Some interesting exoplanet news bites from around the web. Think Outside the Box to Find Extraterrestrial Life Sarah Seager and James Kasting are quasi-interviewed. Seager discusses the Hydrogen Greenhouse planets posited by Eric Gaidos and Raymond Pierrehumbert, while Kasting points out how difficult such worlds would be to observe. Seager also mentions her recent work
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Starship Century May 21, 22 – I will be presenting on Starship Concepts, along with some amazing speakers. Check out the link. Might be hard to be there, so… buy the book! My talk will cover “Starship Concepts” – in the book I present them in roughly chronological order, but this time I’ll mix it
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Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) has been discovered to be flying very close to Mars in October 2014… very close. In fact its current orbital error-ellipse has a minimum distance to Mars of 0 – i.e. IMPACT! The error ellipse is large and the current best guess is ~119,000 km from Mars, which is very
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The Re-Enchantment of the Solar System: A Proposed Search for Local ET’s Dr. Gregory Lee Matloff Adjunct Professor of Physics and Astronomy, NYU, CUNY, Pace University, The New School, SUNY Co-author (with E. Mallove) of The Starflight Handbook, Wiley, NY (1989), Fellow of The British Interplanetary Society Member of the Interstellar Exploration
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A useful distinction, lost in the current breathless prose of the science media, is between Habitable and Earth-like planets. Back in the early 1960s Stephen Dole defined Habitable planets as having Earth-like atmospheres, gravities and at least 10% of their surface lying in a temperature-range suitable for human habitation. Since the 1980s, in the work
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In 7.8 billion years, by current solar models, the unadulterated Sun will be a white-dwarf corpse. No longer fusing hydrogen or helium, the Sun will become a cooling mass of carbon/oxygen. In 2011 Eric Agol posited that white-dwarf stars might have Earth-like planets in their habitable zone for longer than the Sun will be hospitable
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Dennis Tito, space-tourist and uber-rich dude, is planning a Mars Fly-by. The 2018 Launch promises a 501 day Free-Return trajectory – a great big loop past Mars (ain’t stopping) and return to Earth for a high-speed re-entry. Such a mission – if successful – will be a proof of concept that Mars flights aren’t impossible
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Dennis Tito, Space Tourist, and colleagues are holding a press-conference and a quick search of talks at the IEEE Aerospace Conference in Montana brings up Tito’s “8.0105 Feasibility Analysis for a Manned Mars Free Return Mission in 2018″, which discusses (probably) a 501 day Free-Return mission to fly-by Mars, launching in 2018. Of course the
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The Medician Stars, as Galileo dubbed his discovery in orbit around Jupiter, reimagined as terraformed worlds by 1Wyrmshadow1, on his Deviant Art page. James Oberg discussed their terraforming in his (now classic) “New Earths” (1981), as has Martin Beech in his more recent “Terraforming: The Creating of Habitable Worlds” (2009) and Martyn Fogg in “Terraforming:
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