More space updates… And yeah, the ongoing UFO silliness

I am a co-author of this paper, “Science opportunities with solar sailing smallsats,” announcing “Project Sundiver”… offering a wide suite of potential fast interplanetary missions that could accelerate far faster than today’s rockets can manage, by swooping DOWN to pass very close to the Sun, spreading lightsail wings to catch a boost off the blasting brightness there. The team did proof of concept with a grant at NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC).  

But sure, I have another reason to root for “Project Sundiver” ... my first novel, Sundiver!

As for the ongoing UFO silliness… this Forbes journalist back in January did something rare - he asked excellent questions, understood everything I said, and described (condensed) it accurately, in a wide range of topics. “Why Are UFOs Still Blurry? A Conversation With David Brin.”

"Believe" what you like. Just don't claim to be modernist or scientific in this cult that keeps repeating - twice per decade for the last 80 years - the exact same incantations and spells, never producing an iota of actual evidence. Oh, I have studied concepts of the 'alien' all my life! A bazillion concepts that are vastly less tedious and bo-ring.

== Solar System News! ==

The wonderful Japanese probe that brought samples from the asteroid Ryugu has offered glimpses of interstellar dust that likely predates the Solar System. Embedded in the sample rocks are grains of stardust.

Unfortunately, Russia's Luna-25 moon lander suffered an 'emergency situation in lunar orbit, prior to a scheduled touchdown attempt.

A new study featuring data from the NASA Mars Perseverance rover reports on an instrumental detection potentially consistent with organic molecules on the Martian surface.

An observatory made of hundreds of tanks of water observes Cherenkov Radiation when particles pass through them that were created when super-hyper energetic gamma rays hit atoms in the atmosphere. Those super-hypers (up to about 10 Tev each!) are apparently much more common from the Sun than we thought.

NASA and DARPA announced they awarded Lockheed Martin and BWX Technologies to build and develop a nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) engine. An NTR achieves high thrust similar to in-space chemical propulsion but is two to three times more efficient. We helped develop some precursor techs at NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program – (NIAC) – but at half a $billion, this looks to be getting ready for prime time. NASA and DARPA are looking at a launch target of late 2025 or early 2026.

Combining art & science: Ron Miller’s two newest oeuvres. Natural Satellites: The Book of Moons. The natural satellites of the planets―the solar system's moons―are some of the most extraordinary places imaginable. Recently, scientists have turned to the moons for answers in their investigations of the origins of the solar system and the evolution of life on our own planet.  

And The Big Backyard: The Solar System Beyond Pluto. Our solar system extends almost halfway to the nearest star. It is composed of not only planets, asteroids, and comets, but powerful forces and vast fields of energy. Beyond the orbit of Neptune are countless icy comets, and signs of undiscovered planets.

== Farther Out ==

Some really weird objects near the Milky Way’s central black hole.

What a privilege to live to see the twin LIGO observatories, co-founded by my friend Kip Thorne, discover and analyze gravitational waves from converging neutron stars and black holes at ‘short wavelengths of a few hundreds or thousands of kilometers. But what of the deeper growl of longer waves? MUCH longer on galactic scale? Researchers looked at data from about 70 pulsars and found is a pattern of deviations from the expected pulsar beam arrival timings that suggests gravitational waves are ‘jiggling space-time as though it's a vast serving of Jell-O’ … ‘possibilities range from cosmic strings to dark matter to primordial black holes that formed soon after the Big Bang.’

A mirror-like planet with an albedo of 0.80 reflects so much light from its very nearby star that astronomers offer a theory that the planet started out as a gas giant but has been losing mass over time. It must have an atmosphere composed of silica material, like glass, along with titanium. Effectively, then, the atmosphere has a mirror-like composition,  super-saturated with silicate and metal vapors. This means that, quite literally, it rains titanium on this weird world.  

One side of this white dwarf is (apparently) composed (on the surface at least) of hydrogen, while the other seems made up of helium. Weird! Though the mind spins with notions of sloshing tidal waves of hydrogen, since “Janus” is rotating on its axis every 15 minutes. Especially since some white dwarfs transition from being hydrogen- to helium-dominated on their surface. Or else the answer, according to this science team, may lie in magnetic fields.

