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Tau Zero Takes Aim at Interstellar Propulsion : Discovery News
Tau Zero Takes Aim at Interstellar Propulsion : Discovery News
Image: The solar focal point is located at about 550 AU from the sun. Image courtesy of Adrian Mann.
AU ZERO TAKES AIM AT INTERSTELLAR PROPULSION
Guest contributor Paul Gilster explains how interstellar spaceflight may become a reality.
- Mon Jan 10, 2011 04:00 AM ET
Content provided by Paul Gilster, Tau Zero Foundation and Project Icarus Consultant
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Voyager 1 is currently the farthest human-made object from the sun. Click to enlarge this image.
Image courtesy of Adrian Mann
Image courtesy of Adrian Mann
Guest contributor Paul Gilster is a founding member of the Tau Zero Foundation, a non-profit group of scientists dedicated to the incremental advancement of interstellar spaceflight. Project Icarus, one of the Foundation's key initiatives, has reached a major milestone and Paul shares this exciting project with Discovery News. Paul also maintains Centauri Dreams, the news forum of the Tau Zero Foundation.
Marc Millis steeples his fingers, leaning back in his chair to ponder a question from one of the practitioner scientists of the Tau Zero Foundation.
He's in Austin, Texas, for a session devoted to roughing-out ideas and organization plans for the young organization with an ambitious goal: Build a practical groundwork for interstellar flight within sound, peer-reviewed physics; establish the basics that will one day lead -- whether in decades or centuries -- to technologies that can take us to the stars.
The blackboard is littered with his organizational chart, arrows connecting boxes, people attached to study groups. Solar sails, fusion, ion drives -- they're all up for discussion.
Is any idea more packed with raw adventure than interstellar flight? You would think not, judging from the public enthusiasm for space dramas like "Star Trek" and "Avatar," and for many the assumption that large, well financed teams are working on interstellar propulsion is a natural.
Millis, himself a bit of a "Star Trek" buff, would have thought so too if he hadn't been working for NASA in the 1990s, where he headed up the effort known as the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project (BPP). Well financed? Not exactly -- BPP's entire budget ran to $1.6 million, covering the period 1996 to 2002. Large? Hardly, but Millis and colleagues achieved much.
Consider this: In addition to a 1997 workshop covering a wide range of cutting-edge concepts, BPP sponsored five research tasks through competitive selection, two in-house tasks and one grant, spawning sixteen peer-reviewed journal articles, an award-winning website called "Warp Drive When," and related research coordinated with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC).
Millis investigated everything from theories of transient inertia to so-called "quantum tunneling." Targeting propulsion breakthroughs from physics, BPP complemented MSFC's work but with the focus on the most visionary ideas and the need for credible progress toward such goals.
Interstellar Speed Bumps
Coupled with NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts, BPP gave for a brief time the impression that the major space agencies were in the interstellar propulsion game, at least marginally, a thought that went hand in glove with then NASA administrator Dan Goldin's 1997 call for a robotic probe that could reach another star. "We have to set goals so tough it hurts," said Goldin then, "that it drives technology -- in semiconductors, materials, simulation, propulsion."
Goldin's was a clarion call, but despite an initial burst of enthusiasm, the magnitude of the task, not to mention budgetary realities, soon set in. NASA had more immediate goals, and by 2002, BPP had been canceled, followed by the Institute for Advanced Concepts in 2007. Like its fellow space agencies worldwide, NASA had little time or money to devote to interstellar issues.
The truth about interstellar studies is that it is now what it has largely remained since the first tentative papers from the likes of Eugen Sänger, Les Shepherd and Robert Forward made it clear more than fifty years ago that a trip to another star might be possible.
Researchers work in relative isolation, communicating only occasionally at conferences and now on the Internet. Despite a few small government efforts at NASA and the European Space Agency, the interstellar field today is a network of independent scientists eager to do their work but usually lacking the funding to proceed.
That's why interstellar studies is now trying the private sector.
A frustrated Millis, fired-up with ideas and unable to implement them, retired early from his position at NASA's Glenn Research Center to launch the Tau Zero Foundation, where he began to assemble an informal network of practitioner scientists whose previous work had demonstrated their interest in cutting edge ideas.
