* * * This page has been ruined by Geocities adverts : you can see a "clean" bio of Abdul Ahad on the www.astroscience.org website * * *
Abdul Ahad is a remarkable person having accomplished a great deal considering his humble beginnings in our home country of Bangladesh and, at the time of writing, he's only just turned 36 years of age. He has come a long way from his childhood in the village paddy fields near Balagonj, Sylhet... to sending the spirit of the human race all the way to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star in space beyond our own Solar System. Surely the greatest leap that any person can ever hope to make in his whole lifetime.
Abdul Ahad was born in the Sylhet district of Bangladesh on 15 December 1968. He subsequently emigrated to the UK accompanying his mother and two sisters to join his father (late Haji Abdur Rahman) and has been a resident citizen here ever since August 1978. Ahad got his secondary school education in the United Kingdom and he graduated from the University of Luton in 1994 with only a Higher National Diploma in Business & Finance - not even a degree, and not even in maths or science. He has since held a number of executive and management posts in industry, developing a wide business career within multi-national companies.
His interest in stars, planets and space took off in the early 1980s when he was just twelve. At that time he was attending Beech Hill high school in Luton, having picked up a reasonable command of the English language over the past couple of years since first emigrating to the UK. With such an 'average' background up to now, one is left thinking: what is it that sparks the interests of a twelve year old boy to start dreaming about the wonders of our universe and start up on a life long quest toward such far removed from every day life, unearthly, celestial pursuits? Well for him, he recalls, it was a space painting by artist David Hardy which he spotted in a library book at Beech Hill high school, showing a cave on the planet Pluto. That famous painting was an artist's impression of the frozen landscape of Pluto, the outermost planet in our Solar System, showing our distant Sun looking like a bright star hanging like a lantern in the entrance of an alien cave. Whatever 'magic' he saw in that picture, that was the moment of first ignition of his flourishing inspiration in astronomy and space exploration.
In addition to his high IQ, Abdul Ahad is gifted with a strong sense of imagination, dreaming and wonder about our origins, about our place in the universe and our ultimate destiny as a species. It's interesting that he "cares" so much about the future well being of not just us, but our children... our grand children... our great great great grand children too!
In his epic sci-fi novel and would-be feature film "First Ark to Alpha Centauri" (published online in 2004), he envisioned the world's first life-like human colony starship and spaceflight concept for sending a community of 900 people from our planet to the nearest stars in the year 2275 AD. In his own words: "An epic fantasy voyage carrying the hopes and dreams of everyone who ever was, everyone who ever is and everyone who ever will be... on a journey spanning 2,000 generations and lasting no less than 50,000 years into the future..." He single handedly designed that entire ship architecture, simulating its gravity, weather and life support. He thought through the countless multi-generation mission obstacles and devised the best solutions through his own imaginative thought and research efforts. Abdul Ahad was the first person to envision a hypothetical mode of safe and secure interstellar propulsion for reaching our nearest neighbouring solar system of Alpha Centauri by utilising the resources of Oort cloud bodies for rocket fuel and life support ingredients. His concept ("Ahad's virtual bridge to Alpha Centauri") hypothesis, in his famous words: "... utilising a series of interim miniature worlds to bridge the gulf separating two larger worlds in neighbouring star systems." was the world's first scientific blueprint for human star travel. The nearest comparison to Ahad's version of interstellar propulsion concept hitherto was the Bussard Ramjet, which relied upon scooping up molecular hydrogen found sparsely floating around en-route within the interstellar medium.
Ahad inspired thousands from around the world with his sheer enthusiasm and zest for Astronomy and the Space Sciences via his "AA Institute of Space Science & Technology" website. He built surface models of Mars - the Red Planet - in his own back yard and simulated Mars exploration
using micro-rovers controlled using real life radio telemetry links from his own bedroom! He researched plant growth suitability on alien worlds under partially artificial, space simulated growing conditions. He sent the names of his entire family across 300 million miles of interplanetary space to Mars in a NASA DVD carried onboard one of the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers. He successfully executed his own "Rocketry & Aerospace Program", launching electronic payloads on sub-orbital flights, using miniature de-militarised US Army and US Navy missiles! He travelled to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to satisfy his own curiosities about America's epic Moon landings in the late 1960s and 70s when he was too young to remember even the very last mission of Apollo 17 in December 1972. Whilst he was on that vacation he examined first hand the space center, the Saturn 5 rocket, the VAB, the launch pads, the overall engineering requirements for human Moon missions and later weighed up all the facts using his own rocketry knowledge to dispel "conspiracy theories" about Moon landing hoaxes once and for all raging across his peer groups.
