by Kelvin F. Long I recently asked Kelvin Long to write an introduction to the Institute for Interstellar Studies he has created, and he was kind enough to send along a useful overview, along with a backgrounder on his own work: "Kelvin Long is an aerospace engineer and physicist. He is chief editor of the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, author of the book Deep Space Propulsion: A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight, and was the key founder behind the starship design study Project Icarus. Since 2007 he has worked to catalyse the interstellar community through the organization of lectures, symposia, publications and design studies. He is currently the Executive Director for the Institute for Interstellar Studies, founded in August 2012." Here Kelvin describes the new Institute and relates its mission to prior work in deep space technologies. The subject of Interstellar Studies derives its name from a set of special red cover issues of the Journal of the British...

It's been heartening to see renewed interest in the space program's past. Neil Armstrong's death surely had something to do with it, for the scattering of his ashes at sea, which occurred while the 100 Year Starship Symposium was in session, was a reminder of the dramatic days when public fascination with space was intense and the whole world rejoiced at Apollo 11's success. The memorial ceremony held at the National Cathedral in Washington the day before had focused everyone's gaze on that great mission, which remained in the air throughout, a continuing counterpoint to formal discussions and casual conversations in the hallways. Larry Klaes has passed along another historical marker, the fact that today could be called the 60th anniversary of the interplanetary probe. As in so many eventful astronautical moments, the British Interplanetary Society was involved. Eric Burgess and C. A. Cross had come to a BIS meeting in 1952 to read a paper called "The Martian Probe," which took the...

By Larry Klaes A new book looking at the inner lives of astronauts is Larry Klaes' subject today. Planning for long-term missions like a manned trip to Mars requires a great deal of work on closed systems, as we've recently discussed. But we also have to consider the psychological issues raised by confinement in a cramped environment for long durations, issues that are one thing in the confines of low-Earth orbit but perhaps another when far from the home world. Early on the morning of February 5, 2007, several officers from the Orlando Police Department in Florida were summoned to the Orlando International Airport, where they arrested a female suspect. This woman was alleged to have attacked another woman she had been stalking while the latter sat in her car in the airport parking lot. Judging by the various items later found in the vehicle the suspect had used as transportation to the Sunshine State all the way from her home in Houston, Texas, her ultimate intent was to kidnap and...

Yesterday we pondered the possibility of detecting an interstellar craft as a new kind of SETI. If the energies needed to drive such a vessel are as titanic as we think, there could be a detectable signature, as Robert Zubrin pointed out in a 1995 paper. Zubrin's best case in visible light involved an antimatter engine whose exhaust could be detected from as far as 300 light years from Earth. That would cover a huge number of stars, as 100,000 exist within 200 light years of our planet. I suppose the classic starship detection occurs in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's 1975 novel The Mote in God's Eye, where human starfarers using the 'Alderson Drive' -- which allows instantaneous jumps between stars -- detect an alien, laser-pushed lightsail. The starship is a throwback, an older technology that human interstellar methods have long superseded, one that contains a strange, asymmetric alien being, the first extraterrestrial humans have encountered. It's no surprise to learn that...

One of the joys of writing a site like Centauri Dreams is that I can choose my own topics and devote as much or as little time as I want to each. The downside is that when I'm covering something in greater depth, as with the four articles on antimatter that ran in the last six days, I invariably fall behind on other interesting work. That means a couple of days of catch-up, which is what we'll now see, starting with some thoughts on a possible planet beyond Neptune, a full-sized world as opposed to an ice dwarf like Pluto or Eris. This story is actually making the rounds right now, but it triggered thoughts on older exoplanet work I'll describe in a minute. It's inevitable that we call such a world Planet X, in my case because of my love for the wonderful Edgar Ulmer film The Man from Planet X (1951), in which a planet from the deeps wanders into the Solar System and all manner of trouble -- including the landing of an extraterrestrial on a foggy Scottish moor -- breaks out. Of...

by Marc Millis Tau Zero's first graduate student project has been completed. Berkeley Davis, a 2nd Lt. at the United States Air Force Institute of Technology, Dayton Ohio, completed his Masters thesis on a deep space probe to perform Claudio Maccone's gravitational lens mission (FOCAL). For those unfamiliar with FOCAL, it is a mission to utilize the gravitational lens effect that begins at approximately 550 AU from the Sun, one that in the view of Maccone will offer huge magnifications for the study of targets like the Cosmic Microwave Background. For more, see the Centauri Dreams archives. IMPETUS Maccone, Deep Space Flight and Communications: Exploiting The Sun as a Gravitational Lens (Springer, 2009). MISSION/VEHICLE STUDY Davis, Berkeley. R. (2012) Gravitational Lens: The Space Probe Design (Thesis), AFIT/GA/ENY/12-M06, Air Force Institute of Technology. To provide a realistic baseline on what is possible, the student was asked to constrain his design to commercially...