Centauri Dreams became its forum, a gathering place for news and analysis of recent papers on interstellar matters. Credible, near-term work was what Tau Zero would be about, by which Millis meant incremental steps toward a goal whose fruition might be as much as several centuries off. Tau Zero wasn't meant to promote wild, untested ideas, but to use philanthropic donations to support serious, peer-reviewed science in support of a long-range goal.
Small Steps to Icarus
Think of the method as chipping away at a concept that sometimes seems intractable, for neither Millis nor any of his practitioners can say for sure whether starflight will ever happen. But the effort continues, "ad astra incrementis," as the motto for Tau Zero that Millis created would have it. "To the stars in steps, with each small step being larger than the one before."
Or as the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said, "You achieve the great thing by a series of small steps."
Making those steps happen is a foundation set up from the start as a networked, distributed entity, a fact that allowed Tau Zero quickly to pool its efforts with the British Interplanetary Society in the ongoing effort to re-think Project Daedalus, a fusion-based starship design the BIS had compiled in the 1970s.
Daedalus was outrageously ambitious, but its designers put together what, if we had the means to build it, would be the most likely design to get an interstellar probe to another star, in this case Barnard’s Star, some 6 light years away.
Project Icarus, a five year study that has just completed its first year, investigates what the last thirty years of technology development have made possible for an unmanned interstellar probe. But missions closer at hand are also in their conceptualization and design phase.
A precursor mission called FOCAL is the brain-child of Italian physicist Claudio Maccone. FOCAL is envisioned as an attempt to reach the Sun's gravitational focus at 550 AU and beyond, where astrophysical studies using the enormous resolution that such lensing affords could offer us priceless information about the cosmic microwave background and nearby stellar systems.
Image: The solar focal point is located at about 550 AU from the sun. Image courtesy of Adrian Mann.
Maccone is also moving ahead with a "statistical Drake equation" that advances Frank Drake's original thinking on the spread of extraterrestrial civilizations with new statistical considerations.
Also on the agenda is education, in the form of Tibor Pacher's Faces from Earth, an attempt to promote deep space missions by designing messages that future craft could carry onboard, much as Pioneer and Voyager carried their own plaques and records of humanity.
A Continuum of Ideas
The related Mosaic Earth is all about building images of our planet using portraits of the people participating in the project, emphasizing Pacher's belief that reaching out to another civilization, if only in the form of a time capsule aboard a spacecraft, is a deeply human endeavor.
But not all Tau Zero work focuses on near-term technologies. Unlike BPP, Tau Zero works with a continuum of ideas, from near-term concepts like solar sails to the futuristic physics of wormholes and so-called "warp drive."
In 2009, Millis and colleague Eric Davis published "Frontiers of Propulsion Science," the first scholarly text compiling breakthrough propulsion concepts of the kind BPP once specialized in, with eighteen different lead authors providing chapters in a 739 page volume that identifies critical issues and describes future research directions. If there’s a "Star Trek" edge to some of this work, it comes infused with the credentials of well qualified scientists.
"We thought it was science fiction. Then we visited NASA." So goes the sub-title to a 2001 article on BPP that appeared under the title "Warp Speed Gets Real" in Popular Science. The bright promise of that cover story was quickly belied by project cancellations at NASA, but the Tau Zero Foundation intends to adapt to changing circumstances, especially the infusion of commercial activity into space projects that have always been in the hands of government.
As to Millis, he's meeting with Tau Zero practitioners, revamping the Tau Zero public website, developing practitioner online venues for communication and pushing the interstellar goal through a series of speaking engagements.
Soon to move to a membership format, the restructuring Tau Zero Foundation carries what he believes to be humanity's best hope for pushing technology to its limits within sound, peer-reviewed research constraints. The goal is long-term and, in the minds of Tau Zero supporters, doable if we begin to isolate the problems of interstellar flight and work creatively to envision solutions that may pay off for our posterity.
