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Episode 124: Exploring the Stellar Neighbourhood. The Toliman Space Telescope

By Gurbir Dated: June 25, 2025 Leave a Comment

Toliman Space Telescope. Credit Toliman.Space

Just as the Moon was the first stepping stone for our interplanetary exploration, our nearest star, the Alpha Centauri System, will inevitably become our stepping stone for our Interstellar Journey. That is in the distance. A new mission, The Toliman Space Telescope, is launching soon will target the Alpha-Centauri System from Earth orbit.

In summary

The Toliman mission is a fairly innovative space mission primarily designed to survey our stellar neighbourhood for Earth-equivalent planets. Its main research target is to point its telescope towards the Alpha Centauri system to search for planets, specifically hoping to find Earth-sized equivalents in the habitable zone around the two main stars, Alpha Centauri A and B.

Toliman is unique for several reasons. The 12 cm diameter telescope is the only scientific instrument built on a low-budget 16U CubeSat, using off-the-shelf components as much as possible and employing commercial ground stations.

It will use three unique innovations to attain high-precision measurements 1. a Diffractive Pupil Optical Mask 2. High-Precision Tip-Tilt System with fine-steering or fine-pointing the telescope to achieve the required 1-2 arcsecond pointing accuracy and reduce jitter. A novel AI-powered software, called dLux, running on a custom computer onboard the satellite, will preprocess data before it is downlinked.

It has multiple countries involved in development and partnership including the University of Sydney (Australia), Breakthrough Initiatives, University of Leiden (Netherlands), Carling Japan (Japan), SETI Institute (California, USA), Spar Blue (Australia), Leaf Space (Italy – ground stations), Durosad (Bulgaria and France – space bus), AOS (Connecticut, USA – telescope), Lights Optical (UK – secondary mirror), and a team member in New Zealand. Cooperation is also starting with JPL (USA).

During the Breakthrough Discuss conference in April in Oxford, I learnt a little about the Toliman Space Telescope.

Episode 123: Soaring over the surface of Titan: NASA’s Dragonfly Mission

By Gurbir Dated: May 29, 2025 Leave a Comment

Dr Elizabeth Turtle and a scale model of Dragonfly. Credit: NASA

It is December 2034. A spacecraft launched from Earth in July 2028, enters Titan’s atmosphere at 5km/s. Around 2 hours later, it softly lands on the surface at less than 1m /s. Over the next three years, NASA’s Dragonfly mission, a rotorcraft the size of a small car, will chemically analyse the Titan’s atmosphere, ground and a little of its subsurface.

In this interview recorded on 24th April 2025 in Oxford during Breakthrough Discuss, Dr Elizabeth Turtle, Principal Investigator, on the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s largest mission – Titan.

Some of the topics Dr Turtle covers include

Dragonfly’s scientific objectives to explore complex organic chemistry and understand the steps that occurred before biology took hold on Earth, helping us learn about our own chemical origins.
Dragonfly isn’t just landing; it’s designed to fly from place to place. Over its nominal mission lifetime of a little over three years, it expects to visit 30-40 different landing sites.
Flying on Titan is actually easier than flying on Earth because its atmosphere is four times denser and its gravity is only one-seventh of Earth’s.
An overview of the Dragonfly – large rotorcraft, technically an X8 octacopter, roughly the size of a small car or the large Mars rovers like Curiosity and Perseverance.
Dragonfly is powered by an MMRTG, a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator, which provides both the electricity and the crucial heat needed to keep the lander’s interior warm in Titan’s frigid environment.

With a launch set for July 2028 and arrival at Titan in December 2034, Dragonfly promises to reveal the detailed chemistry of this unique world. Launch dates are always susceptible to change. The Cassini-Huygens mission that arrived at Saturn/Titan in 2004 was launched in 1997. Saturn orbits the sun every 30 years. If Dragonfly misses the July 2028 launch window, there may be another thirty-year wait!

Episode 122. Are we alone and the Breakthrough Initiatives

By Gurbir Dated: April 29, 2025 Leave a Comment

For almost 70 years, astronomers have been listening to radio signals from beyond the Solar System, searching for “techno-signatures.” Data collected has increased many folds. Innovative technologies of digital signal processing and artificial intelligence analyse the data in ways never done before. Still, no clear, unambiguous techno or biosignatures have been detected.

You may have heard the announcement about an exoplanet (K2-18b) capable of supporting life, 124 light-years away. The data appears promising, but it is far from definitive.

A two-day Breakthrough Discuss conference held on 23rd and 24th April 2025 in Oxford England, took stock of the latest developments through three main sessions: “Forms of Non-Terrestrial Life”, “The Nature of Consciousness and Intelligence”, and “Detecting Life As We Do Not Know It”.

Breakthough Discuss was overseen by the Chairman of the Breakthrough Foundation, in this interview Dr Pete Worden. A former Brigadier. General, astrophysicist, professor and director of NASA Ames Research Centre talks about

– How and when he became involved with the Breakthrough Initiatives and current status of each
– His reflections on this year’s Breakthrough Discuss
– His interest in astronomy as a child
– What happened to his astronaut application to NASA
– His distant familial connection with his namesake – Al Worden Apollo 15 Command Module Pilot
– His assessment on where we are with the the search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence

Recordings of Breakthrough Discuss presentations are available on the YouTube channel

Episode 121 – Failed stars or successful planets?

By Gurbir Dated: April 17, 2025 Leave a Comment

This episode was recorded at the Mount Teide Observatory with Jerry Zhang, a final year PhD student under the supervision of Professor Eduardo L Martín and Dr Nicolas Lodieu at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. This class of object had been predicted for a long time but was first detected in 1995 from an observation conducted at the Mount Teide Observatory by a team of observers, including Jerry’s supervisor, Eduardo L Martín.

Jerry’s research focuses on Brown Dwarfs. Astronomical objects are somewhere in between stars and planets. Typically, their size is that of Jupiter, around 150,000km and a mass of between 15 and 70 times that of Jupiter. With such low mass (less than 0.08 of our sun), they can never reach the temperature or pressure in their cores necessary for nuclear fusion. They can never shine like our sun. They remain dim and small (brown and dwarf) throughout their lifetime.

Jerry’s most recent publication, arising from his Phd research, records the first detection of methane in an extreme metal-poor T dwarf.