A newly discovered asteroid is a toddler–in space years. The moonlet circling the small asteroid Dinkinesh named Selam is about 2 to 3 million years old. Scientists arrived at this age estimate using new calculation methods that are described in a study published April 19 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Selam is nicknamed “Lucy’s baby,” after NASA’s Lucy spacecraft discovered it orbiting another asteroid in November 2023. The Lucy mission is the first set to explore the Trojan asteroids. These are a group of about 7,000 primitive space rocks orbiting Jupiter. Lucy is expected to provide the first high-resolution images of these space rocks. Dinkinesh and Selam are located in the Main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Discovering a tiny moonlet was a surprise. According to study co-author and Cornell University aerospace engineering doctoral student Colby Merrill, Selem turned out to be “an extraordinarily unique and complex body.” Selem is a contact binary that consists of two lobes that are piles of rubble stuck together and is the first of this kind of asteroid ever observed. Scientists believe that Selam was formed from surface material ejected by Dinkinesh’s rapid spinning.

[Related: NASA spacecraft Lucy says hello to ‘Dinky’ asteroid on far-flying mission.]

“Finding the ages of asteroids is important to understanding them, and this one is remarkably young when compared to the age of the solar system, meaning it formed somewhat recently,” Merrill said in a statement. “Obtaining the age of this one body can help us to understand the population as a whole.”

To estimate its age, the team studied how Dinkinesh and Selam moved in space–or its dynamics. Binary asteroids like this pair are engaged in a galactic tug-of-war. Gravity that is acting on the objects is making them physically bulge and results in tides similar to what oceans on Earth have. The tides slowly reduce the system’s energy. At the same time, the sun’s radiation also changes the binary system’s energy. This solar change is known as the Binary Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (BYORP) effect. The system will eventually reach an equilibrium, where tides and BYORP are equally strong.

Assuming that the forces between the two were at equilibrium and plugging in asteroid data from the Lucy mission, the team calculated how long it would have taken for Selam to get to its current state after it formed. The team said that they improved preexisting equations that assumed both bodies in a binary system are equally dense and did not factor in the secondary body’s mass. Their computers simulations ran about 1 million calculations with varying parameters and found a median age of 3 million years old, with 2 million being the most likely result. This calculation also agreed with one made by the Lucy mission based on a more traditional method for dating asteroids based on an analysis of their surface craters. 

According to the team, studying asteroids this way does not require a spacecraft like Lucy to take close-up images, thus saving money. It could be more accurate in cases where an asteroid’s surfaces have undergone recent changes from space travel. Since roughly 15 percent of all near-Earth asteroids are binary systems this method can also be used to study other secondary bodies like the moonlet Dimorphos. NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into Dimorphos to test out planetary defense technology in September 2022.

[Related: NASA’s asteroid blaster turned a space rock into an ‘oblong watermelon.’]

“Used in tandem with crater counting, this method could help better constrain a system’s age,” study co-author and Cornell University astronomy doctoral student Alexia Kubas said in a statement. “If we use two methods and they agree with each other, we can be more confident that we’re getting a meaningful age that describes the current state of the system.”

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope isn’t only snapping some of the most detailed images of our cosmos—it’s also helping an international team of astronomers determine the weather on planets trillions of miles away from Earth. Its latest subject, WASP-43b, appears to live up to its extremely heavy metal-sounding name.

Astronomers discovered WASP-43b back in 2011, but initially could only assess some of its potential conditions using the Hubble and now-retired Spitzer space telescopes. That said, it was immediately clear that the gas giant is a scorcher.According to their measurements, the planet orbits its star at just 1.3 million miles away. For comparison, that’s not even 1/25th the distance separating Mercury from the sun. WASP-43b is also tidally locked in its orbit, meaning that one side is always facing its star while the other half is constantly cloaked in darkness.

But at 280 light-years away and practically face-to-face with its star, WASP-43b is difficult to see clearly through telescopes. To get a better look, experts enlisted JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) to measure extremely small fluctuations in the brightness emitted by the WASP-43 system every 10 seconds for over 24 hours.

“By observing over an entire orbit, we were able to calculate the temperature of different sides of the planet as they rotate into view. From that, we could construct a rough map of temperature across the planet,” Taylor Bell, a researcher at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute and the lead author of a study published yesterday in Nature Astronomy, said in Tuesday’s announcement.

[Related: JWST images show off the swirling arms of 19 spiral galaxies.]

Some of those temperatures are blazing enough to forge iron, with WASP-43b’s dayside averaging almost 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit. And while the nightside is a balmier 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s still only about 120 degrees short of the melting point for aluminum.

MIRI’s broad spectrum mid-infrared light data, paired alongside additional telescope readings and 3D climate modeling, also allowed astronomers to measure water vapor levels around the planet. With this information, the team could better calculate WASP-43b’s cloud properties, including their thickness and height.

The light data also revealed something striking about the gas giant’s atmospheric conditions—a total lack of methane, which astronomers previously hypothesized may be detectable, at least on the nightside. This fact implies that nearly 5,000 mph equatorial winds must routinely whip across WASP-43b, which are fast enough to prevent the chemical reactions necessary to produce detectable levels of methane.

“With Hubble, we could clearly see that there is water vapor on the dayside. Both Hubble and Spitzer suggested there might be clouds on the nightside,” Bell said on Tuesday. “But we needed more precise measurements from Webb to really begin mapping the temperature, cloud cover, winds, and more detailed atmospheric composition all the way around the planet.”

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Earlier this week, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded a rarely seen event—four nearly-simultaneous flare eruptions involving three separate sunspots, as well as the magnetic filament between them. But as impressive as it is, the event could soon pose problems for some satellites and spacecraft orbiting Earth, as well as electronic systems here on the ground.

It may seem like a massive ball of fiery, thermonuclear chaos, but there’s actually a fairly predictable rhythm to the sun. Similar to Earth’s seasonal changes, the yellow dwarf star’s powerful electromagnetic fluctuations follow a roughly 11-year cycle of ebbs and flows. Although astronomers still aren’t quite sure why this happens, it’s certainly observable—and recent activity definitely indicates the sun is heading towards its next “solar maximum” later this year.

As Spaceweather.com notes, early Tuesday morning’s “complex quartet” of solar activity was what’s known as a “super-sympathetic flare,” in which multiple events occur at nearly the same time. This happens thanks to the often hard-to-detect magnetic loops spreading across the sun’s corona, which can create explosive chain reactions in the process. In this case, hundreds of thousands of miles separated the three individual flares, but they still erupted within minutes of each other. All-told, the super-sympathetic flare encompassed about a third of the sun’s total surface facing Earth.

[Related: Why our tumultuous sun was relatively quiet in the late 1600s]

And that “facing Earth” factor could present an issue. BGR explains “at least some” of the electromagnetic “debris” could be en route towards the planet in the form of a coronal mass ejection (CME). If so, those forces could result in colorful auroras around the Earth’s poles—as well as create potential tech woes for satellite arrays and orbiting spacecraft, not to mention blackouts across some radio and GPS systems. The effects, if there are any, are estimated to occur over the next day or so, but at least they’re predicted to only be temporary inconveniences.

Luckily, multi-flare situations like this week’s aren’t a regular occurrence—the last time something similar happened was back in 2010 in what became known as the Great Eruption.

[Related: Hold onto your satellites: The sun is about to get a lot stormier]

Still, these super-sympathetic flares serve as a solid reminder of just how much of our modern, electronically connected society is at the sun’s mercy. As recently as 2022, for example, a solar storm knocked around 40 Starlink satellites out of orbit. The risk of solar-induced problems will continue to rise as the skies grow increasingly crowded.

While many companies continue to construct redundancy programs and backup systems for these potential headaches, astronomers and physicists still can’t predict solar activity very accurately. More research and funding is needed to create early warning and forecasting programs.

This year alone has already seen at least two other solar activity events—and seeing as how we still haven’t passed the solar maximum, more impressive (and maybe damaging) activity is likely on the way.

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NASA hitched a ride aboard Rocket Lab’s Electron Launcher in New Zealand yesterday evening, and is preparing to test a new, highly advanced solar sail design. Now in a sun-synchronous orbit roughly 600-miles above Earth, the agency’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System (ACS3) will in the coming weeks deploy and showcase technology that could one day power deep-space missions without the need for any actual rocket fuel, after launch.

The fundamentals behind solar sails aren’t in question. By capturing the pressure emitted by solar energy, thin sheets can propel a spacecraft at immense speeds, similar to a sailboat. Engineers have already demonstrated the principles before, but NASA’s new project will specifically showcase a promising boom design constructed of flexible composite polymer materials reinforced with carbon fiber.

Although delivered in a toaster-sized package, ACS3 will take less than 30 minutes to unfurl into an 860-square-foot sheet of ultrathin plastic anchored by its four accompanying 23-foot-long booms. These poles, once deployed, function as sailboat booms, and will keep the sheet taut enough to capture solar energy.

[Related: How tiny spacecraft could ‘sail’ to Mars surprisingly quickly.]

But what makes the ACS3 booms so special is how they are stored. Any solar sail’s boom system will need to remain stiff enough through harsh temperature fluctuations, as well as durable enough to last through lengthy mission durations. Scaled-up solar sails, however, will be pretty massive—NASA is currently planning future designs as large as 5,400-square-feet, or roughly the size of a basketball court. These sails will need extremely long boom systems that won’t necessarily fit in a rocket’s cargo hold.

To solve for this, NASA rolled up its new composite material booms into a package roughly the size of an envelope. When ready, engineers will utilize an extraction system similar to a tape spool to uncoil the booms meant to minimize potential jamming. Once in place, they’ll anchor the microscopically thin solar sail as onboard cameras record the entire process.

NASA hopes the project will allow them to evaluate their new solar sail design while measuring how its resulting thrust influences the tiny spacecraft’s low-Earth orbit. Meanwhile, engineers will assess the resiliency of their novel composite booms, which are 75-percent lighter and designed to offer 100-times less shape distortion than any previous solar sail boom prototype.

Don’t expect the ACS3 experiment to go soaring off into space, though. After an estimated two-month initial flight and subsystem testing phase, ACS3 will conduct a weeks-long test of its ability to raise and lower the CubeSate’s orbit. It’s a lot of work to harness a solar force NASA says is equivalent to the weight of a paperclip in your palm. Still, if ACS3’s sail and boom system is successful, it could lead towards scaling up the design enough to travel across the solar system.

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For the first time since November 2023, NASA is receiving meaningful communication from its Voyager 1 probe. The agency has spent months troubleshooting a glitch in why the famed probe was sending home messages that looked like garbled up gibberish and not scientific data. The probe is now coherent, but according to NASA, the next step is to enable Voyager 1 to begin to return usable science information again. 

[Related: Voyager 1 is sending back bad data, but NASA is on it.]

Alongside its twin Voyager 2, these probes are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space–or the region between stars beyond the influence of the sun. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes launched in 1977. Their mission initially included detailed observations of Jupiter and Saturn, but it continued on exploring the outer reaches of the solar system. Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space in 2012. Voyager 2 followed Voyager 1 into interstellar space in 2018. 

On November 14, 2023, Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth for the first time. Mission controllers could tell that the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally, so they were not sure why it was sending back such incoherent information. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) confirmed that the issue was related to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS packages science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth so that NASA can use it.

The team pinpointed the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. The glitch was only on one single chip representing around 3 percent of the FDS memory, according to Space. They were unable to repair the chip. On April 18, JPL engineers migrated the code to other portions of the FDS memory. This required splitting the code up into several sections to store them at multiple locations in the FDS. The code was adjusted to work from multiple locations as one cohesive process and references to its new directories were updated. 

“When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft,” NASA wrote in an update on April 22.

[Related: When Voyager 1 goes dark, what comes next?]

As of now, the usable data returned so far relates to how the spacecraft’s engineering systems are working. The team plans more software repair work in the next several weeks so that Voyager 1 can send valuable science data about the outer reaches of the solar system that is readable once again. As of now, Voyager 2 is still operating normally.

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NASA’s Juno mission scientists have used complex data collected during two flybys of Jupiter’s third largest moon Io to create animations that highlight this moon’s most dramatic features. Io is a little bit larger than the planet Earth and is also home to a mountain with a smooth lake of lava. Lava lakes like Io’s Loki Patera have a cooling surface crust that slowly thickens until it becomes denser than the underlying magma. It then sinks and pulls in the nearby crust. 

First launched in 2011, Juno arrived at our solar system’s largest planet in 2016 with a mission to explore the Jovian system. It has 95 known moons and its four largest–Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto–are called the Galilean moons. Io is most volcanically active.

This animation is an artist’s concept of Loki Patera, a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io, made using data from the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. With multiple islands in its interior, Loki is a depression filled with magma and rimmed with molten lava. CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS.

“Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action,” Juno’s principal investigator Scott Bolton said in a statement. “We also got some great close-ups and other data on a 200-kilometer-long [127-mile-long] lava lake called Loki Patera. There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava. The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”

The observations were announced April 16 during the European Geophysical Union General Assembly in Vienna, Austria.

[Related: See the most volcanic world in our solar system in new NASA images.]

Juno conducted very close flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024, getting within 930 miles of the surface. The spacecraft obtained first close-up images of Io’s northern latitudes. Maps created with data collected by Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument show that Io has a surface that is more smooth compared to Jupiter’s other Galilean moons, but also has poles that are colder than their middle latitudes.

Created using data collected by the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno during flybys in December 2023 and February 2024, this animation is an artist’s concept of a feature on the Jovian moon Io that the mission science team nicknamed “Steeple Mountain.” CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

Mountains and polar cyclones

With every pass, Juno flies closer to the north pole of Jupiter. Changing the spacecraft’s orientation allows the MWR instrument to improve its resolution of Jupiter’s northern polar cyclones. These storms at the top of the gas giant can reach wind speeds of 220 miles per hour and the data collected by Juno reveals that not all polar cyclones are created equal.

“Perhaps [the] most striking example of this disparity can be found with the central cyclone at Jupiter’s north pole,” Steve Levin, Juno’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. “It is clearly visible in both infrared and visible light images, but its microwave signature is nowhere near as strong as other nearby storms. This tells us that its subsurface structure must be very different from these other cyclones. The MWR team continues to collect more and better microwave data with every orbit, so we anticipate developing a more detailed 3D map of these intriguing polar storms.”

Just how much water is on Jupiter? An enduring mystery

One of Juno’s primary science goals is to collect data that will help astronomers better understand Jupiter’s water abundance. However, the team isn’t looking for liquid water. Instead, they are studying Jupiterl’s atmosphere to quantify the presence of the molecules that make up water–oxygen and hydrogen. According to NASA, an accurate estimate of oxygen and hydrogen molecules present in Jupiter’s atmosphere is crucial to unlocking some of the underlying mysteries of how our solar system formed.  

Jupiter was likely the first planet to form roughly 4.5 billion years ago. It also contains most of the gas and dust that wasn’t incorporated into the sun when the solar system formed. Water abundance also has important implications for Jupiter’s meteorology and internal structure.

[Related: Juno finally got close enough to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot to measure its depth.]

In 1995, NASA’s Galileo probe provided early data on the amount of water on Jupiter, but the data created more questions than answers. It showed that the gas giant’s atmosphere was unexpectedly hot and actually deprived of water—contrary to what computer models had initially indicated.

“The probe did amazing science, but its data was so far afield from our models of Jupiter’s water abundance that we considered whether the location it sampled could be an outlier. But before Juno, we couldn’t confirm,” said Bolton. “Now, with recent results made with MWR data, we have nailed down that the water abundance near Jupiter’s equator is roughly three to four times the solar abundance when compared to hydrogen. This definitively demonstrates that the Galileo probe’s entry site was an anomalously dry, desert-like region.”

[Related: Jupiter’s icy ocean worlds could be cool travel destinations in the future.]

The new results support the idea that sometime during the formation of our solar-system, water-ice material may have been the source of heavy element enrichment. These are chemical elements that are heavier than hydrogen and helium that Jupiter accumulated. The planet’s formation remains puzzling, because Juno’s results on the core of the gas giant suggest that there is very low water abundance. How abundant H₂0 is on the gas giant remains a mystery that the Juno mission could potentially solve.  

What’s next for Juno

Data during the reminder of Juno’s mission could help determine how much water is on Jupiter in two ways. It could enable scientists to compare Jupiter’s water abundance near the polar regions to the equatorial region. It also may shed additional light on the structure of the planet’s dilute liquid core. 

Juno’s most recent flyby of Io was on April 9 and the spacecraft came within about 10,250 miles of the moon’s surface. Its 61st flyby of Jupiter is scheduled for May 12 and it will continue to explore the planet and its moons through September 2025. 

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In the new IMAX film Deep Sky, a protostar shines from the center of a dark cloud, the phantom galaxy swirls, and the dusty space clouds of the Cosmic Cliffs of Carina tower like mountain peaks. Also, scientists cry. The film centers on the James Webb Space Telescope’s visual legacy and the people behind it. At one point, NASA astrophysicist Amber Straughn gets to the heart of why seeing the Cosmic Cliffs of Carina is such an emotional journey. “This has always been there. It’s always been out there, but we’re just now able to see it. We now have this new telescope that’s opened up our eyes to let us see something we haven’t seen before.”

While not quite as challenging as building a space telescope, making Deep Sky posed a novel challenge to the filmmakers, Nathaniel Kahn noted: “…Every time we’d start to get close to finishing, NASA would release a new amazing image, and we’d have to find a way to work that in!” As the film’s writer, director, and producer, Kahn and team were finishing the project in September of 2023, combining digital cinematography by NASA, ESA, and commercial satellite launch company Arianespace with animations and graphics created specifically for IMAX. If you want to see the stereotypes of the stoic scientists challenged and bask in the glory of space, you can catch the IMAX experience starting Friday, April 19. 

The drive to uncover the secrets of the cosmos propels this new telling of JWST’s unfolding story. Here’s what it took to get there.

‘It was waving goodbye’

In the almost two years since those first images were beamed back to planet Earth, it’s easy for casual observers to forget how improbable it was. JWST was initially supposed to launch in 2011 and congress even tried to cancel it that same year over budget concerns. It ultimately took 10,000 people from 14 countries, $10 billion, and 20 years to complete.

[Related: JWST images show off the swirling arms of 19 spiral galaxies.]

“I’ve worked on JWST for 15 years and I’m sort of one of the younger ones working on this telescope,” Straughn tells PopSci. “We faced a lot of challenges along the way and it was an audacious mission. We had to build this enormous telescope that had to be cold and that had to unfold in space. When you describe it, it sounds impossible.”

Multiple technologies needed to be invented to get this game-changer off the ground, including a critical sunshield. Since JWST primarily observes infrared light from faint and very far away objects. It must be kept extremely cold, at about -370 degrees Fahrenheit, to detect these faint signals of heat. The team constructed a five-layer sunshield about the size of a tennis court that protects it from other heat sources like the Earth, sun, and various moons. In the documentary, Amy Lo, the Deputy Director for Vehicle Engineering on JWST for Northrop Grumman, described it as being “SPF one million,” in order to keep it so cold and protected. She noted that there was no “second shot of doing this.”

During its launch on Christmas Day 2021, JWST completed over 40 crucial deployments of its various instruments and overcame 344 “single point failures.” If any one of those single points had failed, the entire mission would have ended.

The mission overcame all 344 single point failures and even got an added surprise. About 45 seconds into the launch, they caught the telescope’s power source called the solar array open up. This proved JWST officially had power and the deployment was not something the team planned to be able to see with their own eyes during the launch. Through tears, NASA JWST Program Scientist Eric Smith said, “It was waving goodbye,” in the documentary. 

Back to the big bang

By several accounts, JWST is performing better than expected. It’s standing up against the micrometeoroids–tiny pieces of space dust that can build up on the telescope’s mirrors. The team had a good idea of how frequently the dust would hit the mirrors, but the size of the impacts was more surprising.

[Related: Why a 3,000-mile-long jet stream on Jupiter surprised NASA scientists.]

“What we’ve been able to do to help mitigate this is essentially change the way we’re operating so that as the telescope is facing away from the direction that the micrometeoroids are coming from when we think we could have higher impacts,” Straughn tells PopSci. 

It has also proven to be more stable and more efficient overall. According to Straughn, JWST has delivered more data in even less time than the team anticipated, revealing some of the most distant galaxies in the universe. These are galaxies that were born just after the big bang about 13.8 billion years ago. JWST has revealed that many are brighter, bigger, and more numerous than astrophysicists previously thought and their black holes are also growing incredibly fast. 

“There’s an overarching new mystery that’s arisen of why galaxies are growing so big,” says Straughn. “When we find something that we don’t expect, that’s a new problem to solve that will help increase our knowledge about how the universe works.”

Towards the future

JWST built on the success of the Hubble Space Telescope and other observational projects are on our horizon. Scheduled to launch in 2027, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will explore exoplanets and dark matter. The Habitable Exoplanet Observatory (HabEx) is also in the early stages of development and will be specifically designed to discover life on other planets. 

[Related: In NASA’s new video game, you are a telescope hunting for dark matter.]

“I think that this telescope launch and these images came along at a perfect time to present a contrast to the bad things that are going on in the world,” says Straughn. “It really is an example of something that’s good, of what we humans can do when we put our hearts and our minds into something that’s for a bigger purpose.”

Deep Sky releases in IMAX theaters nationwide on Friday, April 19.

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Even without any known active tectonic movement, the moon can still rumble. Its dramatic thermal changes, miniscule contractions from cooling, and even the influences of Earth’s gravity have all contributed to noticeable seismic activity. And just like on Earth, detecting these potentially powerful moonquakes will be important for the safety of any future equipment, buildings, and people atop the lunar surface. 

But instead of traditional seismometers, NASA hopes Artemis astronauts will be able to deploy laser-powered fiber optic cables.

In a recent study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers at Caltech made the case for the promising capabilities of a new, high-tech seismological tool known as distributed acoustic sensing (DAS). Unlike traditional seismometers, DAS equipment measures the extremely tiny tremors detected in laser light as it travels through fiber optic cables. According to a separate paper from last year, a roughly 62-mile DAS cable line could hypothetically do the job of 10,000 individual seismometers.

[Related: Researchers unlock fiber optic connection 1.2 million times faster than broadband.]

This is particularly crucial given just how difficult it’s been to measure lunar seismic activity in the past. Apollo astronauts installed multiple seismometers on the lunar surface during the 1970’s, which managed to record quakes as intense as a magnitude 5. But those readings weren’t particularly precise, due to what’s known as scattering—when seismic waves are muddied from passing through layers of extremely fine, powdery regalith dust.

Researchers believe using fiber optic DAS setups could potentially solve this problem by averaging thousands of sensor points, and the data to back it up. According to a recent Caltech profile, the team of geophysicists deployed a similar cable system near Antarctica’s South Pole, the closest environment on Earth to our natural satellite’s surface due to its remote, harsh surroundings. Subsequent tests successfully detected subtle seismic activity such as cracking and shifting ice, while holding up against the harsh surroundings.

Of course, the moon’s brutal surface makes Antarctica look almost pleasant by comparison. Aside from the dust, temperature fluctuations routinely vary between 130 and -334 degrees Fahrenheit, while the lack of atmosphere means regular bombardment by solar radiation. All that said, Caltech researchers believe fiber optic cabling could easily be designed to withstand these factors. With additional work, including further optimizing its energy efficiency, the team believes DAS equipment could arrive alongside Artemis astronauts in the near future, ready to measure any moonquakes that come its way.

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Andreas Mogensen returned to Earth in mid-March after a six-and-a-half month stint aboard the International Space Station. To mark his tenure as part of NASA’s Crew-7 mission, the Danish European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut has shared his souvenir from undock day—a guided video tour of the ISS.

It’s been a month now since I left the International @Space_Station.

One of the very last things that I did on undock day, was film a tour of the Space Station. It is as much a keepsake for me as it is a way for me to share the wonder of the International Space Station with you.… pic.twitter.com/oFR0VXR06A

— Andreas Mogensen (@Astro_Andreas) April 12, 2024

“It’s been a month now since I left the [ISS],” Mogensen posted to X early Friday morning. “… It is as much a keepsake for me as it is a way for me to share the wonder of the International Space Station with you. Whenever I will miss my time onboard ISS, and especially my crewmates, I will have this video to look at.”

Mogensen began his show-and-tell in the space station’s front end, above which a docked SpaceX Dragon craft awaited to take him home on March 12. On his left is the roughly 114-by-22-foot Columbus module—a science laboratory provided by the ESA back in 2008. Across from the lab is the smaller Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), nicknamed Kibō, which arrived not long after Columbus.

From there, Mogensen provides a first-person look at various other ISS facilities, including workstations, storage units, bathrooms, gym equipment, multiple docking nodes, and even the station kitchen. Of course, given the delicate environment, that module looks more like another lab than an actual place to cook meals—presumably because, well, no one is actually cooking anything up there.

But the most stunning area in the entire ISS is undoubtedly the cupola, which provides a 360-degree panoramic view of Earth, as well as a decent look at the space station’s overall size.

[Related: What a total eclipse looks like from the ISS.]

Speaking of which, Mogenen’s video also does a great job showcasing just how comparatively small the ISS really is, even after over 25 years of module and equipment additions. At 356-feet-long, it’s just one yard shy of the length of a football field, but any given module or transit space is only a few feet wide. Factor in the copious amounts of cargo, equipment, supplies, experiment materials, as well as the over 8-miles of cabling that wire its electrical systems, and it makes for pretty tight living conditions. Near the end of Mogensen’s tour, it only takes him a little over a minute to glide through most of the entire station back to his original starting point.

Of course, none of that undercuts one of humanity’s most monumental achievements in space exploration. Although the ISS is nearing the end of its tenure (it’s scheduled for decommission in 2031), Mogensen’s keepsake is a great document of what life is like aboard the habitat. But for those now looking for an even more detailed tour, there’s always NASA’s virtual walkthrough.

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Japan has offered to provide the United States with a pressurized moon rover—in exchange for a reserved seat on the lunar van. Per NASA, the two nations have themselves a deal. 

According to a new signed agreement between NASA and Japan’s government, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will “design, develop, and operate” a sealed vehicle for both crewed and uncrewed moon excursions. NASA will then oversee the launch and delivery, while Japanese astronauts will join two surface exploration missions in the vehicle.

[ Related: SLIM lives! Japan’s upside-down lander is online after a brutal lunar night ]

‘A mobile habitat’

Japan’s pressurized RV will mark a significant step forward for lunar missions. According to Space.com, the nation has spent the past few years working to develop such a vehicle alongside Toyota and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Toyota offered initial specs for the RV last year—at nearly 20-feet-long, 17-feet-wide, and 12.5-feet-tall, the rover will be about as large as two minibusses parked side-by-side. The cabin itself will provide “comfortable accommodation” for two astronauts, although four can apparently cram in, should an emergency arise.

Like an RV cruising across the country, the rover is meant to provide its inhabitants with everything they could need for as long as 30 days at a time. While inside, astronauts will even be able to remove their bulky (and fashionable) getups and move about normally—albeit in about 16.6 percent the gravity as on Earth. Last week, NASA announced it had narrowed the search for its new Artemis Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) to three companies, but unlike Japan’s vehicle, that one will be unpressurized.

[Related: It’s on! Three finalists will design a lunar rover for Artemis ] 

“It’s a mobile habitat,” NASA Administrator Nelson said during yesterday’s press conference alongside Minister Moriyama, describing it as “a lunar lab, a lunar home, and a lunar explorer… a place where astronauts can live, work, and navigate the lunar surface.”

Similar to the forthcoming Lunar Terrain Vehicle, the Japanese RV can be remotely controlled if astronauts aren’t around, and will remain in operation for 10 years following its delivery.

“The quest for the stars is led by nations that explore the cosmos openly, in peace, and together… America no longer will walk on the moon alone,” Nelson added.

A total of 12 astronauts—all American men—have walked across the moon’s surface. When the U.S. returns to the moon with NASA’s Artemis missions, it will also be the first time a woman and a person of color will land on the moon.

After some rescheduling, NASA currently intends to send its Artemis II astronauts on a trip around the moon in late 2025. Artemis III will see the first two humans touchdown in over 50 years in either late 2026 or early 2027. The Artemis IV mission is currently intended to occur no earlier than 2030. Meanwhile, China is trying to land its own astronauts on the lunar surface in 2030. 

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NASA has announced three finalists to pitch them their best moon car ideas by this time next year to use on upcoming Artemis lunar missions. During a press conference yesterday afternoon, the agency confirmed Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab will all spend the next 12 months developing their Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) concepts as part of the “feasibility task order.”

According to Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, the final LTV will “greatly increase our astronauts’ ability to explore and conduct science on the lunar surface while also serving as a science platform between crewed missions.”

While neither Lunar Outpost nor Venturi Astrolab have been on the moon yet, they are planning uncrewed rover missions within the next couple years. In February, Intuitive Machines became the first privately funded company to successfully land on the lunar surface with its NASA-backed Odysseus spacecraft. Although “Odie” officially returned the US to the moon after an over-50 year hiatus, touchdown complications resulted in the craft landing on its side, severely limiting the extent of its mission.

[Related: NASA’s quirky new lunar rover will be the first to cruise the moon’s south pole.]

The last time astronauts zipped around on a moon buggy was back in 1971 during NASA’s Apollo 15 mission. The new LTV, like its Apollo predecessor, will only accommodate two people in an unpressurized cockpit—i.e. exposed to the harsh moon environment.

Once deployed, however, the LTV will differ from the Lunar Roving Vehicle in a few key aspects—most notably, it won’t always need someone at the steering wheel. While astronauts will pilot the LTV during their expeditions, the vehicle will be specifically designed for remote control once the Artemis crew is back home on Earth. In its initial May 2023 proposal call, the agency explained its LRV capabilities will be “similar to NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers.” When NASA isn’t renting the LTV, the winning company will also be free to contract it out to private ventures in the meantime.

But while a promising lunar rover design is great to see on paper, companies will need to demonstrate their vehicle’s capabilities before NASA makes its final selection—and not just on some desert driving course here on Earth.

After reviewing the three proposals, NASA will issue a second task order to at least one of the finalists, requesting to see their prototype in action on the moon. That means the company (or companies) will need to plan and execute an independent lunar mission, deliver a working vehicle to the moon, and “validate its performance and safety.” Only once that little hurdle is cleared does NASA plan to greenlight one of the company’s rovers.

If everything goes smoothly, NASA’s Artemis V astronauts will use the winning LTV when they arrive near the moon’s south pole in 2030.

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What time is it on the moon?

Well, right now, that’s somewhat a matter of interpretation. But humanity is going to need to get a lot more specific if it intends to permanently set up shop there. In preparation, NASA is aligning its clocks in preparation for the upcoming Artemis missions. On Tuesday, the White House issued a memo directing the agency to establish a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC), which will help guide humanity’s potentially permanent presence on the moon. Like the internationally recognized Universal Time Zone (UTC), LTC will lack time zones, as well as a Daylight Savings Time.

It’s not quite a time zone like those on Earth, but an entire frame of time reference for the moon. 

As Einstein famously noted, time is very much relative. Most timekeeping on Earth is tied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which relies on an international array of atomic clocks designed to determine the most precise time possible. This works just fine in relation to our planet’s gravitational forces, but thanks to physics, things are observed differently elsewhere in space, including on the moon.

“Due to general and special relativity, the length of a second defined on Earth will appear distorted to an observer under different gravitational conditions, or to an observer moving at a high relative velocity,” Arati Prabhakar, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTB), explained in yesterday’s official memorandum. 

