100 Year Starship

From: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120518-reaching-for-the-stars 

18 May 2012

100-Year Starship: Mae Jemison reaches for the stars

Astronaut Mae Jemison flew onboard Space Shuttle Endeavour (Copyright: Nasa)

Mae Jemison fulfilled a childhood dream to travel to space. Now she wants to take humanity to the stars.

Today, Mae Jemison may be best known as the first black female astronaut to travel to space, but someday she could be known for something much more monumental. That’s because she is now at the helm of what could well be the most audacious project ever imagined: a Pentagon-funded effort meant to lead within 100 years to a spaceship that will take humans to the stars.
The 100-Year Starship, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), isn’t about building the Starship Enterprise, at least not yet. Rather, it’s about creating a nonprofit organization that can sustain efforts over the next century to enable interstellar travel. The Dorothy Jemison Foundation, headed by Mae Jemison, was selected earlier this year to lead the 100-Year Starship.
This week the foundation announced its plans for shooting for the stars. First on the agenda is a gathering of scientists and the public in Houston, Texas, to discuss ways to advance interstellar travel.
Jemison spoke exclusively with BBC Future to talk about how she plans to lead humanity on an interstellar journey.
Q: You have signed up for an ambitious project. Are you sure that in 100 years, we’ll be ready to launch a starship?
Let me put it this way: It should happen within the 100 years. But if we can figure out how to do it faster, in 20 to 30 years, I’m good, because that way I get to go. Why do I think the technology arc is sufficient? If you think about it, HG Wells wrote First Men in the Moon in 1901. Imagine how incredulous, fantastical that idea was in 1901. We didn’t have rockets, we didn’t have the materials, and we weren’t really flying. It was incredible. Less than 100 years later, we were on the moon. I know we will have the technological knowledge if we choose to pursue it.
Q: To get to the stars, you need to push technology forward. What do you think needs to be a priority?

We’re in the process of developing the research issues. The first one is energy. Even if you say, I’ll take a 1,000 years to get there, you still have to figure how to generate enough energy to power a vehicle for [that length of time]. You can’t do that necessarily with solar energy. If you say I want to do it in a human lifetime, then enormous amounts of energy also have to be created.
Q: Your first step towards the stars will happen in Houston this September. Can you tell us what to expect?
What we really want to do with the symposium is provide a place where folks who are deep into [interstellar travel], whether from the social sciences or plasma physics, can have technical discussions, as well as being able to engage the public writ large in advocacy, participation, and in understanding what’s going on.
Q: What comes after that?
The symposium is a very strong declaration of, “we’re here.” At the same time, we have been actually working on the overall program. What we see with the 100-Year Starship is that it’s really a multidimensional organization. By that I mean, it’s an organization that has at its core a nonprofit foundation. That nonprofit foundation is there to make sure we maintain its purpose. We have the capacity to spinoff for-profit organizations as well: companies, ventures, and partnerships based on things that come around opportunistically.
Part of the nonprofit organization is also a research institute called the The Way, aptly named because it’s going to have us figure out the way to get to the stars. It not something that assumes we’re going to do all the work. It’s an institute to push the technologies, and advocate for radical leaps forward in technology.
We are not saying our organization, is going to be the one that necessarily launches a mission to the stars in a next 100 years. We want to be the little piece that crystalizes out, the effort, the energy, and the capacity to make sure that the capabilities exist within in the next 100 years in case somebody wants to launch a mission.
Q: So, do you think it’ll a public or private organization that actually launches a starship in the next 100 years?
If we start with an assumption right now that that it has to be public, or it has to be private, we may miss something along the way. Our approach right now is to come with a clean slate and say: what are some of the issues that need to be addressed in order to make that happen? And what are some of the benefits that occur if we go to interstellar space?
Some of the ideas that came out from this blank slate include how would economies change? How do you develop an economy that is not directly connected back with the United States? We have the example of people talking about asteroid mining, and bringing it back to Earth. What’s the benefit of not bringing it back to Earth? What does that economy look like? This is re-envisioning fundamental things.
Q: Part of the role the foundation will be fundraising for space travel. What will be your message to organizations or people you’re trying to raise money from.
Our proposal was titled: “An Inclusive Audacious Journey Transforms Life Here on Earth & Beyond.” That title goes to the very heart of what we’re doing. The first term is inclusive.  I think we all know that we would have a lunar base right now, 40 years after Apollo 11, if there had been a public commitment. The fact we don’t have a lunar base has nothing to do with the technology. It has to do with public commitment and societal support.
Why did we have this gung ho spirit for a while, but we were not able to sustain it? I think it’s because many people did not see themselves as beneficiaries of it. That doesn’t mean you get money directly from it. It means, could you participate, could your children participate? Not necessarily being on the vehicle, but how does it impact your world? How does it impact your imagination, your aspiration? We want to look at inclusion, not only in terms of who builds the vehicle, or who does the research, but also the gender, ethnicity, and cultural pieces. We also want to look across disciplines. Something like this requires inclusion of the behavioral sciences, economics, art, and entertainment.
Q: You mention there wasn’t support for a lunar base. How will you ensure there’s support for something as ambitious as a 100-Year Starship?
We’re inviting the public to take part. The public didn’t leave space, they were left out. Nasa and many space organizations tried to do things, such as with teachers and education, but it didn’t feel like it was a public program.
I think that people need an adrenalin rush. Folks need something aspirational, they need to do something that is hard. That’s what ignites the imagination.  I grew up during the Apollo-era, in the 1960s. When I was a little girl: I thought when I had an opportunity to go into space, I thought I would at a minimum be working on Mars, or another large planet because we were doing all of these incredible things. But we stagnated, because we didn’t continue that push. We started to get a little bit timid. Timidity does not inspire bold acts.