In 2004, when US president George W. Bush announced his new space vision for America for sending humans to the Moon and then onto Mars (the so-called "Moon to Mars" initiative), Abdul Ahad produced an article that offered a compelling alternative: the "Asteroid to the Moon to the Planets to the Stars" initiative! In that article, Abdul Ahad was the first to conceptualise the mechanics for in-situ excavation using robotic rovers, subsequent capture and interior habitation of an asteroid - the "Celestial Titanic" - which would initially serve as a permanent Earth-orbiting colony that could subsequently be also used as a propelled platform for long term solar system-wide, and even interstellar, exploration. He pointed to JPL "Robotic Work Crews" as the means for excavation and used the 4-km diameter main belt asteroid #887 Alinda as an illustration for capture mechanics. His famous words: "The destiny of our species rests on the simple toss of a coin..." was referring to the sheer uncertainties that we as a planet face at this time when deciding whether to capture an asteroid or build a base on the Moon or start a program to settle on the Red Planet as the next big bold step for human spaceflight.
Abdul Ahad was also the first person to point out and demonstrate analytically that a particulate ring system around planet Earth could not possibly remain stable in the complex Earth-Moon-Sun gravity interactive environment - quashing previous world opinions to the contrary. Many experts had hitherto believed that past climatic effects on the Earth were due to a thin ring system existing around our planet for hundreds of thousands of years. Ahad's dynamical calculations showed that those ideas were flawed and his paper will change the future course of orbital engineering programs and the way in which near Earth spaceflight is conducted, for ever.
Abdul Ahad's website and scientific works has attracted visitors from the highest ranking academic and science institutes from around the globe. Here's just a handful of big names:
National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA)
Ahad's astronomical achievements are equally as notable as those of his spaceflight research mentioned above.
When he was just 15, at the dawn of the present era of home computers, he compiled and wrote his own planetary positions algorithms
valid for over 300 years, with which he then predicted the approximate geometric circumstances and times of contact for the 2004 Transit of Venus. Amongst his amateur astronomy activities, he drew up a catalogue of the reddest stars in the night sky and made astrometric measurements of visual binary stars.
In 2004, Abdul Ahad became the first person in scientific history to define an analytical approximation of the cosmic night sky's total integrated flux ("Ahad's constant of universal flux" or "Ahad's constant" of circa 1/300th of a Full Moon equivalent). Here's what this means: imagine of you could simply "switch off" the Sun at this very moment in time, as if it were just an ordinary light bulb! What would you then see in the day time sky? It will be filled with stars just like at night time when the Sun has gone down over the horizon, right? Now imagine if you added up the small amounts of light from every single star in the whole universe visible across the entire sky, one by one...and rolled it up into a one number "constant" using mathematical formulae. How much star light would there be in this total figure? Answer: approximately -6.5 magnitudes or 1/300th of a Full Moon (those are astronomical definitions that one can look up on the internet). The net contribution of light from the Milky Way's glow stretching right the way across our night sky, the light from every individual star, every faint extra-galactic source, every globular cluster, every incandescent nebulosity of glowing gas... every source of visible light in the entire universe can thus be quantified into a single, one number "constant". That is "Ahad's constant of universal flux". It answers many popular questions in astronomy like: "How bright is the night sky overall?", "How much starlight does the universe throw at us?", "How bright are the vast regions of empty space _between_ stars in the solar neighbourhood?", "How much light is illuminating objects in the Oort cloud?", "How much overall light illumination will a starship sailing out beyond our solar system, experience?" "How much light is illuminating non-luminous gas and dust in interstellar space?", and so on.
Abdul Ahad was the first person in scientific history to draw an imaginary sphere around the Sun of approximate radius 11,500 AUs (known as the "Ahad Radius" of "Ahad's Sphere of Solar Illuminance") which marks a boundary of equilibrium between solar flux and the net integrated flux produced by the surrounding cosmic night sky. The "Ahad radius" is the distance at which the light from our own Sun becomes secondary to the universe's total background light; it is where our majestic Sun no longer stays majestic in its light output. What an intriguing insight! Ahad's famous words to describe the illumination of space beyond his solar light sphere and the "Ahad Radius": "Beyond the outer edges of this theoretical sphere, the feeble currents of light coming from its core (i.e. our own distant Sun) will cease to make any noticeable ripples in the calm waters of the surrounding cosmic ocean..."
Ahad was the first to analytically determine a net magnitude of -5.0 for the Milky Way's glow stretching across the entire night sky. He derived a universally applicable magnitude model for estimating the visual brightness of an extra-solar planet shining in the habitable zone around its parent star. Our very remote chances of finding an Earth-like planet in one of the two habitable zones in the Alpha Centauri system, he described as: "A tiny ray of hope in the eternal darkness..."
At the end of it all, Abdul Ahad is also a family man and a practising muslim. He is happily married to his wife Shah Papia Lovely and he lives with his family in Luton, UK. He is an avid amateur astronomer, a member of the British Astronomical Association (UK) and the Planetary Society (US).
