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.

Reaching for the Heavens - and expanding our vision

I won't mock them, or get involved in their reciprocal tiffs, because for all their faults, they are at least doing what Republicans promised (lying) that all of the rich would do with massive tax cuts. That is, investing in new capabilities. (Maybe Supply Side woulda worked... if the other 99.99% of rich folks did that, as promised.)

Well. While Branson and Bezos do their suborbital jaunts, SpaceX plans to send half a dozen civilians – with no professional astronauts aboard – into orbit possibly as early as mid September. 2021. This is making my novel Existence darned prophetic about zillionaires in space. (Watch the video trailer!) Apparently, this crew Dragon capsule will have a cupola window and toilet combo (!!) where the docking hatch would usually go. Yipe. A loo with a view.

A MAGA Congressman, Louie Gohmert, recently suggested that the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) attempt to solve global warming by altering the Earth’s orbit. While Gohmert’s sarcastic dig was just another salvo in the mad-right’s all-out war on science, it did get some folks re-evaluating ways to supplement carbon-emission-reduction, e.g. with sunshades or geoengineering. Or else… sure, why not talk about what it would take to alter Earth’s orbital radius outward by about 3 million kilometers, enough to reduce ambient temperatures by about 3 degrees? (Across the next billion years 'we’ will have to do it several times, as the sun grows hotter. And by 'we' I mean our vastly-better heirs who are reading this 'now,' in the year 35640c.e.. and not you, my fellow ancestor sims.)

Could we move the Earth? In a Scientific American essay, Maddie Bender started by offering a cogent appraisal of the energy transfers needed – only about a billion billion times the annual energy use of today’s human civilization. Which makes the whole thing seem… not-so-ridiculous! Given that we need to use other, much quicker methods (like carbon-pollution reduction) in the short term, it is suddenly actually conceivable that advanced descendants might deal with the long term warming by gradual orbit-altering over tens of millions of years. 

Alas, the author then goes on to describe methods for doing this orbital velocity augmentation, by listing nothing but absurd non-starters, like the jibbering-loony notion of flying massive objects past the Earth-Moon system over and over, millions of times, without ever suffering an ‘oopsie” accident.'

As some of you know, I have offered a much better way for a future advanced civilization to do this with utter safety – if patiently – across the requisite time scales. See my video: Let's Lift the Earth! Spaceflight-explanation-maven Scott Manley even referred to the method, recently. (Perhaps someone will tell Scientific American or @MaddieOBender.)  

Meanwhile though, let’s stop with the carbon poisoning, eh? And science-hating meme-poisoning, too? Retiring crazy-moronic traitors like Gohmert to sipping their mint juleps on a virtual veranda, while the nerds they hate save the world for them.

== News from Beyond ==

A large asteroid… or up-size comet… that’s almost big enough to call a  minor planet is about to make its closest pass to the Sun on its 600,000-year highly-eccentric orbit, whose perihelion will come (apparently) within 11 au in 2031.  If it is cometary in makeup (ref. my doctoral thesis) then it may put on quite a show and it’s certainly a good candidate for a flyby mission.

Alas, its passage through the ecliptic, a bit later, will apparently be in August 2033. And that’s NOT good news… not for real world reasons but because we can expect a maelstrom of insanity that year, around the time of the 2000^th Easter, as I describe here.

Mark Buchanan has an article in WaPo offering an argument I've also made about the foolishness and utter irresponsibility of those attempting METI "Messaging to Aliens." My own missive about this, refuting every METI argument in much more detail, including the "I Love Lucy" falsehood, is “Shouting At the Cosmos” – about METI “messaging” to aliens - and can be found on my website.

== And more fun sci-stuff! ==

In detections that came back to back, just 10 days apart, in January 2020, gravity wave detectors revealed events happening a billion years in the past, when black holes ate neutron stars. One had a mass nine times bigger than our sun and gulped a neutron star with about two times our sun's mass. The other black hole had about six times the mass of the sun and ate up a neutron star with 1.5 times the sun's mass. One member of the LIGO team calculates that a black hole eats a neutron star roughly every 30 seconds somewhere in the whole observable universe, though scientists would have to be looking in the right place with the right kind of equipment to detect it. Within 1 billion light-years of Earth, it happens roughly once per month.

A few weeks ago I linked to the new, better images of the M87 black hole showing powerful polarization effects. Now rapid simulation work suggests that the MAD theory of tightly rotating magnetic fields may explain the super-tight jets that spew north and south from many black holes. Wow, what an age we live in.

And further proof of amazing times. From lab experiments, measuring momentum effects in tritium beta decay we have an upper bound on the mass of the electron neutrino at about 1.1ev and from "astronomical oscillation data" a lower bound of 0.5ev... a narrow and narrowing gap. The presenter of a talk I saw yesterday suggests - and she was persuasive - that the number density across the universe is about 330 neutrinos per cubic centimeter.