Interstellar by 2112!

From: http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/mae-jemison-and-team-establish-100-year-starship-with-goal-to-make-interstellar-space-travel-reality-by-2112/

Mae Jemison and Team Establish 100 Year Starship With Goal to Make Interstellar Space Travel Reality by 2112

by admin

HOUSTON, TX, May 17 2012 — The Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence has been selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to receive seed funding to form 100 Year Starship(TM) (100YSS(TM)), an independent, non-governmental, long-term initiative which will ensure that the capabilities for human interstellar flight exist as soon as possible, and definitely within the next 100 years. The winning 100YSS proposal “An Inclusive, Audacious Journey Transforms Life Here on Earth and Beyond,” was created by Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence with team members Icarus Interstellar and the Foundation for Enterprise Development.
Former NASA astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison will lead the global multi-partner organization. Dr. Jemison, the world’s first woman of color to travel in space (1992’s Space Shuttle Endeavour), brings to her leadership role her vast experience as an engineer, physician, professor, former Peace Corps medical officer, and entrepreneur. Known for achieving the improbable, Dr. Jemison also brings a spirit of audacity, innovation and inclusion to 100YSS.
“Yes, it can be done. Our current technology arc is sufficient,” says Dr. Jemison. “100 Year Starship is about building the tools we need to travel to another star system in the next hundred years. We’re embarking on a journey across time and space. If my language is dramatic, it is because this project is monumental. This is a global aspiration. And each step of the way, its progress will benefit life on earth. Our team is both invigorated and sobered by the confidence DARPA has in us to start an independent, private initiative to help make interstellar travel a reality.”
100 Year Starship will bring in experts from myriad fields to help achieve its goal – utilizing not only scientists, engineers, doctors, technologists, researchers, sociologists and computer experts, but also architects, writers, artists, entertainers, and leaders in government, business, economics, ethics and public policy. 100YSS will also collaborate with existing space exploration and advocacy efforts from both private enterprise and the government.
In its first year, 100YSS will seek investors, establish membership opportunities, encourage public participation in research projects, and develop the visions for interstellar exploration. A 100 Year Starship Public Symposium will be held in Houston September 13-16, 2012, inaugurating what will be an annual event open to scientific papers, engineering challenges, philosophical and socio-cultural considerations, economic incentives, application of space technologies to improve life on earth, imaginative exploration of the stumbling blocks and opportunities to the stars, and broad public involvement.
The 100 Year Starship also will include a scientific research institute, The Way whose major emphasis will be speculative, long-term science and technology.
Alongside the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, a non-profit organization that promotes science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) awareness and achievement, the principal 100 Year Starship team members are: Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit research and development organization dedicated to the research that will enable interstellar flight; and the Foundation for Enterprise Development centered on governance, innovation, entrepreneurship, technology and R&D based organizational planning, management, and strategic planning. The SETI Institute, a private, non-profit organization dedicated to astronomy, life sciences, education, and public outreach, will hold a permanent seat on the 100YSS Advisory Council.
To sign up for e-mail alerts from 100 Year Starship or learn more about the 100YSS Public Symposium visit www.100YSS.org. Follow 100 Year Starship on Twitter (@100YSS). Contact 100 Year Starship at info@100YSS.org.

The Daedalus Starship. Designed by members of the British Interplanetary Society
in the 1970s – an inspiration for researchers of today. Image courtesy Adrian Mann.

Rocky Exoplanet Discovered!

