Over this past summer, I was in the pursuit of my Master’s thesis subject. I’ve always been interested in space exploration and settlement, and my graduate advisor, Haym Benaroya, informed me of Project Icarus. This definitely gained my interest, and he subsequently sent me the final report on Project Daedulus. After reading through the Project [...]

Greetings from the Project Icarus Team at the Rutgers University School of Engineering. We are a team of twelve students participating in Project Icarus for our senior design project under the guidance of our adviser, Professor Haym Benaroya. This is a new, exciting venture for us that has already put all of the knowledge that [...]

This guest blog is a contribution from Glenn Thornton. Glenn is recently retired from a career at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He worked on underground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site for four years and then joined the Lab’s satellite design group. He made important contributions to several satellite projects, some NASA funded projects [...]

This article was authored by Harold “Sonny” White and Catherine Ragin Williams Sure and is a submission of the Exotic Research Group of Icarus Interstellar. Sure, the Red Planet or an asteroid are enticing destinations, but what if one day we wanted to go really, really far out? With the technology we have today, it’s [...]

As recent articles [1-7] further suggest, matter/antimatter (MAM)-based propulsion systems may be viable options for both intrasolar system and interstellar travel. Several critical design and engineering issues, especially with regard to the interstellar case, have been raised in these articles and will likely take a long time to resolve. As the articles have discussed, MAM [...]

**Article originally written for Discovery Space News by Richard Obousy** While interstellar mission have been explored in the literature, one mission architecture has not received much attention, namely the interstellar rendezvous and return mission that could be accomplished on timescales comparable with a working scientist’s career. Such a mission would involve an initial boost phase [...]

Abstract Due to the ability of antiprotons to annihilate with ordinary matter with 100% efficiency, antiprotons serve as an exceptionally high-energy density storage mechanism. Upon annihilation, sufficient energy can be generated to trigger fusion reactions. In this paper we study a variety of ways that antiprotons can be utilized as drivers for fusion ignition. In [...]

Tiffany Frierson is a Project Icarus student designer. She is a senior physics major currently at North Georgia College. She plans to go on to a PhD in Theoretical Physics, and study Breakthrough Propulsion Physics, especially the more exotic methods including wormholes and warp drives. With a life-long interest in space travel, her activities have [...]

As part of the Project Icarus Terms of Reference, essentially our engineering requirements, the team is required to demonstrate some form of deceleration for the Icarus probe. The exact text stipulates “The spacecraft mission must be designed so as to allow some deceleration for increased encounter time at the destination”; note the phrase ‘some deceleration’. [...]