AND I just read that they are studying the microbiome of Southwest Pueblo Native Americans from 1000 years ago to recover lost symbionts. (Might one turn into Larry Niven's "booster spice"?)    Again amazing times.

== You want more science. Here's more! ==

 A newfound tiny white dwarf, named ZTF J1901+1458, just 130 light years away, is immensely massive, just shy of Chandrasekhar’s Limit where the mass triggers a type 1a supernova, probably having formed when a binary pair of stars – each having become a white dwarf separately, whirled, emitted gravity waves, and slowed into a merger that created incredible angular momentum (rotation) and magnetic fields. (How’s that for a sentence?) Now this. It would take very little added mass to tip this thing into a too-close-for-comfort 'pop'. And did I mention it's just 130 l.y. away? Sci fi folks take note. 

Through a long standing partnership with World Book, Inc., NIAC is proud to announce the second eight books in the Out of This World 2 series! This award winning STEM book series is geared towards kids with a 4th – 8th grade reading level so they can explore the next frontiers of space through the lives and work of researchers 3ho competed for seed grants from NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC) (I am on the Advisory Council.) The 2021 NIAC Symposium will be held  Sept 20-24 via Livestream here: https://livestream.com/viewnow/niac2021 

Discover second skin space suits, leaping bots, expandable space habitats, solar surfing probes, clockwork rovers, and more in this easy-to-read series about complex space science topics. Stunning imagery and interactive activities will entice and challenge readers of all ages. The Out of This World 2 series features early stage NASA projects that hope to develop bold new advances in space technology. Contact World Book directly, or your local library/bookstore to find out more.

Go asteroids, young folks... but also good luck Perseverance!

Amid all the fights to save civilization and the planet - and my own busiest time (professionally) ever - we could do to pause now and then and remember... we are still a magnificent, scientific and exploratory civilization! Before girding ourselves for those 'minutes of terror" as we root for the aptly named Perseverance rover to land safely on Mars, there are other reasons for confident satisfaction.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu appears to have succeeded at collecting samples even better than expected, having penetrated as much as half a meter into the carbonaceous regolith and jammed itself full of material... even causing a minor problem, forcing scientists to stow the sampler into its return capsule early. Now, if the competence continues, we can keep doing stuff out where the riches are. And that is NOT the dusty, almost (for now) useless tourist trap called the Moon. (Leave that sandbox to the kiddies, please.) 

And while we’re talking asteroids…

From The Planetary Society: " Hayabusa2’s samples from asteroid Ryugu will return to Earth on 6 December 2020, Japan’s space agency announced. The samples will land in southern Australia at the same military complex where the first Hayabusa spacecraft sent samples from asteroid Itokawa in 2010. Hayabusa2 itself will pass within 200 kilometers of Earth and fly on to visit another asteroid. Pictured: Hayabusa2 snapped this picture of Ryugu after collecting 1 of 2 samples in 2019. Hayabusa2's shadow can be seen, along with a dark splotch where the spacecraft's thrusters blew away lighter materials on Ryugu's surface." 

THIS is what only Japan and the U.S. (with ESA) can do and we should be doing, while all the Apollo wannabe eager tourists rush to the dusty-useless lunar plain to plant footprints. (I got no problems renting them hotel rooms and landers and sending down robots to do science.) Asteroids are where quadrillions of dollars in wealth lie.

Meanwhile, plans develop for a 2022 launch of a robotic mission to 16-Psyche... (Psyche was made infamous on the show EXPANSE) … which is thought to be the metal core of a planet that died in collisions that formed the asteroid belt.  Metal that – if crudely totaled by today’s prices (omitting market crashing discounts) would be worth $10 Quadrillions at today’s markets. 

== There’s a Place for Us? ==

Are underground lava tubes the way of the future for colonization in Mars and the Moon? With lower gravity and less quake activity, it's estimated some may be cavernous enough to hold whole cities, offering protection from meteorites, cosmic rays and sections that can be sealed against vacuum. Not mentioned: these realms may be easier to clean vs the moon's jagged regolith dust and the caustic perchlorates of Mars. Those that are near ice deposits could be highly valuable. So who is ahead in the race to these sites?

We are, at NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC)! We've issued a Phase III study that should lead to a lander-bot that creeps to the edge of a "skylight" opening in such a tube, perhaps within a few years.