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2041683,00.html
a huge step closer. Called Kepler-10b, it's just 40% larger than Earth — the smallest planet yet found outside our solar system. Not only that: unlike the vast majority of the 500-odd exoplanets found to date, and unlike Jupiter and Neptune, Kepler-10b isn't just a huge ball of gas or ice. Like Earth, it's made of rock. "This is a historic discovery," said Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley,

Astronomers Get First Peek at Atmosphere of a "Super-Earth" Exoplanet

From: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gj-1214-transit&print=true

New constraints on a relatively small extrasolar world are beginning to reveal what the planet is made of--and whether it looks anything like our own

By John Matson  | Wednesday, December 1, 2010 | 19

FILTERED: With telescopes on Earth, astronomers can detect starlight trickling through the atmosphere of distant planets such as GJ 1214 b, depicted here in an artist's conception.

Image: Paul A. Kempton

ADVERTISEMENT

Someday in the coming years, if astronomers finally succeed in locating a virtual Earth twin outside the solar system—a tiny dot of a world at a temperate, life-enabling distance from a sunlike star—the achievement will hardly be cause for resting on observational laurels. Instead another race will begin: to characterize the planet and its atmosphere and to determine if the world is truly habitable or, tantalizingly, if it is already inhabited by some extraterrestrial life-form....

From: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=exoplanet-catalogue&sc=emailfriend

In the past several days a number of news articles have touted the passage of a tidy astronomical milestone—the discovery of the 500th known planet outside the solar system. In the past 15 years, the count of those extrasolar worlds, or exoplanets, has climbed through single digits into the dozens and then into the hundreds. The pace of discovery is now so rapid that the catalogue of identified planets leaped from 400 to 500 entries in just over a year....Jean Schneider, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, has since 1995 maintained The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia, a modest-looking Web site that charts a wealth of data on known exoplanets as well as those that are unconfirmed or controversial.

Scientists Discover Two Multiple-Planet Solar Systems

From: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100827/hl_time/08599201402400


By MICHAEL D. LEMOMICK – Fri Aug 27, 6:25 pm ET
In the old days - which is to say, the 1990s - discovering a new planet orbiting a distant star was enough to keep an astronomer in the news for days, and maybe even lead to a cover story in TIME. Nowadays, with the extrasolar planet count well into the 400s, even finding an entire alien solar system, while not exactly routine, is not unheard of.
This week, in fact, it's been heard of twice. On Tuesday, a team of stargazers using the European Southern Observatory in the high Chilean desert announced they'd detected a system of at least five, and maybe as many as seven, planets circling a star known as HD 10180, about 127 light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Hydrus. And just two days later, a paper appeared in Science trumpeting the discovery of a multiplanetary system circling a star called Kepler-9, 2,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. The latter solar system has only two or three worlds - but the space telescope that found it is so powerful that this discovery is just a hint of the other worlds and other solar systems it may discover in the next few months. (See pictures of five nations' space programs.)
Both detections are scientific tours de force in different ways. In the first, scientists found the planets indirectly, by noting how HD 10180 is being tugged back and forth by a swarm of circling planets. That's how the first extrasolar planets were found in the mid-1990s, but the effect is so subtle that doing a clear analysis of the mass and orbit of even a single planet is tough. Untangling multiple, independent, overlapping sets of wobbles is excruciatingly hard. (See the top 50 space moments since Sputnik.)
In this case, the untangling showed five worlds between 13 and 25 times as massive as Earth, which puts them in the general range of our own Neptune. Unlike our relatively uncluttered system, though, the five Neptunes are crammed into what we'd call the inner solar system: the most distant of the planets orbits at about the distance of Mars, with a year that lasts about 600 days. The closest is snuggled far closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun, with a year of only six days - and there are three Neptunes in between.
That's not all: the new system may also contain a Saturn-like world orbiting much farther out - and, most tantalizingly, a planet just 1.4 times larger than Earth, orbiting even closer to its star than the innermost Neptune. If it's confirmed, this will be the smallest extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, ever found and thus, the closest yet to the ultimate goal of discovering something exactly Earthlike - in size, anyway. Temperature would be a different matter since a planet that close to a star would sizzle in the thousands of degrees.
As for the Kepler-9 system, it was found by NASA's Earth-orbiting Kepler spacecraft, which looks not for wobbles but for the silhouette of distant planets as they transit or pass in front of their stars. Kepler scientists have announced only five new worlds since the probe was launched early in 2009. But this past June, they revealed that they had some 700 more candidates in the can, which will next be subjected to an exhaustive confirmation process.
This system, with two Saturn-size worlds circling their sun inside what would be Mercury's orbit, is the first time a multiple-planet system has been found this way. And as with the European discovery, this system may be home to a still unverified superhot planet, only a little bigger than Earth. (See an illustrated history of planet Earth.)
But these, say the Kepler scientists, aren't the most exciting things about the new find. One big advantage of transiting planets is that you can tell how physically large they are, not just how massive, because the amount of starlight a planet blocks is a direct measure of its size. If you know the size and if you can also figure out the mass, you know the planet's density - a powerful clue to what it's made of. A transiting planet announced last winter by Kepler, for example, has the approximate density of Styrofoam, suggesting that it's made mostly of gas. Another, found by the ground-based MEarth Project (that's not a typo; it looks for planets around stars known as M dwarfs), has the density of water - and might in essence be a gigantic water droplet.
In the latest case, the Kepler scientists were also able to get the planets' masses - but this time, they did it with a brand-new technique. As the Saturns orbit, they tug not only on their star but also on each other. As result, says the Science paper's lead author Matthew Holman, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, their orbits are slowly changing in velocity, and that lets the scientists calculate each planet's mass. (Comment on this story.)
They can't do the same yet for the tiny hot planet in the system, but further observations might nail down that much trickier measurement for this and for the other solar systems Kepler is inevitably going to find. "We've only looked at the first seven months of data," says Bill Borucki, the Kepler mission's principal investigator, and a co-author on the Science paper. "Within the next few years we should be able to give you a lot more information. Within the next few years," he adds, "we will have answers to the questions of how frequently Earth-mass planets occur, and how often they orbit in the habitable zones of their stars." It's in the habitable zone - on Earthlike worlds - that life as we know it is likeliest to be found.