Because of this, an Earth-based clock seen by a lunar astronaut would appear to lose an average of 58.7 microseconds per Earth day, alongside various other periodic variational influences. This might not seem like much, but it would pose major issues for any future lunar spacecraft and satellites that necessitate extremely precise timekeeping, synchronization, and logistics.

[Related: How to photograph the eclipse, according to NASA.]

“A consistent definition of time among operators in space is critical to successful space situational awareness capabilities, navigation, and communications, all of which are foundational to enable interoperability across the U.S. government and with international partners,” Steve Welby, OTSP Deputy Director for National Security, said in Tuesday’s announcement.

NASA’s new task is about more than just literal timing—it’s symbolic, as well. Although the US aims to send the first humans back to the lunar surface since the 1970’s, it isn’t alone in the goal. As Reuters noted yesterday, China wants to put astronauts on the moon by 2030, while both Japan and India have successfully landed uncrewed spacecraft there in the past year. In moving forward to establish an international LTC, the US is making its lunar leadership plans known to everyone.

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

But it’s going to take a lot of global discussions—and, yes, time—to solidify all the calculations needed to make LTC happen. In its memo, the White House acknowledged putting Coordinated Lunar Time into practice will need international agreements made with the help of “existing [timekeeping] standards bodies,” such as the United Nations International Telecommunications Union. They’ll also need to discuss matters with the 35 other countries who signed the Artemis Accords, a pact concerning international relations in space and on the moon. Things could also get tricky, given that Russia and China never agreed to those accords.

“Think of the atomic clocks at the US Naval Observatory. They’re the heartbeat of the nation, synchronizing everything,” Kevin Coggins, NASA’s space communications and navigation chief, told Reuters on Tuesday. “You’re going to want a heartbeat on the moon.”

NASA has until the end of 2026 to deliver its standardization plan to the White House. If all goes according to plan, there might be actual heartbeats on the moon by that point—the Artemis III crewed lunar mission is scheduled to launch “no earlier than September 2026.”

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If you use social media of any kind, you’ve seen tons of articles about how to take a photo of the April 8 total solar eclipse. Some of them were created by true experts, while others were cobbled together from bits of information found hastily on Google. But photographing a solar eclipse is actually rather complicated–if you want to maximize your chances to get a good image and minimize the possibility of frying your eyes into scorched Ikea meatballs. Here, I’ll help cut through some of the noise to what’s really important for a good eclipse photograph.

Don’t: Put your eyes in jeopardy

By now you’re probably sick of hearing about how the eclipse can hurt your vision, but damaged sight is serious business. Here’s a solid safety guide to review before you even think about creating a photographic masterpiece. Make sure your eclipse glasses are legit, too. (We have some recommendations on eclipse glasses to try, too.)

Do: Plan to be in a good spot for the eclipse

Planning is important for a shot like this, but luckily it’s easy to scout a location before go-time. Use a resource like these NASA eclipse maps to find out where you can see the most coverage. The super popular spots will be crowded with other photography enthusiasts, so aim for something more unique than that scenic overlook where everyone you know had their engagement photos taken.

Do: Try and work a foreground element into your eclipse shot to give it context

Without any foreground, eclipse pictures just look like partial orange discs. If that’s what you want, have at it; but it likely won’t stand out when you share it. Using a wide-angle lens will help you fit other elements into the shot, to give it scope and context. Try a cityscape or some trees. Anything with a strong shape will read better in the image. A telephoto lens can get you some stunning images, but be careful: That kind of glass magnifies light, and, eclipse or no, you’re still photographing the sun. The viewfinder is not your friend.

If you have access to a really long telephoto lens, you can do some truly cool stuff by positioning a subject between you and the sun. The shot below, for example, took an 800mm telephoto lens (that’s even bigger than most of the big, white lenses you see on the sidelines of an NFL game) to make this scene look as it does. The result is a lot more striking than a circle floating in space. (Again, beware the viewfinder!)

Don’t: Rent expensive gear or buy expensive filters for a single eclipse

Solar filters are specialized pieces of photographic equipment meant to do two things: considerably reduce the total amount of visible light coming in and filter out invisible (at least to the naked eye) IR and UV rays that could damage your camera. For most people, buying one is total overkill. The good ones are expensive and don’t really have much utility outside of an eclipse. The cheap, bad ones will just distort your photos. If you’re dead set on pointing your camera at the sun, you need a filter to protect your gear, but make sure it’s worth the investment for you.

NASA says you can use welding glass to protect your eyes and camera, but it needs to be at least 12 shade, which is much darker than the stuff you’ll typically find at the hardware store. So, if you have a typical welding helmet laying around, don’t use it for viewing unless you check the shade of the glass.

You can also reportedly use a standard neutral density filter, but it needs to be rated to reduce light intake by 16 stops for safety. That means it takes exponentially more light to make the same exposure with the filter as it would without. That’s seriously dark and it still may not be sufficient for blocking the IR and UV rays.

If you already bought the filter, then have a blast with it. If not, see if another friend will let you share. You don’t actually need a solar filter on your camera (or your eyes) when the sun is fully covered by the moon (called totality), so you can shoot during that time without damage. Just err on the side of caution with your timing to make sure you don’t catch some straggling or emerging rays. The rule of thumb is that if you see the little marbles of light starting to form at the edge of the eclipse, you should already have your filter back on.

Don’t: Use an optical viewfinder when you’re using a solar filter

That photographic solar filter on the front of your camera can protect the sensor inside from getting fried and help correct your exposure, but it won’t necessarily protect your eyeballs. That’s not its job nor its promise. Amazon actually ran into a serious problem with this fact regarding some filters from a very reputable company called Lee. If you’re using a DSLR or a rangefinder camera, then stay away from that viewfinder and use your camera’s live view mode.

Don’t: Look through a telephoto lens with your eclipse glasses on

Solar filters are meant to go on the front of lenses you look through. Putting a lens behind a lens, only subjects it to rays that have been magnified and the intensity can do serious damage. This goes for photo lenses, telescopes, and even binoculars. This is true even when there’s no eclipse happening.

Do: Be careful about exposure (and shoot raw if you know what that is)

Exposure can be tricky when shooting the eclipse. The B&H guide has a handy exposure settings chart you can refer to before you go shooting. Chances are, when you point your camera in auto mode toward the eclipse, the resulting photo will be washed out because it’s compensating for the dark scene. You can fix this by using a camera feature called exposure compensation. This is typically achieved by turning a dial on your camera, but you can also do it on your smartphone. Tap and hold over the eclipsed sun to lock the focus and exposure. Then drag your thumb down and watch the image get darker.

If you’re using a camera that has raw mode—some smartphones even have this option now—you will get extra image data you can use when you’re editing your photo.

If you have no idea what “shooting in raw” means, then skip this step because a big important event is the worst time to try something new. Give raw a try down the road, though. Here’s a tutorial now how to get started.

Do: Shoot a lot of photos

While I’m not advocating the “spray and pray” method enabled by holding down the camera’s shutter button and letting it hammer out pictures as fast as it can, you should plan to shoot a lot of photos. If you get a sufficient number of good photos, you can make a cool sequence like the one below.

There are certain important moments during the eclipse that you’ll want to capture, especially if you’re making a sequence. Each phase has a technical name, as well as a more colloquial name like the “diamond ring” which happens just before and after totality.

Don’t: miss out on the actual event because you’re trying to snap a perfect pic

While getting the photo you want is great, also consider that you’re witnessing a very rare event, and take some time to admire it rather than obsessing over your camera.

Don’t: Be afraid to shoot a picture with your iPhone

According to Apple, the iPhone’s camera doesn’t need a solar filter for shooting a picture of the eclipse because of its wide angle lens and overall construction. We haven’t tested that fact, and Samsung and LG didn’t comment when contacted about the subject, but Apple seems very confident that it’s not a problem. Do consider this a disclaimer, however: It’s still totally possible that the eclipse will damage your iPhone camera, so proceed at your own risk.

One caveat is that your smartphone will probably try to overexpose the scene and wash out the wonderful eclipse part. You can fix this by pressing your thumb over the sun to lock the focus and exposure, then dragging your thumb downward to reduce the overall exposure. Exposure compensation, remember? It’s a pretty handy thing to use in a variety of other situations, too, not just epic events like this one.

Do: use a tripod

Setting up your shot and following the action will be a lot easier if you have a stable base, especially if you’re planning on using a long telephoto lens. Just be sure to check if you need a permit to put down a tripod where you’re planning to shoot. Often, parks let you operate without a permit if you’re going handheld, but require a permit when you start putting down stands or tripods.

Do: Use that fancy solar filter you bought after the eclipse is over

OK, so you didn’t get the advice about not buying a filter in time and now you’ve got an overly-expensive and extremely specific piece of gear. Luckily, that solar filter can also act as a pretty capable neutral density filter, which photographers use all the time.

By limiting light as it comes into the camera, it allows you to use longer shutter speeds to blur moving objects in the photo or shoot at wider apertures in bright conditions, which is good if you want to get that oh-so-popular shallow depth of field look with a nice blurry background.

This story was originally published in 2017 and updated in 2024.

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It’s hard to think of anyone as excited about the upcoming North American total solar eclipse as NASA. From citizen research projects to hosted events within the path of totality, the agency is ready to make the most of next month’s cosmic event—and they want to help you enjoy it, too. Earlier this month, NASA offered a series of tips on how to safely and effectively photograph the eclipse come April 8. Certain precautions are a must, but with a little bit of planning, you should be able to capture some great images of the moon’s journey across the sun, as well as its effects on everything beneath it.

First and foremost is protection. Just as you wouldn’t stare directly at the eclipse with your own eyes, NASA recommends you place specialized filters in front of your camera or smartphone’s lens to avoid damage. The easiest way to do this is simply use an extra pair of eclipse viewing glasses, but there also are a number of products specifically designed for cameras. It’s important to also remember to remove the filter while the moon is completely in front of the sun—that way you’ll be able to snap pictures of the impressive coronal effects.

[Related: How to photograph solar eclipse: The only guide you need]

And while you’re welcome to use any super-fancy, standalone camera at your disposal, NASA reminds everyone that it’s not necessary to shell out a bunch of money ahead of time. Given how powerful most smartphone cameras are these days, you should be able to achieve some stunning photographs with what’s already in your pocket. That said, there are still some accessories that could make snapping pictures a bit easier, such as a tripod for stabilization.

Next: practice makes perfect, as they say. Even though you can’t simulate the eclipse ahead of time, you can still test DSLR and smartphone camera settings on the sun whenever it’s out and shining (with the proper vision protection, of course). For DSLR cameras, NASA recommends using a fixed aperture of f/8 to f/16, alongside shutter speeds somewhere between 1/1000 to one-fourth of a second. These variations can be used during the many stages of the partial eclipse as it heads into its totality. Once that happens, the corona’s brightness will vary greatly, “so it’s best to use a fixed aperture and a range of exposures from approximately 1/1000 to 1 second,” according to the agency. Most smartphone cameras offer similar fine-tuning, so experiment with those as needed, too.

[Related: NASA needs your smartphone during April’s solar eclipse.]

A few other things to keep in mind: Make sure you turn off the flash, and opt for a wide-angle or portrait framing. For smartphones during totality, be sure to lock the camera’s focus feature, as well as enable the burst mode to capture a bunch of potentially great images. Shooting in the RAW image format is a favorite for astrophotographers, so that’s an option for those who want to go above and beyond during the eclipse. While Google Pixel cameras can enable RAW files by themselves, most other smartphones will require a third-party app download to do so, such as Yamera and Halide.

But regardless of your camera (and/or app) choice, it’s not just the sun and moon you should be striving to capture. NASA makes a great point that eclipses affect everything beneath them, from the ambient light around you, to the “Wow” factor on the faces of nearby friends and family members. Be sure to grab some shots of what’s happening around you in addition to what’s going on above.
For more detailed info on your best eclipse photographic options, head over to NASA.

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Listening for crickets isn’t the only way you can help NASA conduct research during the total solar eclipse passing across much of North America on April 8—you can also lend your smartphone camera to the cause. The agency is calling on anyone within the upcoming eclipse’s path to totality to participate in its SunSketcher program. The program will amass volunteer researcher data to better understand the star’s shape. To participate, all you need is NASA’s free app, which uses a smartphone’s camera coupled with its GPS coordinates to record the eclipse. But why?

The sun looks simply spherical in many photographs and renderings, and in the sun if you happen to briefly glance at it during the day—an emphasis on “briefly,” of course. But thanks to what’s known as oblateness, this isn’t ever really the case. A rotating spheroid will oblate when its centrifugal force generates enough inertia to slightly flatten it out into a more irregular, elliptical shape. Within the solar system, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn all also display oblateness, but the sun has some unique characteristics affecting how it oblates in particular.

According to NASA, the sun’s oblateness “depends upon the interior structure of the rotation, which we know from sunspot motions to be latitude-dependent at least.” Astronomers also think gas flows accompanying the sun’s magnetic activity and convection can create “transient distortions at a smaller level.” The upcoming total solar eclipse will provide astronomers an opportunity to better understand all this in the sun, but to make that happen, NASA wants you to harness the moon.

Earth’s natural satellite can serve as a valuable research partner in measuring the sun’s oblateness. This is due to a phenomenon known as “Baily’s beads,” which are the tiny flashes of light during an eclipse that occur as solar light passes over the moon’s rugged terrain of craters, hills, and valleys. Since satellite imagery has helped produce extremely detailed mappings of lunar topography, experts can match Baily’s beads to the moon’s features as it passes in front of the sun.

[Related: New evidence suggests dogs may ‘picture’ objects in their minds, similarly to people.]

These flashes will vary depending on where an observer is located within the path of totality. If you could amass data from a vast number of observer locales, however, you could better understand the sun’s surface variations due to its oblateness. And there are potentially millions of individual locales directly underneath the April 8 eclipse. Enter: SunSketcher.

“With your help, we hope to create a massive hour-long database of observations, more than we could ever make on our own,” NASA says.

All volunteers need to do is angle their phones up to capture the big event and let SunSketcher record the rest. Once all those videos are collected, NASA says the solar disk’s size and shape can be calculated to within a few kilometers, “an accuracy that is far better than currently known.” The reliable, detailed information on solar oblateness captured during SunSketcher can also be used to study how solar gravity affects the motions of inner planets, as well as help test various gravitational theories.

It’s worth noting that serving as an official SunSketcher volunteer will sacrifice the ability to use your smartphone to snap videos or pictures for yourself—but that’s arguably a small price to pay for helping conduct valuable scientific research.

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In a “picture perfect” test, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully smashed a car-sized spacecraft into an asteroid in September 2022. The mission showed that a spacecraft could successfully defect a hazardous space rock if it were ever heading for Earth, even though the odds of a cataclysmic event happening are pretty low. DART changed the asteroid’s orbit, and now scientists found that the blistering impact also likely changed the asteroid’s shape. The findings are described in a study published March 19 in the Planetary Science Journal.

DART targeted the 560-foot-wide asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits a larger near-Earth asteroid called Didymos. Before the impact, Dimorphos had a generally symmetrical oblate spheroid shape.

“When DART made impact, things got very interesting,” Shantanu Naidu, a study co-author and navigation engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement. “Dimorphos’ orbit is no longer circular. The entire shape of the asteroid has changed, from a relatively symmetrical object to a ‘triaxial ellipsoid’-–something more like an oblong watermelon.”

Previously, it took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to complete one loop around Didymos and it had a well-defined, circular orbit about 3,900 feet from it. The space rock’s orbital period–the time it takes to complete one orbit–is now shorter by about 33 minutes and 15 seconds. 

To look into the changes after the impact with DART, Naidu and the team on this study used multiple sources of data in their computer models. The first source was the images that DART captured as it approached the asteroid. These images taken aboard the spacecraft gave close-up measurements of the gap between Didymos and Dimorphos and helped the team gauge the dimensions of both asteroids just before impact.  

The second data source was NASA’s Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Solar System Radar. This rader system is located near Barstow, California. It bounced radio waves off both Didymos and Dimorphos. These radio waves precisely measured the position of Dimorphos relative to Didymos after impact. These radar observations helped NASA conclude that DART exceeded the mission’s expectations. 

[Related: DART left an asteroid crime scene. This mission is on deck to investigate it.]

The most significant source of data came from ground telescopes all over the world that measured both asteroids’ light curve. This is how the sunlight reflecting off the asteroids’ rocky surfaces changed over time. Comparing the light curves before and after impact helped the team learn how DART changed Dimorphos’ motion. As Dimorphos orbits, it periodically passes in front of Didymos and then behind it. During these mutual events, one of the asteroids in the system can cast a shadow on the other, or block our view from Earth. A temporary dimming in the light curve can be recorded by telescopes in both scenarios. 

The team used the timing of this series of light-curve dips to figure out the shape of the orbit. Their models revealed that Dimorphos’ orbit is now slightly elongated, or eccentric. 

“Before impact the times of the events occurred regularly, showing a circular orbit. After impact, there were very slight timing differences, showing something was askew,” study co-author and JPL senior research scientist Steve Chesley said in a statement. “We never expected to get this kind of accuracy.”

[Related: Smashed asteroid surrounded by a ‘cloud’ of boulders.]

According to the team, the models are so precise that they can even show that Dimorphos rocks back and forth as it orbits Didymos. 

The models also calculated how the orbital period evolved. Right after impact, DART reduced the average distance between the two asteroids. It shortened Dimorphos’ orbital period by 32 minutes and 42 seconds, down to 11 hours, 22 minutes, and 37 seconds. 

In the week’s following its collision with DART, the asteroid’s orbital period continued to shorten as it shed more rocky material. It settled in at 11 hours, 22 minutes, and 3 seconds per orbit–or 33 minutes and 15 seconds less time than it took before impact. Dimorphos also now has an average orbital distance of about 3,780 feet–or roughly 120 feet closer to Didymos than it was before colliding with DART.

Another study published in February found that the asteroid is likely a loose rubble pile asteroid–like the recently sampled asteroid Bennu–composition due to its collision with DART. 

“The results of this study agree with others that are being published,” lead scientist for solar system small bodies at NASA Headquarters Tom Statler, said in a statement. “Seeing separate groups analyze the data and independently come to the same conclusions is a hallmark of a solid scientific result. DART is not only showing us the pathway to asteroid-deflection technology, it’s revealing [a] new fundamental understanding of what asteroids are and how they behave.” Statler was not an author on this study. 

To get a closer look at Didymos and Dimorphos, the European Space Agency’s Hera mission is scheduled to launch in October 2024. It will be taking a detailed survey of the asteroid pair and could officially confirm just how much DART reshaped Dimorphos.

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Space travel is certainly not for the faint of heart, for many reasons including its effects on physical health. It can potentially disturb human immune systems and increase red blood cell death. Astronauts can even suffer from bone loss during missions. It could also increase headaches. Astronauts with no prior history of headaches may experience migraine and tension-type headaches during long-haul space flights–over 10 days in space. The findings are detailed in a study published March 13 in the journal Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

“Changes in gravity caused by space flight affect the function of many parts of the body, including the brain,” W. P. J. van Oosterhout, study co-author and a neurologist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, said in a statement. “The vestibular system, which affects balance and posture, has to adapt to the conflict between the signals it is expecting to receive and the actual signals it receives in the absence of normal gravity.”

[Related: 5 space robots that could heal human bodies—or even grow new ones.]

The study looked at 24 astronauts from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). All of the astronauts were assigned to International Space Station expeditions for up to 26 weeks from November 2011 to June 2018. Combined, the astronauts studied spent a total of 3,596 days in space. 

The astronauts all completed health screenings and a questionnaire about individual headache history before their space flight flight. Nine of them reported never having any headaches prior to the study, with three reporting a headache that interfered with their daily activities within the last year. None of the astronauts had a history of recurrent headaches or had a migraine diagnosis. 

During space flight, they filled out a daily questionnaire for the first seven days and a weekly questionnaire each following week throughout their stay in the International Space Station. The astronauts reported 378 headaches during their combined days in space. 

The study found that 92 percent of the astronauts surveyed experienced headaches during space flight, compared to just 38 percent who reported experiencing headaches in the two to six months before going into space. Twenty-two of the 24 astronauts studied also experienced one or more headache episodes during their first week in space. About 89 percent of these headaches were tension headaches and 10 percent were likely a migraine. Headaches were also of a higher intensity and more likely to be like a migraine during the first week of space flight. 

According to van Oosterhout, the changes to the brain’s balance and posture system, combined with adjusting to zero gravity during the first week of space flight, “can lead to space motion sickness in the first week, of which headache is the most frequently reported symptom. Our study shows that headaches also occur later in space flight and could be related to an increase in pressure within the skull.” 

[Related: Why space lettuce could be the pharmacy astronauts need.]

The astronauts were monitored after returning back to Earth and none of them reported any headaches in the three months after returning home. 

One of the study’s limitations is that it relied on self-reporting of symptoms, so the memory recall may not have been fully accurate. It also didn’t say that going into space causes headaches, only shows an association. 

“Further research is needed to unravel the underlying causes of space headache and explore how such discoveries may provide insights into headaches occurring on Earth,” said van Oosterhout. “Also, more effective therapies need to be developed to combat space headaches as for many astronauts this [is] a major problem during space flights.”

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NASA is wasting no time after yesterday’s 23rd astronaut class graduation ceremony. After congratulating the 10 newest people now eligible for flight assignments, the agency has opened the application portal for its next pool of potentially spacebound voyagers. And to celebrate the occasion, NASA enlisted the legend Morgan Freeman to narrate its announcement video.

A total of 360 candidates have now taken part in the demanding, two-year training school since 1959, but only three did not finish the program. Currently, just 48 Astronaut Office members are currently active. NASA picked its latest 10 graduates from over 12,000 applicants, who are now also qualified for future assignments aboard the International Space Station, Artemis program missions, and even future commercial space station projects. As Space.com notes, however, their current newbie status will more likely place them in technical roles supporting flights, such as serving as Mission Control capsule communicators (capcoms), as well as overseeing rocket and spacecraft preparations. Before long, however, they could find themselves in line to board those very same vehicles for missions to the ISS or the moon, based on their backgrounds and career experience.

“Picture yourself in space, contributing to a new chapter of human exploration as a NASA astronaut,” Freeman says during the one-minute spot—okay, easy to do, but what about the reality of what’s required to apply?

The astronaut application checklist

According to NASA’s current astronaut candidate application page, you need at least a master’s degree or international equivalent in a STEM-related field such as “engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science, or mathematics.” A minimum of two years currently enrolled in a PhD or similar program can also qualify you, as well as advanced medical degrees. Currently, participation in a stateside or international Test Pilot School program is fair game, too. Either two years of related STEM professional experience or a minimum of 1,000 hours pilot-in-time spent on jet aircrafts are also needed. There aren’t any age restrictions, but every astronaut candidate has so far been somewhere between 26 and 46-years-old, with a median age of 34. 

[Related: How to apply for NASA’s next Mars habitat simulation.]

Unsurprisingly, there’s also a lengthy list of physical assessments and medical requirements, including preliminary and random drug testing for illegal substances, psychiatric evaluations, swimming tests, and the Agency Physical Fitness Test. One’s sitting blood pressure can’t exceed 140/90 and you need 20/20 vision, although LASIK surgery or eyeglasses is fine these days. On the shorter or taller side? Sorry—the height window is only 65-to-75-inches in order to fit into NASA’s (increasingly trendy) spacesuits.

If all those hurdles sound relatively feasible to clear, feel free to head over to the USAJOBS page to fire off an application by April 6. That said, if you’re looking to start a bit closer to Earth, there’s always NASA’s Mars habitat simulation project to consider.

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Space produces some otherworldly sounds–black hole songs, Martian dust tornadoes, and meteorites crashing into the Red Planet to name a few. Now, NASA has released three new sonifications of images taken from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes.

The new sonifications highlight different celestial objects observed by NASA telescopes.

[Related: NASA turns spectacular space telescope images into vibey ‘cosmic sonifications.’]

What is sonification?

Sonification translates data into sound. Scientific data is collected by Chandra and other space telescopes as digital signals that are usually turned into the dazzling visuals that we see on Earth. Sonification takes that information and maps it into sound. 

According to NASA, the sonification scans data from one side to the other and each wavelength is mapped out to a different range of tones that our ears can hear. The light of objects is pitched higher and the intensity of the light controls the volume. Radio waves are given the lowest tones, the medium tones are visible data, and the X-rays have the highest tones. 

MSH 11-52–The Cosmic Hand

The first sonification is of MSH 11-52. This is a supernova remnant that is releasing a large cloud of energized particles that looks somewhat like a human hand. It’s estimated that light from this supernova reached Earth roughly 1,700 years ago. The supernova is seen and heard here using data from Chandra, NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), and ground-based optical data.

M74–The Phantom Galaxy

This sonification features M74, which is a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way. It is about 3.2 million light-years away from earth in the constellation Pisces. Spiral galaxies like these typically have a rotating disc with spiral ‘arms’ that curve out from a dense central region. This sonification combines data taken with NASA’s James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes and X-rays from Chandra.

IC 443–The Jellyfish Nebula

The third sonification trio IC 443, nicknamed the Jellyfish Nebula. This nebula is about 5,000 light years away and is the expanding debris cloud from a very large star that exploded. The light from this supernova reached planet Earth more than 30,000 years ago. The data in this sonification include X-rays from Chandra and the now-retired German ROSAT mission. It also uses  radio data from NSF’s Very Large Array and optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey.

NASA’s sonification project began in 2020 and built off of other Chandra projects aimed at reaching blind and visually-impaired audiences. A new documentary, Listen to the Universe, is   now available on NASA+ and explores how these sonifications are created and tells the story of the team that makes them possible. 

[Related: Listen: Meteoroids make little ‘bloop’ noises when crashing into Mars.]

“Sonifications add a new dimension to stunning space imagery, and make those images accessible to the blind and low-vision community for the first time,” Liz Landau, who leads multimedia efforts for NASA’s Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. “I was honored to help tell the story of how Dr. Arcand and the System Sounds team make these unique sonic experiences and the broad impact those sonifications have had.”

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Despite landing on its side and struggling to maintain power, Odysseus, the first US spacecraft to land on the moon in over half a century, is still somewhat operational. Built by the Houston-based company, Intuitive Machines, “Odie” marked a historic return to the lunar surface, and became the first privately funded venture ever to successfully reach the moon.

On Tuesday morning, Intuitive predicted that the spacecraft “may continue up to an additional 10-20 hours.” Yet, mission control plans to put the lander to sleep later tonight. Odie “continues to generate solar power,” said Intuitive Machines co-founder and president Steve Altemus during today’s mission update. Altemus also confirmed that engineers will attempt to revive Odysseus in 2-to-3 weeks following the upcoming lunar night’s conclusion.

“We’ve gotten over 15 megabytes of data,” said CLPS project scientist Sue Lederer when discussing the data the team is retrieving from Odysseus on Wednesday. “We went from basically a cocktail straw of data coming back to a boba tea size straw of data coming back.”

Launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on February 15 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Odysseus spent the next week traveling 230,000-miles towards the moon—and even documented its journey in the process.

[Related: ‘Odie’ makes space history with successful moon landing.]

For a moment, it seemed as though Odysseus might meet a recent predecessor’s similar fate. Less than a week before the Odysseus launch, the Peregrine lunar lander built by Astrobotics experienced a “critical loss of propellant” on its way to the moon, forcing the private company to abandon its mission.

While circling the moon ahead of last week’s descent, Odysseus ground engineers discovered they failed to turn on the spacecraft’s navigating laser system. As luck would have it, Odysseus housed an experimental NASA laser navigation device intended for testing once it reached its final destination. Mission controllers managed to boot up the laser, which allowed the lander to finish its trip. On February 22, Odysseus arrived close to the Malapert A crater within a mile of its target, approximately 185 miles from the moon’s south pole—but not without a debilitating setback.

While landing, a faster-than-intended descent caused one of its six legs to malfunction and tip Odysseus on its side. According to mission representatives, the resulting position blocked a number of Odie’s antennas, and angled solar panels in a way that limited their ability to draw power. A similar issue plagued yet another recent historic lunar landing mission, when Japan’s SLIM spacecraft arrived to the moon last month intact, if upside down.

[ Related: SLIM lives! Japan’s upside-down lander is online after a brutal lunar night ]

But even if it perfectly stuck the landing, Odysseus would still only have had another two-to-three days of life before powering down as the moon entered its next lunar night. Designers did not intend Odie to survive the harsh, 14.5-day phase that sees temperatures plummet as low as -208 Fahrenheit.

During a February 28 mission update, representatives say NASA Adminstrator Bill Nelson considers Odie’s landing a “success” despite setbacks.

Odysseus contained six NASA experiments (including that aforementioned laser nav system) intended to help plan for future Artemis program missions, a camera designed by university students, a lunar telescope prototype, as well as an art project containing 125 steel sculptures by Jeff Koons. According to Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus, Odysseus tipped so that only the Koons cargo faces downward into the lunar dirt.

This story is developing. We will update this article with more details.

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Less than 4,500 tigers remain in the world, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Habitat loss continues to pose an immense existential threat to the planet’s largest cat species—a problem compounded due to the animals residing in some of Earth’s most ecologically at-risk regions and landscapes.

To better monitor the situation in real time, NASA, Google Earth Engine, and over 30 researcher collaborators are announcing TCL 3.0 today, a new program that combines satellite imagery and powerful computer processing to keep an eye on tigers’ existing and reemerging ecosystems.

“The ultimate goal is to monitor changes in real time to help stabilize tiger populations across the range,” Eric W. Sanderson, VP for Urban Conservation at the New York Botanical Garden and first author of a recent foundational study published in Frontiers in Conservation Science explained.

[Related: A new algorithm could help detect landslides in minutes.]

“Tiger Conservation Landscapes,” or TCLs, refer to the planet’s distinct locales where Panthera tigris still roam in the wild. Because of their size, diet, and social habits, tigers require comparatively large areas to not only survive, but flourish.

According to researchers, stable tiger populations “are more likely to retain higher levels of biodiversity, sequester more carbon, and mitigate the impacts of climate change, at the same time providing ecosystem services to millions of humans in surrounding areas.” In doing so, TCLs can serve as a reliable, informative indicator of overall environmental health markers.

Unfortunately, the total area of Tiger Conservation Landscapes declined around 11 percent between 2001 and 2020. Meanwhile, potential restored habitats have only plateaued near 16 percent of their original scope—if such spaces were properly monitored and protected, however, tigers could see a 50 percent increase in available living space. 

Using this new analytical computing system based on Google Earth Engine data, NASA Earth satellite observations, biological info, and conservation modeling, TCL 3.0 will offer environmentalist groups and national leaders critical, near-real time tools for tiger conservation efforts.

“Analysis of ecological data often relies on models that can be difficult and slow to implement, leading to gaps in time between data collection and actionable science,” Charles Tackulic, a research statistician with the US Geological Survey, said in today’s announcement. “The beauty of this project is that we were able to minimize the time required for analysis while also creating a reproducible and transferable approach.”

Researchers say government and watchdog users of TCL 3.0 will be able to pinpoint tiger habitat loss as it happens, and hopefully respond accordingly. National summaries of initial available data can be found through the Wildlife Conservation Society, with more information to come.

TCL 3.0 provides an unprecedentedly complex and advanced monitoring system for one of the planet’s most threatened creatures, but as researchers note in their new study, the solution is arguably extremely simple.
“What have we learned about tiger conservation over the last two decades? Conservation works when we choose to make it so,” the authors conclude in their recent report. “Conservation is straightforward. Don’t cut down their habitat. Don’t stalk them, harass them, or kill them or their prey. Control poaching and extinguish the illegal trade in tiger bones and parts. Prevent conflicts with people and livestock wherever possible, and where and when not, then mitigate losses to forestall retaliation.”

