We looked recently at Titan Mare Explorer (TiME), a mission to land a probe on Titan's Ligeia Mare, a methane-ethane sea that would be observed for an extended period by this floating observatory. But I don't want to pass too quickly over Comet Hopper, one of the...
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Under a Sri Lankan Moon
Looking to put things into perspective? The recent Kepler illustration of the 1235 candidate planets thus far identified, each shown in transit, is something to revel in. The image, shown below, offers a sweeping look at the range of stellar sizes that accomodate...
On Meteorites and Budgets
Two kinds of astrobiology stories are in the wind this morning. One of them has to do with the weekend eruption of stories concerning evidence of fossilized life inside a meteorite. The other deals with scientific investigation off-planet, and although sparsely...
A Gas Giant in the Oort Cloud?
Of all the interesting targets the WISE (Wide-Field Infrared Explorer) mission might find, I've focused primarily on two in Centauri Dreams: A small star, doubtless a brown dwarf, that might be found closer to us than the Alpha Centauri trio, and a large planet out in...
Water, Water, Everywhere
Our view of the Solar System has changed utterly in the last fifty years. Mention that at a cocktail party and your listener will assume you're talking about Pluto, the demotion of which has stirred more response than any other recent planetary news. But in addition...
Jupiter Impactor Probably an Asteroid
What was it that left such an interesting infrared signature in Jupiter's atmosphere on July 19, 2009? The images below, made with a wide variety of instruments, show what appears to be the debris of an object that collided with the planet. The event was first noted...
100 Year Starship Meeting: A Report
by Marc Millis On January 11 & 12, I participated in a gathering of roughly 30 individuals to learn about and discuss the DARPA/Ames 100-year Starship Study. In addition to reporting on those events, I've included my personal commentary at the end of this report....
ASPW: A Report from Colorado Springs
by Richard Obousy As project leader for Project Icarus, the ambitious successor to the British Interplanetary Society's Project Daedalus starship design, Richard Obousy is deeply engaged with the advanced propulsion community. Here he gives us a report on the recent...
A FOCAL Mission into the Oort Cloud
After all this time, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea of massive objects in space as lenses, their distortion of spacetime offering the ability to see distant objects at huge magnification. On Friday we saw how the lensing effect caused by galactic...
WISE: First Ultra-cool Brown Dwarf
"To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail," said Mark Twain, one take on which is that the way we see problems shapes how we see solutions. That fact can be either confining or liberating depending on how open we are to examining our preconceptions, but in...