And if a breakthrough comes along sooner than that? So much the better. "Ad astra incrementis" is a purposely cautious motto, but it has always been the business of the future to surprise us.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Sunday, January 9, 2011
A Privately-Financed Manned Mars Mission
A Privately-Financed Manned Mars Mission-“Yes We Can!”
Over my many years in the Mars manned flight advocacy community I have been frustrated with all of the false starts that we have had with the US government and funding for actual manned Mars missions. We have heard all sorts of promises and then plans change and priorities change. It appears that we are treading water and going nowhere.
My late father had some words of wisdom for me as follows:
“Son, if you want something done right, do it yourself!”
These are my sentiments with respect to getting a true manned mission to Mars organized, planned, funded, and launched.
I do not work in the technical, research, or commercial side of the aerospace industry. I stay up from 2:00 AM until 10:00 AM each workday doing macroeconomic research for clients in Europe, Sao Paul, and Africa. When I worked these hours with the New Orleans Police Department as a young Tulane student we said: “I’m working the grave yard shift.” By the way, there are some virtues to working these hours including no interruptions and the ability to bring to bear incredible powers of concentration.
I discovered an amazing fact during my research. On any given day there is some $15 trillion dollars in circulation in various hedge funds, investment trusts, etc. around the world. In this time of high unemployment and awful economic suffering, there is still a lot of wealth in this world. Of equal surprise to all of us is that most of this wealth is in the US, Europe, and Canada. Asia is a super growth story but they do not control that much of the wealth yet.
A figure of $15 trillion dollars is almost impossible to comprehend. Let us work with a smaller figure of $1 trillion dollars. Here is a good representation as follows:
(The object of this exercise is to show there is more than enough private money in
the world economy to finance a manned mission to Mars and to start a complete program to establish human settlements on Mars.) In any private investment scheme, one needs to offer the investor a good return with a degree of safety to attract funds. So far we know of nothing on Mars that we could bring back to earth and make a huge sum of money for our investors.
So how do we attract the funding that we need? Step one is to have a solid and creditable plan of action. This has to be a detailed plan covering everything from rockets carrying payload to low earth orbit, astronaut transport vehicles, propulsion systems to carry our manned vehicle to Mars, and the hardware to take astronauts to the surface, the habitation modules for them to live in, surface transport vehicles, etc. This plan would be long and detailed. It would have the blessing of the finest engineering minds in the Mars community including our own Dr. Robert Zubrin. Under no circumstances would this flight be “a record breaking event” or “a cheap stunt.” Rather it would be the start of viable human settlements on Mars. There would also be a tentative cost estimate on the project. For this article I will set a figure of $15 billion dollars.
Step two in the process would be to find the actual investors. In my humble opinion you are going to find two groups of investors. The first group will be giant companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, and Facebook who appreciate technology and want to do something that advances mankind and enhances their image. (Of course they will make a large profit on advertising revenues, etc. Their motives will not be completely altruistic.)
The second group of investors will be those that true manned Mars advocates would see as more crass and interested in immediate profits. Such an investor might be CNN, the Turner Cable Network, or Fox News that might pay several billion dollars just for the right to have an embedded reporter fly on the first mission manned Mars mission. Promoters of mega sporting events would be another group of investors who would pay large amounts of money to have their names associated with the project. Let your imagination run wild and you can imagine any more. The advertising revenues from such a project could run into the tens of billions of dollars on a worldwide basis. Likewise merchandising agreements and book deals would generate billions of more dollars in profits.
Step three will be setting up all of the commercial agreements and actual schedules. The good news is that one will not need $15 billion dollars “upfront.” Over the ten year life of the project smaller sums would be needed each year. Please bear in mind that the Dutch and the British used private companies like The Hudson Bay Company and Dutch East India company to settle the New World and parts of Asia.
Step four will be to pick the prime contractor to build it all and make it happen. All of can think of people like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE, and the RSC Energia, and Orbital Technologies companies in Russia come to mind. We also have Space X here in the US that has superb capabilities to carry out this project. Out of these excellent companies and others that appear later a prime contractor will be chosen.
Step five would be to realize that ten years is a long time to keep the attention of the public and investors. Smaller projects at intervals including a manned trip to an asteroid could be undertaken to maintain interest and sharpen technology.