== Even farther out ==

A team used gravitational lensing to discover an ultra-massive black hole, an object over 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, in the foreground galaxy – a scale rarely seen by astronomers.

Farther out… WAY farther… the Webb is helping several approaches to refining the famed Hubble Constant for how rapidly the universe is expanding. A good summary here. 

Interesting article in Universe Today that identifies the distant stars that were in the line-of-sight of high-power, very directional planetary-radar transmissions, estimates when the signal should arrive at each star, and when we might expect a reply if anyone on the other end detects the NASA signal and is able to answer promptly.

Fortunately 99.999% of Earth’s radio emissions – including “I Love Lucy” – fade away long before one light year. The "METI" cult, who are fetishistically and rudely and illegally trying to foist "yoohoo!" so-called messages, aim to send far more lasting, laser-like coherent beams. And my opposition is explained here. 

So why don't I mind these deep space radar blips which are also coherent? Because the odds of bad outcomes are hugely lower compared to the beneficial science. And - simply - because unlike arrogant METI, this is not a jerky rude and illegal thing to do.

And as long as we're on rude jerks.... Kooky Dmitry Rogozin strikes again - denying that NASA landed on the moon! This is the same fella who turned down Elon Musk and this unintentionally caused Musk to create SpaceX, the greatest launch success since Sputnik. Of course this is part of the putinist doubling down on riling-up the one force on Earth that might save them... the US lobotomized right.

Is Space for Everyone?

Happy Thanksgiving to fellow USAns. And for all of you around the globe, may autumn and winter bring gifts of hope and resilience and joy - and fresh horizons of adventure - for us all.

Here in this posting are just a few high-horizon bits to help you digest that overstuffed meal.

Are you concerned that the rich might wind up owning outer space? Here I read from a chapter of Existence that makes it pretty vivid! (And it was >ten years ago.)

I'll be posting soon about the new white paper issued by the White House re: colonizing the Moon. I understand their reasons. Consider me the Loyal Opposition on this particular matter, as I explained here... and I will post more about it soon.

== Out where we really should be active! ==

DART hit on target! See the way-cool flash as seen from ATLAS! And this zoom in closeup from DART itself. Amazing they used the same 'transmit video until smash' approach that I remember from summer 1964's Ranger probes to impact the moon. Took 7 tries to get it right.

And a month later? The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) slammed a spacecraft into one asteroid to see if it could change its orbit around another asteroid. It did. After impact, the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos was shortened to 11 hours, 23 minutes: a 32-minute change.  

Speaking of hits… The largest space rock to strike Mars since spaceflight began ‘rocked’ the Insight Lander’s seismometer 2500 miles away… and also revealed boulder-size ice chunks when it slammed into Mars. They were found buried closer to the warm Martian equator than any ice that has ever been detected on the planet. “Since landing on 2018, the mission has revealed new details about Mars’ crust, mantle and core and detected 1,318 marsquakes. Sadly, InSight’s mission is running out of time. Increasing amounts of dust have settled on the lander’s solar panels, only exacerbated by a continent-size dust storm detected on Mars in September, and its power levels keep dropping.”

We're a lot better at it, now... we need to be! And yes, THIS stuff... planetary protection and asteroid mining... is what we should be doing with Japan and EU, instead of going back to that useless sandbox of worthless poison dust.

== Deep space ==

The James Webb Telescope captures the Tarantula Nebula in stunning detail. 160,000 light years away, it is the largest star-forming region in the Local Group of galaxies.

And other NASA scopes captured this color snapshot of a magnificent supernova remnant. 

A black hole has been "burping" out energy from a small star it was observed shredding in 2018, after two years in which it didn't eject any such material.

Another black hole that is about 10 times more massive than the Sun and is located only about 1600 light-years away is Gaia BH1, a dormant singularity in the constellation Ophiuchus. This means it is three times closer to Earth than the previous record holder.