Nasa's Kepler planet-hunter detects five worlds

By Jonathan Amos

Science correspondent, BBC News
From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8440392.stm
Nasa's Kepler Space Telescope has detected its first five exoplanets, or planets beyond our Solar System.


The observatory, which was launched last year to find other Earths, made the discoveries in its first few weeks of science operations.

Although the new worlds are all bigger than our Neptune, the US space agency says the haul shows the telescope is working well and is very sensitive.

The exoplanets have been given the names Kepler 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b and 8b.

They were announced at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington DC.

The planets range in size from an object that has a radius four times that of Earth, to worlds much bigger than even our Jupiter.

And they all circle very close to their parent stars, following orbits that range from about 3.2 to 4.9 days.

This proximity and the fact that the host stars are themselves much hotter than our Sun means Kepler's new exoplanets experience an intense roasting.

Intriguing density

Estimated temperatures go from about 1,200C to 1,650C (2,200F to 3,000F).

"The planets we found are all hotter than molten lava; they all simply glow with their temperatures," said Bill Borucki, Kepler's lead scientist from Nasa's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

"In fact the upper two are hotter than molten iron and looking at them might be like looking at a blast furnace. They are very bright in their own right and certainly no place to look for life."


Kepler 7b will intrigue many scientists. It is one of the lowest-density exoplanets (about 0.17 grams per cubic centimetre) yet discovered.

"The average density of this planet with its core is about the same as Styrofoam," explained Dr Borucki. "So it's an amazingly light planet, something I'm sure theoreticians will be delighted to look at in terms of trying to understand [its] structure."

Kepler blasted into space atop a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on 6 March, 2009.

It is equipped with the largest camera ever launched into space. The telescope's mission is to continuously and simultaneously observe more than 100,000 stars.

It senses the presence of planets by looking for a tiny "shadowing" effect when one of them passes in front of its parent star.

'Water worlds'

Kepler's detectors, built by UK firm e2v, have extraordinary sensitivity.

Nasa says that if the observatory were to look down at a small town on Earth at night from space, it would be able to detect the dimming of a porch light as somebody passed in front of it.

The space agency hopes this sensitivity will lead it to planets that are not only Earth-size but which orbit their stars at distances more favourable to life, where liquid water might potentially reside on their surfaces.


The mission's scientists told the AAS meeting that Kepler had measured hundreds of possible planet signatures but that these needed further investigation to establish their true nature.

To confirm the existence of the most ideal Earth-like planets would take a few years, they warned.

In the meantime, all detections will help scientists improve their statistics on the distributions of planet size and orbital period.

The follow-up observations needed to confirm the new exoplanets' existence used a suite of ground-based facilities including the Keck I telescope in Hawaii.

ALIEN 'WATER WORLD' FOUND

Exerpts From: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/12/16/2152989.aspx
by Alan Boyle

Astronomers say they have detected a planet just six and a half times as massive as Earth - at a distance so close its atmosphere could be studied, and with a density so low it's almost certain to have abundant water.

