Missions | Centauri Dreams

A Wish for New Horizons

by Paul Gilster | Jan 18, 2006 | Culture and Society, Missions | 2 Comments

Yesterday's brief and unplanned exercise in 'liveblogging' was caused by an odd discovery: the only way for this observer to track the New Horizons launch was through the Internet. With over 200 channels available through cable television, I found that channel surfing through all of them yielded not one with live NASA coverage. Now ponder this. Centauri Dreams is based near North Carolina's Research Triangle Park, with three major universities within easy driving distance. The woods are full of PhDs, the area priding itself on high tech. With all these resources, there was not a single cable channel that could be devoted to the first mission to Pluto/Charon ever launched. You can imagine what kind of fare was available on many of the channels that were available. Around the same time, I also noted the slowdown in NASA servers as the launch progressed and received e-mails from people who were having trouble accessing NASA TV. Thus the attempt to post updates on the launch holds...

New Horizons Launch Aborted

by Paul Gilster | Jan 17, 2006 | Missions, Outer Solar System | 0 Comments

Centauri Dreams is not conceived as a streaming news site, but the NASA servers are slammed, so I'll update as needed until we get New Horizons off the ground. Update times are GMT (subtract 5 for EST). Update: 2022 Launch abort, with at least a 24-hour turnaround. Launch now scheduled for tomorrow at 1816 GMT (1316 EST). 2019: Countdown resumes at T-4 minutes. 2001: Launch now re-scheduled for 2023 GMT (1523 EST). We're nearing the outer edge of today's launch envelope. Ground-level winds are now problematic. 1950: Upper level winds remain a concern although launch is still set for 2005 GMT (1505 EST). No technical issues with the Atlas V; the problem is solely meteorological at this point. 1946: Launch time now set for 2005 GMT (1505 EST), due to a problem with the Deep Space Network that has now been resolved. An earlier delay had been caused by upper level winds. ----------- All eyes are on Launch Complex 41 this morning, and on the clock. The New Horizons launch is scheduled for...

Of Missions and Deep Time

by Paul Gilster | Jan 16, 2006 | Culture and Society, Missions | 2 Comments

The successful return of the Stardust samples offers a chance to study cometary materials up close, surely deepening our understanding of the origins of the Solar System. But it also serves as a reminder of the time frames in which deep space missions must be flown. At that, Stardust has been a relatively swift mission, traveling some 2.88 billion miles in a seven-year journey. But ten years of planning also went into that journey, and design work goes back over 20 years. Thus Don Brownlee's comment on the mission's origin. "I have been waiting for this day since the early 1980s when Deputy Principal Investigator Dr. Peter Tsou of JPL and I designed a mission to collect comet dust," said Dr. Brownlee. "To see the capsule safely back on its home planet is a thrilling accomplishment." As well it must be, for Brownlee (University of Washington, Seattle) is principal investigator for the entire Stardust mission. Now thoughts turn to New Horizons, just over a day from launch. Scheduled to...

Solar Sail to the Heliopause

by Paul Gilster | Dec 2, 2005 | Missions, Sail Concepts | 0 Comments

Proposals for realistic interstellar missions are not a new thing; in fact, several concepts grew out of work in the early 1980's at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, starting with the 'Thousand Astronomical Units' (TAU) mission, and extending to recent studies on the mission commonly referred to as the Interstellar Probe. By 'interstellar,' I mean journeys not to a nearby star but (a much needed first step) a journey to the interstellar medium beyond the heliosphere, that region carved out by the influence of the Sun's solar wind. We have one vehicle there now, as Voyager 1 seems to be crossing the heliopause into true interstellar space. What we need to ponder next is how to build a spacecraft specifically designed for heliopause studies. A team of European researchers is now tackling the job. Designed as part of the European Space Agency's excellent Technology Reference Studies, the Interstellar Heliopause Probe is put forth as a mission to reach 200 AU within 25 years, using a...

Nuclear Pulse Propulsion Re-Examined

by Paul Gilster | Nov 24, 2005 | Breakthrough Propulsion, Missions | 11 Comments

Consider two hypothetical spacecraft. The Orion vehicle would have worked by setting off low-yield nuclear devices behind a massive pusher plate, driving forward a payload attached at a safe distance from the pusher (and protected by mind-boggling shock absorbers). Even if we had the nuclear devices at our disposal, agreed to use them for such a purpose, and found the political will to construct an Orion craft for deep space exploration, a problem still remains: most of the energy from the nuclear blasts is dissipated into space, and the craft thus requires a huge critical mass of fission explosives. Orion, in short, is not efficient in using its energies. Now consider Project Daedalus, the hypothetical mission to Barnard's Star designed by members of the British Interplanetary Society back in the 1970s. Daedalus was designed to use fusion microexplosions instead of fission. One of the reasons the Daedalus craft demanded as much fuel as it did is that the ignition apparatus, whether...

