Centauri Dreams' resident film critic Larry Klaes continues his in-depth look at science fiction movies with 1972's Silent Running, whose protagonist is faced with a stark choice far from home. The film rode the era's surging interest in environmentalism, and while...
Search Results:
The Next Steps in Space
Most of my research for Centauri Dreams involves looking at papers and presentations on matters involving deep space, whether propulsion systems, closed loop life support, or even possible destinations. That's why it's a huge help to get an article like the one below,...
The Essence of the Human Spirit: Apollo 8
Farewell to Dawn
It seems to be a week for endings. Following the retirement of the wildly successful Kepler spacecraft, we now say goodbye to Dawn following an extraordinary eleven years that took us not only to orbital operations around Vesta but then on to detailed exploration of...
MASCOT Operations on Asteroid Ryugu
To me, the image below is emblematic of space exploration. We look out at vistas that have never before been seen by human eye, contextualized by the banks of equipment that connect us to our probes on distant worlds. The fact that we can then sling these images...
Kepler 1625b: Orbited by an Exomoon?
8,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, the star designated Kepler 1625 may be harboring a planet with a moon. The planet, Kepler 1625b, is a gas giant several times the mass of Jupiter. What David Kipping (Columbia University) and graduate student...
Hayabusa2: Successful Rover Deployment at Asteroid Ryugu
That small spacecraft can become game-changers, our topic last Friday, is nowhere more evident than in the success of Rover 1A and 1B, diminutive robot explorers that separated from the Hayabusa2 spacecraft at 0406 UTC on September 21 and landed soon after. Their...
MarCO: Taking CubeSat Technologies Interplanetary
The image below intrigues me. It's the first image of the Earth and the Moon together taken from a CubeSat, one of a pair of such tiny spacecraft NASA has despatched to Mars as part of a mission called MarCO (Mars Cube One), which will work in conjunction with the...
Timing Planetary Migration in the Early System
Given that we’ve been talking lately about collisions and water-delivering impacts in the early days of the Solar System, it’s a natural enough segue to today’s work from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) on how the planets themselves may have moved about in...
Dawn at Sunset
The announcement that the Dawn spacecraft is running out of its hydrazine fuel was not unexpected, but when we prepare to lose communications with a trailblazing craft, the moment is always tinged with a bit of melancholy. Even so, the accomplishments of this mission...