Related papers: The Astronomical, Astrobiological and Planetary Sc…
Advanced civilizations capable of interstellar travel, if they exist, are likely to have advanced propulsion methods. Spaceships moving at high speeds would leave a particular signature which could be detected from Earth. We propose a…
Significant advances in the discovery and characterization of the planetary systems of nearby stars can be accomplished with a moderate aperture high performance coronagraphic space mission that could be started in the next decade. Its…
New means of interstellar travel are now being considered by various research teams, assuming lightweight spaceships to be accelerated via either laser or solar radiation to a significant fraction of the speed of light (c). We recently…
Astrobiology is the field of science devoted to searching for life elsewhere in the Universe. It is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating results from multiple fields of science, and in this respect has strong synergies with 'big…
The astrobiology is an interdisciplinary science, combining the methods and the means of physics, biology, chemistry and astronomy. Its main purpose is to find out if the exoplanets are habitable and if so, to confirm life on them. The…
The rapid cost growth of flagship space missions has created a crisis for astronomy and planetary science. We have hit the funding wall. For the past 3 decades scientists have not had to think much about how space technology would change…
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…
Interstellar travel in the Milky Way is commonly thought to be a long and dangerous enterprise, but are all galaxies so hazardous? I introduce the concept of galactic traversability to address this question. Stellar populations are one…
The recent progress in laser propulsion research has advanced substantially the prospects to realize interstellar spaceflight within a few decades. Here we examine passive deceleration via momentum braking from ionized interstellar media.…
Recently, we witnessed how the synergy of small satellite technology and solar sailing propulsion enables new missions. Together, small satellites with lightweight instruments and solar sails offer affordable access to deep regions of the…
The problem is discussed of whether a traveller can reach a remote object and return back sooner than a photon would when taken into account that the traveller can partly control the geometry of his world. It is argued that under some…
Interstellar transport is an object of interest in many sci-fi stories. In history a lot of sci-fi predictions have turned into reality, such as communications satellites, deep-sea submarines and journies to the moon. In this work we study…
A close partnership between people and partially autonomous machines has enabled decades of space exploration. But to further expand our horizons, our systems must become more capable. Increasing the nature and degree of autonomy - allowing…
Astrophysics spans an enormous range of questions on scales from individual planets to the entire cosmos. To address the richness of 21st century astrophysics requires a corresponding richness of telescopes spanning all bands and all…
The design of a downlink communication system for returning scientific data from an interstellar flyby probe is reviewed in this tutorial white paper. It its assumed that the probe is ballistic, and data is downloaded during a period…
To-date, all human economic activity has depended on the resources of a single planet, and it has long been recognized that developments in space exploration could in principle open our closed planetary economy to external resources of…
Recent years have seen dramatic progress in cosmology and particle astrophysics. So much so that anyone who dares to offer an overview would certainly risk him- or herself for being incomplete and biased at best, and even incorrect due to…
The concept of a system-wide measure of the sustainment of life (habitability) for space-faring interplanetary species is introduced and explored. Although largely agnostic to the details of how interplanetary life might operate (e.g., via…
The design of mission scenarios for the flyby investigation of nearby star systems by probes launched using directed energy is addressed. Multiple probes are launched with a fixed launch infrastructure, and download of scientific data…
We model accelerated trips at high-velocity aboard light sails (beam-powered propulsion in general) and radiation rockets (thrust by anisotropic emission of radiation) in terms of Kinnersley's solution of general relativity and its…