Correction 2/27/24 5:53PM: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the world’s remaining tiger population. PopSci regrets the error.

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American scientist William Wheeler not only looked to the sky during a total solar eclipse; he also made sure to pay attention to everything around him. On August 31, 1932, Wheeler and fellow collaborators located throughout the northeastern regions of US and Canada took part in one of the earliest eclipse-related participatory studies to document the celestial event’s effects on wildlife. Volunteers made nearly 500 records of animal and insect reactions that day—nearly a century later, NASA hopes to honor those contributions, as well as exponentially expand on them.

On April 8, the agency is calling for citizen scientist volunteers along the upcoming total solar eclipse’s path to help in its ongoing Eclipse Soundscapes Project. Through a combination of visual, audio, and written recordings, NASA aims to help further researchers’ understanding of the occurrence’s influence on various ecosystems across the country.

As the moon passes in front of the sun, ambient light dims, temperatures fall, and even some stars begin to appear. These sudden environmental shifts have been known to fool animals into behaving as they would at dusk or dawn. According to NASA, the agency is specifically interested in better understanding the behavior of crickets, as well as observing the differences between how nocturnal and diurnal animals may respond.

“The more audio data and observations we have, the better we can answer these questions,” Kelsey Perrett, Communications Coordinator with the Eclipse Soundscapes Project, said in an announcement earlier this month. “Contributions from participatory scientists will allow us to drill down into specific ecosystems and determine how the eclipse may have impacted each of them.”

[Related: Delta’s solar eclipse flight sold out, but your best bet to see it is still down here.]

There are multiple ways any of the roughly 30 million people within the eclipse’s path can participate on April 8. People on or close to the path of totality can act as designated “Data Collectors” by purchasing a relatively low-cost audio recorder called an AudioMoth alongside a micro-SD card to capture surrounding sounds. Meanwhile, “Observers” can write down what they see and hear, then submit them through the project’s website, while “Apprentices” and “Data Analysts” can take quick, free online courses to help assess the incoming data. There are also plenty of options for anyone with sensory accessibility issues, and NASA made sure to include resources for facilitating large groups of volunteers through local schools, libraries, parks, and community centers.

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Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may be the winners of a mysterious 37-year-long game of hide-and-seek and solved a stellar death mystery in the process. They detected the best known evidence for a neutron star laying in the remnants of one of the most famous supernovae in space. 

This massive star explosion created so much debris that it took several years and one of the most powerful space telescopes ever created to peer through the wreckage of its stellar death. The findings are detailed in a study published February 22 in the journal Science and advances the study of these dramatic celestial deaths. 

“The mystery over whether a neutron star is hiding in the dust has lasted for more than 30 years and it is exciting that we have solved it,” study co-author and University College London astrophysicist Mike Barlow said in a statement.

[Related: An amateur astronomer spotted a new supernova remarkably close to Earth.]

What is a supernova?

A supernova is the explosive final death of some of the most massive stars in the known universe. They occur in stars that are eight to 10 times the mass of our sun, so it can take years for all of that gas and energy to collapse in on itself. Its final initial death blows can end within a few hours, but the brightness of the explosion will generally peak within a few months. Importantly, supernovae offer a way for scientists to study a key astronomical process in real time. Explosions like these fill space with the iron, silicon, carbon, and oxygen that build future stars and planets. They can even create the molecules that create life. 

In the study, the team looked at Supernova (SN) 1987A. This well known supernova occurred 160,000 light-years from Earth in a region called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Its light was first observed on Earth in February 1987, with its brightness peaking that May. It was the first supernova that could be seen with the naked eye since Kepler’s Supernova in 1604.

“Supernovae are the main sources of chemical elements that make life possible–so we want to get our models of them right,” said Barlow. “There is no other object like the neutron star in Supernova 1987A, so close to us and having formed so recently. Because the material surrounding it is expanding, we will see more of it as time goes on.”

SN 1987A is also considered a core-collapse supernova, where its compacted remains could form a neutron star or a black hole. Some incredibly small subatomic particles produced by the supernova called neutrinos indicated that a neutron star may have formed. However, in the almost 40 years since SN 1987A was detected, it has not been clear if this neutron star persisted or collapsed into a black hole. The star has been hidden by dust from the explosion.  

How JWST confirmed a neutron star

The observations for this work were taken on July 16, 2022, just after the space telescope became operational. The team in the study used JWST instruments–MIRI and NIRSpec–that can observe the supernova at infrared wavelengths to peer beyond the dust. They found evidence of heavy argon and sulfur atoms whose outer electrons had been stripped off near where the explosion occurred. This process is called ionization. 

[Related: See the stunning Supernova 1987A in a whole new light.]

They modeled multiple scenarios and found that the atoms may have been ionized by ultraviolet and X-ray radiation from a hot cooling neutron star. It also could have been due to the winds of relativistic particles that were accelerated by a quickly rotating neutron star and interacting with material from the supernova. 

“Our detection with James Webb’s MIRI and NIRSpec spectrometers of strong ionized argon and sulfur emission lines from the very center of the nebula that surrounds Supernova 1987A is direct evidence of the presence of a central source of ionizing radiation,” said Barlow. “Our data can only be fitted with a neutron star as the power source of that ionizing radiation.”

The findings are consistent with several theories about how neutron stars form. Models suggest that sulfur and argon are produced in large amounts inside of a dying star just before it goes supernova. Scientists studying SN 1987A and other supernovae predicted that ultraviolet and X-radiation in a supernova remnant would indicate that a newborn neutron star was present. Now, using ultraviolet and X-ray radiation was what helped us find it. 

“This supernova keeps offering us surprises,” study co-author and Sweden Royal Institute of Technology astrophysicist Josefin Larsson said in a statement. “Nobody had predicted that the compact object would be detected through a super strong emission line from argon, so it’s kind of amusing that that’s how we found it in the JWST.”

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After a few tense minutes troubleshooting some communications issues, Odysseus has officially become the first privately constructed spacecraft to land on the moon. Mission Director Tim Crain announced that “Odysseus has a new home.” The uncrewed lunar lander likely touched down near at an impact crater by the moon’s south pole called Malapert A at 6:24 p.m. EST on February 22, 2024. Built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, “Odie” is the first American spacecraft to land on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. 

“I know this was a nail-biter, but we are on the surface, and we are transmitting,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus announced on the webcast. “Welcome to the moon.” While the company has confirmed that it has made contact with the lander, the state of the spacecraft is not yet clear.

It landed in a region that is about 3.5 billion years old. This landing site is near some craters and cliffs, on the side of the moon that is visible from the Earth and could be prime future landing spot for astronauts. Scientists believe that the permanently shadowed craters hold frozen water, which could be used for drinking water during the crewed Artemis missions scheduled later this decade. 

[Related: ‘Odie’ snaps its first images of Earth on its way to the moon.]

During the livestream, NASA administrator Bill Nelson announced that today begins “a new adventure in science, innovation, and American leadership in space. Today is a day that shows the power and promise of NASA’s commercial partnerships. Congratulations to everyone involved in this great endearing quest at Intuitive Machines, Space X, and right here at NASA.”

On Wednesday February 21, Intuitive Machines announced that Odysseus had fired its engine for six minutes and 48 seconds. This slowed it down enough to be pulled into the moon’s orbit about 57 miles above the lunar surface. 

Odysseus successfully launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 15 at 1:05 a.m. EST. The uncrewed lander completed a 230,000-mile journey towards the moon, sending back some images of the Earth along the way. Only government-funded programs from Russia, China, India, the United States, and most recently Japan have performed a successful lunar landing. 

The spacecraft is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs and stands at roughly 14 feet tall and five feet wide. Intuitive Machines calls the spacecraft design Nova-C and notes that it’s about the size of red London telephone booths. When completely loaded with fuel, it weighs about 4,200 pounds. 

NASA is the main sponsor of the mission, paying Intuitive Machines about $118 million to deliver its payload to the moon. NASA hopes that this mission will jumpstart the lunar economy ahead of future crewed Artemis missions. The six NASA navigation and tech experiments in the lander’s payload will collect data critical for the planned missions. Odysseus is also carrying a camera built by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, a prototype for a future moon telescope, and an art project by Jeff Koons. Koons told The New York Times that the project was inspired by his son, Sean Koons. It includes 125 stainless steel sculptures of the moon that are named after inspiring historical figures, including Ada Lovelace, Plato, and Leonardo da Vinci. 

[Related: This private lander could be the first US machine on the moon this century.]

Odysseus’s success comes one month after Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander failed to complete its mission. The spacecraft burned in the Earth’s atmosphere about 10 days after a broken fuel tank and massive leak caused the mission to fail. Other attempts to get a privately-built lunar lander on the moon include Israel’s Beresheet lander in 2019 and Japan’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander in 2023. 

This is a developing story, please check back for more details.

UPDATE, February 22, 2024, 8:53 p.m. EST: Two hours after successfully landing on the moon, Intuitive Machines confirmed on X that “Odysseus is upright and starting to send data.”

UPDATE, February 23, 2024 8:19 a.m. EST: This story has been update with images taken by Odysseus while in orbit and an artist’s rendition of what the lander could look like on the lunar surface.

UPDATE, February 26, 2024 8:23 a.m. EST:  According to Intuitive Machines, the moon lander tripped and fell during its touchdown and is lying on its side. However, it is still functioning. During landing maneuvers, one of its legs got stuck in the lunar surface, causing it to fall over a rock.

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Looking for a change of pace from your day-to-day routine? Life on Earth feeling a bit overwhelming at the moment? How about a one-year residency alongside three strangers at a 3D-printed Mars habitat simulation?

On Friday, NASA announced it is now accepting applications for the second of three missions in its ongoing Crew Health and Performance Analog (CHAPEA) experiment. For 12 months, a quartet of volunteers will reside within Mars Dune Alpha, a 1,700-square-foot residence based at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where they can expect to experience “resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, and other environmental stressors.” 

[Related: To create a small Mars colony, leave the jerks on Earth.]

When not pretending to fight for your survival on a harsh, barren Martian landscape, CHAPEA team members will also conduct virtual reality spacewalk simulations, perform routine maintenance on the Mars Dune Alpha structure itself, oversee robotic operations, and grown their own crops, all while staying in shape through regular exercise regimens.

But if the thought of pretending to reside 300 million miles away from your current home sounds appealing, well… cool your jets. NASA makes it clear that there are a few requirements applicants must meet before being considered for the jobs—such as a master’s degree in a STEM field like engineering, computer science, or mathematics. Then you’ll need either two years professional experience in a related field, or a minimum of 1,000 hours spent piloting aircrafts. Also, only non-smokers between 30 and 55-years-old will be considered, and military experience certainly sounds like a plus.

Oh, and you’ll also need to fill out NASA’s lengthy questionnaire, which includes entries like, “Are you willing to have no communication outside of your crew without a minimum time delay of 20 minutes for extended periods (up to one year)?” and, “Are you willing to consume processed, shelf-stable spaceflight foods for a year with no input into the menu?”

It’s certainly a lot to consider. But as tough as it might be, simulations like CHAPEA are vital for NASA’s Artemis plans to establish a permanent human presence on both the moon and Mars. The truly intrepid and accomplished among you have until April 2 to fill out the official application. Seeing as how CHAPEA’s inaugural class is currently about halfway through their one-year stint, this second round of volunteers won’t need to report for duty until sometime in 2025. 

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Scientists have detected water molecules on the surface of an asteroid in space for the first time. The findings reveal new details about how water is distributed in the solar system and are detailed in a study published February 12 in The Planetary Science Journal.

[Related: What astronomers learned from a near-Earth asteroid they never saw coming.]

Water molecules have been detected in asteroid samples returned to Earth, but this marks the first time that the molecules have been discovered on the surface of an asteroid in space. The team studied four silicate-rich asteroids using data from the now-retired Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). This plane equipped with a telescope was operated by the German Aerospace Center and NASA. Some observations taken by SOFIA’s Faint Object InfraRed Camera (FORCAST) instrument revealed that asteroids Iris and Massalia have evidence of a specific wavelength of light that indicates that water molecules are present on their surface. The asteroid Iris is giant at 124-miles-diameters and orbits our sun between mars and Jupiter. Massalia is about 84 miles across and is also near the Red Planet.  

“Asteroids are leftovers from the planetary formation process, so their compositions vary depending on where they formed in the solar nebula,” Anicia Arredondo, study co-author and astronomer and asteroid specialist at the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. “Of particular interest is the distribution of water on asteroids, because that can shed light on how water was delivered to Earth.”

Dry silicate asteroids are described as anhydrous and they typically form closer to the sun. More icy space rocks like Chariklo are found further away from the sun. Understanding where asteroids are located in the solar system and what they are made from can tell us how the materials in our solar system have been distributed and evolved over time. Since water is necessary for all life on Earth, pinpointing where water could exist can drive where to look for life in our solar system and even beyond.

“We detected a feature that is unambiguously attributed to molecular water on the asteroids Iris and Massalia,” said Arredondo “We based our research on the success of the team that found molecular water on the sunlit surface of the moon. We thought we could use SOFIA to find this spectral signature on other bodies.”

The water molecules were detected by SOFIA in one of the moon’s largest craters in its southern hemisphere. Earlier observations of the moon and asteroids have found some form of hydrogen, but could not tell the difference between water and a close chemical relative called hydroxyl. The team found roughly the equivalent of a 12-ounce bottle of water on the crater. The water was chemical bound in minerals and trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface.

“Based on the band strength of the spectral features, the abundance of water on the asteroid is consistent with that of the sunlit Moon,” said Arredondo. “Similarly, on asteroids, water can also be bound to minerals as well as adsorbed to silicate and trapped or dissolved in silicate impact glass.”

[Related: NASA spacecraft Lucy says hello to ‘Dinky’ asteroid on far-flying mission.]

Parthenope and Melpomene were the two fainter asteroids in the study, and the data did not reveal any definitive conclusions about the presence of water molecules. According to the team, the FORCAST instrument is not sensitive enough to detect the water spectral feature if present here. The team is now getting the help from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to use its precise optics and ability to see in infrared signals to investigate other targets in space.

“We have conducted initial measurements for another two asteroids with Webb during cycle two,” said Arredondo. “We have another proposal in for the next cycle to look at another 30 targets. These studies will increase our understanding of the distribution of water in the solar system.”

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Researchers successfully completed the first remote, zero-gravity “surgery” procedure aboard the International Space Station. Over the weekend, surgeons based at the University of Nebraska spent two hours testing out a small robotic arm dubbed the Miniaturized In Vivo Robotic Assistant, or spaceMIRA, aboard the ISS as it orbited roughly 250 miles above their heads. 

But don’t worry—no ISS astronauts were in need of desperate medical attention. Instead, the experiment utilized rubber bands to simulate human skin during its proof-of-concept demonstration on Saturday.

[Related: ‘Odie’ is en route for its potentially historic moon landing.]

Injuries are inevitable, but that little fact of life gets complicated when the nearest hospital is a seven-month, 300-million-mile journey away. But even if an incredibly skilled doctor is among the first people to step foot on Mars, they can’t be trained to handle every possible emergency. Certain issues, such as invasive surgeries, will likely require backup help. To mitigate these problems in certain situations, remote controlled operations could offer a possible solution.

Designed by Virtual Incision, a startup developing remote-controlled medical tools for the world’s most isolated regions, spaceMIRA weights only two pounds and takes up about as much shelf-space as a toaster oven. One end of its wandlike is topped with a pair of pronglike arms—a left one to grip, and right one to cut.

[Related: 5 space robots that could heal human bodies—or even grow new ones ]

Speaking with CNN on Wednesday, Virtual Incision cofounder and chief technology officer Shane Farritor explained spaceMIRA’s engineering could offer Earthbound the hands and eyes needed to perform “a lot of procedures minimally invasively.”

On February 10, a six-surgeon team in Lincoln, Nebraska, took spaceMIRA (recently arrived aboard the ISS via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket) for its inaugural test drive. One arm gripped a mock tissue sample, and the other used scissors to dissect specific portions of the elastic rubber bands.

While researchers deemed the experiment a success, surgeons noted the difficulty in accounting for lag time. Communications between Earth and the ISS are delayed about 0.85 seconds—while a minor inconvenience in most circumstances, even milliseconds can mean a matter of life or death during certain medical emergencies. Once on the moon, Artemis astronauts and NASA headquarters will deal with a full 1.3 seconds of delay between both sending and receiving data. On Mars, the first human explorers will face a full hour of waiting after firing off their message, then waiting for a response. Even taking recent laser communications breakthroughs into consideration, patience will remain a virtue for everyone involved in future lunar and Mars expeditions.

This means that, for the time being, devices like spaceMIRA are unlikely to help in split second medical decisions. But for smaller issues—say, a lunar resident’s stitch up after taking a tumble, such medical tools could prove invaluable for everyone involved. In the meantime, Virtual Incision’s remote controlled equipment could still find plenty of uses here on Earth.

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A potentially new frontier of lunar exploration began at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the wee hours of the morning. Intuitive Machines’ robotic Odysseus lunar lander successfully launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on February 15 at 1:05 a.m. EST. The uncrewed lander was successfully separated from the rocket about an hour after launch, beginning its 230,000-mile journey towards the moon.

If the mission goes as planned, Odysseus will land on the moon on February 22, where it would be the first private spacecraft to conduct a successful lunar landing. Only government-funded programs from Russia, China, India, the United States, and most recently Japan have performed a lunar landing. 

[Related: This private lander could be the first US machine on the moon this century.]

“It is a profoundly humbling moment for all of us at Intuitive Machines,” the company’s vice president of space systems Trent Martin said during a pre-launch press conference. “The opportunity to return the United States to the moon for the first time since 1972 demands a hunger to explore, and that’s at the heart of everyone at Intuitive Machines.”

The spacecraft is a hexagonal cylinder with six landing legs and is roughly 14 feet tall and five feet wide. Intuitive Machines calls the spacecraft design Nova-C and notes that it’s about the size of a classic red London telephone booth. When fully loaded with fuel, it weighs about 4,200 pounds. 

The lander is aiming to touch down 186 miles away from the moon’s south pole. This region has cliffs, craters, and possibly frozen water. NASA is the main sponsor of the mission, paying Intuitive Machines about $118 million to deliver its payload to the moon. NASA hopes that if this mission is successful it will jumpstart the lunar economy ahead of future crewed missions. The space agency plans to land astronauts there later this decade. The six navigation and tech experiments in the lander’s payload that will collect data critical for these missions. 

“NASA scientific instruments are on their way to the moon–a giant leap for humanity as we prepare to return to the lunar surface for the first time in more than half a century,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “These daring moon deliveries will not only conduct new science at the moon, but they are supporting a growing commercial space economy while showing the strength of American technology and innovation. We have so much to learn through CLPS flights that will help us shape the future of human exploration for the Artemis Generation.”

A camera constructed by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and an art project by Jeff Koons are also making the lunar journey.

Employees at Intuitive Machines held a naming contest to select the lander’s moniker, picking Odysseus after the hero in the ancient Greek poem the Odyssey by Homer. Engineer Mario Romero suggested the name as an analogy for a mission to the moon. 

[Related: Watch a giant, inflatable space station prototype explode during its intentional ‘ultimate burst.’]

“This journey takes much longer due to the many challenges, setbacks and delays,” Romero said in a statement. “Traveling the daunting, wine-dark sea repeatedly tests his mettle, yet ultimately, Odysseus proves worthy and sticks the landing back home after 10 years.”

Odysseus launches one month after Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander failed to complete its mission. The spacecraft burned in the Earth’s atmosphere about 10 days after a broken fuel tank and massive leak caused the mission to fail. Other attempts to get a privately-built lunar lander on the moon include Israel’s Beresheet lander in 2019 and Japan’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander in 2023. 

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The next solar eclipse to cross North America is fast approaching, but over on Mars, the Red Planet already experienced one of its own celestial shadow events this year.

On February 8, the asteroid-sized Martian moon Phobos crossed in front of the sun above Jezero Crater—the area just so happening to host NASA’s Perseverance rover. As Phobos continued across the sky, Percy’s left Mastcam-Z camera angled away from its usual landscape vista subject matter towards the satellite, snapping a few dozen photos for project coordinators back at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

The images showcase a markedly different full lunar eclipse than the ones Earth receives every 2.5 or so years. Given both Phobos’ size and shape, the moon doesn’t fully cover the sun—instead, the  17x14x11 mile misshapen hunk of rock blocks only a small portion of the star as it continues along its path. The result arguably resembles more googly eye than awe-inspiring cosmic calendar occurrence, but it’s still a pretty impressive vantage point.

Phobos and its smaller sibling moon Deimos were discovered in 1877 by US astronomer Asaph Hall, and are respectively named after the Greek words for “Fear” and “Dread.” The origins of both satellites aren’t wholly understood, although astronomers theorize them to be either asteroids or debris leftover from the solar system’s formation that occurred around 4.5 billion years ago.

[Related: The Mars Express just got up close and personal with Phobos.]

While the Earth’s moon continues to inch away from its planetary pull at a rate of roughly 1.5 inches per year, Phobos is actually being drawn towards Mars—about six feet closer every century. While that makes for a comparatively slow descent, it does still mean the moon will eventually either crash into Mars, or break it up into thousands of fragments to form a planetary ring like Saturn’s. No need to worry, though, since that grand finale isn’t expected for another 50 million years. In the meantime, Phobos will continue orbiting Mars at a rate of three times per day, while the slower Deimos completes its journey every 30 hours.

Perseverance’s lunar eclipse capture, while incredible on its own, naturally fails to capture much detail of the moon’s pockmarked surface. Luckily, the European Space Agency’s Mars Express caught a closer look back in 2022, when the satellite came within just 52 miles of the moon to snap its own photos.

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When galaxies collide, their stars are not actually destroyed. These rough-and-tumble dynamics actually trigger the formation of new generations of stars, and potentially even planets to accompany them.

[Related: Behold six galactic collisions, masterfully captured by Hubble.]

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have taken a closer look at 12 of these interacting galaxies. These galaxies all have long tails of gas, dust, and multitudes of stars. Hubble can detect ultraviolet light and has uncovered 425 clusters of newborn stars located along these galactic tails that resemble a string of lights or pearls. Each of these clusters is packed with as many as one million newborn blue stars. The findings were described in a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in September 2023. A new image of the string of pearls galaxy (Galaxy AM 1054-325) was released by NASA on February 8. 

Galactic collisions and high pressure

When galaxies interact with each other, gravitational tidal forces will pull out long streams of gas and dust from the material that make up each galaxy. The Antennae and Mice galaxies have long, narrow, finger-like tendrils and are common examples of what these galactic tails look like.

“As galaxies merge, clouds of gas collide and collapse, creating a high-pressure environment where stars could form,” study co-author and Penn State University astronomer Jane Charlton said in a statement. “The interiors of these mergers have been well studied, but less was known about possible star formation in the debris that results from these mergers, such as in the tidal tails.”

Tails of young stars

In their study, a team of scientists used new observations and archival data to estimate the ages and masses of tidal tail star clusters. At only 10 million years old, these clusters are very young and appear to be forming at the same rate along tails that stretch for thousands of light-years.

“It’s a surprise to see lots of the young objects in the tails. It tells us a lot about cluster formation efficiency,” study co-author and Randolph-Macon College astronomer Michael Rodruck said in a statement. “With tidal tails, you will build up new generations of stars that otherwise might not have existed.”

The tails appear to be taking the spiral arm of a galaxy and stretching it further out into space. The exterior arm is pulled in a gravitational tug-of-war between the two interacting galaxies. 

Galaxies as a time capsule

Before these galactic mergers even happened, the galaxies were rich in dusty clouds of molecular hydrogen. These clouds may simply have been unable to move, but the clouds eventually jostled around and began to bump into each other. This activity then compressed the hydrogen to a point where it created a huge storm of star birth. 

[Related: How do you make cosmic sausage?]

Scientists are still not sure what the fate of these strung-out clusters of stars will be. They could stay gravitationally intact and eventually change into globular star clusters. It’s possible that they may also disperse to form a halo of stars around their host galaxy, or even be cast off and become wandering intergalactic stars.

Nearby galaxies observed by Hubble like these can be used as a proxy for what happened in our universe millions of years ago and are a way to peer into the distant past.

“We think that star clusters in tidal tails may have been more common in the early universe,” said Charlton, “When the universe was smaller and galaxy collisions were more frequent.”

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NASA’s PACE satellite successfully launched into orbit at 1:33 a.m. EST on February 8. The climate satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

[Related: Scientists say the ocean is changing color—and it’s probably our fault.]

The new Plankton, Aerosol, Climate, ocean Ecosystem satellite will study ocean health, air quality, the atmosphere, and the effects of climate change from about 420 miles above the Earth. While NASA already has over 24 Earth-observing satellites and instruments in orbit, this new one should give scientists better insight into how particles in the atmosphere like pollutants and volcanic ash interact with algae and plankton. 

“It’s going to teach us about the oceans in the same way that Webb is teaching us about the cosmos,” said Karen St. Germain, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division, Science Mission Directorate, during a pre-launch briefing on February 4th. St. Germain is referencing the James Webb Space Telescope, which has been unveiling mysteries of the deep cosmos for almost two years. 

What’s on board

PACE will scan the Earth every day using two science instruments, while a third device will take monthly measurements.  

According to NASA, the hyperspectral ocean color instrument will help researchers measure the world’s oceans and other bodies of water across a spectrum of ultraviolet (UV), visible, and near-infrared light. PACE will be able to detect 200 colors, compared to the seven or eight colors that current satellites can pick up. Seeing such a wide spectrum of color will allow researchers to track how phytoplankton is distributed around the globe. 

Two polarimeter instruments are also onboard–Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter #2 and Spectro-polarimeter for Planetary Exploration. Both will detect how sunlight interacts with particles in the atmosphere. This will give sciencents new insight into atmospheric aerosols and cloud properties, and air quality at local, regional, and global scales.

“Observations and scientific research from PACE will profoundly advance our knowledge of the ocean’s role in the climate cycle,” St. Germain said in a statement following the launch. “The value of PACE data skyrockets when we combine it with data and science from our Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission–ushering in a new era of ocean science. As an open-source science mission with early adopters ready to use its research and data, PACE will accelerate our understanding of the Earth system and help NASA deliver actionable science, data, and practical applications to help our coastal communities and industries address rapidly evolving challenges.”

Why study phytoplankton from space

Our planet’s oceans are responding to climate change in several different ways. Sea levels are rising as polar ice melts. Marine heat waves are killing sea life and fueling stronger storms. The ocean is even getting more green and shifts in ocean color is an indication that ecosystems may also be changing. A July 2023 study found that the changes and blue-green fluctuations to the ocean’s hue over the last two decades cannot be explained by natural year-to-year variability alone. These changes are present in over 56 percent of the planet’s oceans. The study also found that tropical oceans near the Earth’s equator have become steadily greener overtime.

[Related: The epic journey of dust in the wind often ends with happy plankton.]

Following tiny phytoplankton can help monitor all of these changes. These microscopic marine algae play a major role in the global carbon cycle. Phytoplankton absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into cellular material. It drives the larger aquatic and global ecosystem by providing food for bigger organisms.

PACE will provide the first measurements of phytoplankton community composition around the world. “This will significantly improve our ability to understand Earth’s changing marine ecosystems, manage natural resources such as fisheries and identify harmful algal blooms,” wrote NASA.

A mission 20 years in the making

In addition to two scrubbed launch attempts earlier this week, PACE has powered through other adversity on its way into orbit. The Trump Administration tried to cancel the mission four times in separate budget proposals. However, the funds were already allocated by Congress which saved it.

It has also had delays and cost overruns. NASA capped the mission’s total price tag at $805 million in 2014, with a launch initially scheduled for 2022. By the 2024 launch, the cost ballooned to $948 million.

“After 20 years of thinking about this mission, it’s exhilarating to watch it finally realized and to witness its launch. I couldn’t be prouder or more appreciative of our PACE team,” Jeremy Werdell, PACE project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement. “The opportunities PACE will offer are so exciting, and we’re going to be able to use these incredible technologies in ways we haven’t yet anticipated. It’s truly a mission of discovery.”

Scientists expect to start getting the first data from PACE in a month or two. 

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On February 4, NASA’s Perseverance Rover snapped an image of its now defunct companion, the Ingenuity helicopter. The pair had spent almost three Earth years scouring the Red Planet for signs of ancient life, advancing aerial missions on Mars. The damaged ingenuity helicopter has been sitting there for just over two weeks. 

[Related: RIP Mars Ingenuity, the ‘little helicopter that could.’]

The Perseverance Rover snapped the image at 1:05 p.m. global mean solar time that shows the “little helicopter that could” sitting alone on a barren Martian sand dune in Neretva Vallis. Perseverance rolled away from its broken companion, possibility for the last time. The image was beamed back to Earth and processed by visual design student Simeon Schmauss, who stitched together the six raw NASA images into a panorama. 

Zooming in on Ingenuity's final resting place among the sand ripples in Neretva Vallis.

Full resolution panorama: https://t.co/jbDkOAM5bB

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Simeon Schmauß #ThanksIngenuity #MarsHelicopter pic.twitter.com/EiBZYYjbZR

— Simeon Schmauß (@stim3on) February 5, 2024

On January 18, Ingenuity’s rotors were damaged when it made a landing on what NASA called a “bland” patch of Martian landscape. Typically, the helicopter used rocks and other distinguishing features on the Red Planet to help it navigate, but the drone did not have many visual cues during its 72nd and final flight. 

NASA confirmed that the rotocopter damaged at least one blade when it completed the flight. While it landed upright and was still in communication with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), its flying days were officially over. The JPL is still analyzing the damage. 

On January 31, NASA held a live streamed tribute to Ingenuity. “We couldn’t be prouder or happier with how our little baby has done,” Ingenuity Project Manager Teddy Tzanetos said during the event. “It’s been the mission of a lifetime for all of us. And I wanted to say thank you to all of the people here that gave their weekends, their late nights. All the engineers, the aerodynamic scientists, the technicians who hand-crafted this aircraft.”

Ingenuity first landed on Mars on February 18, 2021. By April, it became the first powered aircraft to lift off from the surface of another planet. Ingenuity was initially intended to do five test flights with the Perseverance over 30 days. However, this four pound helicopter just kept going. It flew 14 times farther than planned and had a total flight time of two hours. Ingenuity hovered above the rover acting as a scout, as Perseverance puttered along the sands of Mars. It lasted about 33 times longer than NASA expected. 

[Related: Name a better duo than NASA’s hard-working Mars rover and helicopter.]

Before Ingenuity’s demise, the dynamic duo explored Mars’ Jezero Crater. This site contains evidence of ancient bodies of water that could have harbored life billions of years ago. Ingenuity worked by capturing aerial views of Mars that pinpointed places for Perseverance to explore further. 

During the January 31 livestream, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Deputy Director Tiffany Morgan said that Ingenuity will have a lasting legacy for future aerial missions, and demonstrated how to use helicopters in missions to other planets

Thanks in part to Ingenuity’s success, NASA has proposed using two helicopters in a planned Mars Sample Return mission. These  small aircraft could help pick up the canisters of rock samples that the rover has been placing along the planet’s surface. The orbiter for this mission is expected to launch in 2027 and the lander in 2028, with the samples returned to Earth as early as 2033. 

Until then, Perseverance must go it alone. 

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Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have released new images of 19 nearby face-on spiral galaxies seen in a combination of near- and mid-infrared light. Spiral galaxies are some of the universe’s most awe-inspiring bodies. Their buff and wavy arms are chock full of stars arranged in a whirlpool pattern with vibrant colors and light. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), the most visually spectacular spiral galaxies are considered “face-on,” which means that their spiral arms and bulge are clearly visible.