Step six would be to accept as inevitable that technical and human challenges will arise that will increase the price of such an under taking. Cost over-runs are going to be inevitable. Those who oppose a privately-financed manned mission to Mars argue that technical challenges will arise that literally are too expensive for private investors to pay for. I honestly do not agree with this.
Step seven will be the realization that once governments see a viable project going forward, they will want to be involved. They will come with money in hand.
All of this will lead to one of the most exciting moments in human history.
A Gene Sequencing Machine To Look For Life On Mars
The DNA Sequencer That Could Go To Mars
Image via Wikipedia
Did life begin on Earth?
Maybe not. For more than a hundred years, some scientists have believed the first living things evolved elsewhere, perhaps on Mars, and then stowed away on rocks that made their way here.
This idea is known as ‘panspermia.’ Lord Kelvin, the British physicist who formulated the first and second laws of thermodynamics, proposed it in 1871, though he was neither the first nor the last to do so.
For more than a century, panspermia has fallen into the large category of scientific ideas that capture the imagination but are completely unverifiable. Gary Ruvkun, a Harvard molecular biologist, has been trying to figure out ways of designing space probes that could test the idea for years. Now, he thinks he has found the perfect tool: a new DNA sequencing device called the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine, made by Life Technologies of Carlsbad, Calif. The device is launching commercially today.
DNA sequencing has been undergoing a revolution, decreasing in price and increasing power at a speed unmatched by any other technology since the microchip. Decoding a human genome cost more than $1 billion a decade ago, but can be done for less than $10,000 now, a rate of decrease that beats the computer industry’s famous Moore’s law. But you wouldn’t think of sending these existing machines, which contain complicated high tech cameras and robotics and are operated by highly trained scientists, to another planet.
“Anything you’re proposing to fly in space, it should be in eighth grade science classes,” says Ruvkun. He believes that with advances like the Ion Torrent machine “sequencing will be done in eighth grade science classes very soon.”
The promise of the Ion Torrent PGM is that it is based entirely on the kind of silicon chips the microprocessor industry has used for decades. It sequences DNA by measuring the electrical charges produced as DNA molecules are copied; it does this by testing for each of the four possible DNA letters in sequence, catching a whiff of charge every time it hits the right code. Right now, it is far more expensive on a DNA-letter by DNA-letter basis, but it also delivers results faster – in hours, not a week. Moreover, the machine costs just $50,000, about a tenth as much as the more expensive machines made by Illumina, Life Technologies, and, coming soon, Pacific Biosciences.
Ruvkun became excited when he heard about the PGM because it sounded so much sturdier than existing machines. For years, he had been making the case that polymerase chain reaction (PCR) would be the best way to test for the existence of Earth-like DNA on Mars. His argument was that the technique, which makes many copies of a piece of DNA, would be so cheap to put on a Mars probe that it would be silly not to. But PCR doesn’t tell you what genetic code is written on a DNA strand. And without that information, it would be impossible to know for sure that the DNA didn’t hitch a ride to Mars from Earth. It could be dandruff from the guys who put together the probe, or a hardy virus.
But being able to get even a tiny bit of sequence from DNA found on Mars would allow scientists to know for sure that they’re not looking at a run-of-the-mill earthling. The current version of the PGM is capable of sequencing 10 million DNA bases; Ruvkun hopes to modify the device to make it simpler, and says that he could make do with as little as a thousand bases. His work is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but he is first to admit the chances of actually making it onto a space probe are slim.
Here on Earth, the promise of the PGM is that it will allow scientists to verify their results more quickly and sequence microbes more easily. In the future, it might form the basis for diagnostic tests. Jonathan Rothberg, who led the development of the device and is chief executive of Life’s Ion Torrent division, says he hopes it will open up DNA sequencing to thousands more labs. Chad Nusbaum, co-director of the Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program at the Broad Institute, says that he thinks of the technology as being akin to digital photography: it was adopted because it was small and fast, but there was always the potential that it would replace film. Either way, it shows how quickly the field of DNA decoding is advancing.