Hayabusa in the Shadows

by Paul Gilster | Nov 21, 2005 | Advanced Rocketry, Missions | 2 Comments

The Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft has always seemed to have a couple of strikes against it, at least in terms of media coverage. Never much in the spotlight, the ambitious attempt to explore and bring back samples from the asteroid Itokawa has been all but eclipsed by China's recent manned orbital ventures. And Centauri Dreams suspects that's a primary problem: robotic missions don't draw the public eye the way risky manned flights do, even if the scientific payback from the former is often immeasurably greater. Now Hayabusa is encountering a different set of problems. The Minerva robot was to have landed on Itokawa last week, but disappeared after its release. A lower profile issue has been solar flare damage to the spacecraft's solar panels and continuing problems with its positioning control system. And now we have word of a mission-endangering glitch: Hayabusa failed to touch down on the tiny asteroid when the attempt was made on Sunday. "I don't think it landed," project leader...

FOCAL: Using the Gravitational Lens

by Paul Gilster | Nov 16, 2005 | Missions, Sail Concepts | 0 Comments

Among the curious features of a gravitational lens is the way it focuses electromagnetic waves. Supposing we could build a spacecraft like Claudio Maccone's FOCAL concept, a vehicle designed to reach the Sun's gravity focus at 550 AU. From that vantage, the electromagnetic radiation from an object occulted by the Sun (i.e., on the other side of the Sun from the spacecraft), would be amplified by a factor of 108. Such amplification could be exceedingly useful for astronomy at all wavelengths, and even for SETI. But note this key difference between a gravity focus and its optical counterpart: in an optical lens, the light diverges after the focus. Light focused by the Sun's gravitational lens, however, stays fixed along the focal axis as you move to distances greater than 550 AU. Quoting Maccone: "It is true that one does not have to stop FOCAL at just 550 AU, because every point along the straight line trajectory beyond 550 AU still is a focal point." It was in the 1980s that Alenia...

On Deflecting Near Earth Objects

by Paul Gilster | Oct 31, 2005 | Asteroid and Comet Deflection, Missions, Outer Solar System | 0 Comments

The B612 Foundation continues to examine the danger of near-Earth objects (NEOs). As noted earlier in these pages, B612 points to the continuing evidence for asteroid and comet impacts and their role in shaping the planet's history; the much discussed demise of the dinosaurs, due to a likely asteroid strike in the Yucatan, is but one of the instances where the planetary ecology has been altered. We know that the Earth orbits in a swarm of near-Earth asteroids, with a probability of collision in this century that the Foundation pegs at an unacceptably high 2 percent. Given these concerns, and the possible dangers posed by the object called NEO 99942 Apophis, the Foundation has engaged in a dialogue with NASA about possible missions to this asteroid. Apophis (also known as 2004 MN4) is on course for a near-miss in 2029 , with the 400-meter asteroid approaching to within 32,000 kilometers. What happens afterwards as the near-miss itself disrupts the orbit of this object remains a...

A Gravitational Lens at Work

by Paul Gilster | Oct 27, 2005 | Deep Sky Astronomy & Telescopes, Missions | 0 Comments

Gravitational lenses of the sort discussed in yesterday's post are now widely discussed. The idea that gravity can bend light may seem counterintuitive but we've seen numerous demonstrations of the effect, starting with the famous eclipse studied by Arthur Eddington in 1919. Hoping to test Einstein's general theory of relativity, Eddington traveled to the island of Principe, off the coast of West Africa. There, despite initially cloudy skies, he was able to take the crucial photograph that verified Einstein. Stars in the Hyades Cluster that should have been blocked by the Sun were revealed in the image, offset by an amount close to that predicted by Einstein. Some have questioned whether Eddington's equipment was sufficiently precise to make accurate readings, but whatever the case, the bending of light as a result of gravity has stood up. Among the various images that show this effect in deep space, none is as dramatic as the one below. Here we're looking at multiple bluish images...

A Mission to the Gravity Focus

by Paul Gilster | Oct 26, 2005 | Astrobiology and SETI, Missions | 1 Comment

Voyager 1 is, in a sense, our first interstellar spacecraft, with evidence mounting that it has reached the heliopause, that area marking the boundary between the Sun's outward-flowing particles and the true interstellar medium. The New Horizons mission, scheduled for launch in January, will go on to explore at least part of the Kuiper Belt. But what will our first true interstellar mission be; i.e., when will we launch a spacecraft designed from top down to studying nearby interstellar space? The answer may well be a mission to the Sun's gravity focus. Located at 550 AU (3.17 light days), some 14 times farther from the Sun than Pluto, the focus is that point to which the Sun's gravity bends the light from objects on the other side of it. The effect is to magnify distant images in ways that could be observed using the proper equipment. The effect of gravitational focus, first studied by Einstein in 1936, had already borne observational fruit by 1978 in the discovery of a 'twin...

