As we saw recently with the analogy of salt grains for stars, the scale of things cosmic stuns the imagination. But we don't have to go to galactic scale. We can stay much closer to home and achieve the same effect. Because at our current technological levels, getting even as far as the outer planets taxes our capabilities. The least explored types of planet in our Solar System are the dwarf worlds, places like Ceres, Pluto and Charon, not to mention the enigmatic Triton. It takes years to reach them. Beyond these objects we have a wide range of other dwarfs that merit study, at distances that push us ever farther. In a description of their NIAC Phase I study, just announced as a selection for 2022, Jason Benkoski and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University look into a combination heat shield and solar propulsion system that would perform a close Solar pass and use the Sun's gravity to slingshot outwards at the highest possible velocity. It's a maneuver familiar to Centauri Dreams...

In Part 2 of Andrew Higgins' discussion of laser-thermal rocketry and fast missions to Mars, we look more deeply at the design and consider its potential for other high delta-V missions. Are we looking at a concept that could help us build the needed infrastructure to one day support expansion beyond the Solar System? by Andrew Higgins We now turn to the detailed design our team at McGill University came up with for a laser-thermal mission capable of reaching Mars in 45 days. Our team took the transit time and payload requirement (1 ton) from a NASA announcement of opportunity that appeared in 2018 that was seeking "Revolutionary Propulsion for Rapid Deep Space Transit". Although being in Canada made us ineligible to apply to this program, we adopted this mission targeted by the NASA announcement for our design study; being in Canada also means we are used to working without funding. Image: McGill University students responsible for the design of the laser-thermal mission to Mars....

As far back as the 1960s, aerospace engineer John Bloomer published on the idea of using an external laser as the energy source for a rocket, using the incoming beam to fire up an onboard electrical propulsion system. And it was in a 1971 speech that Arthur Kantrowitz, looking toward the technologies that would succeed chemical rockets, suggested using lasers to heat a propellant within a rocket. This is laser-thermal propulsion, in which hydrogen (the assumed propellant) is heated to produce an exhaust stream. The hybrid method would be studied extensively in the 1970s. So when Al Jackson and Daniel Whitmire took up the idea in a 1978 paper, they were in tune with an area that had already provoked some research interest. But Jackson and Whitmire had ideas that would refine the ramjet design introduced by Robert Bussard. They were pondering ways to power a starship, one that would carry its own reaction mass. Uneasy about the core Bussard design, the duo had, the year before,...

The fact that we have three functioning spacecraft outside the orbit of Pluto fills me with holiday good spirits. Of the nearest of the three, I can say that since New Horizons' January 1, 2019 encounter with the Kuiper Belt Object now known as Arrokoth, I have associated the spacecraft with holidays of one kind or another The July 14, 2015 flyby of Pluto/Charon wasn't that far off the US national holiday, but more to the point, I was taking a rare beach vacation during the last of the approach phase, most of my time spent indoors with multiple computers open tracking events at system's edge. It felt celebratory, like an extended July 4, even if the big event was days later. Also timely as the turn of the year approaches is Alan Stern's latest PI's Perspective, a look at what's ahead for the plucky spacecraft. Here January becomes a significant time, with the New Horizons team working on the proposal for another mission extension, the last of which got us through Arrokoth and...

We've been learning about the solar wind ever since the first interplanetary probes began to leave our planet's magnetosphere to encounter this rapidly fluctuating stream of plasma. Finding a way to harness the flow could open fast transport to the outer Solar System if we can cope with the solar wind's variability - no small matter - but in any case learning as much as possible about its mechanisms furthers our investigation of possible propulsive techniques. On this score and for the sake of solar science, we have much reason to thank the Parker Solar Probe and its band of controllers as the spacecraft continues to tighten its approaches to the Sun. The spacecraft's repeated passes by the Sun, each closer than the last, take advantage of speed and a heat shield to survive each perihelion event, and the last for which we have data was noteworthy indeed. During it, the Parker Solar Probe moved three separate times into and out of the Sun's corona. This is a region where magnetic...