“It has changed everything about what I do,” says Ruvkun. “There’s nothing more fun than living through a revolution. Genomics is just the best. It’s so much better to be a scientist now that it was 20 years ago.”
Saturday, January 8, 2011
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Monday, January 3, 2011
NASA Scientists Urges Mars Colonization
ir & Space
NASA Scientist Publishes 'Colonizing the Red Planet,' a How-To Guide
Published December 30, 2010
| FoxNews.com
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NASA
A conceptual illustration depicts what a manned mission to Mars may look like.
A manned mission to Mars would be the greatest adventure in the history of the human race. And one man knows how to make it a reality. In fact, he just wrote the book on it -- literally.
Joel Levine, senior research scientist with NASA's Langley Research Center and co-chair of NASA's Human Exploration of Mars Science Analysis Group, just published "The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet." The book reads like a who's who of Mars mission science, featuring senators, astronauts, astrophysicists, geologists and more on getting to Mars, studying its atmosphere and climate, the psychological and medical effects on the crew and other details.
There's even a section detailing the science of sex on Mars, should NASA attempt to create a permanent colony there.
"For the last three years, I've been co-chairing a panel of about 30 U.S. and Canadian scientists, coming up with a blueprint, purely from a scientific perspective, of humanity's role on Mars," Levine told FoxNews.com. He was asked to put together a special edition of the Journal of Cosmology exploring the topic, which was just published as the new book.
"The United States of America is the only country that can do this successfully right now," he said. And to remain the technological leader of the world, he argued, we need to do this. And it's quite possible, the book notes; after all, a trip to Mars isn't even a lengthy one.
"The trip to Mars would take on the order of 220 days using today’s chemical propulsion technology," writes Steven A. Hawley, a former astronaut now with the department of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas, in a chapter on the challenges and sacrifices of the trip to Mars. He suggests either a short duration or longer duration stay before the return trip. "The longer surface mission would enable significant science, but also expose the crew to greater risk if systems don’t function as planned."
But regardless of whether a colony is initially established, Levine is passionate -- and poetic -- about a trip to Mars. "When we do this, the human species will be a two-planet species for the first time ever," he said. A trip to Mars would open up countless revelations and possibly answer one of the greatest questions science today seeks to answer: is there life elsewhere in the universe?
"The search for life outside the Earth is one of the key questions in all of science," he told FoxNews.com, "and of all the objects in the Solar System, Mars is the most likely."
Many scientists speculate that life may exist on the red planet today in the form of microorganisms, and the book concludes that a manned mission could very well answer that question for once and all. "All of the articles here conclude that yes, it's possible that when we go to Mars we will find microorganism at the surface or below the surface."
Another question Levine believes the mission will answer deals with the strange history of Mars -- which he called the most intriguing, and the most confusing planet in the solar system. Today Mars has no liquid water and a very, very thin atmosphere -- it's like the Earth's atmosphere at 100,000 feet, he said. Yet we have very, very strong evidence that its surface used to be covered with water. What happened to it all?
"What catastrophic event led to Mars going from an Earth-like planet to a very inhospitable planet today?" he asked. The Mars mission would send humans there to study that, and see if there's a lesson in the planet for the future of Earth.
Levine has a general timeline in mind for the mission, which he hopes to launch by 2040. He believes we could launch the missions far sooner, however -- if we could afford to. Tragically, the major problem for getting humans to Mars isn't building new spacecraft, furthering science, or inventing new technologies, he says.
The only hold-up is the budget.
"NASA's budget is 18 billion a year, and I don't think we can seriously plan a launch until 2040" given those funds, he said. "If NASA's budget went up 3 billion a year, or 5 billion a year, we could do it in half the time."
But Levine presents a solution for that problem in his book as well, something unprecedented for NASA: advertising.
"The suggestion is marketing to different corporations and professional sports leagues for advertising, which is something NASA never does -- it's a whole new economic plan for financing what has to be the greatest adventure in the history of the human race."
Read the special edition of the Journal of Cosmology here.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/30/nasa-scientist-publishes-colonizing-red-planet-guide/#ixzz19yeCrkfR
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