[Related: Elliptical galaxies may just be spiral galaxies with their arms lobbed off.]

These new images combine years of data collected from multiple different telescopes to paint a more complete picture of these whirly spiral galaxies and how they form. 

“I feel like our team lives in a constant state of being overwhelmed–in a positive way–by the amount of detail in these images,” Thomas Williams, a postdoctoral researcher from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. 

Tracing spiral arms

JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIR-Cam) captured millions of stars that appear in blue tones in the new images. Some of the stars appear climbed tightly together in clusters, while others are spread along the spiral arms. 

The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) data shows where glowing space dust exists around and between the stars. It also shows some stars that have not fully formed. These stars are still encased in the dust and gas that fuel their growth. 

“These are where we can find the newest, most massive stars in the galaxies,” Erik Rosolowsky, a physicist from the University of Alberta in Canada, said in a statement.

The JWST images also show large, spherical shells in the gas and dust. According to the team, these holes were potentially created by one or more stars that exploded. The explosion then carved out giant holes in interstellar material. 

The spiral arms also reveal the extended regions of gas that appear red and orange in the new images.  

“These structures tend to follow the same pattern in certain parts of the galaxies,” Rosolowsky added. “We think of these like waves, and their spacing tells us a lot about how a galaxy distributes its gas and dust.” 

Further research into these structures could provide key insights into how galaxies in our universe build, maintain, and stop star formation. 

Center of the galaxy

Spiral galaxies likely grow from the inside out. Stars will begin to form at the core of the galaxy before spreading along the arms and spiraling away from the center. The location of the stars can also provide clues to their ages. The younger stars are most likely the ones the furthest away from the galaxy’s core. The areas closest to the core that appear to be illuminated by a blue spotlight are believed to be the older stars.  

The galaxy cores in pink and red spikes may be a sign of a giant and non-dormant black hole.

“That’s a clear sign that there may be an active supermassive black hole,” Eva Schinnerer, a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, said in a statement. “Or, the star clusters toward the center are so bright that they have saturated that area of the image.”

Sinking PHANGS into space

The images are part of a long-standing project called PHANGS–Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS. It is supported by over 150 astronomers worldwide. Before JWST created the images, PHANGS was already analyzing large amounts of data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope’s Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array. 

[Related: Bursting stars could explain why it was so bright after the big bang.]

These previous observations were taken in ultraviolet, visible, and radio light. JWST’s new near- and mid-infrared contributions have provided several pieces of evidence to the study of spiral galaxies. 

“Webb’s new images are extraordinary,” Janice Lee, a project scientist for strategic initiatives at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, said in a statement. “They’re mind-blowing even for researchers who have studied these same galaxies for decades. Bubbles and filaments are resolved down to the smallest scales ever observed, and tell a story about the star formation cycle.”

In addition to these new images, the PHANGS team has also released the largest catalog to date of about 100,000 star clusters which may help astronomers learn more about their stellar lives.

“Stars can live for billions or trillions of years,” Ohio State University astronomer Adam Leroy said in a statement. “By precisely cataloging all types of stars, we can build a more reliable, holistic view of their life cycles.”

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Earth’s moon is a constant in the night sky, following predictable phases in its orbit. However, its size likely has been changing over time. A study published January 25 in the Planetary Science Journal found that the moon has shrunk more than 150 feet in circumference as its core gradually cooled over the past few hundred million years. 

[Related: The moon is 40 million years older than we thought, according to crystals collected by Apollo astronauts.]

A team of scientists from NASA, the Smithsonian, Arizona State University, and The University of Maryland discovered evidence that the continuing shrinkage led to some surface changes around the Lunar South Pole. The terrain has even changed in areas where NASA hopes to land during the crewed Artemis III mission. 

How the moon is like a grape

This lunar shrinking process looks similar to how a grape wrinkles when it becomes a raisin. The moon also wrinkles and creases as it shrinks down. However, a grape has a flexible skin, while the moon has a brittle surface. The brittleness causes faults to form where sections of the crust push up against each other.

The fault formation caused by this continued shrinking often comes with seismic activity like moonquakes. Any locations near these moon fault zones could pose a threat to human exploration there, the same way that those living near fault lines on Earth face a greater risk of earthquakes. 

In the new study, the team linked a group of faults in the moon’s south polar region to a powerful moonquake recorded by Apollo seismometers over 50 years ago. They used computer models to simulate the stability of surface slopes here and found that some areas in particular were vulnerable to lunar landslides from the seismic activity.

“Our modeling suggests that shallow moonquakes capable of producing strong ground shaking in the south polar region are possible from slip events on existing faults or the formation of new thrust faults,” Thomas R. Watters, study co-author and senior scientist emeritus in the National Air and Space Museum, said in a statement. “The global distribution of young thrust faults, their potential to be active and the potential to form new thrust faults from ongoing global contraction should be considered when planning the location and stability of permanent outposts on the moon.”

Shaking for hours

Shallow moonquakes occur only about 100 or so miles deep into the moon’s crust. They are caused by faults and can be strong enough to damage equipment and human-made structures. Earthquakes tend to last for only a few seconds or minutes at most. Shallow moonquakes can last for hours and even a whole afternoon. The team connected the magnitude 5 moonquake recorded by the Apollo Passive Seismic Network in the 1970s  to a group of faults detected by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter more recently. This means that this seismic activity could devastate any future hypothetical settlements on the moon. 

[Related: 10 incredible lunar missions that paved the way for Artemis.]

“You can think of the moon’s surface as being dry, grounded gravel and dust. Over billions of years, the surface has been hit by asteroids and comets, with the resulting angular fragments constantly getting ejected from the impacts,” study co-author and University of Maryland geologist Nicholas Schmerr, said in a statement. “As a result, the reworked surface material can be micron-sized to boulder-sized, but all very loosely consolidated. Loose sediments make it very possible for shaking and landslides to occur.”

The team will continue to map out this seismic activity on the moon, hoping to pinpoint more locations that could be dangerous for human exploration. NASA’s Artemis missions are currently scheduled to launch their first crewed flight in September 2025, with a crewed moon landing scheduled for September 2026. One of the ultimate goals of these future missions is a long-term human presence on the moon.

“As we get closer to the crewed Artemis mission’s launch date, it’s important to keep our astronauts, our equipment and infrastructure as safe as possible,” Schmerr said. “This work is helping us prepare for what awaits us on the moon—whether that’s engineering structures that can better withstand lunar seismic activity or protecting people from really dangerous zones.”

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Ingenuity—NASA’s tiny, overachieving Mars rotocopter—has officially ended its historic mission after three years of loyal, extended service. Despite initial plans to only conduct five-or-so test flights over roughly 30 days back in 2021, the four-pound, 19-inch-tall drone kept on trucking for another three years. Ingenuity ultimately spent over two hours buzzing through Red Planet’s thin, CO2-laden atmosphere during its 72 total flights, eventually traversing a whopping distance of roughly 11 miles.

On January 25, however, NASA confirmed its rotocopter damaged at least one blade while completing a flight on January 18. Although upright and still in communication with ground control, Ingenuity’s days of aerial exploration are definitely behind it.

Dubbed “the little helicopter that could” by NASA director Bill Nelson in a prerecorded message posted yesterday, Ingenuity “flew higher and farther than we ever imagined.”

“Through missions like Ingenuity, NASA is paving the way for future flight in our solar system and smarter, safer human exploration to Mars and beyond,” he continued.

The helicopter touched down alongside the Perseverance rover way back on February 18, 2021, but continued setting new records as recently as last month. On December 20, 2023, Ingenuity sped along at nearly 22.5 mph for 135 seconds, covering about 2,315 feet in the process. Another successful flight ensued on December 22, but Ingenuity’s 71st mission unfortunately ended in an emergency landing. A planned vertical takeoff to confirm its location on January 18 allowed Ingenuity to ascend 40 feet into the air for 4.5 seconds before starting a slow descent to the Martian surface.

At about three feet from landing, however, the rotocopter lost contact with Perseverance, which is (among many other things) responsible for relaying Ingenuity’s data back to Earth. NASA reestablished a link the following day, but later identified significant rotor blade damage.

[Related: NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter set a new flight distance record on Mars.] 

“Ingenuity is an exemplar of the way we push the boundaries of what’s possible every day,” Laurie Leshin, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in yesterday’s announcement. “I’m incredibly proud of our team behind this historic technological achievement and eager to see what they’ll invent next.”

According to NASA’s final tally, Ingenuity lived up to its name for nearly 1,000 Martian days—around 33 times longer than anticipated. During its tenure, the rotocopter received a software update beamed through space that allowed it to autonomously select the best landing sites, weathered destructive dust storms, contended with a dead sensor, and lived through Martian winter temperatures as low as -112 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Fare thee well, Ingenuity. For a trip down memory lane, check out NASA’s official mission website.

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The final samples collected from the asteroid Bennu are finally coming into view. Four months after they were dropped off in a Utah Desert and nine days after safely prying open two stubborn fasteners, a team of astromaterials experts at NASA’s John Space Center has revealed the contents of the fully disassembled OSIRIS-REx sampler. 

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials.]

On January 19, NASA’s planetary science division posted “It’s open! It’s open!” on Twitter/X along with a photograph of dark dust and tiny rocks inside the canister. The reveal comes after the team successfully removed the remaining two fasteners that prevented them from opening the Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism (TAGSAM) head. 

The samples were collected in 2020 from a 4.5 billion year-old near-Earth asteroid named Bennu. According to NASA, the remaining sample material contains dust and rocks that are up to about 0.4 inch in size. The team will determine the final mass of the sample over the coming weeks. Previously, the team collected 2.48 ounces of asteroid material, which surpassed their initial goal of bringing at least 2.12 ounces back to Earth. 

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History debuted a piece of the asteroid Bennu to the public for the first time in November 2023. The sample was dropped off on Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on September 24, 2023. After the dropoff, the spacecraft continued on to a new mission called OSIRIS-APEX. It is set to explore the asteroid Apophis when it comes within 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029. 

What’s next for the Bennu samples

While it looks like average rocks and dirt to the naked eye, the sample is actually asteroid material that could hold chemical clues to our solar system’s formation. Evidence of essential elements like carbon in the rocks outside of the main sample container have already been uncovered by NASA scientists and these early samples also contain some water-rich minerals. Scientists believe that similar water-containing asteroids bombarded Earth billions of years ago, which provided the water that eventually formed our planet’s first oceans.

[Related: NASA sampled a ‘fluffy’ asteroid that could hold clues to our existence.]

The asteroid Bennu dates back to the first 10 million years of the solar system’s development, so it gives scientists a window into what this time period looked like. Bennu is shaped like a spinning top and is roughly one-third of a mile across at its widest part–slightly wider than the Empire State Building is tall. The space rock is classified as “potentially hazardous” by NASA because there is a slim 1 in 2,700 (about 0.037 percent) chance that Bennu could collide Earth by 2182.

The sample curation team at NASA is expected to release a publicly available catalog of the Bennu samples later this year. 

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Despite some recent delays, NASA’s Artemis program is still largely on track to establish a permanent human presence on the moon. Artemis astronauts will rely on a lot of logistical information, both while traversing the lunar surface, as well as for the semi-regular traffic to and from Earth. To prepare for this, NASA is testing various tools to ensure a safe, precise, and reliable extended lunar stay for visitors—and one of the space agency’s most successful recent experiments harnessed a long-used tactic here on Earth to achieve a first for the moon.

According to NASA, its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO)—currently in moon’s orbit—recently aimed a laser altimeter approximately 100km (roughly 62 miles) away below at the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) Vikram lander, near the South Pole region’s Manzinus crater. After firing off a series of five pulses on December 12, 2023, the LRO then recorded the signal mirrored off a small retroreflector aboard Vikram, confirming the method’s first lunar success.

[Related: NASA delays two crewed Artemis moon missions.]

Measuring a laser’s return time from a retroreflector can help accurately estimate an object’s distance and location. Laser altimeters are often utilized to track satellites above Earth, albeit in the reverse of last month’s test; pulses usually fire from equipment on the surface towards orbital satellites, instead of the other way around. Retroreflectors were also used during Apollo missions to measure the moon’s distance from Earth—an expanse revealed to be growing 1.5 inches further every year.

The Apollo missions’ suitcase-sized reflectors were much larger than the one aboard Vikram, however. In comparison, the Laser Retroreflector Array housed on the Vikram lander is just a circular, 2-inch-diameter aluminum framework. No power source is needed to do its job—all it has to do is wait for lasers to bounce off any of its eight quartz-corner-cube prisms back to the beam’s source.

And speaking of waiting, there was quite a lot of it. LRO’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) emits pulses that only cover a 32-feet-wide portion of the moon’s surface. Gaps between each pulse ensured only a small chance actually hitting the retroreflector as the LRO traveled over the Vikram lander.

“Altimeters are great for detecting craters, rocks, and boulders to create global elevation maps of the Moon. But they aren’t ideal for pointing to within one-hundredth of a degree of a retroreflector, which is what’s required to consistently achieve a ping,” NASA explained last week. Because of this, it took eight attempts to finally make contact with Vikram.

LRO’s altimeter is currently the only laser tool orbiting the moon, so many more will be needed to ensure consistent, accurate measurement readings from retroreflectors. Once those are in place, however, future laser systems could be used to help Artemis astronauts land in the near total lunar darkness, as well as mark locations of already landed spacecraft. Similar retroreflector arrays are currently employed to help cargo deliveries autonomously dock with the International Space Station. Think of them like tiny lunar air traffic controllers helping direct navigation and safety for astronauts. 

Until then, more retroreflectors are on their way—JAXA’s SLIM lander included one during its touchdown last week, and another is scheduled to be aboard a private company’s launch in mid-February.

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Even the brilliant minds at NASA sometimes have trouble opening up a tightly-sealed container. Engineers and scientists from Johnson Space Center finally opened a container of asteroid sample material, after two fasteners had been stuck for about 3.5 months. 

[Related: NASA’s OSIRIS mission delivered asteroid samples to Earth.]

On September 24, 2023, the agency received roughly 2.5 ounces of rocks and dust collected from a 4.5 billion year-old near-Earth asteroid named Bennu. The regolith was dropped off by OSIRIS-REx in a Utah desert. This is the first United States mission to collect samples from an asteroid. The spacecraft traveled 1.4-billion-miles from Earth, to the asteroid Bennu, and then back again to drop off the asteroid dust. However, NASA announced in October that some of the material was out of reach in a capsule inside a robotic arm with a storage container called the Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM). 

The asteroid samples must be analyzed in a specialized glovebox with a flow of nitrogen to prevent them from becoming contaminated. According to NASA, 35 fasteners were holding the sampler shut and two of the fasteners were too difficult to open with any of the pre-approved ways to access containers of such precious samples. They initially managed to collect some black dust and debris l from the TAGSAM head when the aluminum head was first removed and could access some of the material from inside the canister with tweezers or a scoop, while the TAGSAM head’s mylar flap was held down. 

To pry open the stuck fasteners, NASA needed to develop new materials and specialized tools that minimize the risk that the precious space rock samples will be damaged or contaminated. These new tools include custom-fabricated bits built from a specific grade of surgical, non-magnetic stainless steel. This is the hardest metal approved for use in the container’s pristine curation gloveboxes. These techniques enabled the team to open the stuck fasteners. 

“In addition to the design challenge of being limited to curation-approved materials to protect the scientific value of the asteroid sample, these new tools also needed to function within the tightly-confined space of the glovebox, limiting their height, weight, and potential arc movement,” Johnson Space Center OSIRIS-REx curator Nicole Lunning said in a statement. “The curation team showed impressive resilience and did incredible work to get these stubborn fasteners off the TAGSAM head so we can continue disassembly. We are overjoyed with the success.”

After a few additional disassembly steps, the remainder of the sample will be fully visible. Image specialists will be able to take ultra-high-resolution pictures of the sample while it is still inside TAGSAM’s head. After imaging, this portion of the sample will be removed, weighed, and the team will determine the total mass of the asteroid material captured by the mission. 

Bennu dates back to the crucial first 10 million years of the solar system’s development. Its age offers scientists a window into what this time period looked like. The space rock is shaped like a spinning top and is about one-third of a mile across at its widest part–slightly wider than the Empire State Building is tall. It revolves around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

An analysis of Bennu’s dust conducted last fall revealed that the asteroid had a lot of water in the form of hydrated clay minerals. The team believes that signs of water on asteroids support the current theory of how water arrived on Earth.

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials.]

OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta told PopSci in October that asteroids like Bennu were likely responsible for all of Earth’s oceans, lakes, rivers, and rain. Water likely arrived when space rocks landed on our planet about 4 billion years ago. The asteroid Bennu has water-bearing clay with a fibrous structure, which was the key material that ferried water to Earth, according to Lauretta.

The Bennu sample also contained about 4.7 percent carbon. According to Daniel Glavin, the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, this sample has the highest abundance of carbon that a team from the Carnegie Institution for Science have measured in an extraterrestrial sample. Glavin told PopSci that when the team opened it, “There were scientists on the team going ‘Wow, oh my God!’ And when a scientist says that ‘Wow;’ that’s a big deal.”

In the spring, the curation team is scheduled to release a catalog of the OSIRIS-REx samples for the global scientific community to study. OSIRIS-REx is now renamed OSIRIS-APEX and is currently on its way to study a potentially asteroid named Apophis. That rendezvous is scheduled for sometime in 2029.

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On January 9, NASA leadership announced that it is delaying future missions to the moon. Originally slated to launch November 2024, the Artemis II mission that will send four astronauts around the moon has been postponed to September 2025. Meanwhile, the moon-landing mission Artemis III will now aim for September 2026 instead of late 2025. The Artemis IV mission remains on track for September 2028. 

[Related: Inside NASA’s messy plan to return to the moon by 2024.]

The agency cited safety concerns with its spacecraft and development issues with the lunar landers and spacesuits, both of which are being made by private industry. The announcement came within hours of private space company Astrobotic abandoning its attempt to land a spacecraft on the moon due to a fuel leak. Peregrine Mission One launched on January 8 as part of NASA’s commercial lunar program and the lander was intended to serve as a support scout for Artemis astronauts. 

When it eventually launches, Artemis II will not enter orbit around the moon the way that Apollo missions did. Instead, the Orion capsule will swing around the moon and use lunar gravity to sling the spacecraft back towards the Earth. The entire trip is expected to take about 10 days. In April 2023, NASA announced that the crew will be three of its astronauts—Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Reid Wiseman—and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen. 

NASA plans to land two astronauts on the moon near its south pole for the first time in its now rescheduled Artemis III mission. If successful, it will mark humanity’s first return to the lunar surface in over 50 years. 

“Safety is our top priority, and to give Artemis teams more time to work through the challenges with first-time developments, operations and integration, we’re going to give more time on Artemis II and III,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in the live streamed briefing. 

The officials cited several technical issues for the delay, including the electronics in the life support system that will need to sustain the astronauts inside the Orion and the heat shield on the capsule. 

According to deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Moon to Mars program Amit Kshatriya, the heat shield issues that the Orion capsule experienced during the uncrewed Artemis 1 test flight around the moon in November and December 2022 have been a major concern while the data from that mission has been analyzed. They’ve found that while Orion’s heat shield sufficiently protected the capsule, a large amount of the shield was burned away from the spacecraft. 

[Related: Before the Artemis II crew can go to the moon, they need to master flying high above Earth.]

“We did see the off-nominal recession of some char that came off the heat shield, which we were not expecting,” Kshatriya said in the briefing. “Now, this heat shield is an ablative material—it is supposed to char—but it’s not what we were expecting, with some pieces of that char to be liberated from the vehicle.”

Over the past 10 years, NASA’s moon-landing effort has been delayed repeatedly. In December 2023, the Government Accountability Office reported that Artemis III’s targeted December 2025 lunar landing was unlikely. The accountability office cited an optimistic schedule for developing Space X’s Starship lunar lander and the spacesuits necessary for walking on the moon. In 2023, two Starship test launches failed to reach orbit. 
These delays have added billions of dollars to the cost of the program. According to the Associated Press, recent government audits project that it will cost $93 billion through 2025.

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It may officially be Hollywood awards season, but NASA is also rolling out a red carpet of its own. On January 12 at 4pm EST, the agency will livestream the official public debut of its highly anticipated X-59 QueSST experimental aircraft. Designed alongside Lockheed Martin’s secretive Skunk Works division, the currently one-of-a-kind X-59 QueSST (short for Quiet SuperSonic Technology) is intended to demonstrate its potentially industry-shifting ability for human air travel at supersonic speeds sans sonic boom.

A sonic boom’s trademark thunderclap has long been associated with vehicles traveling faster than Mach 1. As a plane’s velocity surpasses the speed of sound, the shockwave formed by its wake results in a percussive noise capable of startling nearby humans and animals, as well as shattering windows if loud enough.

[Related: This experimental NASA plane will try to break the sound barrier—quietly.]

While sonic booms are permitted by certain military aircraft, commercial flights above the US have been prohibited from generating them since the Concorde jet’s retirement in 2003. The cutting edge X-59, in contrast, is designed to travel around 938 mph while only creating a “sonic thump” that is supposedly much quieter than an average sonic boom’s 110 decibels. NASA representatives previously estimated the X-59 will generate around 75 decibels of sound, or about as loud as slamming a car door.

Engineers have spent years creating and honing the X-59’s state-of-the-art design. The experimental craft to be showcased on Friday is much smaller and more elongated than similar planes, measuring roughly 95-feet-long and less than 30-feet-wide. As New Scientist points out, that’s narrower than an F-16, but twice as long. The nose alone comprises nearly half plane’s length to ensure shockwaves generated near the front do not merge with waves created in the rear and thus emit a deafening boom. Because of this, the plane’s pilot will rely on 4K video screens inside the cockpit for their visuals to guide the aircraft.

It’s highly unlikely that X-59 will publicly take to the skies on Friday. Instead, the ceremony is meant to mark the beginning of a multiyear testing phase that will see the X-59 speed above “several US communities” selected by NASA’s QueSST team, who will then gather data and assess public reactions to the supposedly “gentle” sonic thump.

“This is the big reveal,” Catherine Bahm, manager of NASA’s Low Boom Flight Demonstrator project overseeing the X-59’s development and construction, said in a separate announcement. “The rollout is a huge milestone toward achieving the overarching goal of the QueSST mission to quiet the sonic boom.”

To call a sonic thump “quiet” may be a bit of an oversell, however. According to a 2022 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, many people aren’t exactly pleased with daily disruptions caused by existing subsonic air travel, so it’s hard to envision sonic thumps being quieter than the average passenger jet. And even if the X-59’s volume proves nominal, environmental advocates continue to voice concerns over the potentially dramatic increase in carbon emissions that a new era of hypersonic flights could generate. In a letter penned to NASA administrator Bill Nelson by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) last year, the watchdog organization argued increased supersonic travel would be a “climate debacle.”

[Related: Air Force transport jets for VIPs could have a supersonic future.]

“Because the QueSSt mission is focused on the sonic boom challenge, the X-59 is not intended to be used as a tool to conduct research into other challenges of supersonic flight such as landing and takeoff noise, emissions and fuel burn. These challenges are being explored in other NASA research,” NASA representatives told The Register in July 2023.

Even if everything goes smoothly, however, it is unlikely that a fleet of X-59 jets will be zipping over everyone’s heads anytime soon. In 2021, a Lockheed Martin Skunk Works manager estimated that supersonic air travel won’t feasibly make its potential return until around 2035.

First, however, is Friday’s scheduled pomp and circumstance. Viewers can tune into NASA’s livestream of the event at 4pm ET on YouTube, as well as through the agency’s NASA+ streaming service, NASA app, and website.

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On January 8 at 2:18 a.m. local time, the United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) new Vulcan Centaur rocket successfully launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket separated from the lander after about an hour and sent Peregrine Mission One into space.

Several hours after the launch, the company who built the Peregrine lander announced that it had experienced an “anomaly” that stopped Peregrine from pointing its solar panels stably at the sun. In a press release, Astrobotic stated that it has engineers working on this issue, but without the spacecraft’s ability to charge its battery, the plan to for a soft landing on the moon is in jeopardy.

At 1:03 p.m. EST Astrobotic issued an update saying that the mission will likely not go on as planned, as the lunar lander is experiencing a failure within its propulsion system.

Later, Astrobotic announced that Peregrine is suffering a critical fuel leak and has less than two days of fuel left.  An image taken by the lander in space showed damaged insulation on the spacecraft, which indicates a leak in Peregrine’s propulsion system.

“An ongoing propellant leak is causing the spacecraft’s Attitude Control System (ACS) thrusters to operate well beyond their expected service life cycles to keep the lander from an uncontrollable tumble,” the company wrote.

On Tuesday January 9, Astrobiotic announced that it would be abandoning its attempt for a soft landing on the moon. The lunar lander was slated to attempt to make the first soft landing on the moon by the United States since 1972. Peregrine’s mission is to study the lunar surface ahead of future human missions to the moon.

The launch also began a new chapter in the age of private space exploration. The United Launch Alliance is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, with the Vulcan rocket designed to replace two older rockets and compete with SpaceX. The private company owned by Elon Musk sent close to 100 rockets into orbit in 2023 alone. The United States Space Force is also counting on the Vulcan Centaur rocket to launch spy satellites and other spacecraft that Space Force believes are in the interest of national security. 

The Peregrine lander was built by Pittsburgh-based space robotics firm Astrobotic and aimed to become the first lunar lander constructed by a private company. This is also the first mission to fly under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, where NASA pays private companies to send scientific equipment to the moon.

“It’s a dream … For 16 years we’ve been pushing for this moment today,” said Astrobotic CEO John Thornton during a webcast of the launch according to CNN. “And along the way, we had a lot of hard challenges that we had to overcome and a lot of people doubted us along the way. But our team and the people that supported us believed in the mission, and they created this beautiful moment that we’re seeing today.”

Peregrine has a total of 20 payloads on board, five for NASA and 15 others. They include five small moon rovers and the first Latin American scientific instruments attempting to reach the lunar surface. If successful, the technology on board will measure properties including radiation levels, magnetic field, ice and water on the surface and subsurface, and a layer of gas called the exosphere. A better understanding of the exosphere and the moon’s surface is expected to help minimize risks when humans return to its surface, as early as 2025.  

Several non-scientific payloads are aboard as well, including a lunar dream capsule with over 180,000 messages from children around the world, a chunk of Mount Everest, and a physical coin containing one bitcoin.

Controversially, Peregrine is carrying human remains on behalf of commercial space burial companies Celestis and Elysium Space. Celestis offers to carry ashes to the moon for prices starting at more than $10,000. The 265 capsules include human remains from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and original cast members and DNA samples from three former US presidents–George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. Bringing human remains to the moon is strongly opposed by the Navajo Nation, as allowing human remains to touch the lunar surface would be desecration of a body that many tribes consider sacred. In a statement on January 4, Navajo Nation president Buu Nygren said that NASA or other government officials should address the tribe’s concerns ahead of the launch. 

“The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology,” Nygren wrote. “The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.”

[Related: The moon is 40 million years older than we thought, according to crystals collected by Apollo astronauts.]

According to The New York Times, NASA officials said in a news conference that they were not in charge of this mission and do not have a direct say on the payloads that were sold on Peregrine. ”There’s an intergovernmental meeting being set up with the Navajo Nation that NASA will support,” deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA Joel Kearns said on January 4.

Peregrine 1 was originally scheduled to touch down on the surface of the moon on February 23, near Sinus Viscositatis–or the Bay of Stickiness. This area is named for rock domes that were potentially created by viscous lava.

Update January 9, 2:39PM: Additional information from the company about the technical problems has been added.

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A rocket stocked with scientific instruments, technological gadgets, and… bitcoin (literally) is about to head for the moon’s surface. United Launch Alliance’s NASA-funded Vulcan Centaur is slated to lift off in the early hours of January 8 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to begin its nearly two-month journey. After traveling roughly 238,900 miles, the nearly 2,829-pound Peregrin lander, built by private space company Astrobotic, should arrive at the Gruithuisen Domes within the moon’s Sinus Viscositatis region. If successful, it will mark the first US landing on Earth’s satellite since NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

As Gizmodo notes, over 20 various payloads from six countries will be aboard the Peregrin lander—some meant for research, with others purely symbolic gestures ahead of Artemis astronauts’ planned touchdown later this decade.

[Related: Why scientists think it’s time to declare a new lunar epoch.]

The technology aboard

NASA intends to utilize a number of new tools and analysis tech aboard the lander, including a Near-Infrared Volatile Spectrometer System (NIRVSS) and Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS) meant for identifying substances such as water on the lunar surface. A Laser Retro-Reflector Array (LRA) will also provide incredibly precise distance measurements between the moon and Earth, while the Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS) will assess lunar surface radiation to advance future astronauts’ safety.

Similar to LETS, Germany’s M-42 radiation detector will analyze similar potential mission dangers, as Mexico’s Colmena robot swarm will deploy and assemble to form a solar panel. Alongside not to be outdone, Carnegie Mellon University’s tiny, student-built Iris Lunar rover could become the first US robot upon the moon if all goes as planned. In addition, the university is also sending off a MoonArk lightweight time capsule containing poems, music, nano-scale objects, Earth samples, and images.

Also, that

Despite the industry’s many criticisms, a portion of Vulcan’s inventory will also center on cryptocurrency—namely, Bitcoin. Thanks to BitMex and Bitcoin Magazine, a physical Bitcoin engraved with a private encryption key will be deposited on the lunar surface for “future explorers” to recover, along with a few other shiny crypto objects.

Stranger things

Although primarily intended to signify humanity’s future on the moon, next week’s launch also includes the literal remnants of its past. Two memorial space companies, Celestis and Elysium Space, will also have cargo aboard the Vulcan rocket: DNA from legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, as well as the trace cremated ashes of multiple original Star Trek actors and show creator, Gene Roddenberry.

And all that’s just a portion of the larger inventory list intended to travel in the Vulcan rocket next week. For a more detailed look at additional payload info, including a hunk of Mount Everest, head over to Gizmodo.

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Over the holiday weekend, NASA released new images of Jupiter’s icy, volcanic moon Io. The Juno spacecraft flew within roughly 930 miles of the celestial body’s surface on December 30, 2023, capturing images that show off a volatile and pockmarked moon. 

[Related: Astronomers find 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter.]

The JunoCam imager captured the new images. They depict a red sphere dotted with giant gray volcanoes. Io is considered the most volcanic world in our solar system. By comparison, Earth sees roughly 50 eruptions each year and Io may have volcanic activity that is 100 times greater. Jupiter’s gravitational pull is largely responsible for Io’s volcanism. A tug-of-war between the large planet and the additional gravitational effects of Jupiter’s other giant moons–Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto–intensifies frictional tidal heating on Io. It takes this moon about 42 hours to orbit Jupiter, and the immense heat produced during orbit likely creates an ocean of magma underneath Io’s surface, fueling eruptions.

According to NASA, this was the closest flyby of Io since a similar flight made by the Galileo spacecraft in October 2001. Launched in 2011, the Juno spacecraft first entered Jupiter’s orbit in 2016. It is the first explorer to look below the gas giant’s dense clouds, with a mission to study our solar system’s largest planet and the origins of the solar system as a whole. The Juno mission has been monitoring the moon’s volcanic activity from distances ranging from about 6,830 miles to more than 62,100 miles. The team hopes that information collected in the December flyby and previous observations from the mission help them learn more about these intense volcanoes.  

“We are looking for how often they erupt, how bright and hot they are, how the shape of the lava flow changes, and how Io’s activity is connected to the flow of charged particles in Jupiter’s magnetosphere,” Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. 

