Philip Lubin has led a team at UCSB to create laser arrays for propulsion and asteroid deflection. He has received NASA and Starshot funding. There have 100 students in his programs. They have created hardware components and performed various experiments. The DE-STAR (Directed Energy System for Targeting of Asteroids and ExploRation) has several sizes. DE-STAR-1 …
Power is everything is a famous quote from the movie Apollo 13. A similar statement is made by Marc Millis about interstellar travel. Marc is a thought leader in interstellar travel. Marc says that for whatever speed increase we want then we will need to square the energy increase. If we want to go ten …
1. Universe Today – LightSail 2 is Sending Home New Pictures of Earth LightSail 2, the brainchild of The Planetary Society, has gifted us two new gorgeous images of Earth. The small spacecraft is currently in orbit at about 720 km, and the LightSail 2 mission team is putting it through its paces in preparation …
In 2018 the Parker Solar Probe launched and plans to approach the Sun to within 8.5 solar radii (4 million miles) of its surface. This is seven times closer than any previous mission. Researchers think a new coating could allow spacecraft to get close as one solar radii (430,000 miles) from the Sun’s surface. This …
The conventional means of collecting and redirecting solar sail light uses a metal-coated polyimide film but this is sub-optimal and unstable because the very large and very thin sail must be rapidly slewed away from the sun line for navigational purposes. Stability rigging and attitude control devices add mass to the sailcraft, thereby reducing the …
Arxiv – Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative to prove ultra-fast light-driven nanocrafts, and lay the foundations for a first launch to Alpha Centauri within the next generation. Along the way, the project could generate important supplementary benefits to solar system exploration. A number of hard engineering challenges remain to be solved before these missions can …
There is a 49-page report that has updated analysis on sending a small probe towards the Alpha Centauri system in a 50 year total mission time traveling at an average cruise velocity of 10% of light speed. The Andromeda Study: A FemtoSpacecraft Mission to Alpha Centauri Andreas M. Hein, Kelvin F. Long, Dan Fries, Nikolaos …
Les Johnson of the NASA Marshall Space Center provides a 37-page presentation on solar sails covering the technical details, past projects and future projects. Near-term work is with various cubesats and solar sails. Near Earth Asteroid Scout The Near Earth Asteroid Scout Will • Image/characterize a NEA during a slow flyby • Demonstrate a low-cost …
The Planetary Society’s solar sailing CubeSat (Lightsail2) has been installed into a spring-loaded deployer, and that deployer was bolted to the Prox-1 spacecraft. It was a double integration; basically they put a box inside a box inside a box. Lightsail 2 has a momentum wheel to help maintain position in space. It has new attitude …
The South Korean K2 Black Panther tank development started in 1995 and cost $260 million. South Korea designed a tank that on paper appears to be at equal or better than the specifications of current NATO tanks. Mass production commenced in 2013 and the first K2s were deployed with the armed forces in June 2014. …
The Carnival of Nuclear Energy blogs has changed its name to Nuclear Energy News Weekly. 1. Neutron Bytes – Dan Yurman – An Up and Down Week for Developers of Advanced Reactors In Washington, DC, the Third Way, a think tank, hosted a meeting of some of the country’s best thinkers, leaders, funders, and doers …