We’ve spoken recently about civilizations expanding throughout the galaxy in a matter of hundreds of thousands of years, a thought that led Frank Tipler to doubt the existence of extraterrestrials, given the lack of evidence of such expansion. But let’s turn the issue around. What would the very beginning of our own interstellar exploration look like, if we reach the point where probes are feasible and economically viable? This is the question Johannes Lebert examines today. Johannes obtained his Master’s degree in Aerospace at the Technische Universität München (TUM) this summer. He likewise did his Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering at TUM and was visiting student in the field of Aerospace Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain. He has worked at Starburst Aerospace (a global aerospace & defense startup accelerator and strategic advisory company) and AMDC GmbH (a consultancy with focus on defense located in Munich). Today's essay is based upon his...

The ongoing Interstellar Probe study at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory reminds us of the great contribution of the Voyager spacecraft, but also of the need to develop their successors. Interstellar flight is a dazzling goal considered in the long term, but present technologies develop incrementally and missions to other stars are a multi-generational goal. But as we continue that essential effort with projects like Interstellar Probe, we can also make plans to explore objects from other stellar systems (ISOs) closer to home. I refer of course to the appearance in the last three years of two such objects, 1I/’Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, the ‘I’ in their names referencing the exciting fact that these are interstellar in nature, passing briefly through our system before moving on. Papers have begun to appear to examine missions to one or the other of these objects, or to plan how, with sufficiently early discovery, we could get a spacecraft to the next one. And...

I notice that the question of 'when to launch' has surfaced in comments to my first piece on Interstellar Probe, the APL study to design a spacecraft that would be, in effect, the successor to Voyager. It's a natural question, because if a craft takes 50 years to reach 1000 AU, there will likely be faster spacecraft designed later that will pass it in flight. I'm going to come down on the side of launching as soon as possible rather than anticipating future developments. Two reasons: The research effort involved in stretching what we can do today to reach as high a velocity as possible inevitably moves the ball forward. We learn as we go, and ideas arise in the effort that can hasten the day of faster spacecraft. The second reason is that a vehicle like Interstellar Probe is hardly passive. It does science all along its route. By the time it reaches 1000 AU, it has returned massive amounts of information about the interstellar medium, our Sun's passage through it, and the heliosphere...

Our doughty Voyager 1 and 2, their operations enabled by radioisotope power systems that convert heat produced by the decay of plutonium-238 into electricity, have been pushing outward through and beyond the Solar System since 1977. Designed for a four and a half year mission, we now have, more or less by accident and good fortune, our first active probes of nearby interstellar space. But not for long. At some point before the end of this decade, both craft will lack the power to keep any of their scientific instruments functioning, and one great chapter in exploration will close. What will the successor to the Voyagers look like? The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) has been working on a probe of the local interstellar medium. We're talking about a robotic venture that would be humanity's first dedicated mission to push into regions that future, longer-range interstellar craft will have to cross as they move far beyond the Sun. If it flies, Interstellar...

Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout) is a CubeSat mission designed and developed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. I'm always interested in miniaturization, allowing us to get more out of a given payload mass, but this CubeSat also demands attention because it is a solar sail, the trajectory of whose development has been a constant theme on Centauri Dreams. And while NASA has launched solar sails before (NanoSail-D was deployed in 2010), NEA Scout moves the ball forward by going beyond sail demonstrator stage to performing scientific investigations of an asteroid. As Japan did with its IKAROS sail, the technology goes interplanetary. Les Johnson (MSFC) is principal technology investigator for the mission: "NEA Scout will be America's first interplanetary mission using solar sail propulsion. There have been several sail tests in Earth orbit, and we are now ready to show we can use this new type of spacecraft propulsion...