== Life, who needs it? ==

Speculation: “it's possible that life appears regularly in the universe. But the inability of life to maintain habitable conditions on the surface of the planet makes it go extinct very fast.” At least that’s a theory re early life on Mars. 

Following on that… Well dang. The hunt for habitable planets may have just gotten far more narrow: “The pressure from a class M red dwarf star’s radiation is immense, enough to blow a planet’s atmosphere away,” boding poorly for the “Goldilocks Zone” around such stars (the most common type.) This does not affect the kind of planets where most of the life in the universe likely resides - Europa style ice worlds, which might orbit almost every star out there. Alas, very unlikely to build civilizations with starships or radio.

== The best place for humans off-Earth? ==

Veteran space engineers Joe Carroll and Al Globus point out that  that the best place for the earliest human space settlements is in equatorial low earth orbit  or "ELEO". Going to the moon, Mars, or beyond takes roughly an order of magnitude more launch mass. So, until you can reliably harvest >90% of your mass from non-earthly material, it is cheaper to expand in ELEO than anywhere else.  Also, you don't need heavy radiation shielding in ELEO.

The earliest tests will involve large slow-spinning dumbbell shapes, because they provide any desired range of artificial gravity with lower annoying artifacts than feasible with any other shape or facility mass. But I think the argument is likely to remains true for other design approaches as well. 

There is another key factor. Expanding settlements with Moon, Mars, asteroid, or comet materials involves distinctly different mining and refining technologies, and unique other constraints like long lunar nights, launch windows to each NEO, etc. Mastering each site will require mastering and reliably maintaining site-specific capabilities.   But every site will require one common capability: reliably delivering usable air, water, food, and other supplies to support the settlers. This is almost certainly best done mostly by recycling onboard waste flows. And that (plus occasional launches) are the ONLY key capabilities required for settling ELEO. If you start there, you can "close the life-support loop" at whatever rate you want, because you can get supplies from earth >90% cheaper than anywhere else, and without launch constraints or latencies.

I strongly suspect that any serious plan to settle the moon, Mars, or beyond will end up redirecting the plans to start in ELEO first, because it lets you crawl and walk before needing to run or fly. And it is likely to kill far fewer people unnecessarily, even though it adds "unnecessary" steps in a long-term plan for serious human expansion beyond earth. 

There is yet another factor that may become dominant in any commercial scenario: large-scale orbital tourism and even retirement-in-space should be >90% cheaper in ELEO than further out, That may drive viable early investments. ELEO is clearly the "minimum viable product."

… and along those lines… Orbital Assembly inc. is planning the first free-flying, habitable, privately operated facility in orbit for both work and play. With artificial gravity, OA is leading the space tourism market with a safe and comfortable destination in orbit.  Several of the required technologies were first developed at NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program – (NIAC) 

Finally… Here is a discussion with Seti Institute legend Jill Tarter – after a screening of "Contact" –  interviewed by author David Brin and physicist Brian Keating.

And yes, I will post about Greg Bear, soon. It's just too painful a bummer for Thanksgivingtime.

Peace & joy to all.

Space Age marvels - near and far

Let's lift our heads from Earthly troubles for a bit. First something cosmic -- BBC World Service uses me pretty often, most recently on a program about moving the Earth.   A light take on a very – um – heavy topic that I explicate further here.

Is “dark energy” real? It’s based on the notion that cosmic expansion started accelerating again, some 5 to 10 billion years ago, as apparently evidenced by the distance and brightness profiles of Type 1a supernovae, which are our standard candles for immense distances. But what if those candles were not “standard” across those billions of years? Might the brightness of a typical S1a have varied, as the galaxies got older, and more ‘metal-rich’? Or even (perhaps) as space-time itself got more stretched out? (I feel it, even across my almost seven decades!) 

If so, then the new inferred distance/recession curves might eliminate the supposed acceleration and thus any need for dark energy.  (There are other metrics like the Cosmic Background Radiation and the baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO), but these are even more indirect.) What fascinating times. Fight for a brave, scientific civilization.

