Al Jackson shares more memories of Apollo this morning in his account of a little known spacecraft component, the Abort Guidance System. A NASA historical document on computers aboard the Apollo spacecraft refers to the Abort Guidance System as "...probably the most...
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Reminiscences of Apollo
While compiling materials for a book on Apollo 11, Neil McAleer accumulated a number of historical items that he passed along to me (thanks, Neil!), and I'm thinking that with the 50th anniversary of the first landing on the Moon approaching, now is the right time to...
Breakthrough Listen: SETI Data Release
On Monday I was talking about the rise of open access scientific journals, using the European Space Agency's Acta Futura as just one example. The phenomenal arXiv service, not itself a journal but a repository for preprints of upcoming papers, is already well known in...
Haumea: Probing an Outer System Ring
I rarely get the chance to talk about the exotic dwarf planet Haumea, but it’s a personal favorite when it comes to the outer Solar System. That’s because of its odd shape (a bit like an American football), evidently the result of a catastrophic collision, which makes...
“An Intellectual Carrot – The Mind Boggles!” Dissecting The Thing from Another World
Centauri Dreams' resident movie critic turns his attention to a personal favorite from the canon of science fiction films. My own memories of The Thing from Another World go back to late Saturday night black-and-white TV, where I first saw the chilling tale as a boy....
TRAPPIST-1: Of Flux and Tides
Seven planets of roughly Earth-size make TRAPPIST-1 a continuing speculative delight, as witness the colorful art it generates below. And with three of the planets arguably in the star's habitable zone, this diminutive star attracts the attention of astrobiologists...
The Problem with Probes
I'll wrap up this three-part series on 'lurker' probes and ways of finding them with Keith Cooper's provocative take on the matter. A contributor to Centauri Dreams whose far-ranging ideas have fueled a number of dialogues here (see the archives), Keith is editor of...
A SETI Search of Earth’s Co-orbitals
One objection to SETI is that it is not falsifiable -- there is no point at which a lack of signals can prove that extraterrestrial civilizations do not exist. But there are some aspects of SETI that can be falsifiable. Consider a class of objects near enough for us...
Carbon Monoxide as Biosignature?
Biosignature gases are those that can alert us to the possibility of life on a planet around another star. We're moving into the era of biosignature observation by studying the atmospheres of such planets through instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope, and...
Spacefaring Mythologies
I became fascinated with Scandinavian mythologies in grad school and wound up doing a deep dive into early Icelandic literature. Heroic tales from a worldview long superceded proved a rich source of materials, but is myth always a thing of the past? Joseph Campbell...