More planet-hunting news! The ‘Centauri Dreams’ blog examines the content of a soon-to-be-published paper that claims the odds for habitable planets in the Centauri star system are much better than thought before. This is thanks to evidence that the dwarf third star in the system may be ideally placed to lob comets and other organic volatiles right into the habitable planetary orbits. This is good news, but don’t go laying down money for land deals just yet.

The Cassini probe keeps on spewing out great data about Saturn and its local neighbourhood and sending it back to us earthbound dreamers, and long may it continue. Recent investigations of Saturn’s best-known features seem to indicate that the ‘E-ring’ is largely composed of material from the recently-observed outgassings of icy moon Enceladus, among other things.

I predict a busy few months for space announcements, and here’s the first to take advantage of the shuttle’s media buzz: Blue Origin, a company that receives big dollar from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has submitted a draft environmental assessment paper for their proposed ‘New Shepard’ suborbital vehicle program to the FAA. The contents of the document give a lot of details of their future plans away – another serious contender has stepped into the commercial space arena.

The search for ‘exosolar’ planets, Earth-like bodies in other star systems, is starting to pick up pace. A large part of the problem at the moment is the light from the parent stars of potential planets making them hard to spot. A daisy-shaped star-shade, designed by a team at the University of Colorado, may make it possible to screen out the starlight and allow detailed analysis of planetary features, such as atmospheric content and surface topography, via spectrographic methods.

It’s been a good year for 3D display technologies so far; here’s a demo video (embedded) of a ‘multi-digit 3D volumetric display‘ from some Toronto students. Looks a bit rough and ready so far, but hey, it’s a proof-of-concept, right?