[Related: A mysterious magma ocean could fuel our solar system’s most volcanic world.]

A second close flyby of Io is scheduled for February 3, 2024, where Juno will fly within about 930 miles of the moon’s surface again. The spacecraft has also performed close flights near the of the Jupiterian moons Ganymede and Europa.

“With our pair of close flybys in December and February, Juno will investigate the source of Io’s massive volcanic activity, whether a magma ocean exists underneath its crust, and the importance of tidal forces from Jupiter, which are relentlessly squeezing this tortured moon,” said Bolton. 

Beginning in April, Juno will also perform a series of occultation experiments that use Juno’s Gravity Science experiment to probe the makeup of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Studying what materials compose this part of the planet’s atmosphere should provide astronomer’s with key data on Jupiter’s shape and interior structure. The Juno mission is scheduled to wrap-up in late 2025. 

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NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter (technically a rotorcraft) has made dozens of tiny aerial jaunts across Mars since first arriving on the planet in February 2021, but its latest flight set a new record for the tiny aircraft. On December 21, NASA reported Ingenuity’s 69th flight was also its farthest, according to its flight log—over 135 seconds, the four-pound, 19-inch-tall helicopter traveled roughly 2,315 feet at a speed of nearly 22.5 mph, beating its previous distance of about 2,310 feet achieved in April 2022.

As impressive as Ingenuity’s most recent flight already is, the trip went even better than originally expected. According to NASA’s Flight 69 preview log, the agency estimated its helicopter to journey about 2,304 feet over 131 seconds.

[Related: Name a better duo than NASA’s hard-working Mars rover and helicopter.]

In total, Ingenuity has so far spent 125.5 minutes aloft to fly nearly 10.5 miles across the surface at altitudes as high as almost 80 feet. While chugging along, the helicopter snaps images of the ground beneath it to send back home to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) team overseeing the program in California. As Digital Trends notes, the visual aids have so far helped NASA engineers plot efficient, safe paths for the project’s Perseverance rover. In some instances, photographs even revealed new nearby geologic formations that the rover then detoured to explore.

Ingenuity long surpassed its original estimated lifespan, even without taking its latest feats into consideration. When first launched back in 2021, NASA expected the aircraft to only last for 5 flights in order to test avionic capabilities in the thin Martian air (just 1 percent of Earth’s atmosphere), and had no intention of utilizing it as a major component in the overall Perseverance mission.

It hasn’t all been smooth flying for Ingenuity, however. Back in May 2022, the helicopter briefly went dark after a seasonal increase in atmospheric dust prevented its solar arrays from fully recharging. Thankfully, engineers sorted out the situation and reestablished communications with their rotorcraft. Now, after nearly 14 times more trips than first intended under its wings, Ingenuity doesn’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.

[Related: Why NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter briefly went dark on Mars.]

Now that the helicopter exceeded NASA’s hopes, the agency believes similar, more advanced iterations could be deployed during future Mars missions, and perhaps even other locales throughout the solar system. For now, however, it’s one day at a time for Ingenuity—its 70th flight is also tentatively scheduled for this week.

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NASA’s Psyche spacecraft accomplished yet another historic communications achievement less than a month after successfully firing its “first light” laser data transmission. On December 11, the onboard Deep Space Optical Communications array’s flight laser transceiver sent an “ultra-high definition” video clip approximately 19 million miles back to Earth—a new record not just for transmission, but for cat videos, as well.

According to NASA’s December 18 announcement, Psyche sent an encoded near-infrared laser beam to Earth last week at its maximum bandwidth speed of 267 megabits per second (Mbps) while en route to the space probe’s final destination, a metal-heavy asteroid located between Mars and Jupiter. Roughly 101 seconds later, researchers at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory received and downloaded the data package. The team then sent each individual video frame over to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the clip played in real time. And then, a cat named Taters made space exploration history.

As NASA explains, the 15-second video clip’s main character is an ode to some of the very first television test broadcast transmissions. Beginning in 1928, many of these earliest airings included a tiny statue of popular cartoon character, Felix the Cat. In honor of cats’ long lineage in telecommunications, Psyche’s brief scene showcases a sizable orange tabby named Taters chasing a red laser pointer across a couch while chilled out music plays in the background. Overlaid graphics also display information about the cute cat such as its heart rate, alongside more pertinent project info like Psyche’s orbital path, technical specs, and data bit rate information. 

[Related: NASA’s Psyche wins first deep space laser relay.]

Even across millions of miles of space, the demonstration reportedly holds up to some of the best internet download rates here on Earth.

“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, [Psyche] was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” Ryan Rogalin, JPL’s receiver electronics lead for the project, explained on Monday. “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space.”

Thanks to this and future Psyche laser system testing, NASA plans to ready astronauts’ communications arrays for longterm voyages to the moon and Mars.

“Increasing our bandwidth is essential to achieving our future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to the continued advancement of this technology and the transformation of how we communicate during future interplanetary missions,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said in the agency’s December 18 announcement.

For now, however, Taters takes center stage—although the video’s focal point wasn’t only a callback television’s very first test broadcasts.

“Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online,” reads NASA’s announcement, adding in its accompanying material that, “Coincidentally, cats like to chase lasers.”

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A team using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted the smallest free-floating brown dwarf star ever recorded and two other “failed stars.” They are located in a star cluster that’s only 1,000 light-years from Earth and is not associated with a parent star. The findings were published December 13 in the Astronomical Journal and may help astronomers better determine the boundaries between stars and planets. 

[Related: A Jupiter-sized dwarf star burns half as hot as a campfire.]

Failed Stars

Brown dwarfs are celestial bodies that are more massive than planets, but not quite as large as stars. They form the way stars do, growing dense enough to collapse under the weight of their own gravity, but they never become dense and hot enough to start fusing the hydrogen needed to turn into a star. This is why they get the nickname “failed stars.”

The brown dwarf JWST spotted has a mass around eight times that of the planet Jupiter. Meanwhile, the smallest of these stars has a mass around three times that of Jupiter, which challenges current theories about how these types of celestial bodies are formed. Astronomers are using JWST to try and determine what the smallest celestial objects that can form in a star-like manner are. 

“One basic question you’ll find in every astronomy textbook is, what are the smallest stars? That’s what we’re trying to answer,” study co-author and Pennsylvania State University astronomer Kevin Luhman said in a statement. 

Scouring the skies

Luhman and his colleague Catarina Alves de Oliveira began their search with star cluster IC 348. This grouping is only about 1,000 light-years away in the Perseus star-forming region. Star cluster IC 348 is relatively young, at only about 5 million years old. Due to its age, any brown dwarfs present would still be relatively bright in infrared light and be glowing from the heat of their formation.

They imaged the center of the star cluster with JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to identify any brown dwarf candidates from their brightness and colors. They then used the microshutter array on the telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) to look at the most promising targets. The JWST’s sensitivity to infrared light allowed the team to detect fainter objects than other ground-based telescopes. 

They narrowed the star cluster down to three possible targets. All of the stars weighed three to eight Jupiter masses and had surface temperatures ranging from 1,500 to 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the team’s computer models, the smallest target was only three to four times the size of Jupiter and can offer clues to the star formation process.

[Related: Two tiny stars fit into an orbit smaller than our sun.]

“It’s pretty easy for current models to make giant planets in a disk around a star,” study co-author and European Space Agency (ESA) astronomer Catarina Alves de Oliveira of ESA said in a statement. “But in this cluster, it would be unlikely this object formed in a disk, instead forming like a star, and three Jupiter masses is 300 times smaller than our Sun. So we have to ask, how does the star formation process operate at such very, very small masses?”

A strange molecule

Tiny brown dwarfs can also help astronomers better understand exoplanets because the smallest brown dwarfs overlap with the largest known exoplanets. While they would generally be expected to have some similar properties, a free-floating brown dwarf is easier to study than a giant exoplanet. The glare of its host star generally hides giant exoplanets, making them more difficult to observe.  

Two of the brown dwarfs in this study also have evidence of an unidentified hydrocarbon, a molecule made up of both hydrogen and carbon atoms. NASA’s Cassini mission detected the same infrared signature in the atmosphere of Saturn and its moon Titan and in the gas between stars.

“This is the first time we’ve detected this molecule in the atmosphere of an object outside our solar system,” said Alves de Oliveira. “Models for brown dwarf atmospheres don’t predict its existence. We’re looking at objects with younger ages and lower masses than we ever have before, and we’re seeing something new and unexpected.”

The star or planet identity crisis

The question remains whether brown dwarfs are considered stars or rogue planets that were ejected from planetary systems. This team argues that the brown dwarfs in this study are most likely brown dwarf stars, and not an ejected planet. 

While the rogue planet theory couldn’t be completely ruled out, it is unlikely. Most of the stars in cluster IC 348 are low-mass and the team believes that it’s unlikely that they are capable of producing massive planets. The cluster also may not have had enough time during its 5 million years of existence for gas giants to form and be ejected from their planetary systems.  

Finding more objects like these brown dwarfs could help clarify their status as stars or planets. Some theories suggest that rogue planets are more likely to be spotted on the outskirts of a star cluster. Expanding the search area may reveal if they exist within IC 348. Future research could also take longer surveys that can pick up fainter and smaller objects. 

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NASA intends the Voyager program to continue its historic exploration for at least another few years. But after nearly half a century and billions of miles of cosmic travel, the pair of space probes aren’t the young, spry technological wonders they were back in 1977. Repairs are to be expected, as was the case earlier this year when NASA beamed a pair of software patches out to both Voyager 1 and 2. Earlier this week, however, NASA confirmed the detection of a new issue—while this one only reportedly affects Voyager 1, its engineering team is already at work finding a solution to coax a bit more life out of the record-breaking endeavor.

On December 12, NASA announced an issue within Voyager 1’s flight data system (FDS), one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Although the probe can receive and carry out engineers’ commands, the FDS is currently unable to use its telemetry modulation unit (TMU) subsystem. Without this line of communication, Voyager 1 can’t transmit its engineering and science data back home.

[Related: Voyager probes get virtual tune-up to keep decades-long missions going and going.]

Although the TMU is designed to send data packages to Earth through simple binary code, it’s now “stuck” repeating a single pattern. NASA reportedly attempted the classic “turn it off and on again” IT trick, but to no avail.

According to the agency on Tuesday, it may take “several weeks” for a new potential solution to materialize. This is largely due to the fact that the Voyager program has continued chugging along far past its original lifespan estimate. Any remedies to these sorts of issues likely involves delving into decades-old documents penned by NASA engineers, people who had no way of knowing back in 1977 just how much further the probes would travel past Jupiter and Saturn. NASA also reminded everyone in its news update that, unlike near instantaneous texting between pals on Earth, it takes about 22.5 hours for signals to reach Voyager 1. That means it takes roughly two days minimum to assess the efficacy of any potential remedy.

Regardless of the current issue’s outcome, Linda Spilker, a project scientist for the Voyager program, knows there will inevitably come a day when Earth bids a final adieu to the little spacecrafts that could.

[Related: How is Voyager’s vintage technology still flying?]

“We’ve been able to resolve so many Voyager issues in the past but these are old spacecraft and we know that they can’t last forever,” she writes. “Voyager’s original mission was only four years long and we have certainly outlasted those early expectations.”

“The Voyager mission has transformed the way we look at our own solar system, from the planetary flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, to now exploring interstellar space, a place where no spacecraft has flown before,” Spilker continued.

“We realize that Voyager means a lot to people and we are doing our best to keep them going for as long as possible.”

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Six decades of human lunar exploration has shaped the moon’s environment. There has been enough change that some scientists argue that a new geological epoch on the moon should be declared. In a commentary published December 8 in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of anthropologists and geologists say it should be called the Lunar Anthropocene and “space heritage” should be preserved and cataloged. 

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

Why the Lunar Anthropocene?

Scientists used the term Anthropocene to describe the epoch where humans began to have a significant impact on Earth’s ecosystem and geology. The planet is about 4.5 billion years old, and modern humans have only been around for 200,000 years. In that short amount of time, Homo sapiens have significantly altered Earth’s biological, chemical, and physical systems. 

The beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch is still being debated and has a large range. Some suggest it began thousands of years ago. Others pinpoint 1950, when plutonium isotopes from nuclear weapons tests were found at the bottom of a relatively pristine lake in Canada. Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses accelerating global warming, ocean acidification, increased species extinction, habitat destruction, and natural resource extraction are additional signs that humans have dramatically modified our planet.

“The idea is much the same as the discussion of the Anthropocene on Earth—the exploration of how much humans have impacted our planet,” study co-author and Kansas University archaeologist Justin Holcomb said in a statement. “Similarly, on the moon, we argue the Lunar Anthropocene already has commenced, but we want to prevent massive damage or a delay of its recognition until we can measure a significant lunar halo caused by human activities, which would be too late.”

64 years of moon exploration–and disturbance

On September 13, 1950, the USSR’s uncrewed spacecraft Luna 2 first descended onto the lunar surface. In the decades since, over 100 other spacecraft have touched the moon. NASA’s Apollo Lunar Modules followed in the 1960s and 1970s and China got the first seedling to sprout on the moon in 2019. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully landed on the moon with the Chandrayaan-3 mission in August. 

All of this activity has displaced more of the moon’s surface than natural meteroid impacts and other natural processes. 

In Nature Geoscience, the team argues that upcoming lunar missions and projects will change the face of the moon in more extreme ways. They believe that the concept of the Lunar Anthropocene may help correct a myth that the moon is barely impacted by human activity and is an unchanging environment. 

[Related: Lunar laws could protect the moon from humanity.]

“Cultural processes are starting to outstrip the natural background of geological processes on the moon,” Holcomb said. “These processes involve moving sediments, which we refer to as ‘regolith,’ on the moon. Typically, these processes include meteoroid impacts and mass movement events, among others. However, when we consider the impact of rovers, landers and human movement, they significantly disturb the regolith.”

They believe that the lunar landscape will look entirely different in only half a century, with multiple countries having some presence on the surface of the moon. 

University College London astrophysicist Ingo Waldmann told New Scientist that the moon has entered its version of the Anthropocene. He said that lunar geology isn’t very dramatic. The moon might see an asteroid impact every couple of million years, but there aren’t too many other big events. “Just us walking on it has a bigger environmental impact than anything that would happen to the moon in hundreds of thousands of years,” said Waldmann.

The moon is currently in a geological division called the Copernican Period. It dates over one billion years ago. In that time, Earth has gone through roughly 15 geological periods.

Leave only footprints

The unofficial motto of the United States National Park Service here on Earth is “take only photographs, leave only footprints.” The authors of this commentary believe that a similar mindset should apply to the moon. Debris from human missions to the moon includes everything from spacecraft components, excrement, golf balls, flags, and more.

“We know that while the Moon does not have an atmosphere or magnetosphere, it does have a delicate exosphere composed of dust and gas, as well as ice inside permanently shadowed areas, and both are susceptible to exhaust gas propagation,” the authors wrote. “Future missions must consider mitigating deleterious effects on lunar environments.”

The team hopes that calling a similar attention to the environmental impact of the moon will protect their historical and anthropological value. There are currently no laws or policy protections against disturbing the moon. The team hopes that this concept of a Lunar Anthropocene will spark conversations about human impacts on the moon and how historical artifacts are preserved.

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SpaceX’s second, unpiloted Starship test flight of the year ended in yet another fiery inferno on November 18. This time, the sudden end arrived roughly 8 minutes into its 90-minute scheduled mission. But although its Super Heavy first stage booster suffered a fatal “rapid unscheduled disassembly” in the Caribbean, the world’s most powerful rocket almost doubled its previous lifespan and passed multiple other crucial milestones.

Starship launched once again from its test site near Boca Chica, Texas, at 8:03am ET on Saturday, with all 39 of the Super Heavy booster’s Raptor engines remaining lit during the mission—a first for the spacecraft intended to eventually deliver humans to Mars. At two minutes and 41 seconds following liftoff, Starship’s hot-staging sequence—in which upper stage engines ignite and separate from the booster—also proceeded successfully, clearing yet another hurdle for SpaceX engineers. The reusable booster then performed its flip maneuver en route towards an intended safe return back to Earth, but exploded only a few seconds later. The booster’s fate wasn’t a huge surprise, however, as SpaceX mission control operators already suspected such a dramatic event could occur due to the immense “load on top of the booster.”

Meanwhile, the Starship upper stage continued to soar for another few minutes to roughly 92 miles above the Earth’s surface—well above the Kármán Line, an internationally recognized demarcation between the planet’s atmosphere and outer space. Moments before its scheduled Second Engine Cut Off, or SECO, the upper stage met its own explosive demise. Space X representatives cited a delay in Starship’s automated flight termination system, but do not yet know the exact cause for its malfunction. If successful, Starship would have circumnavigated Earth before performing a hard landing near Hawaii.

The results of April’s Starship test received considerable criticism from both Boca Chica locals and the Federal Aviation Administration for surrounding environmental damage sustained during launch. Starship’s Raptor engines burn approximately 40,000 pounds of fuel per second to reach 17 million pounds of thrust. Nearby Texan residents described the blowback as resembling a “mini earthquake” at the time, with at least one business owner’s store window shattering. The April 20 test flight blasted a 25-feet deep crater, ejecting clouds of dirt, dust, and debris into the air while smashing a bowling ball-sized fragment into a nearby NASA Spaceflight van. Much of the area near Starship’s launch site includes protected ecosystems, as well as land considered sacred by local Indigenous communities. The FAA soon issued 63 corrective actions needed before SpaceX could legally attempt another Starship test.

[Related: SpaceX’s Starship launch caused a ‘mini earthquake’ and left a giant mess.]

Unlike SpaceX’s outing, Starship’s upgraded launch mount reportedly better mitigated the resulting blowback—at least according to Elon Musk’s company assessment. The FAA, meanwhile, wasted no time in issuing its own statement on Saturday’s event.

“A mishap occurred during the [SpaceX] Starship OFT-2 launch from Boca Chica, Texas, on Saturday, Nov. 18,” the administration posted to X over the weekend. Although no injuries or public property damage was reported this time, the FAA promised to oversee the “SpaceX-led mishap investigation” to ensure the company will comply with “regulatory requirements.”

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Although NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is currently en route to its rendezvous with a unique, metal-heavy asteroid floating between Mars and Jupiter, it still has quite a while before it reaches its destination. But researchers aren’t waiting until the end of its 3.5 year, 280-million-mile journey to make the most of the project. Even after barely a month of spaceflight, Psyche is already achieving some impressive technological feats.

On November 16, NASA announced its Deep Space Optical Communications experiment aboard Psyche successfully achieved “first light” earlier this week, beaming a data-laden, near-infrared laser nearly 10 million miles back to Caltech’s Palomar Observatory. Additionally, DSOC operators were able to “close the link”—the vital process in which test data is simultaneously beamed through both uplink and downlink lasers. Although only the first of numerous test runs to come, it completes a necessary step within NASA’s ongoing plans to develop far more powerful communications tools for future space travel.

[Related: In its visit to Psyche, NASA hopes to glimpse the center of the Earth.]

Astronauts, ground crews, and private companies have all utilized radio wave frequencies for data transfers and communications since the late-1950’s, thanks to a global antenna array known as the Deep Space Network. As organizations like NASA aim to expand humanity’s presence beyond Earth in the coming decades, they’ll need to move away from radio systems to alternatives like infrared lasers. Not only are such lasers more cost efficient, but they are also capable of storing and transmitting far more information within their shorter wavelengths. Further along in DSOC’s development, for example, will hopefully accomplish data transmission rates between 10-to-100 times greater than today’s spacecraft radio systems.

“Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,”  Trudy Kortes, NASA’s director of Technology Demonstrations, said in Thursday’s announcement.

NASA also noted that, while similar infrared communications has been successfully achieved in low Earth orbit as well as to-and-from the moon, this week’s DSOC milestone marks the first test through deep space. This is more difficult thanks to the comparatively vast, growing distance between Earth and Psyche. During the November 14 test, data took roughly 50 seconds to travel from the spacecraft to researchers in California. At its farthest distance from home, Psyche’s data-encoded photons will take around 20 minutes to relay. That’s more than enough time for both Earth and Psyche to drift further along their own respective cosmic paths, so laser arrays on the craft and at NASA will need to adjust for the changes. Future testing will ensure the terrestrial and deep space tech is up to the task.

[Related: NASA’s mission to a weird metal asteroid has blasted off.]

Once it becomes the new norm, Jason Mitchell, director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies Division within NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, believes optical lasers will offer a “boon” for researchers’ space missions data collection, and will help enable future deep space exploration.
“More data means more discoveries,” Mitchell said in NASA’s announcement.

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Hindsight is not quite 20/20 for NASA’s historic Apollo missions. For instance, the Apollo 12 lander successfully touched down on the moon at exactly 6:35:25 UTC on November 19, 1969. What happened to the lunar environment as astronauts touched down, however, wasn’t recorded—and exact details on the reactions between nearby rocks, debris, and lunar regolith to lander engines’ supersonic bursts of gas aren’t documented. And physically replicating Apollo 12’s historic moment on Earth isn’t possible, given stark differences in lunar gravity and geology, not to mention the moon’s complete lack of atmosphere.

This is particularly a problem for NASA as it continues to plan for astronauts’ potential 2025 return to Earth’s satellite during the Artemis program. The landing craft delivering humans onto the lunar surface will be much more powerful than its Apollo predecessors, so planning for the literal and figurative impact is an absolute necessity. To do so, NASA researchers at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, are relying on the agency’s Pleiades supercomputer to help simulate previous lunar landings—specifically, the unaccounted information from Apollo 12.

As detailed by NASA earlier this week, a team of computer engineers and fluid dynamics experts recently designed a program capable of accurately recreating Apollo 12’s plume-surface interactions (PSI), the interplay between landing jets and lunar topography. According to the agency, the Pleiades supercomputer generated terabytes of data over the course of several weeks’ worth of simulations that will help predict PSI scenarios for NASA’s Human Landing System, Commercial Lunar Payload Services, and even future potential Mars landers.

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’]

NASA recently showed off one of these simulations—the Apollo 12 landing—during its appearance at SC23, an annual international supercomputing conference in Denver, Colorado. For the roughly half-minute simulation clip, the team relied on a simulation tool called the Gas Granular Flow Solver (GGFS). The program is both capable of modeling interactions to predict regolith cratering, as well as dust clouds kicked up around the lander’s immediate surroundings.

According to the project’s conference description, GGFS utilizing its highest fidelities can “model microscopic regolith particle interactions with a particle size/shape distribution that statistically replicates actual regolith.” To run most effectively on “today’s computing resources,” however, the simulation considers just one-to-three potential particle sizes and shapes.

[Related: Moon-bound Artemis III spacesuits have some functional luxury sewn in.]

The approximation of the final half-minute of descent before engine cut-off notably includes depictions of shear stress, or the lateral forces affecting a surface area’s erosion levels. In the clip, low shear stress is represented by a dark purple hue, while the higher shear stress areas are shown in yellow.

Going forward, the team intends to optimize the tool’s source code, alongside integrating increased computational resources. Such upgrades will allow for better, higher fidelity simulations to fine-tune Artemis landing procedures, as well as potentially plan for landing missions far beyond the lunar surface.

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There are millions of pieces of space junk orbiting Earth these days, so what’s one more bit of detritus amidst the trash cloud?

According to NASA’s recent spacewalk debriefing, International Space Station denizens Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara spent nearly seven hours conducting various repairs on a sun-tracking solar panel array. During their shift, however, one of their “crew lock bags” (astronaut-speak for a toolkit) accidentally got loose, and drifted away before either astronaut could catch it. While not a major issue in and of itself, this certainly highlights (yet again) the growing problem floating above humanity’s heads.

[Related: The FCC just dished out their first space junk fine.]

Thankfully, the lock bag didn’t contain anything of major importance. In a separate press conference last week, ISS deputy program manager Dana Weigel stated the bag’s contents included “some tethers and things like tool sockets” similar to the everyday household varieties, calling them “fairly common items” that aren’t a “huge impact” for the crew. Most importantly, Mission Control observed the bag’s current orbital trajectory and determined it presents a low risk of “recontacting” with the ISS, with “no action required.”

Meganne Christian, a European Space Agency 2022 astronaut class member, shared a clip on social media taken from Moghbeli’s helmet camera showing the toolbag’s escape into the cosmic abyss.

Since the toolbag isn’t in a stable orbit, experts estimate it will decay into Earth’s atmosphere sometime during March 2024. Given its size, the lost equipment will burn up completely during the descent, so there’s no need to stress or keep an eye to the sky—unless that’s your thing, of course.

The US Space Force already cataloged the new orbital debris as 58229/1998-067WC, and will track its movements over the course of its lifespan. Per The Register, the toolbag’s brightness is measured at a stellar magnitude +6, meaning you could hypothetically witness its atmospheric reentry with the naked eye during perfect weather conditions. That said, binoculars will probably increase the odds of seeing its fiery end.

[Related: Some space junk just got smacked by more space junk, complicating cleanup.]

But one toolbag’s atmospheric cremation does very little to solve the ongoing issue of space junk. After years of orbital industry expansion, the planet is surrounded by discarded rocket debris, satellites, and all manner of space travel detritus. It’s getting so bad that a recent project space junk cleanup project was suddenly complicated by its target colliding with another bit of trash.

Thankfully, governmental regulators are taking notice—earlier this year, the FCC issued its first ever space pollution fine to the satellite television provider, Dish Network, for failing to properly decommission one of its satellites last year. No penalties are expected for ISS astronauts Moghbeli and O’Hara; after all, they aren’t the first astronauts to drop the bag, so to speak. In 2008, two ISS astronauts accidentally lost a kit containing “two grease guns, scrapers, several wipes and tethers and some tool caddies.”

Update 11/17/2023 12:20PM : The Virtual Telescope Project has released this image, taken on November 15, 2023. The tool bag is still zooming around the Earth at roughly 17,500 mph until its projected March 2024 deorbit.

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After over half a century of loyal service, the world’s last remaining Super Guppy aircraft continues to dutifully transport NASA’s gigantic rocket parts in its cavernous, hinged cargo bay. On Tuesday, the Huntsville International Airport posted a video and accompanying images to social media of the rotund plane arriving from Kennedy Space Center. Perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, it sounds like a prop plane of that size can make a huge, rich racket on the tarmac.

[Related: Artemis II lunar mission goals, explained.]

Aboard the over 50-ton (when empty), turboprop plane this time around was the heat shield that protected last year’s Artemis I Orion spacecraft. The vital rocketry component capable of withstanding 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit resided in the Super Guppy’s 25-foot tall, 25-foot wide, 111-foot long interior during a nearly 690-mile journey to the Alabama airport, after which it was transported a few miles down the road to the Marshall Space Flight Center. From there, a team of technicians will employ a specialized milling tool to remove the heat shield’s protective Avcoat outer layer for routine post-flight analysis, according to NASA.

The Super Guppy is actually the third Guppy iteration to lumber through the clouds. Based on a converted Boeing Stratotanker refueling tanker and designed by the now defunct Aero Spacelines during the 1960s, an original craft called the Pregnant Guppy was supplanted by its larger Super Guppy heir just a few years later. This updated plane included an expanded cargo bay, alongside an incredibly unique side hinge that allows its forward section to open like a pocket watch. A final Super Guppy Turbine debuted in 1970, and remained in use by NASA for over 25 years. In 1997, the agency purchased one of two newer Super Guppy Turbines built by Airbus. This Guppy is the current and only such hefty boy gracing the skies. With its bulky profile, the Super Guppy’s travel specs are pretty impressive—it’s capable of flying as high as 25,000 feet at speeds as fast as 250 nautical miles per hour.

[Related: NASA’s weird giant airplane carried the future of Mars in its belly.]

Last PopSci checked in on the Super Guppy’s journeys was back in 2016, when it transported an Orion crew capsule potentially destined for a much further trip than the Artemis missions’ upcoming lunar sojourns—Mars. According to Digital Trends, the Super Guppy’s next flight could occur sometime next year ahead of NASA’s Artemis II human-piloted lunar flyby.

“Although much of the glory of America’s space program may be behind it, the Super Guppy continues to be one of the only practical options for oversized cargo and stands ready to encompass a bigger role in the future,” reads a portion of NASA’s official description.

Until then, feel free to peruse the official, 74-page Super Guppy Transport User’s Guide.

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been exploring Jupiter since it arrived at the planet in 2016. In recent years, the mission has turned its attention to the gas giant’s many moons, including the hellish volcanic world Io and the ice ball Europa. Now, in research published in Nature Astronomy, the Juno team revealed new photos of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, which show evidence of salts and organic compounds. These materials are likely the residue of salty sea water from an underground ocean that bubbled up to the frozen surface of Ganymede. And, excitingly, a salty ocean indicates conditions there might be conducive to life.

Ganymede is a particularly weird place. Not only is it Jupiter’s most massive satellite, it’s the biggest moon in the whole solar system—it’s even larger than the planet Mercury. It also is the only moon to have its own magnetic field, generated from a molten metal core deep in its interior. Like other icy worlds of the outer solar system, such as Europa or possibly Pluto, Ganymede probably has an ocean lurking under its icy crust. Some studies suggest multiple seas, stacked together in a layer cake of ice sheets and oceans, hide underground.

“Because Ganymede is so big, its interior structure is more complicated” than that of smaller worlds, explains University of Arizona geologist Adeene Denton, who is not affiliated with the new work. She notes that the moon’s massive size means there’s a lot of space for interesting molecules to mix about. But that also means they’re tricky to spot, because material must cover a large distance  to get to the surface where our spacecraft can see them.

Juno finally passed close enough to Ganymede—within 650 miles, less than the distance from New York City to Chicago—to take a close look at the chemicals on its surface using its Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM). This incredible instrument tracked the composition of Ganymede’s surface in great detail, noting features as small as 1 kilometer wide. If JIRAM were looking at New York City, it would be able to map Manhattan in ten-block chunks.

[Related: Astronomers find 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter]

Importantly, material on the surface of Ganymede might tell us about the water hiding below. If there are salts above, the subsurface ocean might have that same brine. Oceans, including the ones on Earth, acquire their salt from chemical interactions where liquid water touches a rocky mantle. This kind of exchange is “one of the conditions necessary for habitability,” says lead author Federico Tosi, research scientist at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome, Italy.

However, other current research suggests that Ganymede doesn’t have a liquid water layer directly touching its mantle. Instead, icy crusts separate the ocean from the rock. But because the team did see these salts in the JIRAM data, it suggests they were touching at one point in the past, if not now. “This testifies to an era when the ocean must have been in direct contact with the rocky mantle,” explains Tosi.

As for the organic chemicals that Juno detected, the team still isn’t completely  sure what flavor of compound they are. They’re leaning towards aliphatic aldehydes, a type of molecule found elsewhere in the solar system that’s known as an intermediate step necessary to build more complex amino acids. These usually indicate liquid water and a rocky mantle are interacting. This definitely isn’t a detection of life, but it’s interesting for the possibility of life lurking in Ganymede’s hidden oceans. “The presence of organic compounds does not imply the presence of life forms,” says Tosi. “But the opposite is true: life requires the presence of some categories of organic compounds.”

[Related: Why a 3,000-mile-long jet stream on Jupiter surprised NASA scientists]

Unfortunately, Juno won’t have a chance to swing by Ganymede again to search for more salty shores—instead, it’s headed toward the explosive Io. The probe’s most recent survey of these minerals was a “a unique opportunity to take a close look at this satellite,” Tosi says. We won’t have to wait too much longer, though, for a second visit. In about ten years, he adds, we’ll get another chance to explore these salty waters with the ESA JUICE mission, “which is expected to achieve complete and unprecedented coverage of Ganymede.”