The alien world known as GJ 1214b orbits a red dwarf star one-fifth the size of our own sun, 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, the astronomers reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"Astronomically speaking, this is on our block," David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, lead author of the study, told reporters this week. "This is a next-door neighbor. For perspective, our own TV signals have already passed beyond the distance of this star."

He said the planet was detected using an array of eight off-the-shelf, 16-inch telescopes equipped with commercially available cameras.

"Since we found the super-Earth using a small ground-based telescope, this means that anyone else with a similar telescope and a good CCD camera can detect it too," Charbonneau said in a news release. "Students around the world can now study this super-Earth."

Super-Earths - planets that are roughly two to 10 times Earth's mass - represent the hottest frontier in the years-long search for worlds beyond our solar system. Planet-hunters reported finding their first transiting super-Earth in February, and earlier this week, other researchers addedtwo more super-Earths to the list.

Those planets orbit stars like our own sun, but the brightness of GJ 1214b's parent star is hundreds of times dimmer. The planet is also much closer to the star than any of our own solar system's planets, orbiting at a distance of only 1.3 million miles (2 million kilometers). That combination suggests that the planet's surface temperature would be about 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius), Charbonneau's research team reported.

Charbonneau speculated that GJ 1214b was a little too hot for life as we know it, "but it didn't miss it by very much."

The planet's discovery was hailed as a potential breakthrough by Geoffrey Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley who is a pioneer in the planet quest. In a commentary written for Nature, Marcy said Charbonneau and his colleagues "provide the most watertight evidence so far for a planet that is something like our own Earth, outside our solar system."

How it was found
GJ 1214b was detected thanks to an innovative telescope system, a cleverly focused observation campaign - and perhaps a little bit of luck. The eight-telescope array, dubbed the MEarth Project, was set up at the Whipple Observatory on Mount Hopkins in Arizona. The telescopes were programmed to gaze at 2,000 low-mass stars and check for slight, regular dips in light that could be caused by a dark planet's transit across the star's disk.

Relatively dim, relatively close stars were favored because the planet's dimming effect would be more noticeable than it would be with brighter, bigger, farther-out stars.

Just a few months after the MEarth Project began, graduate student Zachory Berta spotted the signature of GJ 1214b's 38-hour orbit. Based on the pattern of the dimming, the team figured out that the planet was 2.7 times as wide as Earth.

The astronomers then turned to another instrument, the HARPS spectrometer on the European Southern Observatory's La Silla telescope in Chile, to figure out the planet's mass. Such mass calculations depend on another technique that checks for the slight wobble in a star's motion caused by a planet's gravitational pull. The HARPS observations indicated that the planet was 6.55 times as massive as Earth.

Putting those measurements together, the team was able to model the planet's density and composition. The best fit for the data was a mixture consisting of about three-quarters water and other ices, one-quarter rock and a gaseous atmosphere.

Implications of a water world
Although the surface temperature on GJ 1214b would be well above water's boiling point on Earth's surface, Charbonneau said the planet could nonetheless possess an exotic form of liquid water due to extreme atmospheric pressure at the surface. In today's news release, Berta said the pressure may turn at least some of the water into a rare crystalline form known as ice-seven.

"Despite its hot temperature, this appears to be a water world," Berta said.

On Earth, organisms have been found living near deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where superheated water is held under high pressure. But Charbonneau said he wouldn't want to bet that life could endure under GJ 1214b's crushing conditions.

In fact, it's too early to bet heavily on any detailed description of GJ 1214b. Fortunately, Charbonneau said, the star is close enough that the Hubble Space Telescope could someday analyze the composition of the planet's atmosphere. "That will make it the first super-Earth with a confirmed atmosphere - even though that atmosphere probably won't be hospitable to life as we know it," he said.

Knowing what the atmosphere is made of, and how thick it is, could help astronomers determine whether their characterization of GJ 1214b as a water world is correct. "It's possible that what you have is a ball of rock with a much bigger envelope of light gas," Charbonneau said.

The larger implication of the Nature study is that other super-Earths may be waiting out there with just the right conditions for life. "We found this planet in the first six months," Charbonneau noted. "We had only looked at a small fraction of the stars that we planned to look at through the entire project. That means that either we got really lucky - which is possible - or these planets are common."

Two planet-hunting spacecraft, NASA's Kepler and the European Space Agency's COROT, are expected to find hundreds of super-Earths and Earth-sized planets in the years to come. The first scientific results from the Kepler mission are due to be reported next month in Washington at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society.