With NASA announcing that its Discovery program would fund both Davinci and Veritas, two missions to Venus, it's worth pausing to consider where we are in the realm of Solar System exploration. This is not to knock the Venus decisions; this is a target that has been neglected compared to, obviously, Mars, and we've kept it on the back burner while exploring Jupiter, Saturn and, with a fast flyby, Pluto/Charon. With budgets always tight, the axe must fall, and fall it has on the promising Trident. Discovery-class involves small-scale missions that cost less than $500 million to develop. The Trident mission would have delivered imagery from Triton that upgraded the 1989 images from Voyager 2, useful indeed given the moon's active surface, and we might have learned about the presence of a subsurface ocean. I should also mention that we lost IVO when the four candidate missions were pared down to two. IVO (Io Volcano Observer) had a strong case of its own, with close flybys of the...

I see that a white paper on Richard Linares' interesting 'statite' concept became available just before Christmas, and I want to call your attention to it (and thanks to Antonio Tavani for the pointer). Back in April, the idea received funding as a Phase 1 study in the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, renewing attention on the matter of interstellar objects (ISO) like 'Oumuamua. The notion is to deliver a payload to an object discovered entering our Solar System so that, unlike the two we've found thus far ('Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov), we can examine them up close before they depart. Statites are to be the enabling technology. So let's circle back to that concept, for statites are getting more interest these days given the plans for Solar Cruiser, NASA's solar sail mission that may experiment with maneuvers that allow it to act in non-Keplerian ways. The idea is that a solar sail can achieve 'station-keeping' -- hovering in place -- by using light pressure from the Sun...

Our recent discussions about Claudio Maccone's FOCAL mission to the Sun's gravitational focus, and the ongoing work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts office, have had Alex Tolley thinking about alternative scenarios. Yes, a spacecraft moving along the focal line extending from the solar gravitational lens (SGL) would be capable of extraordinary imaging, and could serve as a communications relay for interstellar probes, but that tricky Sundiver maneuver suggested by Slava Turyshev and team in their 'string of pearls' concept puts huge demands on sail materials. Moreover, we'd ideally like to be able to slow the craft as it moves along the focus, to allow maximum time for observations. To achieve both fast transit and maneuverability at the gravitational focus, Alex advocates beamed propulsion, a method whose advantages and consequences are discussed below. Synergies with the ongoing Breakthrough Starshot effort are apparent. by Alex Tolley The...

Getting a probe to another star is a big enough problem, but woven inextricably through it is the issue of communications. Adding payload steepens the propulsion curve in dramatic fashion, which is why recent thinking has dwelled so firmly on miniaturizing the spacecraft. Thus Breakthrough Starshot, which envisions payloads roughly on the order of a computer chip. No wonder, with spacecraft of that size, getting data back to Earth is such a daunting challenge. Can gravitational lensing help? We've seen that the Sun's mass shapes spacetime around it, bending light from targets on the other side so that electromagnetic waves come to a focal point about 550 AU out. The implications for imaging are under intense study at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where Slava Turyshev's team, working with a Phase III NIAC grant, is exploring "Direct Multipixel Imaging and Spectroscopy of an Exoplanet with a Solar Gravitational Lens Mission," taking two prior studies, a Phase I and II at NIAC, forward...

In the early summer of 2005, I found myself, thanks to the efforts of Greg Matloff and Princeton's Ed Belbruno, in Princeton for a conference called New Trends in Astrodynamics and Applications II, which Dr. Belbruno had organized. I was to give a brief talk at the end of the session summarizing what was going on in the interstellar travel community. Two days of chill rain didn't dampen my enthusiasm at seeing Greg and his wife, the artist C Bangs, as well as Belbruno himself, who had been a great help as I put together my Centauri Dreams book. And on the morning of the first day of the conference, I joined Greg, C and Claudio Maccone for breakfast at the Nassau Inn, Princeton's lovely colonial era hostelry. I've since had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Maccone many times at conferences, and one year enjoyed memorable meals with him in the Italian Alps, but that first encounter really sticks in my mind. I had been thinking about gravitational lensing for several years, but it was...