New Horizons Readied for Flight

by Paul Gilster | Oct 19, 2005 | Interstellar Medium, Missions, Outer Solar System | 0 Comments

With liftoff scheduled for January, the New Horizons mission to Pluto and Charon (and, if we are lucky, at least one flyby of a more distant Kuiper Belt object) continues to generate excitement in the scientific community. The spacecraft is now at the Kennedy Space Center and will be moved to the launch pad in December, with liftoff planned for January 11. Major testing on the science payload is complete. The next round of major instrument calibrations and testing won't occur until the early months of the journey as New Horizons moves toward a 2007 flyby of Jupiter for a gravity assist to Pluto. How do you package enough instrumentation for good science at the edge of the Solar System into a payload that draws only 28 watts of power? The science payload work was led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), whose recent news release lists the seven instruments that will explore these icy worlds: Alice, an ultraviolet imaging spectrometer that will probe the atmospheric composition...

Finding Planets in the Starshine

by Paul Gilster | Sep 30, 2005 | Exoplanetary Science, Missions | 1 Comment

Finding planets around other stars is hampered by a key fact: the light from the primary star effectively masks the far dimmer reflected light from any planets. But NASA engineers at the Keck Observatory (Mauna Kea, HI) have used the Keck Interferometer in conjunction with a light-blocking device to suppress the starlight around three stars, one of which is Vega. The procedure may be used to detect dust disks of planetary systems in formation. "We have proven that the Keck Interferometer can block light from nearby stars, which will allow us to survey the amount of dust around them," said Dr. James Fanson, project manager for the Keck Interferometer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Keck's interferometer links its two 10-meter telescopes to provide the resolving power of a much larger instrument (in Keck's case, one the size of a football field). Examining dust disks in greater and greater detail is crucial, because NASA needs to select targets for its Terrestrial Planet Finder...

New Horizons Arrives in Florida

by Paul Gilster | Sep 29, 2005 | Missions, Outer Solar System | 0 Comments

The New Horizons spacecraft, slated for a January launch and a decade-long journey to Pluto and Charon, has arrived at Kennedy Space Center for final preparations and testing. This follows a four-month series of tests at Goddard Space Flight Center and the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where the craft was designed and built. What's in the immediate future for New Horizons? The October testing period includes readiness checks, tests of instrument functionality and checks on communications via NASA's Deep Space Network. Hydrazine fuel for attitude control and course correction maneuvers will be loaded in November, and the craft will then undergo a final spin-balance test. A launch countdown rehearsal will be held in November, and in December the spacecraft will be loaded onto the Atlas V rocket that will carry it aloft. Launch is now scheduled for January 11, 2006, with later launch windows available daily between January 12 and February 14.

Life’s Possibilities on Titan Weighed

by Paul Gilster | Sep 8, 2005 | Astrobiology and SETI, Missions, Outer Solar System | 0 Comments

Can there be livable habitats on Titan? A paper just presented at the Division for Planetary Sciences meeting in Cambridge makes the case that several key ingredients of life may be present on the huge moon. Titan possesses liquid reservoirs, organic molecules and the needed energy sources. The question: is the environment simply too cold? With temperatures down to -178 degrees Celsius (-289 degrees Fahrenheit), the chemical reactions to produce life would move ponderously, but perhaps not too slowly to function. The first images from beneath Titan's cloud cover made the speculation all the more intense. Methane shows up in clouds as well as in liquid form at the surface at these temperatures, and may provide the analog for Earth's water in a life-sustaining hydrological cycle. Moreover, there are hints of ice volcanoes that imply the existence of large amounts of water (mixing with ammonia) not far below the surface. So where does it all lead? From a Southwest Research Institute...

A Closer Look at Tempel 1

by Paul Gilster | Sep 7, 2005 | Astrobiology and SETI, Missions, Outer Solar System | 1 Comment

Comet Tempel 1, the target of NASA's Deep Impact probe back in July, has offered scientists a stunning view of cometary topography. The first published results from the mission team will appear in the September 9 issue of Science and have been released at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting at Cambridge. Among other things, Tempel 1 is the first comet to demonstrate impact craters, an indication of collisions with various space debris over the aeons. The craters range from 40 to 400 meters across, but are they common to all comets? Those we've had good views of, including Borelly and Wild 2, show significant differences in topography and shape. Of Tempel 1, we can only say that its lifetime has been complex. "This comet is a geologic wonder," said Peter Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator on the mission team. "There are smooth surfaces, filled-in craters, ridges, cliffs. Tempel 1 also features an area marked by innumerable...