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Astronomers have discovered the most distant supermassive black hole ever observed. They had the help of a “cosmic magnifying glass,” or gravitational lensing. This happens when a massive celestial body creates a large curvature of spacetime so that the path of light around it can be bent as if by a lens.

The black hole is located in the galaxy UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744. The galaxy cluster is about 13.2 billion-years-old. The team used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find the telltale signature of a growing black hole. It started to form only 470 million years after the big bang when the universe was only 3 percent of its current age of about 13.7 billion years-old. The galaxy is much more distant than the cluster itself, at 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. 

[Related: Gravitational wave detector now squeezes light to find more black holes.]

Astronomers can tell that this black hole is so young because it is so giant. Black holes evaporate over time. Most black holes in galactic centers have a mass that is equal to roughly a tenth of the stars in their host galaxy, according to NASA. This early black hole is growing and as a mass that is on par with our entire galaxy. Astronomers have never witnessed a black hole at this stage before and studying it could help explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed. The findings are detailed in a study published November 6 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole,” study co-author and astronomer Akos Bogdan said in a statement. Bogdan is affiliated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected,” Bogman added. This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing. The team took X-ray observations with Chandra for two weeks. They saw intense, superheated X-ray emitting gas—a supermassive black hole’s trademark—from the galaxy. The light coming from the galaxy and the X-ray from the gas around the supermassive black hole were magnified by the hot gas and dark matter coming from the galaxy cluster. This effect was like a “cosmic magnifying glass” and it enhanced the infrared light signals that the JWST could detect and allowed Chandra to see the faint X-ray source.

“There are physical limits on how quickly black holes can grow once they’ve formed, but ones that are born more massive have a head start. It’s like planting a sapling, which takes less time to grow into a full-size tree than if you started with only a seed,” study co-author and Princeton University astronomer Andy Goulding said in a statement. 

[Related: ‘Rogue black holes’ might be neither ‘rogue’ nor ‘black holes.’]

Observing this phenomenon could help astronomers answer how some supermassive black holes can hit enormous masses so soon after the explosion of energy from the big bang. There are two opposed theories for the origin of these supermassive black holes–light seed versus heavy seed. The light seed theory says that a star will collapse into a stellar mass black hole and then grow into a supermassive black hole over time. In the heavy seed theory, a large cloud of gas–not an individual star–collapses and condenses to form the supermassive black hole. This newly discovered black hole could confirm the heavy seed theory. 

“We think that this is the first detection of an ‘Outsize Black Hole’ and the best evidence yet obtained that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas,” study co-author and Yale University theoretical astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan said in a statement. “For the first time we are seeing a brief stage where a supermassive black hole weighs about as much as the stars in its galaxy, before it falls behind.”

The team plans to use this and more data coming in from the JWST and other space telescopes to create a better picture of the early universe. 

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On November 3, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History debuted a piece of the asteroid Bennu to the public for the first time. The sample was deposited on Earth by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on September 24. The spacecraft did not land, but instead dropped a capsule containing about nine ounces of asteroid samples down to Earth. The spacecraft continued on to a new mission called OSIRIS-APEX. It is set to explore the asteroid Apophis when it comes within 20,000 miles of Earth in 2029. 

On display is a 0.3-inch in diameter stone that weighs only 0.005-ounces. The stone was retrieved amidst rocks and dust collected by the spacecraft in 2020 after two years of exploring Bennu. 

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials.]

OSIRIS-REx stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer and is the first US mission to collect samples from an asteroid. The spacecraft traveled 1.4-billion-miles from Earth, to the asteroid Bennu, and then back again. Bennu is roughly 4.5 billion years old and dates back to the crucial first 10 million years of the solar system’s development. Its age offers scientists a window into what this time period looked like. The space rock is shaped like a spinning top and is about one-third of a mile across at its widest part–slightly wider than the Empire State Building is tall. It revolves around the sun between the orbits of Earth and Mars.

“The OSIRIS-REx mission is an incredible scientific achievement that promises to shed light on what makes our planet unique,” Kirk Johnson, the Sant Director of the National Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. “With the help of our partners at NASA, we are proud to put one of these momentous samples on display to the public for the first time.”

The sample was labeled OREX-800027-0 by NASA scientists at Houston’s Johnson Space Center and is being stored in a nitrogen environment to keep it safe from contamination. CT scans of the displayed stone revealed that it is composed of dozens of smaller rocks. The fragments were fused back together at some point and the entire stone was changed by the presence of water. The alterations to the stone produced clays, iron oxides, iron sulfides, and carbonates as its major minerals and even carbon. 

The samples from this mission hold chemical clues to our solar system’s formation. Evidence of essential elements like carbon in the rocks outside of the main sample container have already been uncovered by NASA scientists. These early samples also contain some water-rich minerals. Scientists believe that similar water-containing asteroids bombarded Earth billions of years ago, which provided the water that eventually formed our planet’s first oceans.

[Related: NASA’s OSIRIS mission delivered asteroid samples to Earth.]

“Having now returned to Earth without being exposed to our water-rich atmosphere or the life that fills every corner of our planet, the samples of Bennu hold the promise to tell us about the water and organics before life came to form our unique planet,” museum meteorite curator Tim McCoy said in a statement. McCoy has worked on the OSIRIS-REx mission for nearly two decades as part of an international team of scientists.

According to Space.com, a sizable crowd turned out to see the space rock and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and other space agency and Smithsonian officials were present at the unveiling ceremony. Additional Bennu samples will be on display at a later date and at the Alfie Norville Gem & Mineral Museum at the University of Arizona in Tucson and Space Center Houston, next to to NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

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Tired of paying increasingly hefty monthly subscription fees for your streaming services, only to scroll nearly as long as a movie’s runtime just to find something to watch? Well, your choices are only going to expand thanks to NASA’s new streaming channel. But at least when NASA+ launches on November 8, it won’t come with any fees or commercials.

The commercial free on-demand platform will be available via the NASA App on iOS and Android devices, web browsers, as well as through Roku, Apple TV, and Fire TV. The ever-expanding catalog will include live coverage of launch events and missions, original videos, and multiple new series.

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials.]

“We’re putting space on demand and at your fingertips with NASA’s new streaming platform,” Marc Etkind, NASA Headquarters’ Office of Communications associate administrator, said earlier this year. “Transforming our digital presence will help us better tell the stories of how NASA explores the unknown in air and space, inspires through discovery, and innovates for the benefit of humanity.”

Check out trailers for some of the first series to hit NASA+ this month:

NASA Explorers will offer viewers a multi-episode look at the agency’s recently concluded, seven-year OSIRIS-REx mission. Completed in September, OSIRIS-REx successfully returned samples collected in space from Bennu, a 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid traveling across the cosmos since the dawn of the solar system.

Other Worlds will focus on the latest updates and news from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program. Launched in 2021 following a 17-year-long development on Earth followed by a six-month orbital tune up, the JWST provides researchers with some of the most spectacular glimpses of space ever achieved. Over the course of its decade-long lifespan, the JWST aims to capture information and imagery from over 13.5 billion years ago—when some of the universe’s earliest galaxies and stars began to form.

And for those looking to just bask in cosmic majesty, Space Out will allow viewers to do just that alongside “relaxing music and ultra-high-definition visuals of the cosmos, from the surface of Mars to a Uranian sunset.”

[Related: Moon-bound Artemis III spacesuits have some functional luxury sewn in.]

“From exoplanet research to better understanding Earth’s climate and the influence of the Sun on our planet along with exploration of the solar system, our new science and flagship websites, as well as forthcoming NASA+ videos, showcases our discovery programs in an interdisciplinary and crosscutting way, ultimately building stronger connections with our visitors and viewers,” Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA Headquarters’ Science Mission Directorate, said over the summer.

NASA+ comes as the space agency nears a scheduled 2025 return to the lunar surface as part of its ongoing Artemis program. When humans touch down on the moon for the first time in over 50 years, they apparently will do so in style, with both Prada-designed spacesuits and high-tech lunar cameras.

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The freshly released images from NASA’s Lucy spacecraft’s first asteroid flyby reveal that Dinkinesh is actually a binary pair. A binary asteroid pair has a larger main asteroid and a smaller satellite orbiting around it. In the weeks leading up to the flyby, the Lucy team had wondered if Dinkinesh was actually a binary system because Lucy’s instruments detected the brightness of the asteroid changing over time. This is a sign that something is getting in the way of the light, likely a body orbiting the main space rock. 

[Related: NASA spacecraft Lucy says hello to ‘Dinky’ asteroid on far-flying mission.]

From a preliminary analysis of the first available images, the team estimates that the larger asteroid body is roughly 0.5 miles at its widest and that the smaller body is about 0.15 miles in size.

Dinkinesh is another name for the Lucy fossil that this mission is named after. The 3.2 million-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor were found in Ethiopia in 1974. The name Dinkinesh means “marvelous” in the Amharic language. 

“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” Hal Levison, Lucy principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement. “When Lucy was originally selected for flight, we planned to fly by seven asteroids. With the addition of Dinkinesh, two Trojan moons, and now this satellite, we’ve turned it up to 11.”

The November 1 encounter primarily served as an in-flight test of the asteroid-studying spacecraft. It specifically focused on testing the system that allows it to autonomously track an asteroid as it whizzes by at 10,000 miles per hour. The team calls this its terminal tracking system.

“This is an awesome series of images. They indicate that the terminal tracking system worked as intended, even when the universe presented us with a more difficult target than we expected,” Lockheed Martin guidance and navigation engineer Tom Kennedy said in a statement. “It’s one thing to simulate, test, and practice. It’s another thing entirely to see it actually happen.”

It will take up to a week for the remainder of the data from the flyby to be downloaded to Earth. This week’s encounter was carried out as an engineering check, but the team’s scientists are hoping this data will help them glean insights into the nature of small asteroids.

“We knew this was going to be the smallest main belt asteroid ever seen up close,” NASA Lucy project scientist Keith Noll said in a statement. “The fact that it is two makes it even more exciting. In some ways these asteroids look similar to the near-Earth asteroid binary Didymos and Dimorphos that DART saw, but there are some really interesting differences that we will be investigating.”

[Related: Why scientists are studying the clouds of debris left in DART’s wake.]

The Lucy team plans to use this first flyby data to evaluate the spacecraft’s behavior and  prepare for its next close-up look at an asteroid. This next encounter is scheduled for April 2025, when Lucy is expected to fly by the main belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson. This asteroid is named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johnson, one the scientists who discovered the Lucy fossils.

Launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission is the first spacecraft set to explore the Trojan asteroids. This group of primitive space rocks is orbiting our solar system’s largest planet Jupiter. They orbit in two swarms, with one moving  ahead of Jupiter and the other lagging behind it. 

There are about 7,000 asteroids in this belt, with the largest asteroid estimated to be about 160 miles across. The asteroids are similar to fossils and represent the leftover material that is still hanging around after the giant planets including Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune formed.

Lucy will then travel into the leading Trojan asteroid swarm. After that, the spacecraft will fly past six Trojan asteroids, including binary asteroids like Dinkinesh: Eurybates and its satellite Queta, Polymele and its yet unnamed satellite, Leucus, and Orus. 

In 2030, Lucy will return to Earth for yet another bump that will gear it up for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair in the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm. This mission is scheduled to conclude some time in 2033.

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On November 1, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft successfully completed its first asteroid flyby. The 56 feet-long spacecraft came within 230 miles of the asteroid Dinkinesh aka “Dinky.” This fairly small space rock is in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. 

[Related: Meet Lucy: NASA’s new asteroid-hopping spacecraft.]

Dinkinesh is the first of 10 asteroids the probe will visit over the next 10 years. The asteroid is about 10 to 100 times smaller than the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that are the main target of the Lucy mission. Dinkinesh is another name for the Lucy fossil that this mission is named after. The 3.2 million-year-old skeletal remains of a human ancestor were found in Ethiopia in 1974.

Lucy zoomed by Dinkinesh at about 10,000 miles per hour.  This encounter was the first in-flight test of the spacecraft’s terminal tracking system. 

“The Lucy operations team has confirmed that NASA’s Lucy spacecraft has phoned home after its encounter with the small main belt asteroid, Dinkinesh,” NASA wrote in a blog post. “Based on the information received, the team has determined that the spacecraft is in good health and the team has commanded the spacecraft to start downlinking the data collected during the encounter.”

It will take NASA up to a week to download the data on how Lucy performed during this first in-flight test during the encounter. NASA planned for the high-resolution grayscale camera onboard Lucy to take a series of images every 15 minutes. Dinkinesh has been visible to Lucy’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI) as a single point of light since early September. The team began to use L’LORRI to assist with the navigation of the spacecraft. 

Lucy’s thermal infrared instrument (L’TES) should also begin to collect data. Since L’TES was not designed to observe an asteroid quite as small as Dinkinesh, the team is interested to see if it can detect the half-mile wide asteroid and measure its temperature during the encounter.

Astronomers plan to use the data from this approach to gain a better understanding of small near-Earth asteroids and if they originate from larger main belt asteroids. 

Launched in October 2021, NASA’s Lucy mission is the first spacecraft set to explore the Trojan asteroids. These are a group of primitive space rocks orbiting our solar system’s largest planet Jupiter. They orbit in two swarms, with one ahead of Jupiter and the other lagging behind it. Lucy is expected to provide the first high-resolution images of what these space rocks look like. 

There are about 7,000 asteroids in this belt with the largest about 160 miles across. The asteroids are similar to fossils and represent the leftover material that is still hanging around after the giant planets including Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter, and Saturn formed.

[Related: New image reveals a Jupiter-like world that may share its orbit with a ‘twin.’]

In 2024, Lucy will return towards Earth for a second gravity push that will give it the energy needed to cross the solar system’s main asteroid belt. It is expected to observe asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson in 2025. This asteroid is named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johnson, one the scientists who discovered the Lucy fossils.

It will then travel into the leading Trojan asteroid swarm. After that, the spacecraft will fly past six Trojan asteroids: Eurybates and its satellite Queta, Polymele and its yet unnamed satellite, Leucus, and Orus. 

In 2030, Lucy will return to Earth for yet another bump that will gear it up for a rendezvous with the Patroclus-Menoetius binary asteroid pair in the trailing Trojan asteroid swarm. This mission is scheduled to end some time in 2033.

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In the summer, astronomers spotted an airplane-sized asteroid—large enough to potentially destroy a city—on an almost-collision course with Earth. But no one saw the space rock until two days after it had zoomed past our planet. 

This asteroid, named 2023 NT1, passed by us at only one-fourth of the distance from Earth to the moon. That’s far too close for comfort. Astronomers weren’t going to let this incident go without a post-mortem. They’ve recently dissected what went wrong and how we can better prepare to defend our planet from future impacts, in a new paper recently posted to the preprint server arXiv.

We know from history that asteroids can cause world-shattering events and extinctions—just look at what happened to the dinosaurs. The study team estimated that, if NT1 hit Earth, it could have the energy of anywhere from 4 to 80 intercontinental ballistic missiles. “2023 NT1 would have been much worse than the Chelyabinsk airburst,” says University of California, Santa Barbara astronomer Philip Lubin, a co-author on the new work, referring to the meteor that exploded over a Russian city in 2013. As devastating as that would be, it’s “not an existential threat like the 10-kilometer hit that killed our previous tenants,” he adds.

The asteroid-monitoring system ATLAS, the “Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System”—four telescopes in Hawaii, Chile, and South Africa—discovered NT1 after the rock flew by. ATLAS’s entire purpose is to scour the skies for space rocks that might threaten Earth. So with this set of eyes on the sky, how did we miss it? 

It turns out that Earth has what Brin Bailey, UC Santa Barbara astronomer and lead author on the paper, calls a “blindspot.” Any asteroid coming from the direction of the sun gets lost in the glare of our nearest star.” There’s another way for asteroids to sneak up on us, too: the smaller the asteroid, the harder it is for our telescopes to spot them, even when the rocks come from parts in the sky away from the sun.

[Related: NASA’s first asteroid-return sample is a goldmine of life-sustaining materials]

“Currently, there is no planetary defense system which can mitigate short-warning threats,” Bailey says. “While NT1 has no chance of intercepting Earth in the future, it serves as a reminder that we do not have complete situational awareness of all potential threats in the solar system,” they add. That leads to Lesson #1: We simply need better detection methods for planetary defense. 

If we can manage to detect an asteroid with a few years’ warning, we might be able to redirect it with the technology recently tested by NASA’s Double-Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.For a case with very little warning, such as NT1, though, we’d need a different approach—that’s Lesson #2. Bailey and colleagues propose a method they call “Pulverize It” (PI). 

PI’s plan is exactly what it sounds like: break the asteroid into tiny pieces, small enough to burn up in the atmosphere or fall to the ground as much less dangerous little rocks. They’d do this by launching one or multiple rockets to send arrays of small impactors to space. The impactors—six-foot-long, six-inch-thick rods—would smash into the asteroid like buckshot, efficiently dismantling it. “Had we intercepted it [NT1] even one day prior to impact, we could have prevented any significant damage,” claims Lubin.

It sounds simple enough, but some astronomers aren’t quite convinced. “I think the PI method is impractical even though it does not violate the laws of physics,” says University of California, Los Angeles astronomer Ned Wright, who was not involved in the new work. “When a building is demolished by implosion using explosive charges, a weeks-long testing and planning phase is needed in order to place the charges in the right locations and set up the proper timing. The PI method seeks to do this measuring, planning, and placing the explosives all within a period of 1 minute or so just before the spacecraft hits the asteroid.”

[Related: NASA’s first attempt to smack an asteroid was picture perfect]

Lubin points out that unlike a careful demolition on Earth, the goal is a sudden, bomb-like explosion—an event that needs less prep to pull off. But whether we use PI or another line of defense, it’s clear that we need to plan ahead. Not only is there the hazy threat of an asteroid coming out of nowhere, there are two specific, extremely risky events headed our way: asteroid Apophis’ near flyby in 2029, and close approaches from the even larger Bennu (recently sampled by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission) in 2054, 2060, and 2135.

“Humanity now possesses the technology to robustly detect and defend the planet if we choose to do so,” says Lubin. “And a variety of people are working hard to ensure we can.”

This story has been updated: An earlier version indicated that the asteroid-destroying impactors would be filled with explosives. While that may be an option, most forms of the “Pulverize It” method use non-explosive metal rods.

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Sometimes, amazing science happens in the background with little to no public attention. All those years of hard efforts and incremental progress are left unseen except by those living and working through it. Now, a new book detailing the making of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) aims to change that by sharing photographs, diagrams, and behind-the-scenes information of the science and pioneers behind the project. 

Inside the Star Factory: The Creation of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Largest and Most Powerful Space Observatory gives us a full-body summary of an astronomical feat that required more than 100 million hours of labor over the course of 30 years. It covers everything from the initial conception of the idea to the Christmas Day launch in 2021, providing a robust picture of what went into designing, engineering, and testing such a masterpiece. Science writer Christopher Wanjek provides an in-depth overview of the history of JWST, but even more, the book serves as an “illustrated guide [that] shows readers the heady world of scientific discovery at the very limits of human knowledge.”

All of the 100-plus images of the telescope’s construction were taken by Chris Gunn, who joined the project 15 years ago and was the only photographer given such extensive access to the development and launch of JWST. Over his long career, he’s focused on creating intricate images and videos related to science and technology, with previous experience capturing the last servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. His work puts faces to NASA’s biggest telescope endeavor, humanizing the entire assignment and showcasing those who dedicated so much of their time to a single goal. 

We had a chance to speak with Gunn about his new book to find out more about his process and experience. Here’s what he revealed. 

PopSci: How did you get involved with NASA and JWST? 

Gunn: I worked as a photographer on the last servicing mission to Hubble from 2006 to 2009. When that mission ended, I was asked to join the JWST team. I had never imagined being on such a long-term project. 

PopSci: What was the most challenging part about photographing the project? 

Gunn: The most challenging part about photographing this project was also the most exciting: the constantly evolving subject. Seeing parts of the observatory come together was amazing, but the trick was to keep a consistent look and feel in my photographs throughout the project. I started to pay more attention to the environments that I was shooting and bring elements of these environments into my compositions. When I could light my subjects, I took great care to do it subtly. Eventually, I realized that JWST’s geometry photographed beautifully but any distortion ate away at that beauty. Over time I became a more selective shooter with more restraint. 

PopSci: What’s your favorite moment (or moments) from your time with the team? 

Gunn: My favorite moments include the arrival of the first mirrors, the first time I saw the optical system deployed inside of NASA Johnson’s test chamber, and the mating of the optical system to the sunshield and main spacecraft bus. During each of these project milestones the cleanrooms were filled with a sense of awe and wonder. They aren’t particularly noisy in general, but they were super quiet for these moments. I had a sense that I was witnessing something great that humankind was achieving. 

PopSci: What were your go-to cameras and lenses? 

Gunn: One of the most interesting things about being on such a long-term project is seeing the progression in photographic technology as the years passed. I initially shot with Nikon’s D3s and D3X cameras, and finally settled on D4s for several years. Nikon’s 14-24mm 2.8 lens was my favorite lens early on. 

After the observatory was built, I switched to a medium-format Hasselblad-H camera boasting 50 megapixels. The Hassy gave me more resolution, and more importantly, allowed me to shoot with less distortion. Later in the project I acquired a mirrorless Hasselblad, which I used with adapted H lenses. The Hasselblad 50mm was probably my favorite lens as it offered a sharp, undistorted, and wide perspective. The medium format cameras also forced me to slow down and concentrate on composition. 

PopSci: Do you have a no. 1 photograph from the series? 

Gunn: I have quite a few favorites—they’re all in the book. If I had to choose one, it’s the image used for the cover. It was made at the tail end of a long day and depicts the one and only time that the secondary mirror was deployed using the flight motors. That’s the smaller mirror in the center. The center section of the primary mirror reflects the secondary mirror, and you can see the primary mirror in this reflection. Look closely and you also can see me in this reflection. The selfie was unintentional.

Buy Inside the Star Factory: The Creation of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Largest and Most Powerful Space Observatory here.

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When humans finally return to the moon as part of NASA’s Artemis program, they’ll arrive with a bevy of high-tech equipment to capture new, awe-inspiring glimpses of Earth’s satellite. But cameras have come a long way since the Apollo missions. In 2023, some incredibly advanced options are already almost moon-ready right off the shelf.

According to a recent update from the European Space Agency, engineers collaborating with NASA are finalizing a Handheld Universal Lunar Camera (HULC) with real-world testing in the rocky, lunar-esque vistas of Lanzarote, Spain. While resilient enough to travel to the moon, HULC’s underpinning tech derives from commercially available professional cameras featuring high light sensitivities and cutting-edge lenses. To strengthen the lunar documentation device, researchers needed to add a blanket casing that is durable enough to protect against ultra-fine moon dust, as well as the moon’s extreme temperature swings ranging between -208 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. At the same time, the covering can’t impede usage, so designers also created a suite of ergonomic buttons compatible with astronaut spacesuits’ thick gloves.

[Related: Check out this Prada-designed Artemis III spacesuits.]

So far, HULC has snapped shots in near pitch-black volcanic caves, as well as in broad daylight to approximate the lunar surface’s vast spectrum of lighting possibilities. According to the ESA, HULC will also be the first mirrorless handheld camera used in space—such a design reportedly offers quality images in low light scenarios.

Even with the numerous alterations and adjustments, the HULC is still not quite ready for the Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2025. The ESA reports that at least one version of the camera will soon travel to the International Space Station for additional testing.

“We will continue modifying the camera as we move towards the Artemis III lunar landing,” Jeremy Myers, NASA lead on the HULC camera project, told the ESA on October 24. “I am positive that we will end up with the best product–a camera that will capture Moon pictures for humankind, used by crews from many countries and for many years to come.”

Images of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong striding across the lunar surface during the Apollo 11 moonwalk instantly became iconic photographs in 1969, but they were only a preview of many more to come. Over the next three years, 10 more astronauts documented their visits to the moon using an array of video and photographic cameras. When humans finally return as part of the Artemis program, HULC will be in tow to capture new, awe-inspiring glimpses of Earth’s satellite.

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Against all odds and expectations, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still going strong after nearly half a century of hurtling through—and far past—the solar system. To help boost the potential for the probes’ continued operations, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have beamed out two software updates across the billions of miles separating them from the historic spacecraft. If successful, the pair of interstellar travelers could gain at least another five years’ worth of life, if not more.

On October 20, NASA announced plans to transmit a software patch to protect Voyager 1 and 2 against a glitch that occurred within the former’s system last year. In May 2022, NASA started noticing inaccurate readings coming from Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS). A few months later, engineers determined the AACS was accidentally writing commands into memory instead of actually performing them.

Although engineers successfully resolved an original data issue within Voyager 1 in 2022, the new patch will hopefully ensure such a problem won’t arise again in either probe. Receiving the patch will take over 18 hours to reach transmitters; Voyager 2 will get the patch first to serve as a “testbed for its twin” in case of unintended consequences like accidentally overwriting essential code. Given Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are respectively 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, engineers consider the farther craft’s data more valuable, as it still remains the farthest traveling human-made object. The NASA-JPL team will issue a command on October 28 to test the patch’s efficacy.

[Related: The secret to Voyagers’ spectacular space odyssey.]

The second planned tune-up for Voyager 1 and 2 involves the small thrusters responsible for controlling the probes’ communication antennas. According to NASA, spacecraft can generally rotate in three directions—left and right, up and down, as well as wheellike around a central axis. During these movements, propellant automatically flows through incredibly narrow “inlet tubes” to maintain the antennas’ contact with Earth.

But each time the propellant is used, miniscule residue can stick within the inlet tubings—while not much at first, that buildup is becoming problematic after the Voyager probes’ (many) decades’ of life. To slow the speed of buildup, engineers have edited the probes’ operational commands to allow both craft the ability to rotate nearly 1 degree farther in each available direction. This will reduce how often their thrusters need to fire. When engineers do need to enable thrusters, they now plan to fire them for longer periods of time, thus reducing the overall number of usages. 

[Related: How is Voyager’s vintage technology still flying?]

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” Linda Spilker, Voyager mission project scientist, said via NASA’s update. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

Experts estimate both the fuel lines and software adjustments could extend the Voyager program’s lifespan by another five years. According to NASA, however, “additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.”

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The moon is our closest neighbor in space and the only celestial body humans have set foot on, yet we are still learning about it. In fact, Earth’s moon might actually be 40 million years older than scientists previously believed. By conducting an atom-by-atom analysis on crystals that were brought back by Apollo astronauts in 1972, a team of geochemists and plenary scientists now calculate that the igneous orb is at least 4.46 billion years old. The findings are described in a study published today in the journal Geochemical Perspectives Letters.

Intertwined fates

Heck is a curator for the meteorite collection at the Field Museum in Chicago and a professor at the University of Chicago. He says that studying the moon also helps us understand our own planet because of the topographical differences.

“Earth’s surface is much, much younger because there’s so much geologic activity [here] from volcanism and weathering,” explains Heck. “The moon’s surface is essentially an archive of solar system dynamics. This is a record that we don’t have on Earth, but our planet’s evolution is tied to these impacts that happened in the early solar system.”

A historical perspective

In the study, the team looked at moon dust brought back by the Apollo 17 crew. The 1972 lunar landing included NASA geologist Harrison Schmidt, who collected multiple rocks to study back on Earth. His samples contain very small crystals that were created billions of years ago and can help indicate when the moon was formed.

The energy created by the impact from the object that struck Earth and created the moon melted the rock that eventually became the lunar surface. That offers a clue to the elements that existed on the celestial body since its emergence versus the ones that appeared much later. For example, zirconium, a silver metal found on both the Earth and the moon, could not form and survive on the molten lunar surface: Any zircon crystals that are currently present on the moon must have formed after the magma ocean cooled. Determining the age of these structures can thus reveal the minimum possible age for the moon, assuming that they emerged right after the impact.

Looking atom by atom

Researchers have previously suggested that the moon is older than estimated, but this new study is the first to use an analytical method called atom probe tomography to pinpoint the age from the oldest known lunar crystal retrieved by humans.

“In atom probe tomography, we start by sharpening a piece of the lunar sample into a very sharp tip using a focused ion beam microscope, almost like a very fancy pencil sharpener,” study co-author and planetary scientist Jennika Greer said in a statement. “Then, we use UV lasers to evaporate atoms from the surface of that tip. The atoms travel through a mass spectrometer, and how fast they move tells us how heavy they are, which in turn tells us what they’re made of.”

This atom-by-atom analysis revealed how much of the zircon crystals had undergone radioactive decay—a process where atoms that have an unstable configuration shed some protons and neutrons. They then transform into different elements, like how uranium decays into lead. Based on the amount of conversion and the known half-lives of different chemical isotopes, experts can estimate the age of the sample.

“Radiometric dating works a little bit like an hourglass,” Heck said in a statement. “In an hourglass, sand flows from one glass bulb to another, with the passage of time indicated by the accumulation of sand in the lower bulb. Radiometric dating works similarly by counting the number of parent atoms and the number of daughter atoms they have transformed to. The passage of time can then be calculated because the transformation rate is known.”

The team working with the Apollo 17 sample found that the proportion of lead isotopes (the daughter atoms created during the decay) indicated that the crystals were about 4.46 billion years old, so the moon must at least be that old too. While this puts the moon’s age back 40 million years, that’s still a very short time compared to the universe’s roughly 13.7 billion-year history. 

“It’s amazing being able to have proof that the rock you’re holding is the oldest bit of the moon we’ve found so far. It’s an anchor point for so many questions about the Earth. When you know how old something is, you can better understand what has happened to it in its history,” Greer said.

From Apollo to Artemis

In future studies, clues pulled from these decades-old samples could be pooled with those from samples taken by upcoming Artemis lunar missions. Artemis III is scheduled for 2025 and will land on and explore the lunar South Pole. The Apollo 17 mission collected samples from the Taurus-Littrow valley on the eastern edge of Mare Serenitatis, so crystals from a different region of the moon could yield unimaginable discoveries. 

[Related: Scientists have new moon rocks for the first time in nearly 50 years]

“I am convinced that there is older stuff on the moon—we just haven’t found it yet. I even think we have older zircons in the Apollo samples. This is really the power of sample return,” says Heck. 

A mixture of new samples and future advances in technology could further anchor the timeline of how our solar system was formed and beyond.  “Maybe in 50 or 100 years or even later, new generations of scientists will have the tools we can only dream about today to address scientific questions we can’t even think about today,” says Heck. “These templates are a legacy for future generations.”

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NASA plans to return humans to the moon in 2025 with the Artemis III mission. Before that, the space agency will conduct a vital preliminary mission in November 2024, when the Artemis II mission flies a crew of astronauts in lunar orbit for the first time since the 1970s. But the “important first step” toward those goals, as NASA put it in a recent blog post, is the planned launch of the IM-1 mission carrying the NOVA-C lunar lander in a few weeks. It will attempt to land several NASA science experiments near Malapert A, a crater in the southern lunar polar region. Those studies could help NASA prepare for astronaut operations in the area in 2025. 

Unlike the Artemis missions, though, NOVA-C isn’t a big NASA project. Instead, the truck-sized craft designed to ferry small payloads to the lunar surface was built, and will be operated by, the small Texas-based company Intuitive Machines. 

If it succeeds in landing near the lunar south pole, NOVA-C will be the first US soft landing on the moon since the 1970s, and the first ever commercial landing on the moon that hasn’t crashed or failed. So why is a small spacecraft built by a relatively small company a key part of NASA’s big moon program?

