Upcoming Guests: JUMBOs, Spaceflight, and Ion Engines
Thanks to everyone who jumped in last week and asked questions for my guest interviews last week. It worked out really well, so let's keep going. Here are the three guests that I have scheduled for the upcoming week. Go ahead and put any questions you might have for the guests into the comments down below. I'll gather them up and try to include as many as I can during the interview.
How do we get rogue planets?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09159
Jessica Diamond - University of Sheffield
We've all been fascinated about these Jupiter-mass objects discovered by Hubble and Webb. Almost 20% of them are in binary pairs. So how do they form? Jessica and her team have proposed that JUMBOs are what you get after radiative stars blast away their mass.
What's happening with human spaceflight?
https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/
Eric Berger - Ars Technica
Eric is probably the best space exploration journalist working in the field right now and just wrote a new book. I'm going to be asking him all about the current state of human spaceflight, considering all the nations and players, from the US to China, from SpaceX to NASA.
Getting to the solar gravitational lens with advanced electric propulsion systems
Dan Fries - University of Texas, Austin
We've seen a few spacecraft with ion engines, like Dawn. Now it's time to scale them up, with fast missions to the outer Solar System, like Jupiter, Pluto and even the Solar Gravitational Lens.
Comments (6)
@Eric Berger: Since the SpaceX success story seems to be hard to duplicate, do you see the future of rocketry in multiple competing companies and states, or are we steering towards a monopoly?
@Dan Fries: Once a spacecraft has arrived at the solar gravitational lens focal point, would it be practical to move it along the 550AU radius circle, using electric propulsion, to observe different targets?
@Jessica Diamond: Can your explanation be adapted for the formation of non-binary rogues? If not, what is the leading theory for singlet rogues?
For Eric - 1.) Cyclers seem like one of the most reasonable options for human interplanetary travel both from the standpoint of transit time (5 months one way vs 9 months) and from the standpoint of size/shielding so you don’t have to have a heavy ship expend large amounts of delta-V every trip and can instead have a smaller/lighter transfer craft ferry you to the cycler once you make the one-time investment to get it established. Are there any groups who are seriously looking at a Mars Cycler in a practical way, or is almost everything still theoretical? 2.) Are any reasonably funded groups pursuing a space station with spin gravity in a practical way? Or is most of that work still conceptual?
Jessica - What are the estimated ages for the JUMBOs and rogue planets we've actually found, and are we getting enough info about them to trace which molecular cloud/cluster they've come from (for those which are not still embedded in their origin)? If so, what new info about the origin nebulae has JUMBO/rogues revealed? Eric - as a high-profile space journalist, what trends are you seeing with regard to the quality and focus of space journalism? i.e. trends in factuality, optimism/pessimism about specific projects or space corporations, etc.? I'm curious as to the extent to which space journalism has dodged (or been harmed by) the overall recent movement away from quality journalism in general. Dan - I'm assuming you have some mission parameters for a gravitational lens mission in mind... What mass would a gravitational lens mission need, including its propellant, engine/chassis/ power source and scientific payload, and how much initial velocity could be provided by a "disposable super heavy/Jupiter flyby" profile? Also, for target selection, how problematic is it getting to position for the lens for targets far from the ecliptic? (I'm thinking a Jupiter flyby/assist would be a must-have for such sharp changes in direction)
Jessica, can rogue planets be suitable for life if there’s no tidal heating from an exomoon or a binary planet?