completes First Full Survey The WISE mission completed its first survey of the entire sky on July 17, generating more than a million images, of which one of the most beautiful is surely the image of the Pleiades cluster below. We're looking in the infrared at a mosaic of several hundred image frames with the combined light of WISE's four detectors working in a range of wavelengths. The cluster of stars in seen in a dense latticework of dust in an area covering seven square degrees, equivalent to about 35 full moons. Image: In this infrared view of the Pleiades from WISE, the cluster is seen surrounded by an immense cloud of dust. When this cloud was first observed, it was thought to be leftover material from the formation of the cluster. However, studies have found the cluster to be about 100 million years old -- any dust left over from its formation would have long dissipated by this time, from radiation and winds from the most massive stars. The cluster is therefore probably...

I once had an uncle who, in his eccentric way, taught me the glories of reading widely and across many disciplines. Every year he would visit us from Florida and each time he came, he was off on another tangent, usually a scientific pursuit of some kind, and now and then a venture into linguistics. One of his more memorable visits found him arriving with a set of slides he had made from books on Egyptian hieroglyphics, and we went through them one at a time as he explained what he had learned about Egyptian culture by mastering these symbols. Hieroglyphics Meet the Machine I think about that every time I ponder the fate of digital data, and this Reuters story, which mentions hieroglyphics, triggered the memory. For as Andreas Rauber (University of Technology of Vienna) points out, hieroglyphics -- or, for that matter, stone inscriptions or medieval manuscripts -- have a shelf life of millennia, and have proven it. In my own wandering way, I was for a time focused on medieval...

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 the Earth. The authors imagine large numbers of the Dyson dots placed near the L1 point, using the momentum from solar photons to maintain their position. Imagine thousands -- maybe millions -- of these sails equipped with sensors to receive the instructions of their builders, communicate with each other, and make changes in the configuration of the swarm. Could you use a sail array like this to cool off the planet? From the book: ...using reasonable middle values for the parasol parameters -- 80 percent reflectivity or albedo, mass 53 grams per square meter, positioned 2,100,000 kilometers from Earth -- we would need almost 700,000 km2 of sunshade area to...

Solar Sail Symposium in July The 2nd International Symposium on Solar Sailing (ISSS 2010) draws closer, the event occurring July 20-22 at New York City College of Technology of the City University of New York. The focus will be on recent advances in solar sailing technologies and near-term solar sailing missions, with coverage of hardware, enabling technologies, concepts, designs, dynamics, navigation, control, modeling and mission applications and programs. The deadline for abstracts is May 15, 2010, with full information available at the symposium's Web site. Image: The IKAROS hybrid sail concept. A solar sail gathers sunlight as propulsion by means of a large membrane while a solar "power" sail gets electricity from thin film solar cells on the membrane in addition to acceleration by solar radiation. What's more, if the ion-propulsion engines with high specific impulse are driven by such solar cells, it can become a "hybrid" engine that is combined with photon acceleration to...

Project Ozma's Anniversary It was just fifty years ago today, April 8, 1960, when Frank Drake launched Project Ozma by turning the Green Bank, WV dish toward Tau Ceti. In a reminiscence of the project written for Cosmic Search magazine, Drake recalls the initial sense of anticipation, followed by examination of the chart recorder, which returned nothing but noise. When Tau Ceti set in the west, Drake and team pointed the telescope at Epsilon Eridani. Let Drake tell it: A few minutes went by. And then it happened. Wham! Suddenly the chart recorder started banging off scale. We heard bursts of noise coming out of the loudspeaker eight times a second, and the chart recorder was banging against its pin eight times a second. We had never seen anything like this before in all the previous observing at Green Bank. We all looked at each other wide-eyed. Could it be this easy? Some people had even predicted that the most rational extraterrestrial signal would be a slow series of pulses, as...

by Larry Klaes Faces from Earth is an ambitious plan to send information about our species to the stars. We've done this before, in the form of the plaques mounted on the Pioneer spacecraft and the famous Golden Record of Voyager. What more can we do to ensure that future missions leaving Earth will carry such representation? Larry Klaes puts Faces from Earth in context by looking at how the idea of such messaging has developed and where we might go from here. This post originally appeared as an editorial on the SETI League site and is reprinted with permission. For the vast majority of human existence, most members of our species rarely ventured beyond the borders of the places they were born and raised in their entire lives. For them, the whole world consisted of their family and their village. As for the other people in distant lands far away, they often had only a limited awareness of them, based mostly on stories told by visitors who had either been to these exotic realms...

Since starting this site in 2004, I've periodically emphasized the value of long-term thinking as we consider interstellar flight. This is not to suggest that travel to other stars will not undergo some kind of breakthrough that lets us manage it within a single human lifetime -- we can hope and work for such technological advances. Rather, the idea is that interstellar flight is unlikely to be achieved in the near future, and that being the case, we have to recover an older way of thinking, one that looks beyond immediate reward to achieving benefits for our descendants. That notion of carrying things forward motivated me when I wrote Centauri Dreams (the book), and naturally led to comparisons with long-term projects from the past, such as the great cathedrals of Europe. It also brought me to the well traveled story of the Oxford beams. It's a fascinating tale, one that gets across exactly the point I wanted to make in the book, but the more I researched it, the more I realized...