Now researchers estimate that Martian and lunar tubes are respectively 100 and 1,000 times wider than those on Earth, which typically have a diameter of 10 to 30 meters. Lower gravity and its effect on volcanism explain these outstanding dimensions (with total volumes exceeding 1 billion cubic meters on the Moon). “Tubes as wide as these can be longer than 40 kilometers, making the Moon an extraordinary target for subsurface exploration and potential settlement in the wide protected and stable environments of lava tubes.”  Further: “Lava tubes could provide stable shields from cosmic and solar radiation and micrometeorite impacts which are often happening on the surfaces of planetary bodies. Moreover, they have great potential for providing an environment in which temperatures do not vary from day- to night-time.” Reminiscent of life in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

And now more news how the lava tubes on Mars and the Moon are considerably larger than here on Earth. Enough so future settlements or research outposts could be safely nestled away inside. Certainly any such tubes that are also near Martian sub-surface ice formations or adjacent to Lunar Polar ice deposits would be sweet spots and among the most valuable sites in the Solar System.  

Then there’s Venus, a broiling, high pressure hell, down at the ground level. But my colleague Geoff Landis and others have speculated about a shell-level of the dense atmosphere where temperature and pressure (though not gas mixture) could be pleasant to Earth-type life, encouraging thoughts of balloon beings or steam-punk dirigibles and colonists getting about needing only face masks… AND NOW a stunning discovery of spectral signs of Phosphine gas - a molecule made up of one phosphorus atom and three hydrogen atoms - which on Earth is pretty much always (outie of certain factories) a sign of life!

Also underground!  One of our Mars orbiters used radar to detect several of what seem likely to be lakes of hyper-saline perchlorate brines, “known to form at Martian polar regions and shown to survive for geologically significant periods of time at temperatures well below the freezing point.”  Unhealthy stuff for any of us, but definitely plausible refuges for Martian life. If so, we can likely co-exist in careful colonies there, because ain’t no Earth-bugs gonna live in that stuff.

New research challenges the “warm and wet ancient Mars” hypothesis, which posits that Mars was once covered in massive river systems, fed by rain and large oceans of liquid water. Instead the “river tracks” we now see may have formed under sheets of ice. 

== Planets out there? ==

UC Riverside astrobiologist Stephen Kane crunched the data and found that some stars could potentially host as many as seven Earth-like planets, so long as they don't have a Jupiter to screw things up. Already the Trappist-1 system is home to several Earth-like planets located in the star's habitable zone where liquid water could exist. Is that beginning to sound like the “Verse” system of copious colonized worlds in Firefly/Serenity?

95 newly discovered brown dwarf sub-stellar ‘planets” have been found by a smart mob of 100,000 amateurs. The finds are vastly colder than other known brown dwarfs — and are likely cool enough to have water-rich clouds like we do here on Earth. It’s not yet clear whether that’s important from an astrobiological perspective, but it does help scientists better understand these bizarre worlds.

== NASA & Space Tech ==

In a much-criticized tweet, US president (now former) Donald Trump claimed that “NASA was Closed & Dead [sic] until I got it going again.” The categorically false claim drew widespread ire from the space exploration community - NASA never “closed” and it was never dead. “In a searing reply on Twitter, veteran NASA astronaut Scott Kelly also entered the fray: “Great leaders take blame and pass along credit.”

The notion that the present miracle of commercial space development cannot be credited to 8 years of Obama administration efforts to goose and stimulate it is insane. Moreover, I am on record denouncing the loony notion that the US should focus on returning American footprints to the dusty and (for now) useless moon, rather than joining Japan heading where the real wealth is, in asteroids. And yet – 

-- and yet, I do feel that NASA Director Bridenstine - a Trump appointee - has been surprisingly sensible, curious and willing to listen and learn. In fact, I nominate him as one of the few GOP officials who might serve as holdover gestures to bipartisanship.

The Blue Origin-led Human Landing System (HLS) National Team just delivered to NASA a full-scale prototype of a lander that could one day carry American astronauts to the surface of the Moon. Terrific, but not in the way meant here. As you know, I oppose any frantic effort to return US astronauts to that dusty, useless, nasty plain. Yes to robots! And yes HUMANITY will return there soon, since China, India, Russia and the rest are eager for their rite of passage “Bar Moonzvahs.” Tourism will be the economic driver and US companies should prepare to cater to it! Make money on landers for tourists, yeah! But NASA should lift its gaze to do (with Japan and Europe) things that others can’t do.

And finally....

As you’d expect, I love these new, improved images of the granular photosphere of the Sun. 

Finally… One of the better recent SMBC comics.

More spaaaace news!

I'm about to zoom-attend the summer orientation meeting of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC), for which I serve on the External Advisory Council. It's fun asking questions of some of the most innovative investigators of space technology concepts that are just this side of plausible. Naturally, it's disappointing not to bend their elbows in person. But take pride that we are still (for now) a proudly scientific and exploring civilization.

Now for some cool space stuff to remind us of that fact...