Enceladus and the Hunt for Life

by Paul Gilster | Sep 6, 2005 | Astrobiology and SETI, Missions, Outer Solar System | 0 Comments

Saturn's moon Enceladus is back in the news at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting at Cambridge University this week. Not that it has ever quite left the spotlight since 1981; that's when Voyager 2 photographs told scientists that parts of the moon had been geologically active as recently as 100 million years ago. The moon's smooth terrain was hard to explain -- how does an object 314 miles across get hot enough to melt? Then Cassini came and Enceladus' wonders increased. We now know that the moon has an atmosphere of water vapor, nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other organic (i.e., carbon-based) molecules concentrated at its south pole. Moreover, that polar region is hotter than expected, -183 degrees Celsius vs. -203 Celsius as predicted by the models, and is marked by 80-mile long parallel cracks that vent vapor and ice particles. Some of this material may have crystallized on the surface as recently as the past decade. At the Cambridge meeting, Robert H. Brown (University of...

Hubble Makes ‘Movie’ of Neptune’s Atmosphere

by Paul Gilster | Sep 5, 2005 | Missions, Outer Solar System | 1 Comment

The Hubble Space telescope used 14 different color filters to dig out the details of different layers in Neptune's atmosphere, showing the haze and clouds in considerable detail, and producing a time-lapse movie that has now been released on the Internet. In the image below (click to enlarge), a natural color view of Neptune appears on the left; the familiar blue-green of the atmosphere is the result of absorption by methane of the red wavelengths striking the planet. At upper right is an enhanced color view. But now check the view at bottom right, taken using methane filters that bring out details above the bulk of the atmospheric methane. At these wavelengths, the planet appears much darker and the long exposure times this permits help to reveal some of Neptune's smaller moons. You can see these in the natural color image, which is a composite of images in green, red and blue light. Clockwise from the top, Proteus is the brightest moon; the others are Larissa, Despina and Galatea....

7th Annual NIAC Meeting in October

by Paul Gilster | Aug 27, 2005 | Antimatter, Autonomy and Robotics, Breakthrough Propulsion, Missions | 0 Comments

Among papers to be presented at the upcoming NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts meeting are several that catch the eye from an interstellar perspective: Alexey Pankine, Global Aerospace Corporation Sailing the Planets: Science from Directed Aerial Robot Explorers Constantinos Mavroidis, Northeastern University Bio-Nano-Machines for Space Applications John Slough, University of Washington The Plasma Magnet These are among the papers to be presented by Phase II fellows of NIAC; i.e., those whose work has received a second round of NIAC funding. More lectures are to be announced before the meeting, which takes place October 10-11 in Broomfield, CO (30 minutes from the Denver airport). Those interested in attending should contact Katherine Reilly at kreilly@niac.usra.edu with their name, affiliation, email address, telephone number and specific dates of attendance. There is no charge for registration. A number of poster presentations will also be available, including three intriguing...

Pondering the Space Elevator

by Paul Gilster | Aug 23, 2005 | Missions | 0 Comments

It was the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky who first proposed the idea of a space elevator -- an incredibly strong cable stretching from the surface of the Earth to a point 100,000 kilometers in space. Along this track elevator cars would move, powered by electricity and whisking people and cargo into space at a tiny fraction of the cost of today's chemical rockets. Tsiolkovsky was always ahead of his time, but the key drawback to the plan was that there was no cable material strong enough to support such loads. Enter Sumio Iijima, who discovered carbon nanotubes in 1991. Long, cylindrical molecules whose walls are made of carbon atoms, nanotubes may turn out to be 100 times as strong as steel at one sixth the density. Carbon-nanotube composite fibers have been produced at kilometer lengths, but they're not yet strong enough to provide space elevator capabilities. Nonetheless, ongoing work at places like Carbon Designs Inc. in Dallas may produce workable answers within the...

Rare Occultation Promises New Look at Charon

by Paul Gilster | Jul 20, 2005 | Missions, Outer Solar System | 0 Comments

With excitement building over what everyone hopes will be a January launch of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and Charon, astronomers have found yet another tool for studying the distant worlds. They're taking advantage of a rare alignment in which Charon, Pluto's moon, passes in front of a star. Such an event has been observed only once, some 25 years ago, and with less capable instrumentation. We'll know a lot more about the results of the July 10-11 occultation in September, when they're presented at the 2005 meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences meeting, to be held in Cambridge, England. There, scientists from MIT and Williams College will report on observations taken with four telescopes located at various sites in Chile. Remarkably, the team was able to muster more than 100 square meters of telescope surface facing Charon, a number that represents a '...noticeable fraction of the world's total telescope area,' according to an MIT news...

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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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