“There is a pattern that we have now seen of NASA trying to move to more commercial solutions and services, rather than do it all on their own,” says Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert and instructor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. It’s much like NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo programs, which contracted with SpaceX to fly astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station aboard its Dragon space capsules. 

[Related: Why do all these countries want to go to the moon right now?]

Now NASA is turning to commercial companies to prepare the way for humanity’s return to the moon. Intuitive Machines was one of the first companies to receive a contract—for $77 million— under NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS program, back in 2019. NASA designed CLPS to fund private sector companies interested in building small, relatively inexpensive spacecraft to fly experiments and rovers to the moon, allowing NASA to simply purchase room on the spacecraft rather than developing and operating it themselves. 

In the case of NOVA-C, five NASA payloads will ride along with devices from universities including Louisiana State and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. ”The NASA payloads will focus on demonstrating communication, navigation and precision landing technologies, and gathering scientific data about rocket plume and lunar surface interactions, as well as space weather and lunar surface interactions affecting radio astronomy,” the space agency wrote in a blog post about the mission. 

“We don’t still don’t know a lot about the moon,” Whitman Cobb adds. The moon has variable gravity depending on where there are more metallic materials. “Finding out where those places are, how lunar dust is going to kick up when you’re trying to land or take off—all of these things are really key.”

That’s why NASA is sending payloads to ride along with NOVA-C. But the reason NOVA-C is landing where it is, about 300 kilometers from the south pole, has more to do with how the whole world is now thinking about the moon.

NOVA-C was originally destined to land in the Oceanus Procellarum, one of the large, dark areas known as mares, or “seas,” on the lunar surface. But in May, NASA and Intuitive Machines announced the change in plans and the new target near the south pole. 

[Related: We finally have a detailed map of water on the moon]

”The decision to move from the original landing site in Oceanus Procellarum was based on a need to learn more about terrain and communications near the lunar South Pole,” NASA announced in a blog post at the time. “Landing near Malapert A also will help mission planners understand how to communicate and send data  back to Earth from a location that is low on the lunar horizon.”

The reasons NASA wants to land near the lunar south pole with Artemis, and why the recent and successful Chandrayaan 3 mission of India, and the failed Russian Luna 25 mission, both targeted the lunar south pole are twofold: research and resources, according to Richard Carlson, a lunar geologist who retired from the Carnegie Institute for Science in 2021.  

“Both north and south polar regions have permanently shadowed craters where water has been detected from orbit,” he says. ”The real question is whether that water is a one micron surface coating of water on a few grains, or whether it’s a substantial abundance of water. Water of course being useful for a lot of things, from drinking water to turning it into hydrogen and oxygen, which is rocket fuel.”

The other motivation for going to the south pole is that it’s geologically very different from where the Apollo missions landed, according to Carlson. “They all landed on a pretty small portion of the moon on the Earth facing side of the moon on the nice flat mares, and that’s a rather unusual part of the moon geologically,” he says. ”If you think of studying the Earth this way, the Apollo lunar program would have basically landed on, let’s say, just North America, and that’s it.”

The lunar south polar region is much more geologically varied, with tall mountains and ridges, as well as rocks dug out from deep within the moon and scattered over the region by impact craters billions of years ago, Carlson says. But of course, such a landscape has its downsides for spacecraft coming from Earth. 

“You look at the pictures of the places that they selected [for Artemis III] and I wouldn’t want to land there. I mean, they’re really rough,” he says. “If we land on a rock, the spacecraft is going to fall over.” Sending small, uncrewed craft like NOVA-C to the moon’s south polar ahead of Artemis astronauts will test how difficult landing there really is. 

After all, as Witman Cobb notes, touching down anywhere on the moon is really hard. Before the failed Luna 25 landing on August 21, there were two failed commercial lunar landings. The Israeli company SpaceIL saw its Beresheet lander crash land in 2019, while the Hakuto-R M1 lander from Japanese company ispace crashed in April. 

”We haven’t seen a commercial company be successful in landing on the moon yet,” Whitman Cobb says. ”That’s really fascinating when you think about our capability of landing humans on the moon in the 1960s, and 1970s. That today, with all of the technology that we now have, this is still a really, really difficult thing to do.”

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Last Friday, NASA launched the Psyche spacecraft toward an asteroid of the same name. Psyche is blazing a trail as the first mission to a metal asteroid, and it’s also about to blaze a literal blue trail. The source of its bright wake—the probe’s remarkable propulsive system—will switch on within the first 100 days of the mission.

A mechanism known as a Hall thruster will propel the Psyche through space. This thruster glows blue as it ionizes xenon, a noble gas also used in headlights and plasma televisions, to move the spacecraft forward. This is the first time this tech, which has only been available for NASA spaceflight since 2015, has been used to travel beyond the moon—but what makes it so special, and why is Psyche using it?

When planning a space mission, engineers are focused on efficiency. Carrying chemical fuel along for the massive interplanetary journey would be like trying to drive around the entire world while having to keep all the gasoline you need in the trunk, because there are no rest stops along the way—it’s just not feasible. To get to its destination, Psyche would need thousands and thousands of pounds of chemical propellant.

[Related: How tiny spacecraft could ‘sail’ to Mars surprisingly quickly]

To get around this problem, engineers turned to electric thrusters. These come in many flavors: “There are many different types of electric thrusters, almost as many as there are different makers of cars,” explained NASA’s Psyche chief engineer Dan Goebel in a blog post. But space travel uses two kinds in particular, known as ion thrusters and Hall thrusters. “They can probably be considered the Tesla versions of space propulsion,” Goebel wrote. Rather than burning fuel, electric thrusters rip off the electrons from the propellant’s atoms in a process known as ionization. Then they chuck those ions out at some 80,000 miles per hour. This generates a higher specific impulse—which Goebel says is “equivalent to miles per gallon in your car,” but for spacecraft—than chemical fuels, enabling a thruster-powered spacecraft to go farther on less propellant.

Ion thrusters use high electric voltages to make a plasma (the fourth state of matter) and spew ions into space. NASA’s Dawn mission used these to get to dwarf planet Ceres, but they’re not the fastest—according to NASA, it would take the spacecraft four days to go from 0 to 60 miles per hour. Definitely not race car material! 

[Related: Want to learn about something in space? Crash into it.]

Hall thrusters, on the other hand, use a magnetic field to swirl electrons in a circle, producing a beam of ions. They don’t get quite as good “mileage” as ion thrusters, but they pack a bigger punch. The Psyche team picked this system because it allowed them to make a smaller, and therefore more cost-efficient, spacecraft. 

For the thrusters to work, the spacecraft needs power—which it gets from the sun, via solar panels—and something to ionize. For Psyche, that’s xenon gas. “Xenon is the propellant of choice because it’s inert (it doesn’t react with the rest of the spacecraft) and is easy to ionize,” explained Goebel. It also gives the thrusters their remarkable blue shine. Psyche carries about 150 gallons of the stuff, and gets about 10 million miles per gallon. 

Now that the mission has launched, the team will spend the next 100 days checking out all the spacecraft’s systems to ensure they’re ready for the journey. At some point in this period, those glimmering blue thrusters will turn on.

If Psyche proves to be a success, Hall thrusters will be likely to make an appearance on future space missions. They offer “the right mix of cost savings, efficiency, and power, and could play an important role in supporting future science missions to Mars and beyond,” said Steven Scott, program manager for the Psyche mission at the company Maxar, which built the thrusters, in a press release. Thanks to these propulsive devices, Psyche should reach its destination in the asteroid belt in just 3.5 years—and we can’t wait to see what lies at the end of its electric blue trail.

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The powdery material that NASA officials unveiled on Wednesday looked like asphalt or charcoal, but was easily worth more than its weight in diamonds. The fragments were from a world all their own—pieces of the asteroid Bennu, collected and returned to Earth for analysis by the OSIRIS-REx mission. The samples hold chemical clues to the formation of our solar system and the origin of life-supporting water on our planet.

The clay and minerals from the 4.5 billion-year-old rock had been preserved in space’s deep freeze since the dawn of the solar system. Last month, after a seven-year-long space mission, they parachuted to a desert in Utah, where they were whisked away by helicopter. 

And now those pristine materials sit in an airtight vessel in a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where researchers like University of Arizona planetary scientist Dante Lauretta are getting their first chance to study the sample up close. 

“The electron microscopes were fired up and ready” by September 27, Lauretta said in a news conference. “And boy did we really nail it.” (Lauretta, the principal investigator, gave the mission its name, which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer.) The preliminary investigation of a tiny fraction of the sample revealed it is rich in water, carbon, and organic compounds.

Carbon is essential for all living things on Earth, forming chemical bonds with hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements necessary to build proteins and enzymes. “We’re looking at the kinds of minerals that may have played essential roles in the origin of life on Earth,” Lauretta said. 

The Bennu sample contained about 4.7 percent carbon, as measured by the Carnegie Institution for Science, according to Daniel Glavin, the OSIRIS-REx sample analysis lead at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This is “the highest abundance of carbon” the Carnegie team has measured in an extraterrestrial sample, Glavin said. “There were scientists on the team going ‘Wow, oh my God!’ And when a scientist says that ‘Wow;’ that’s a big deal.”

[Related: This speedy space rock is the fastest asteroid in our solar system]

The Bennu sample is also flush with organic compounds, too, which glowed like tiny stars within the dark sample when exposed to a black light. “We picked the right asteroid—and not only that, we brought back the right sample,” Glavin said. “This stuff is an astrobiologist’s dream.”

Asteroids like Bennu were most likely responsible for all of Earth’s wet features—the water in oceans, lakes, rivers, and rain probably arrived when space rocks landed on our young planet some 4 billion years ago. Bennu has water-bearing clay with a fibrous structure, which according to Lauretta, was the key material that ferried H₂O to Earth.

Under magnification, the clay has a sinuous shape. “We call this serpentine because they look like serpents or snakes inside the sample, and they have water locked inside their crystal structure,” he said. “That is how we think water got to the Earth.”

This is only the start. The OSIRIS-REx science team, as they catalog the sample, have months of more detailed work ahead. After six months, they will publish the catalog; scientists from around the world will be able to propose studies using the materials—though more than half the sample will be kept in reserve for research to take place years or even decades in the future. 

[Related: NASA’s mission to a weird metal asteroid will blast off … soon]

They have more than a half-pound of material to work with. OSIRIS-REx recovered an estimated 250 grams of Bennu material, more than four times the 60 grams the mission had targeted. And as the science team began dissembling the sample return capsule at Johnson Space Center, they discovered what NASA is calling bonus material: bits of Bennu adhering to the collector head and lid of the sealed canister that brought the bulk of the sample home. 

”The first thing we noticed was that there was black dust and particles all around the outer edge,” Lauretta said. “Already this is scientific treasure.”

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The 2018 winner of PopSci’s annual Best of What’s New continues to impress. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is still edging closer to the sun than any other spacecraft has ever achieved, and it’s setting new speed records in the process. According to a recent status update from the space agency, the Parker Solar Probe has broken its own record (again) for the fastest thing ever made by human hands—at an astounding clip of 394,736 mph.

The newest milestone comes thanks to a previous gravity-assist flyby from Venus, and occurred on September 27 at the midway point of the probe’s 17th “solar encounter” that lasted until October 3. As ScienceAlert also noted on October 9, the Parker Solar Probe’s speed would hypothetically allow an airplane to circumnavigate Earth about 15 times per hour, or skip between New York City and Los Angeles in barely 20 seconds. Not that any passengers could survive such a journey, but it remains impressive.

[Related: The fastest human-made object vaporizes space dust on contact.]

The latest pass-by also set its newest record for proximity, at just 4.51 million miles from the sun’s plasma “surface.” In order not to vaporize from temperatures as high as nearly 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, the Parker Solar Probe is outfitted with a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield to protect its sensitive instruments. These tools are measuring and imaging the sun’s surface to further researchers’ understanding of solar winds’ origins and evolution, as well as helping to forecast environmental changes in space that could affect life back on Earth. Last month, for example, the probe raced through one of the most intense coronal mass ejections (CMEs) ever observed. In doing so, the craft helped prove a two-decade-old theory that CMEs interact with interplanetary dust, which will improve experts’ abilities in space weather forecasting.

Despite its punishing journey, NASA reports the Parker Solar Probe remains in good health with “all systems operating normally.” Despite its numerous records, the probe is far from finished with its mission; there are still seven more solar pass-bys scheduled through 2024. At that point (well within Mercury’s orbit), the Parker Solar Probe will finally succumb to the sun’s extreme effects and vaporize into the solar winds— “sort of a poetic ending,” as one mission researcher told PopSci in 2021.

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NASA’s Artemis III astronauts are apparently going to look incredibly fashionable walking the lunar surface. On October 4, the commercial aerospace company Axiom Space announced a new collaboration with luxury fashion house Prada to design spacesuits for the upcoming moon mission currently scheduled for 2025.

According to Wednesday’s reveal, Prada’s engineers will assist Axiom’s systems team in finalizing its Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) spacesuit while “developing solutions for materials and design features to protect against the unique challenge of space and the lunar environment.” Axiom CEO Michael Suffredini cited Prada’s expertise in manufacturing techniques, innovative design, and raw materials will ensure “not only the comfort of astronauts on the lunar surface, but also the much-needed human factors considerations absent from legacy spacesuits.”

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’.]

NASA first unveiled an early prototype of the AxEMU spacesuit back in March, and drew particular attention to the fit accommodating “at least 90 percent of the US male and female population.” Given the Artemis mission has long promised to land the first woman on the lunar surface, such considerations are vital for astronauts’ safety and comfort.

In Wednesday’s announcement, Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada’s Group Marketing Director, cited the company’s decades of technological design and engineering experience. Although most well known for luxury fashion, Prada is also behind the cutting-edge Luna Rossa racing yacht fleet.

“We are honored to be a part of this historic mission with Axiom Space,” they said. “It is a true celebration of the power of human creativity and innovation to advance civilization.”

Despite Prada’s association with high fashion, the final AxEMU design will undoubtedly emphasize safety and function over runway appeal. After all, astronauts will need protection against both solar radiation and the near-vacuum of the lunar surface, as well as ample oxygen resources and space for HD cameras meant to transmit live feeds back to Earth. According to the BBC earlier this year, each suit will also incorporate both 3D-printing and laser cutters to ensure precise measurements tailored to each astronaut.

Although NASA’s first images of the AxEMU in March showcased a largely black-and-gray color palette with blue and orange accents, Axiom Space’s newest teases hint at an off-white cover layer more reminiscent of the classic Apollo moon mission suits. It might not be much now, but you can expect more detailed looks at the spacesuits in the coming months as the Artemis Program continues its journey back to the moon.

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NASA’s Psyche mission to a unique, metallic asteroid of the same name launched from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 10:20 a.m. Eastern on October 13 via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

It was, finally, a smooth exit from Earth for the probe. Psyche had been scheduled to blast off on October 5, the first day of a window that stretches through October 25. But NASA officials announced a delay on September 28, citing issues with the spacecraft’s maneuvering thrusters, which are used to point the vehicle where it needs to go. “The change allows the NASA team to complete verifications of the parameters used to control the Psyche spacecraft’s nitrogen cold gas thrusters,” NASA officials wrote in the announcement. 

That weeklong delay was small, though, compared to the mission’s earlier hold-ups. Psyche was first set to launch in October of 2022, but issues with the navigation software developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory forced the agency to delay the mission by a year. 

This mission should be well worth the wait. It could help uncover details about unusual asteroids and our planet. And the pioneering technology and operations it will demonstrate during its nearly six-year mission will influence the design of future spacecraft. 

Psyche to Psyche

The destination of Psyche (a spacecraft) is 16 Psyche (an asteroid)—an object about 140 miles in diameter in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It looks a bit like a cratered potato. 

Remote observations by astronomers have already determined 16 Psyche to be a highly metallic asteroid, rich in iron, and it is believed to be the exposed core of a small planet that never fully formed. Getting up close and personal with 16 Psyche could help scientists better understand Earth’s iron-rich core: It’s easier to send a spacecraft 280 million miles away to study an asteroid than to access Earth’s rocky center, 1,800 miles beneath our feet. Exploring the metallic object in space has implications for our planet’s geomagnetic field, which protects life from space radiation—that field is generated when our planet’s solid inner core spins within liquid metal surroundings. 

Thrusters and lasers

Psyche is one of NASA’s first spacecraft to use solar electric propulsion as its primary means of reaching an asteroid. Rather than relying on traditional chemical rockets, Psyche will use Hall effect thrusters, which use electrostatic fields to accelerate ions—charged particles—and expel them, generating thrust. (These are different machines from the nitrogen thrusters that caused the launch delay.) Such thrusters produce very low thrust—far less than a pound—but do so very efficiently, allowing Psyche to preserve its xenon gas propellant and build up speed over the vast distances it will cover. 

The electric thrusters will use solar power—though the sunlight it absorbs will shrink as Psyche approaches its destination. Still, it’s well prepared. While the spacecraft itself is the size of a large car, its twin solar panels are about the size of tennis courts. They’ll produce 21 kilowatts of energy near Earth and about two kilowatts when at asteroid Psyche. 

[Related on PopSci+: In its visit to Psyche, NASA hopes to glimpse the center of the Earth]

In addition to solar electric propulsion, Psyche will also test a new form of Earth-to-spacecraft transmission system called Deep Space Optical Communication. Deep Space Optical Communication encodes data in infrared lasers, rather than radio waves, and can potentially carry much more information to and from the Psyche spacecraft than can traditional methods. The laser communications are just a demonstration—Psyche will still stay in touch with Earth, and vice versa, using NASA’s radio-based Deep Space Network. 

Research on a metal world

When Psyche arrives at the asteroid 16 Psyche in 2029, it will set to work studying the iron asteroid’s magnetic properties. With the aid of an imager and two kinds of spectrometer, the probe will also use patterns of light absorption to determine what elements and compounds exist on this metal potato. 

But Psyche won’t simply scratch the surface. It will also study the asteroid’s internal structure by measuring the space rock’s gravity field. There’s no specific instrument to pull this off. Instead, scientists on the ground will use radio signals from Psyche to precisely measure the spacecraft’s orbit around the asteroid, measuring any slight perturbations that signal variations in the gravitational field, which in turn can tell scientists about the internal density of 16 Psyche. 

[Related: Smashed asteroid surrounded by a ‘cloud’ of boulders]

And while the Psyche mission has the unique potential to shed light on how planetary bodies are formed and function, it’s also a part of an expanding portfolio of NASA asteroid missions. NASA’s Lucy mission, which launched in 201, is currently on its way to fly by multiple asteroids near Jupiter between 2025 and 2033. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission, meanwhile, just dropped pieces of the asteroid Bennu back on Earth on September 24. It’snow headed to visit the asteroid Apophis; the mission has been renamed to OSIRIS-APEX, or Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-APophis EXplorer.

Such missions have multiple goals: they help scientists better understand the formation of the early solar system and how planets like Earth, and they can also tell us about the makeup of asteroids that could one day pose a threat—and how to deflect them if necessary. 

Apophis, for instance, was at one time considered a very hazardous asteroid; though it won’t hit Earth, it will pass within 20,000 miles of our planet on April 13, 2029. 

The people of Earth don’t have to worry about any danger from 16 Psyche, though, as it will continue along in its orbit between Mars and Jupiter indefinitely, hundreds of millions of miles from our planet. 

That is, unless humans make changes to the metallic space rock. Mining asteroids is an old idea. But, as spacecraft improve, the estimated $10 quintillion worth of metal ore on Psyche and asteroids like it might begin to look pretty appetizing to companies that want to capitalize on resources in the heavens.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on October 2.

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This article was originally published on Undark.

IN JANUARY 2023, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric, and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level rise. But while near Earth’s southernmost point, Sweeney kept thinking about the moon.

“It felt every bit of what I think it will feel like being a space explorer,” said Sweeney, a former Air Force officer who’s now working on a doctorate in lunar geology at the University of Texas at El Paso. “You have all of these resources, and you get to be the one to go out and do the exploring and do the science. And that was really spectacular.”

That similarity is why space scientists study the physiology and psychology of people living in Antarctic and other remote outposts: For around 25 years, people have played out what existence might be like on, or en route to, another world. Polar explorers are, in a way, analogous to astronauts who land on alien planets. And while Sweeney wasn’t technically on an “analog astronaut” mission — her primary objective being the geological exploration of Earth — her days played out much the same as a space explorer’s might.

For 16 days, Sweeney and her colleagues lived in tents on the ice, spending half their time trapped inside as storms blew snow against their tents. When the weather permitted, Sweeney snowmobiled to and from seismometer sites, once getting caught in a whiteout that, she said, felt like zooming inside a ping-pong ball.

On the glacier, Sweeney was always cold, sometimes bored, often frustrated. But she was also alive, elated. And she felt a form of focus that eluded her on her home continent. “I had three objectives: to be a good crewmate, to do good science, and to stay alive,” she said. “That’s all I had to do.”

None of that was easy, of course. But it may have been easier than landing back on the earth of El Paso. “My mission ended, and it’s over,” she said. “And how do I process through all these things that I’m feeling?”

Then, in May, she attended the 2023 Analog Astronaut Conference, a gathering of people who simulate long-term space travel from the relative safety and comfort of Earth. Sweeney had learned about the event when she visited an analog facility in the country of Jordan. There, she’d met one of the conference’s founders, Jas Purewal, who invited her to the gathering.

The meeting was held, appropriately, at Biosphere 2, a glass-paneled, self-contained habitat in the Arizona desert that resembles a 1980s sci-fi vision of a space settlement — one of the first facilities built, in part, to understand whether humans could create a habitable environment on a hostile planet.

A speaker at the conference had spent eight months locked inside a simulated space habitat in Moscow, Russia, and she talked about how the post-mission period had been hard for her. The psychological toll of reintegration became a chattering theme throughout the whole meeting. Sweeney, it turned out, wasn’t alone.

Across the world, around 20 analog space facilities host people who volunteer to be study subjects, isolating themselves for weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, or even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. These places are intended to mimic how people might fare on Mars or the moon, or on long-term orbital stations. Such research, scientists say, can help test out medical and software tools, enhance indoor agriculture, and address the difficulties analog astronauts face, including, like Sweeney’s, those that come when their “missions” are over.

Lately, a community of researchers has started to make the field more formalized: laying out standards so that results are comparable; gathering research papers into a single database so investigators can build on previous work; and bringing scientists, participants, and facility directors together to share results and insights.

With that cohesion, a formerly quiet area of research is enhancing its reputation and looking to gain more credibility with space agencies. “I think the analogs are underestimated,” said Jenni Hesterman, a retired Air Force officer who is helping spearhead this formalization. “A lot of people think it’s just space camp.”

ANALOG ASTRONAUT FACILITIES emerged as a way to test drive space missions without the price tag of actually going to space. Scientists, for example, want to make sure tools work properly and so analog astronauts will test out equipment ranging from spacesuits to extreme-environment medical equipment.

Researchers are also interested in how astronauts fare in isolation, and so they will sometimes track characteristics like microbiome changes, stress levels, and immune responses by taking samples of spit, skin, blood, urine, and fecal matter. Analog missions “can give us insights about how a person would react or what kind of team — what kind of mix of people — can react to some challenges,” said Francesco Pagnini, a psychology professor at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Italy, who has researched human behavior and performance in collaboration with the European and Italian space agencies.

Some facilities are run by space agencies, like NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog, or HERA, which is located inside NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The center also houses a 3D-printed habitat called Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, where crews will simulate a year-long mission to Mars. The structure looks like an artificial intelligence created a cosmic living space using IKEA as its source material.

“My mission ended, and it’s over,” Sweeney said. “And how do I process through all these things that I’m feeling?”

Most analog spots, though, are run by private organizations and take research proposals from space agencies, university researchers, and sometimes laypeople with projects that the facilities select through an application process.

Such work has been going on for decades: NASA’s first official analog mission took place in 1997, in Death Valley, when four people spent a week pretending to be Martian geologists. In 2000, the nonprofit Mars Society, a space-exploration advocacy and research organization, built the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station in Nunavut, Canada, and soon after constructed the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. (Both facilities have been used by NASA researchers, too.) But the practice was in place long before those projects, even if the terminology and permanent facilities were not: In the Apollo era, astronauts used to try out their rovers and space walks, along with scientific techniques, in Arizona and Hawaii.

Many facilities, according to Ronita Cromwell, formerly the lead scientist of NASA’s Flight Analogs Project, are located in two types of places: extreme environments or controlled ones. The former include Antarctic or Arctic research stations, which tend to be used to study topics like sleep patterns and team dynamics. The latter — sealed, simulated habitats — are primarily useful for human behavior research, like learning how cognitive ability changes over the course of a mission, or testing out equipment, like software that helps astronauts make decisions without communicating to mission control. That independence becomes necessary as crews travel farther from Earth, because the communication delays increase with distance.

During her work on NASA’s mission simulations, Cromwell saw their value. “What excited me is that we were able to create sort of spaceflight situations on the ground, to study spaceflight changes in the human body,” Cromwell said, “whether they be, you know, psychological, cognitive changes, or physiological changes.”

Psychiatry researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, for instance, recently found that members of a crew at HERA performed better on cognition tasks — like clicking on squares that randomly appear on a screen and memorizing three-dimensional objects — as their mission went on. Another recent HERA study, led by scientists at Northwestern and DePaul universities, found that over time, teams got better at executing physical tasks together, but worsened when they tried to work together creatively and intellectually, like brainstorming as many uses as possible for a given object. Those brain and behavioral changes could teach scientists about tight teams deployed in other remote, tedious, stressful situations. “I think space psychology can also speak a lot about everyday life,” said Pagnini.

On the physical side, an international team that included a NASA scientist recently used the Mars Desert Research Station to test whether analog astronauts could be quickly taught how to fix broken bones using a device that could work on Mars — or an earthly site far from medical facilities. Investigations into self-contained, sustainable living reveal how low-resource existence could work on Earth, too. For example, another crew, led by Griffith University medical researchers, performed an experiment extracting water from minerals in case of emergency.

“I think the analogs are underestimated,” said Hesterman. “A lot of people think it’s just space camp.”

While scientific research that actually takes place in space usually gets the spotlight, the ground-testing of all systems, including human ones, is necessary, if not always glamorous or publicly lauded. “I felt like I was in charge of a deep, dark secret,” said Cromwell, jokingly, of her work on the NASA analog program.

In fact, even people who work in adjacent fields sometimes haven’t heard of the field. Purewal, an astrophysicist, only learned about analog space research in 2020. With Covid-19 restrictions in place, though, most facilities had halted new missions. “If I can’t go to an analog, maybe I can bring the analog to me,” Purewal thought.

Amid the drapey willow branches and manicured hedges of her parents’ backyard in Warwick, England, she constructed a geodesic dome out of broomstick handles and tent-like materials. Purewal sequestered inside for a week, leaving only to use the bathroom — and then only while wearing a simulated spacesuit. She communicated with those outside her dome on a synthesized 20-minute delay and ate freeze-dried foods, which she came to hate, and insect protein from mealworms and locusts, which she came to like more than she anticipated.

While Purewal admits her personal analog was “low-fidelity,” it offered a test drive for more rigorous research. By 2021, Purewal had, with SpaceX civilian astronaut Sian Proctor, co-founded the Analog Astronaut Conference that Sweeney attended, along with an associated online community of more than 1,000 people. She also participated in an analog mission in someone else’s backyard — one surrounded by Utah State Trust Lands — in November 2022. Their endeavor was sponsored by the Mars Society and involved research on mental health, geologic research tools, and sustainable food supplies, all of which would be necessary if they were going to Mars.

BUT THEY WEREN’T HEADED to Mars, they were headed to Utah. About five minutes from the small town of Hanksville — home to “Hollow Mountain,” a gas station convenience store dug out of a rock formation — sits the turnoff to the Mars Desert Research Station. Operated by the Mars Society, the facility is 3.4 miles down a dirt track called N Cow Dung Road. The landscape looks otherworldly: mushroom-shaped rock formations; sandy, granular ground; and eroded hills of red rock.

The station sits in a flat spot surrounded by those hills, with a cylindrical living space two stories tall but just 26 feet in diameter. The habitat links out via above-ground “tunnels” to a greenhouse and a geodesic dome that resembles Purewal’s initial backyard creation, and houses a control center and lab.

In November 2022, Purewal brought a team there for two weeks, with Hesterman as commander. In the habitat, an astrobiology student tried to grow edible mushrooms in the crew’s food waste. Another team member wanted to see if they could make yogurt from powdered milk and bacteria. Purewal, meanwhile, was experimenting with an AI companion robot called PARO. Shaped like a baby harp seal, PARO is typically used to relieve stress in medical situations. The crew members interacted with PARO and wore bio-monitoring straps that measured things like heart rate as they did so.

Every day on “Mars” had a set of missions: spacewalks, splinting a broken ankle on a virtual reality headset, a tabletop emergency exercise about evacuating for noxious fumes, a fake pass-out to test emergency response protocol. Their personal protocols were working well, but Purewal and Hesterman, locked in together, had begun to fret about the quality and consistency of the analog enterprise more broadly. They started to think about creating standards: for the research, for the facilities themselves. At their Utah-Mars station, for instance, a pipe broke under their sink. There were electrical issues. A propane monitor was malfunctioning.

After their mission ended, they spoke with others, and heard about issues such as expired fire extinguishers, or the lack of safety training for participants who would be using specialized technologies and life support systems. They consulted Emily Apollonio, a former aircraft accident investigator. In 2022, she traveled to Hawaii to live at HI-SEAS, a 1,200-square-foot analog station located 8,200 feet above sea level on the Mauna Loa volcano. Apollonio thought HI-SEAS had avoidable problems. For one, the bathroom had only a composting toilet, which the mission crew weren’t allowed to pee in, and a urinal, which the women had to use, too.

With a draft version released this June, they hope to improve conditions for participants — ensuring, for instance, that facilities adhere to building codes and provide adequate medical support. They also want to encourage analog participants to follow research best practices to ensure rigorous outputs. The standards suggest, for instance, that each mission have its research plan pre-validated by the principal investigator and habitat director, a timeline for research completion, and an Institutional Review Board approval in place for human experiments. While projects with federal or institutional grant funding go through these steps anyway, the formality isn’t uniform across the board.

While some analogs already have rigorous protocols in place to protect participants, the safety issues and inclusivity gaps she heard about from colleagues helped inspire Apollonio to start a training and consulting company called Interstellar Performance Labs to help prepare would-be analog astronauts before their missions. She also started to work with Purewal, Hesterman, and others on a document called “International Guidelines and Standards for Space Analogs.”

The standards also detail the creation of a research database, putting all the writeups (peer-reviewed and otherwise) of analog projects in one place. That way, people aren’t duplicating efforts — as the mushroom-grower, it turns out, was — unless they mean to test the replicability of results. They can also better link their studies to space agencies’ established needs to be more directly helpful and relevant to the real world.

“I didn’t know where to look, I didn’t know where to go,” Apollonio said. “I couldn’t hear my thoughts.”

As part of this centralization effort, Purewal, Apollonio, Hesterman, and colleagues are also putting together what they call the World’s Biggest Analog: a simultaneous, month-long mission involving at least 10 isolated bases across the world, which together will simulate a large, cooperative future presence in space.

So far, though, attempts to give the community cohesion and coherency have yet to fully address the aspect of analog life that gives many participants trouble: the end of their mission. “Being in an analog mission was less difficult than coming out an analog mission,” said Apollonio, of her own experience.