It's reassuring to hear that we're in two-way contact once again with Voyager 2. Since last March, controllers have been limited to receiving X-band (8 to 12 GHz) downlink data, with no capability to uplink commands to the craft via S-band (2 to 4 GHz). This has been a problem unique to Voyager 2 thanks to its trajectory. The Deep Space Network's three radio antenna facilities -- Canberra, Australia; Goldstone, California and Madrid, Spain -- are positioned so that at least one facility is available for communications with our far-flung space probes. While Voyager 1 can talk to us via the two northern hemisphere DSN stations, Voyager 2's close flyby of Neptune's large moon Triton in 1989 bent its course well south of the ecliptic. 18.8 billion kilometers from Earth, Voyager 2 can only line up on Canberra, and the antenna called Deep Space Station 43 (DSS43) has been the only southern hemisphere dish with a transmitter capable of reaching the craft at the right frequency to send...

I can think of more than one way to get a good look at the Sun's polar regions. After all, we've done it before, through the Ulysses spacecraft, which passed over the Sun's north and south poles in 1994-1995. A gravity assist at Jupiter was the key to the mission, allowing Ulysses to arc out of the ecliptic and inward to the Sun. But Ulysses lacked the kind of remote-sensing instruments we'd like to use to compile an extensive dataset on the polar magnetic field and, as Don Hassler (SwRI) adds, "the surface/sub-surface flows" we might find in the polar regions. It's good to see a mission designed for that purpose. For Hassler is principal investigator on a concept that has just been approved for further study by NASA, with the haunting name Solaris. I say 'haunting' because it's hard for this Stanislaw Lem reader to forget the novel of the same name, published in 1961, that explores the implications of a vast intelligence on a planet far from Earth. I realize this has been done as a...

Get ready for the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission, which will begin popping up even as Centauri Dreams continues to consider heliophysics in relation to proposed missions far beyond the Solar System. We've seen recently that the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins is looking, under the leadership of Ralph McNutt, at a mission to 1000 AU, using an Oberth maneuver at the Sun as a possible way to reach such distances with a flight time of 50 years (see The 1000 AU Target). Thus do heliophysics and deep space intersect in unexpected ways, and not just at APL but JPL and elsewhere as we look toward the upcoming decadal survey. As for PUNCH, it's all about the solar wind and the connection between it and the Sun's corona, says PUNCH principal investigator Craig DeForest of Southwest Research Institute's Space Science and Engineering Division: "For over 50 years, we've studied the solar corona by remote imaging and the solar wind by direct sampling....

One reason I wanted to run yesterday's article about the Opher et al. paper on the heliosphere, aside from its innate scientific interest (and it is a very solid, well crafted piece of work) is to illustrate how much we still have to learn about the balloon-like bubble carved out by the solar wind. The entire Solar System fits within it easily, but we observe only from inside and have little knowledge of its structure. None of the paper's authors would argue that we have the definitive answer on the shape of the heliosphere. That will take a good deal more data, as the paper notes: Future remote-sensing and in situ measurements will be able to test the reality of a rounder heliosphere. In Fig. 6, we show our prediction for the interstellar magnetic field ahead of the heliosphere at V2. In addition, future missions such as the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe will return ENA [energetic neutral atom] maps at higher energies than present missions and so will be able to...

We have all too little information about the heliosphere, the only data from beyond it being what we have collected from the two Voyagers. Altogether, only five spacecraft -- Pioneer 10 and 11, the Voyagers and New Horizons -- have escaped the gravity of the Sun enroute to interstellar space. To understand how the heliosphere operates, and the interactions between the solar wind of charged particles and magnetic fields with what lies beyond, we’d really like to be able to look back at our system in its entirety. The Interstellar Probe concept being pondered at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and elsewhere is one possible way to do this. I’ll have more to say about Interstellar Probe in coming days, though I do want to give a nod to its history, which can be traced as far back as 1958 and a report from the National Academy of Sciences. APL’s Ralph McNutt has been studying interstellar concepts for decades, and was a major source as I worked on my original Centauri Dreams...