From: Larry Klaes (lklaes@bbn.com)
Date: Mon Nov 15 1999 - 11:12:54 MST
http://www.latimes.com:80/news/timesmag/19991114/t000103510.html
>From Rocketeers to Solar Sailors
At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Scientists Are Building Robots to
Explore the Solar System -- and Even Making Plans to Sail to the Stars
To quote in part:
"On a sweltering summer day this year, a small team of scientists attempts
the unimaginable: Working among the 150 structures on JPL's 156-acre home
in La Canada-Flintridge, they are dreaming of a voyage to the nearest star,
Alpha Centauri, a journey that would take the most advanced existing
spacecraft
tens of thousands of years. The JPL team hopes to design a vehicle to fly at
one-tenth the speed of light, cutting travel time to less than 40 years. If
such a journey seems unfathomable, consider this: These scientists and
engineers
are devoting their careers to a mission that won't fly until long after they
are dead.
It's like the 15th century explorers who set out for the Americas, for
Africa,
says Dr. Charles Elachi, the ebullient but low-key Lebanese-born scientist
who
heads JPL's Space and Earth Science Programs. They didn't know, step by step,
how they would explore new continents, he says, but they had the confidence
that they would figure out ways to overcome the hurdles.
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