 One of the very best podcasts around is Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur - a series of wonderfully detailed and cogent explorations about super-science possibilities that dissects almost every aspect you can list regarding interstellar travel, alien motivations, star drives, terraforming or the Fermi Paradox. This one - on “black holes as weapons” - naturally refers to my own novel Earth (which he flatteringly calls his Book of the Month about 27 minutes in). But I highly recommend the entire series.

A video shows that the speed of light – blazing fast to us on Earth – kinda crawls in sci fi terms, taking 3 grinding minutes to reach Mars at its closest. And that’s “the fastest speed there is.”

Things are turning doubtful for Planet Nine. Which means the next planet out from us may be Proxima Centauri b, so well appraised by the new Chilean ESPRESSO radial velocity scope that researchers  found that Proxima b is 1.17 times the mass of Earth. It orbits its star in just 11.2 days. Similar amounts of sunlight, engendering ‘goldilock’ thoughts… though small red stars are flare stars, so Proxima b receives about 400 times the amount of harsh flare radiation as Earth receives from its Sun. Life would be... different.

The Devonian extinction 359 million years ago seems likely to have happened from a stripping of the protective ozone layer. 

Was ‘Oumuamua the Interstellar weird-visitor an elongated chunk of hydrogen ice? It’s claimed that could explain many of its unusual properties.

The UAE hopes to build the Mars Scientific City, as part of the Emirates Mars Mission to establish a human colony on the Red Planet by the year 2117. The city will sprawl across 177,000 square metres (1.9 million square feet), an area about twice the size of Alcatraz Island. Funny how there’s no mention of lessons learned from Biosphere 2.

The space station is getting a brand spanking new toilet that will recover and recycle water from feces. “Our future goals are to stabilize and dry the metabolic waste to make it microbially inactive and possibly reuse that water, reduce the amount of consumables for the potty.” Ah, technical terminology.

Joel Sercel’s TransAstra Corp. Aims to leverage some modest NIAC grants to mine water – and thus propellant – from both asteroids and deposits in sunless craters at the lunar poles. Their tall tower innovation -- Sun Flowers  -- will make affordable solar power feasible in dark icy places near the Moon's poles while doomed Beatle rovers powered by the Sun Flowers will use microwaves to vaporize and then capture frozen water ice near the poles so that it can be converted to high performance rocket propellant.

Stunning images of Jupiter in infrared, compiled from Earth and the Juno Spacecraft.

A tiny Chinese satellite in lunar orbit captured incredible images of a total solar eclipse over South America last year. How cool that an image from near the limb of the moon spots the moon’s own shadow eclipsing daytime on the Earth.

==Beyond our solar system ==

New Horizons has traveled so far that it now has a unique view of the nearest stars. "It's fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator "And that has allowed us to do something that had never been accomplished before — to see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth." The Voyagers couldn’t do such fine parallax so this is a milestone.

Sara Seager and her colleagues now study examining how E. coli bacteria and yeast - prokaryotes and eukaryotes - would react to a hydrogen atmosphere.  Both reproduced normally, but at lower and slower rates than in oxygenated air. Simply amazing and lends credence to the notion of “hydrogen civilizations” based on worlds like Jupiter. “Sentient hydrogen breathers have even made appearances in some rationally-based science fiction, such as the Uplift novels of David Brin.” Thanks, though the possibility also appeared in works by Poul Anderson’s, Greg Bear and Clifford Simak.

Of course then there’s the pressures… and providing water and energy…

In Existence I pose a future when humanity sends out probes beyond 550 astronomical units to peer back, past the rim of the sun and use the solar gravitational lens to explore a dangerous cosmos. Astronomers already use g-lens lineups to gain valuable samples from very distant times and locales. Now comes a model suggesting that the rims of black holes might refract bits of light from *every* direction right at us on Earth. Meaning some singularities out there may be telling stories about… everywhere, all the time. Oh, the instruments to gather that light and then separate/deconvolute those samples into anything useful aren’t available. In fact, they will be almost godlike, compared to our own current methods. But so? We’ve made such leaps before. More pertinently, have others, already?

Even more pertinently, how do we save and boost a civilization that’s confident, good-enough and capable of rising to such challenges?

Yeah, solar g-spot missions are suddenly all the rage at NIAC! 

And here’s another paper on the topic. “Photometric Limits on the High Resolution Imaging of Exoplanets Using the Solar Gravity Lens.” 

One of you wrote in: “Golly! Where was I reading about this a few years ago?  ;^)”  Golly, indeed.

In my novel Existence, there’s a point when millions of tiny probes are sent forth to discover the state of the cosmos in unique ways. One possible discovery? If the gravitational disturbances caused by purported “Planet 9” – which has never been observed – are caused by a midget black hole. Such a swarm of micro probes may be the only way to find out.

And if these were common… reviving the MACHO theory for dark matter… then we’d also get a pretty good explanation for the failure to detect any interstellar travel.