A privately funded telescope called Toliman will seek habitable worlds in our nearest neighboring star system, potentially sparking a new wave of exoplanetary exploration Do any habitable worlds exist ...

BoldlyGo Institute and a consortium of prominent organizations including The SETI Institute, UMass Lowell, and Mission Centaur launched a crowdfunding campaign to support first phase of mission ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Lasers could be used to ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Mankind hasn’t yet explored some of the most interesting objects in our own solar system — heck, we still don’t even know all that ...

This paper discusses the physics, engineering and mission architecture relating to a gram-sized interstellar probe propelled by a laser beam. The objectives are to design a fly-by mission to Alpha ...

Researchers at the University of Sydney have worked with Breakthrough Initiatives, Saber Astronautics, and NASA's JPL to propose a mission to discover planets that are potentially habitable orbiting ...

Alpha Centauri is our closest stellar neighbor, a binary star system located just 4.376 light-years away. Despite its proximity, repeated astronomical surveys have failed to find hard evidence of ...

Laser pushed sails—ultrathin need reflective structures that are square meters but weight a gram. If the sails and the payload each weigh a gram, such a spacecraft could accelerate to one fifth of the ...