We recently looked at biosignatures as part of a discussion about using polarized light to examine exoplanet atmospheres. As if on cue, we now get a reminder of how carefully the biosignature hunt must proceed. It's not enough, for example, to find one or two interesting gases in a distant atmosphere, for natural processes can account for potential biomarkers, which is why we need to find gases like ozone and methane, oxygen and carbon dioxide existing simultaneously. The most recent discovery from Cassini data puts an exclamation point on the matter with the discovery of molecular oxygen ions in the thin atmosphere of Dione, one of Saturn's 62 moons. With a radius of no more than 560 kilometers, Dione is evidently composed of a layer of water ice surrounding a rocky core. We are not, obviously, talking about a thick atmosphere around a world this small. Cassini and its CAPS instrument (Cassini Plasma Spectrometer) closed to within 503 kilometers of the surface in April of 2010,...

Millis on The Space Show Marc Millis is now in Brussels for another TEDx talk -- I link here to the TEDx description of him as 'a rock star in the world of space geeks' that always gives him a chuckle. More about the talk as soon as I have the link for online viewing. All this reminds me to tell you that Marc and I were guests on David Livingston's The Space Show last week, with the MP3 now available at David's site. Although we did kick around some interstellar propulsion concepts, particularly in the call-in segments, we spent most of the time talking about Tau Zero and the 100 Year Starship project. If you want to hear about the nuts and bolts of Tau Zero including the interesting and developing university affiliations, check out the two-hour podcast. David is a superb interviewer. SF and the Sublime Gregory Benford recently posted Peter Nicholls' Big Dumb Objects and Cosmic Enigmas, a talk delivered in 1997 aboard the Queen Mary (now anchored at Long Beach, CA) on his site. Given...

Is the universe at the deepest level grainy? In other words, if you keep drilling down to smaller and smaller scales, do you reach a point where spacetime is, like the grains of sand on a beach, found in discrete units? It's an interesting thought in light of recent observations by ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory, but before we get to Integral, I want to ponder the spacetime notion a bit further, using Brian Greene's superb new book The Hidden Reality as my guide. Because how spacetime is put together has obvious implications for our philosophy of science. Consider how we measure things, and the fact that we have to break phenomena into discrete units to make sense of them. Here's Greene's explanation: For the laws of physics to be computable, or even limit computable, the traditional reliance on real numbers would have to be abandoned. This would apply not just to space and time, usually described using coordinates whose values can range over the real numbers, but also for all...

Photos of the Earth from a significant distance are always fascinating, dating back to the spectacular shot of the rising Earth over lunar mountains taken by Apollo 8 in December of 1968. The image below, showing Earth and its Moon, comes from the Messenger spacecraft, taken at a distance of some 183 million kilometers. I see things like this and think about our future imaging of exoplanets, and the possibilities of space-based missions that can study their atmospheres. Learning how we look helps us understand what to look for around other stars, and also offers a bit of the 'wow' factor. We're nowhere near this kind of imaging with exoplanets but we're getting better all the time, and that's providing some curious results. HR 8799 is the interesting young system some 130 light years from Earth (in Pegasus) that has yielded direct images of three planets. Some eighteen months after the discovery of the system here, we've now managed to get a spectrum of HR 8799b, useful for what it...

An individual meteorite can tell us much about the composition of ancient Solar System material, but today I want to mention a project that is taking the aggregate view. Chris Crawford has set up the Perseid Laptop Meteor Observation Project as a way to use 'crowd-sourcing' to build up a three-dimensional map of the Perseid meteor stream. Here's what Chris said about it in a recent email: This will be one of the better years for Perseids; the Moon, which often interferes with the Perseids, will not be a problem this year. So I'm putting together something that's never been done before: a spatial analysis of the Perseid meteor stream. We've had plenty of temporal analyses, but nobody has ever been able to get data over a wide area -- because observations have always been localized to single observers. But what if we had hundreds or thousands of people all over North America and Europe observing Perseids and somebody collected and collated all their observations? This is crowd-sourcing...

The planet known as TrES-2b is an interesting and useful place. Just over Jupiter mass, it orbits a solar mass star some 717 light years from Earth, a 'hot Jupiter' in a tight 2.47-day orbit. It's also a transiting planet, discovered by the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey, which uses small, automated equipment and off-the-shelf technology to get the job done, feeding planet candidates to larger installations like the Keck Observatory and Palomar Observatory. But TrES-2b has a new and important distinction: It's in the field of view of the space-based Kepler telescope. Now we're really in business. Exomoon-hunter David Kipping (University of London) said in a recent email that when this planet is viewed in 'short-cadence mode' with Kepler, it's like seeing transits in High Definition. And indeed, that seems to be the case, as you can see in the diagram below. Kepler offers two measurement cadences: 1 minute cadence for up to 512 targets and a 30 minute cadence for up to 170,000 stars....

When does it make sense to build a starship? Back in the late 1960s, Freeman Dyson went to work on the question of how much an interstellar probe might cost. Extrapolating from nuclear pulse propulsion and the state of the art in spacecraft design as then understood, Dyson arrived at an estimate of $100 billion to build the craft, which translates into roughly $650 billion today. Though stark, that figure is by no means as eye-popping as one of the estimates drawn up by the original Project Daedalus team: $100 trillion in 1978 dollars. These figures numb the senses, and you may recall the recent work by Ralph McNutt (Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory) and team, which pegged the cost of a series of human expeditions into the outer Solar System at $4 trillion. It's helpful to remember, though, that calculating when a project becomes fiscally feasible can be a useful undertaking in itself. Richard Obousy goes to work on these matters in a recent post in the Project Icarus blog,...