Soon the New Horizons spacecraft (with Pluto and and Ultima behind it) will take images of two "nearby" stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359. When combined with Earth-based images made on the same dates, the result will be a record-setting parallax measurement yielding 3D images of these stars appearing (as points) to pop out of their backgrounds, giving very precise distance measurements.

Image from Inouye Solar Telescope

And coincidental with our re-release of my first novel - Sundiver… the new Inouye Solar Telescope based on Maui in Hawaii is taking the most detailed images of our Sun to date. Amazing pics of convection cells the size of Texas coupled with titanic magnetic fields and sources of the Solar Wind that sometimes surges as massive storms.  

== ...and only slightly less cosmic ==

On a broader scale,  a study published in The Astrophysical Journal  found that hundreds of galaxies were rotating in sync with the motions of galaxies that were tens of millions of light years away. It should be impossible that the galaxies separated by six megaparsecs [roughly 20 million light years] directly interact with each other. Perhaps the synchronized galaxies may be embedded along the same large-scale structure. “In 2014, a team observed curious alignments of supermassive black holes at the cores of quasars, which are ancient ultra-luminous galaxies, that stretch across billions of light years.” And yes, one notion is that this provides forther evidence for “we’re in a simulation.” Well, it’s one thought occurring to science fiction readers.

Amazing composite image of the Tycho Supernova, with the red and blue coloring used to give a 3D feel to it (retreating and advancing silicon and other stuff too).

While breathless reporters ask if Betelgeuse is about to go supernova (not huge odds in our lifetimes) a smaller spectacle seems assured in mere decades. V Sagittae is made up of an ordinary star orbiting around a white dwarf star, with the former’s matter slowly falling onto the latter. The astronomers’ mathematical model predicts this process to result in a merger between 2067 and 2099. “It’ll be “substantially brighter than the all-time brightest known nova just over a century ago, and the last time any ‘guest star’ appeared brighter was Kepler’s Supernova in the year 1604.”

China has finally booted up its “super-Arecibo” radio telescope. The completed FAST is about 2.5 times as sensitive as any other radio telescope on the planet, and is expected to have four times the range of the next largest dish. That is, till the Square Kilometer Array goes live.

Astronomers have discovered a 'void' with absolutely nothing in it. ‘The void, which is about 6 billion to 10 billion light years away, is nearly a billion light years across, is empty of both normal matter and dark matter. The finding challenges theories of large-scale structure formation in the universe.’

Speaking of which, here’s the coolest recent thing: a light echo of SN 1987A! Some of the light from the supernova from 1987 went a different direction, bounced off a gas cloud and got here almost 33 years late. Even cooler, we can do this proactively. We can calculate and find gas clouds that WILL reflect a known event to us, at some future time, and then catch some of the very earliest light curves from sudden events like supernovas. 

== And more coolstuff! ==

The first-ever direct image of a black hole's event horizon was a truly impressive feat though so-far low-resolution, confirming exactly the visual appearance (of an accreting singularity) predicted by Caltech Nobelist (and sci fi fan) Kip Thorne, for the movie “Interstellar.” This computer simulation is truly gorgeous. You’ll be glad you clicked.

A titanic, expanding beam of energy sprang from close to the supermassive black hole in the centre of the Milky Way just 3.5 million years ago, sending a cone-shaped burst of radiation through both poles of the Galaxy and out into deep space.

Hubble Spots a Ghoulish 'Face' in the Depths of Space. Well, two galaxies colliding. But kewl. Watch as it happens! (Be patient.)

The fastest eclipsing white dwarf binary yet known orbits in only 6.91 minutes, and is expected to be one of the strongest sources of gravitational waves detectable with LISA, the future space-based gravitational wave detector. “Closely orbiting white dwarfs are predicted to spiral together closer and faster, as the system loses energy by emitting gravitational waves. J1539’s orbit is so tight that its orbital period is predicted to become measurably shorter after only a few years.”

==The Sci Fi Beat ==

A  Kickstarter for SHAPERS OF WORLDS, an anthology featuring first-year guests of The Worldshapers podcast, offers stories by Seanan McGuire, David Weber, me, and many others.