Shortly after emerging from HI-SEAS, she walked around the streets of Waikiki with her husband. The lights, the noise — everything was too much. “I didn’t know where to look, I didn’t know where to go,” she said. “I couldn’t hear my thoughts.” After they chose a restaurant for dinner, and the server handed her a menu, she froze. “I have to choose my own food,” she realized. It was overwhelming, and that feeling didn’t abate.

Meanwhile, few other people understood the experience, said Hesterman. “You come home and you’re all excited, like, you want to tell everybody about it,” she continued. “You tell everybody about it once, and then they’re just done. On back to paying the bills and cutting the grass and stuff. You still want to talk about it.”

Purewal missed the team and the sense of shared purpose, and started to seek it outside the simulation. “I need to find this same feeling in my day-to-day life,” she said. “We all kind of need our crew.”

RESEARCH ON THE post-mission experience is scant, said Pagnini. In March 2023, he co-authored a review paper, commissioned by the European Space Agency, which aimed to lay out the state of research on human behavior and performance in space, including gaps in the science. Studying how astronauts react and cope “post-mission,” his research found, has been particularly neglected. The same is true of returning from analog space.

Pagnini says the research isn’t just relevant to analog or actual astronauts. Life in space has similarities to life on Earth — including in its difficulties. Italy’s heavily restrictive and prolonged Covid-19 lockdown, for instance, resembled going away on a mission. “When we got out of the lockdown phase, getting in touch with other people was kind of strange,” he said. Much of living a regular life on Earth was strange.

The strangeness also extends to other experiences, like military deployments and the subsequent return to domestic life. “The expectation is kind of that families will live happily ever after” once they’re reunited, said Leanne Knobloch, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois, who performed a large reintegration study on military couples. “So that’s why reintegration has sometimes been overlooked, but more and more researchers are starting to recognize that it is a challenging period, and it’s not the storybook ending that people make it out to be.”

She noted that her research, like that on the psychology of space travel and the post-mission experience, can apply to other arenas. “Any kind of situation where partners are separated and they come together, this research can help understand that puzzle piece more broadly,” she said.

Knobloch’s work includes suggestions for easing the transition, such as preparing people for the issues they’re likely to experience. “If you’re ready and expect that you might experience some of these problems, it won’t be so stressful,” she said. “Because you’ll recognize that they’re normal.”

Apollonio’s Interstellar Performance Labs, for one, is already planning to include education on “aftercare,” educating people about what she calls the “deorbiting effect” of returning to regular life.

WHEN THE DAY finally came for Sweeney to depart Thwaites Glacier, the aircraft seemed to materialize right out of the sky, as though the remote outpost had transformed into a busy airport. As she was leaving, she looked down at the camp where half her team remained. “You could just see how small our little footprint was,” she said. A speck in the middle of endless white space.

Since she landed in North America, Sweeney has savored time with her family. But the adjustment hasn’t been easy. “Each day that ticks by of being back, I started feeling pulled in different directions,” she said. With numerous projects ongoing — mentoring, speaking, doing her doctoral research — she felt her sense of self splintering. In Antarctica, she had been a smooth, singular whole.

But at the Analog Astronaut Conference in May, hearing about others’ similar readjustment difficulties, Sweeney felt some sense of normalcy. Having a community of support could help with post-mission struggles. Further research — aided by the new database and standardization measures — could help uncover best coping strategies, along with the keys to successful crew dynamics, stress creators and mitigators, and tools and designs that make the practicalities of a mission easier. Maybe someone will look at the database, see this scientific gap, and try to fill it.

Such research might resonate with Sweeney and others having trouble readjusting to their daily lives. “We have to get back to work, we have to go see our families, we want to pick up the projects we were doing before,” she said. “But also, we need to make space for the magnitude of the experience that we just had. And to be able to decompress from that.”

UPDATE: A previous version of this piece incorrectly stated that Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier in November 2022. She arrived to McMurdo Station in Antarctica in November 2022, but did not land on Thwaites Glacier until January 2023. The piece also described a scene in which Sweeney left her camp on Thwaites Glacier, and incorrectly stated that she was departing Antarctica at that time. She remained in Antarctica for several weeks after she left the glacier. Lastly, a previous version stated that storms dumped feet of snow on the landscape. To clarify that the snow was not fresh snowfall, the piece has been updated to reflect that snow blew against the tents.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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The dark side of the moon, despite its name, is a perfect vantage point for observing the universe. On Earth, radio signals from the furthest depths of space are obscured by the atmosphere, alongside humanity’s own electronic chatter, but the lunar far side has none of these issues. Because of this, establishing an observation point there could allow for unimpeded views of some of cosmic history’s earliest moments—particularly a 400 million year stretch known as the universe’s Dark Ages when early plasma cooled enough to begin forming the  protons and electrons that eventually made hydrogen.

After years of development and testing, just such an observation station could come online as soon as 2026, in part thanks to researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

[Related: Watch a rocket engine ignite in ultra-slow motion.]

The team is currently working alongside NASA, the US Department of Energy, and the University of Minnesota on a pathfinder project called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night). The radio telescope is on track to launch atop Blue Ghost, private space company Firefly Aerospace’s lunar lander, as part of the company’s second moon excursion. Once in position, Blue Ghost will detach from Firefly’s Elytra space vehicle, then travel down to the furthest site ever reached on the moon’s dark side. 

“If you’re on the far side of the moon, you have a pristine, radio-quiet environment from which you can try to detect this signal from the Dark Ages,” Kaja Rotermund, a postdoctoral researcher at Berkeley Lab, said in a September 26 project update. “LuSEE-Night is a mission showing whether we can make these kinds of observations from a location that we’ve never been in, and also for a frequency range that we’ve never been able to observe.”

More specifically, LuSEE-Night will be equipped with specialized antennae designed by the Berkeley Lab team to listen between 0.5 and 50 megahertz. To accomplish this, both the antennae and its Blue Ghost transport will need to be able to withstand the extreme temperatures experienced on the moon’s far side, which can span between -280 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of its shielded lunar location, however, LuSEE-Night will also need to beam its findings up to an orbiting satellite that will then transfer the information back to Earth.

“The engineering to land a scientific instrument on the far side of the moon alone is a huge accomplishment,” explained Berkeley Lab’s antenna project lead, Aritoki Suzuki, in the recent update. “If we can demonstrate that this is possible—that we can get there, deploy, and survive the night—that can open up the field for the community and future experiments.”

If successful, LuSEE-Night could provide data from the little known Dark Ages, which breaks up other observable eras such as some of the universe’s earliest moments, as well as more recent moments after stars began to form.

According to Berkeley Lab, the team recently completed a successful technical review, and is currently working on constructing the flight model meant for the moon. Once landed, LuSEE-Night will peer out into the Dark Age vastness for about 18 months beginning in 2026. 

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On the morning of September 24, a space capsule containing a pristine sample of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu entered Earth’s atmosphere wreathed in fire. During a 10 minute descent, the craft used its heat shield to dissipate speed through friction. It safely touched down on a military range in Utah, marking the end of NASA’s seven-year-long Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer—the OSIRIS-REx mission. The roughly 9 ounces of asteroid bits, doused in nitrogen to keep out any contaminants, are now in a clean room.

For more than half a decade, the members of this mission faced multiple technical challenges: building, testing, and launching the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft in 2016; rendezvousing with asteroid Bennu in 2018 about 207 million miles from Earth; using a robotic arm to grab half a cup’s worth of Bennu in 2020; and setting a course back to Earth in 2021. 

The scope of the OSIRIS-ReX mission stretches from the distant past into the relatively closer future. Nearly two decades ago, astronomers set out to not only get up close and personal with an ancient asteroid, but actually bring some home. And its scientific observations dip billions of years into the past. Samples from this more than 4.5 billion-year-old asteroid are likely to provide clues to the origin of life itself. It will also help prepare us for a moment, centuries from now, when Bennu could threaten to strike Earth. 

The power of a pristine asteroid 

The OSIRIS-REx sample is a chance to thoroughly examine what compounds may have been present in the early solar system. By bringing pieces of the space rock to Earth, researchers can use the most powerful laboratory techniques available—not just what tools can fit on a spacecraft. 

”It’s tremendously powerful to be able to get something back in the laboratory,” says Jason Dworkin is a biochemist and astrobiologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He’s been the project scientist for OSIRIS-REx since NASA accepted the mission proposal in 2011, and has been involved in the mission’s planning since its conception in 2004. “You can change your mind about what you’re looking for. As new discoveries come in, you can adjust your instrumentation. You can have devices that are not only too large to get on the spacecraft, but for us, even larger than the launch pad.” 

[Related: The asteroid that created Earth’s largest crater may have been way bigger than we thought]

Dworkin has long been interested in the ways interstellar chemistry can shed light on how the early Earth’s organic compounds combined to form life as we know it. It’s possible that material from asteroids, made of similar stuff as Bennu, helped deliver some necessary ingredients when they struck our planet.

We know the strikes happened, Dworkin says, but we don’t know how relevant the “asteroidal input” from objects like Bennu was.

Rapidly recovering the sample

Before scientists like Dworkin can probe the bits of rock for data, they have to get the samples safely into the lab. Sample collection teams—NASA experts and academic mission scientists, US military representatives, and scientists and engineers from Lockheed Martin, which built the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft—have spent the summer practicing to recover the Bennu sample as quickly as possible. 

As the capsule neared Earth’s atmosphere, the recovery teams boarded helicopters, using infrared imaging to track the capsule as it descended. They swiftly arrived to where the capsule came to rest, within a 36-mile by 8.5-mile area of the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range near Salt Lake City. The reason for the haste is to limit the chances that anything Earthly would contaminate the 8.8 ounces of pristine Bennu material. 

To further guard against this, the team recovering the capsule also took samples of soil and material from around the landing site. That way, if scientists detect something “extraordinary,” Dworkin says, “we can make sure that it cannot be explained by contamination or by something else from the environment.”

The capsule, which slowed from 27,650 mph when it entered Earth’s atmosphere to 11 mph when it landed, was taken to a temporary clean room at the military range. There, it will be disassembled and on Monday packaged for a flight to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where the space agency has built a specialized clean room environment. This will be Bennu’s home on Earth.

“The sample comes back and is studied by the science team for two years,” Dworkin says. “Within six months, we produce a catalog of what we’ve observed based on how to describe the sample without damaging the sample using non-invasive techniques.”

What an asteroid on Earth can tell us

The science team has 12 major hypotheses and 54 sub-hypotheses to test, according to Dworkin, which fall into four broad categories. 

The first category is testing the observations that OSIRIS-REx made of Bennu while in space. NASA wants to know: If the results of remote instrument measurements of, say, the asteroid’s mineralogy hold up when tested on the ground? If so, this will be a baseline for additional remote studies of other asteroids NASA won’t send a spacecraft to sample. 

The second category, Dworkin’s favorite, is examining what organic compounds might exist in the sample. It may contain amino acids, sugars, and aldehydes. These are potentially some of the same ingredients that were present on Earth when life began. Studying how they exist on Bennu can reveal the chemical changes they’ve undergone over the eons in space. 

The history of the solar system is the third category. This is the tale, told by the sample, of our solar neighborhood: all the way “from the protosolar nebula to the formation of the crater out of which we collected the sample,” Dworkin says. In this view, as Bennu traveled in the frigid space, it was as if material from the solar system’s early days was held in cold storage.

[Related: Local asteroid Bennu used to be filled with tiny rivers]

And the fourth category of study will be analyzing if and how bringing a piece of Bennu home changes the sample. ”We saw images of it before we stowed it; is that the same, or did it change on the reentry into Earth’s atmosphere?” Dworkin says. “Do we have evidence of contamination from the spacecraft, from the sample processing and handling? 

Some of the answers to questions across all four categories could come within months to a few years. But NASA is preparing for the long haul. Today’s scientists will only have immediate access to about a quarter of the sample. The rest will be held in cold storage for decades, on the assumption that later generations will have better tools and more knowledge to bring to bear. 

NASA wants to avoid repeating mistakes the agency made with some of the Apollo-era moon samples, when tests weren’t as conservative with lunar material. “ “That’s arming the future, and making sure that future generations thank us instead of curse us,” Dworkin says.

There’s one final forward-looking aspect to the OSIRIS-REx mission. In the late 22nd century, sometime between 2170 and 2200, Bennu has a slim chance of hitting Earth. It’s “a small percentage, but not nothing,” Dworkin notes. Information gathered by OSIRIS-REx and subsequent sample studies could help scientists and political leaders decide, with decades of preparation, whether they need to take action to deflect Bennu to prevent a disastrous impact. 

”That’s a wonderful feeling to be able to work on a mission for so long, and have it pay off scientifically for the future, and perhaps planetary defense for the future,” Dworkin says. ”That happens when you start thinking about what happened four and a half billion years ago. You start thinking about the future too.”

Back in space, 20 minutes after this mission came to an end, the spacecraft’s new task began: OSIRIS is now headed for the 1,000-foot-wide asteroid Apophis.

This post was updated after the capsule’s successful landing.

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An unexpected and astonishing find located more than 2.5 million light-years from Earth took top honors at the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year awards this week. Amateur astronomers Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, and Yann Sainty captured an image of a massive plasma arc near the Andromeda Galaxy, a discovery that has resulted in scientists looking closer into the giant gas cloud.

“This astrophoto is as spectacular as [it is] valuable,” judge and astrophotographer László Francsics said in a press release. “It not only presents Andromeda in a new way, but also raises the quality of astrophotography to a higher level.”

[Related: How to get a great nightsky shot]

While “Andromeda, Unexpected” captured the prestigious overall winner title, other category winners also dazzled with photos of dancing auroras, neon sprites raining down from the night’s sky, and stunning far-off nebulas that might make you feel like a tiny earthling floating through space.

Sit back and scroll in awe at all the category winners, runners-up, and highly commended images from the 2023 Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year honorees.

Galaxy

Overall winner: Andromeda, Unexpected

Runner-Up: The Eyes Galaxies

Highly Commended: Neighbors

Aurora

Winner: Brushstroke

Runner-up: Circle of Light

Highly Commended: Fire on the Horizon

Our Moon

Winner: Mars-Set

Runner-Up: Sundown on the Terminator

Highly Commended: Last Full Moon of the Year Featuring a Colourful Corona During a Close Encounter with Mars

Our Sun

Winner: A Sun Question

Runner-Up: Dark Star

Highly Commended: The Great Solar Flare 

People & Space

Winner: Zeila

Runner-Up: A Visit to Tycho

Highly Commended: Close Encounters of The Haslingden Kind

Planets, Comets & Asteroids

Winner: Suspended in a Sunbeam

Runner-Up: Jupiter Close to Opposition

Highly Commended: Uranus with Umbriel, Ariel, Miranda, Oberon and Titania

Skyscapes

Winner: Grand Cosmic Fireworks

Runner-Up: Celestial Equator Above First World War Trench Memorial

Highly Commended: Noctilucent Night

Stars & Nebulae

Winner: New Class of Galactic Nebulae Around the Star YY Hya

Runner-Up: LDN 1448 et al.

Highly Commended: The Dark Wolf – Fenrir

The Sir Patrick Moore Prize for Best Newcomer

Winner: Sh2-132: Blinded by the Light

Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year

Winner: The Running Chicken Nebula

Runner-Up: Blue Spirit Drifting in the Clouds

Highly Commended: Lunar Occultation of Mars

Highly Commended: Roses Blooming in the Dark: NGC 2337

Highly Commended: Moon at Nightfall

Annie Maunder Prize for Image Innovation

Winner: Black Echo

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This post has been updated.

A new NASA-commissioned independent study report recommends leveraging NASA’s expertise and public trust alongside artificial intelligence to investigate unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) on Earth. As such, today NASA Director Bill Nelson announced the appointment of a NASA Director of UAP Research to develop and oversee implementation of investigation efforts.

“The director of UAP Research is a pivotal addition to NASA’s team and will provide leadership, guidance and operational coordination for the agency and the federal government to use as a pipeline to help identify the seemingly unidentifiable,” Nicola Fox, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, said in a release.

Although NASA officials repeated multiple times that the study found no evidence of extraterrestrial origin, they conceded they still “do not know” the explanation behind at least some of the documented UAP sightings. Nelson stressed the agency’s aim to begin minimizing public stigma surrounding UAP events, and begin shifting the subject “from sensationalism to science.” In keeping with this strategy, the panel report relied solely on unclassified and open source UAP data to ensure all findings could be shared openly and freely with the public.

[Related: Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report.]

“We don’t know what these UAP are, but we’re going to find out,” Nelson said at one point. “You bet your boots.”

According to today’s public announcement, the study team additionally recommends NASA utilize its “open-source resources, extensive technological expertise, data analysis techniques, federal and commercial partnerships, and Earth-observing assets to curate a better and robust dataset for understanding future UAP.”

Composed of 16 community experts across various disciplines, the UAP study team was first announced in June of last year, and began work on their study in October. In May 2023, representatives from the study team expressed frustration with the fragmentary nature of available UAP data.

“The current data collection efforts regarding UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection,” study chair David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the nonprofit science organization the Simons Foundation, said at the time. “Existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event.”

Today’s report notes that although AI and machine learning tools have become “essential tools” in identifying rare occurrences and outliers within vast datasets, “UAP analysis is more limited by the quality of data than by the availability of techniques.” After reviewing neural network usages in astronomy, particle physics, and other sciences, the panel determined that the same techniques could be adapted to UAP research—but only if datasets’ quality is both improved and codified. Encouraging the development of rigorous data collection standards and methodologies will be crucial to ensuring reliable, evidence-based UAP analysis.

[Related: You didn’t see a UFO. It was probably one of these things.]

Although no evidence suggests extraterrestrial intelligence is behind documented UAP sightings, “Do I believe there is life in the universe?” Nelson asked during NASA’s press conference. “My personal opinion is, yes.”

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What’s it like to spend a whole year in space? In just a matter of days, US astronaut Frank Rubio will be able to tell the tale. On Wednesday, he broke the record for the longest space mission taken by a US astronaut by spending 355 days in low orbit. He and his fellow Expedition 69 crew members are awaiting three new members that will arrive at the end of the week, according to NASA. 

The seven Expedition 69 members are actually a mashup of two groups, one of which, including Rubio, has been onboard for nearly a year. A Russian Soyuz capsule isn’t expected to return him and his crewmates back to Earth until September 27—meaning his full space trip will hit 371 days. This return date was rescheduled from an original March 2023 timeline so Russia could prepare the vehicle, according to CNN.

When leaving for the International Space Station, Rubio was only expected to spend six months up there. When the Russian Soyuz capsule holding him sprang a coolant leak back in December, the Russian space agency ruled that the craft wasn’t safe enough to bring Rubio and his colleagues back. In March, it made a solo trip back home, while in February a new Soyuz capsule made its way to the ISS. 

[Related: “How Russia’s war in Ukraine almost derailed Europe’s Mars rover” ]

“Rubio’s journey in space embodies the essence of exploration,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a social media statement on Monday, adding that Rubio’s dedication to space research paves the way for future endeavors by a new generation of astronauts. 

While Rubio’s feat beats out previous records set by retired NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei in 2022 and Scott Kelly in 2015-2016, Russia still holds the record for longest trip to space. Between January 1994 and March 1995, astronaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 continuous days in orbit. Another Russian astronaut, Gennadi Padalka, set the record of most cumulative days in space—879—over the course of five different flights in 2015.

This adventure certainly wasn’t planned, but Rubio is taking it in stride. “I think this [duration] is really significant, in the sense that it teaches us that the human body can endure, it can adapt and—as we prepare to push back to the moon and then from there, onward onto hopefully Mars and further on into the solar system—I think it’s really important that we learn just how the human body learns to adapt, and how we can optimize that process so that we can improve our performance as we explore further and further out from Earth,” he said in a recent interview with ABC’s Good Morning America.

At 11 AM Tuesday, NASA broadcasted a pre-recorded “space-to-ground” chat between Rubio and Vande Hei, during which Rubio acknowledged his family. “They’ve been a key component, as much as I appreciate the team and how critical the entire human space flight team has been to this, really my family has been the cornerstone that’s inspired me to keep somewhat of a good attitude as I’ve been up here,” he adds. “Having [family] made it so much easier to be up here, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.”

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Nuclear fuel cells the size of poppy seeds could power NASA’s Artemis lunar base once it begins operations around 2030. Designed by researchers at Bangor University’s Nuclear Futures Institute in the UK, the miniscule power source—dubbed “Trisofuel”—is intended to run on a micro nuclear generator roughly the size of a small car created by Rolls Royce. According to a report in the BBC, engineers intend to begin fully testing their new fuel within the next few months. If successful, Trisofuel’s uses could even extend far beyond the moon’s surface.

Momentum is quickly building towards establishing a permanent human presence on the moon, likely near its south pole where scientists hope to find water-based ice to help support habitation. NASA’s ongoing Artemis project is making progress towards its proposed end-of-decade base construction, most recently with its first successful mission in November 2022. Last month, India made history as the fourth nation to land a probe on the moon via its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft, as well as the first to do so at the lunar south pole.

[Related: India’s successful moon landing makes lunar history.]

Given its size and relative power, a resource like Trisofuel could be vital to lunar bases’ success. With its portability, however, the new nuclear fuel cell could easily be adapted to a range of other scenarios, both here on Earth and beyond.  Phylis Makurunje, a researcher involved Trisofuel testing, explained to the BBC that the tiny fuel pellets could be used to power rockets that one day take humans to Mars. “It is very powerful—it gives very high thrust, the push it gives to the rocket. This is very important because it enables rockets to reach the farthest planets,” Makurunje explained.

Trisofuel may be so strong, in fact, that it could nearly halve the time it takes to reach the Red Planet—from an estimated nine months down to between four-to-six months. “Nuclear power is the only way we currently have to provide the power for that length of space travel,” Bangor University professor Simon Middleburgh said in a release. “The fuel must be extremely robust and survive the forces of launch and then be dependable for many years.”

At a much more localized level, researchers believe that micro generators running Trisofuel could also be deployed to disaster zones with compromised electrical grids.

Having a reliable, powerful fuel source is one thing—having structures to house such systems is another hurdle altogether. Of course, researchers are currently hard at work optimizing construction options for proposed lunar base designs. Potential building materials could even be drawn from the moon itself, using lunar regolith to reinforce 3D-printed bricks to compose base structures.

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken some new images of a star that exploded during the Reagan Administration. The space telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) helped capture the images of a world renowned supernova called Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A) in September 2022. The jaw-dropping new images were officially made public on August 31. 

[Related: An amateur astronomer spotted a new supernova remarkably close to Earth.]

Supernova 1987A is roughly 168,000 light-years away from Earth and located in the Large Magellanic Cloud–a satellite dwarf galaxy of the Milky Way. The supernova is the remnants of a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak–69 202. It was believed to hold a mass about 20 times that of the sun before the explosion was detected in February 1987. It is also the closest observed supernova since 1604, when Kepler’s Supernova illuminated the Milky Way. Supernova 1987A has been the target of observations at wavelengths ranging from gamma rays to radio waves for nearly 40 years. 

The latest image shows a central structure of inner ejecta similar to a keyhole. Clumpy gas and dust pack up the center that is ejected by the supernova explosion. According to NASA, the dust is so dense that even near-infrared light that Webb can detect can’t penetrate it, shaping the dark “hole” in the keyhole. 

Surrounding the inner keyhole is a bright equatorial ring which forms a band around the “waist” of the supernova which connects the two faint arms of hourglass-shaped outer rings. The equatorial ring is formed from material ejected tens of thousands of years before the supernova even exploded.. Bright hot spots in the ring appeared as the supernova’s shock wave hit it, and now exist externally to the ring, with diffuse emission surrounding it. These are where the supernova shocks hit more exterior material.

The Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-ray Observatory have also observed Supernova 1987A, but JWST’s sensitivity and spatial resolution abilities showed a new feature in this supernova remnant–small crescent-like structures. The crescents are believed to be part of the outer layers of gas that shot out from the supernova explosion. They are very bright, which may be an indication of an optical phenomenon called limb brightening. This results from being able to observe the expanding material in three dimensions. “The viewing angle makes it appear that there is more material in these two crescents than there actually may be,” NASA wrote in a press release.

Before JWST, the now-retired Spitzer telescope observed this supernova in infrared throughout its entire 16 year lifespan, providing astronomers with key data about how Supernova 1987A’s emissions evolved over time. However, Spitzer couldn’t observe the supernova with the same level of clarity and detail as JWST.  

[Related: JWST captures an unprecedented ‘prequel’ to a galaxy.]

There are still several mysteries surrounding this supernova, namely some unanswered questions about the neutron star that should have formed in the aftermath of the supernova explosion. There is some indirect evidence for the neutron star in the form of X-ray emission that was detected by NASA’s Chandra and NuSTAR X-ray observatories. Additionally, some observations taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array indicate the neutron star may be hidden within one of the dust clumps at the heart of the remnant.

JWST will continue to observe the supernova over time, using the NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) instruments that give astronomers the ability to capture new, high-fidelity infrared data over time. 

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By year’s end, NASA will begin testing a fridge-sized laser communications upgrade aboard the International Space Station. It’s a major relay system demonstration for the ISS, and one which could chart a path forward for how humans communicate not just in low-orbit, but on the lunar surface and beyond. 

Although radio has long served as both piloted and unpiloted missions’ primary communications method, as Space.com notes, laser communication arrays boast a number of benefits. From a purely logistical standpoint, the equipment is both cheaper and lighter-weight than radio devices. Meanwhile, lasers’ shorter wavelengths ensure far more information can be transferred at one time compared to radio waves.

Once launched aboard a forthcoming SpaceX commercial resupply services mission, NASA’s Integrated LCRD Low Earth Orbit User Modem and Amplifier Terminal (ILLUMA-T) will work alongside the agency’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) launched in December 2021. ILLUMA-T will use infrared light to send and receive laser communications at a higher data rate than previously available. Once installed, these transmissions’ higher rates will allow for more videos and images to transmit back to Earth, all at around 1.2 gigabits-per-second—comparable to a solid internet connection here on Earth.

[Related: NASA is testing space lasers to shoot data back to Earth.]

“Laser communications offer missions more flexibility and an expedited way to get data back from space,” said Badri Younes, former deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program. “We are integrating this technology on demonstrations near Earth, at the Moon, and in deep space.”

After installation, ILLUMA-T will first beam data to-and-from the LCRD satellite hovering 22,000 miles above Earth in geosynchronous orbit. Meanwhile, the LCRD will transmit data back to Earth at two stations in California and Hawaii—spots chosen for their comparatively low cloud cover, which often impedes laser transmissions.

“ILLUMA-T is not the first mission to test laser communications in space but brings NASA closer to operational infusion of the technology,” NASA wrote in a recent statement,  In 2022, a small CubeSat in low Earth orbit began testing laser communications as part of the TeraByte InfraRed Delivery System. Before that, the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration also transferred data to-and-from lunar orbit during 2014’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer mission. Still, NASA explains that all of these tests combined will further help advance aerospace communications between Earth, the moon, Mars, and beyond.

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In 2022, NASA’s Artemis I mission traveled 1.4 million miles into space. When the Orion spacecraft flew by the moon, future trees were on board. The uncrewed spacecraft contained seeds for five tree species, including sweetgums, Douglas-firs, sycamores, loblolly pines, and giant sequoias. After the 25.5 day mission, the Forest Service successfully germinated the seeds. Now, community organizations and schools across the United States now apply to receive a seedling grown from one of the tree seeds that flew by the moon that will grow to become official Artemis Moon Trees. 

[Related: Artemis I’s solar panels harvested a lot more energy than expected.]

NASA and the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service will distribute the Artemis Moon Tree seedlings in an effort to “create new ways for communities home on Earth to connect with humanity’s exploration of space for the benefit of all” and promote STEM in the classroom and beyond. 

Institutions that can apply for a seedling include universities, museums, science centers, organizations that serve K-12 schools, and government organizations. Applications are posted here and are due by Friday October 6. 

The Artemis I Mission launched on November 16, 2022 and was the first integrated test of NASA’s latest deep space exploration technology: the Orion spacecraft itself, the all-powerful Space Launch System rocket, and the ground systems at Kennedy Space Center. Orion returned to Earth after 25.5 days in space, where it journeyed 270,000 miles away from Earth, orbited the moon, and collected crucial data along the way. A plush Snoopy zero-gravity indicator, LEGO minifigures, and three ‘moonikins,’ were also aboard the spacecraft with the Artemis seeds.

“NASA’s Artemis moon trees are bringing the science and ingenuity of space exploration back down to Earth,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “Last year, these seeds flew on the Artemis I mission 40,000 miles beyond the Moon. With the help of the USDA, this new generation of Moon trees will plant the spirit of exploration across our communities and inspire the next generation of explorers.”

[Related: Before the Artemis II crew can go to the moon, they need to master flying high above Earth.]

The Artemis seeds are also the second generation of Moon Trees. In 1971, Apollo 14 Command Module Pilot Stuart Roosa, carried hundreds of tree seeds about the mission as a part of his personal kit. Roosa was a former Forest Service smokejumper, a group of specially trained wildland firefighters who are often the first to respond to remote firefighters. When Apollo 14 returned, the Forest Service germinated the seeds and the first generation of Apollo Moon Tree seedlings were then planted around the United States.

NASA and the Forest Service hope that this next 21st Century generation of Moon Trees carry on the legacy of inspiration launched over 50 years ago. 

“The seeds that flew on the Artemis mission will soon be Moon Trees standing proudly on campuses and institutions across the country,” Forest Service chief Randy Moore said in a statement. “These future Moon Trees, like those that came before them, serve as a potent symbol that when we put our mind to a task, there is nothing we can’t accomplish. They will inspire future generations of scientists, whose research underpins all that we do here at the Forest Service.”

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On December 6, 1968, Time magazine published an issue with a metaphor illustrated on the cover: a Soviet cosmonaut and an American astronaut were in a sprint to the moon. The actual space race had kicked off a decade earlier, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957. It ended less than a year after Time published its cover, when US Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. The excitement wore off quickly—the last humans to step foot on the moon, the crew of Apollo 17, did so in 1972. So far, no one has gone back. 

But that’s changing. NASA is committed to landing astronauts on the moon again in 2025 as part of the space agency’s Artemis Program. China has plans to land humans on the moon by 2030. In the meantime, robotic missions to the moon are increasing: Russia’s endeavor to return to the moon for the first time in 47 years, the robotic Luna-25 mission, crashed this week, and India hopes to make its first soft landing there on August 23 with its Chandrayaan-3 lander. 

With so many nations headed for the moon, including an increasingly aggressive if diminished Russia, is the world at the cusp of a second space race? 

The temptation to reach for the historical space race as a model is understandable, but as long as we’re mapping history onto current events, it may not be the best guide, according to Cathleen Lewis, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museums curator of international space programs. “In my opinion, this isn’t a new race,” she says. “If you want to use historical events, this is more of a gold rush.” 

Or, more precisely, an ice rush. In 2018, scientists discovered water ice preserved in the deep, permanent shadows of polar craters. The US, China, Russia, and India are targeting portions of the lunar South Pole where that frozen resource should be. Water can be used to create rocket fuel or in lunar manufacturing. But it is heavy, and therefore expensive, to launch from Earth.  

Space agencies “haven’t quite worked out” how they are going to use this ice, or for “what technology to what end,” Lewis says. “But everyone wants to get there because we now know there is water ice to be found.” 

[Related on PopSci+: A DIY-rocket club’s risky dream of launching a human to the edge of space]

But it’s not just about the ice. The technological basis for all of this activity is entirely different than in the mid-20th century, Lewis points out. Back then, the US and the Soviet Union were developing the technology to go to the moon for the very first time. 

President Kennedy backed the lunar program because his advisors convinced him the race was technologically winnable, she says. While this competition had a destination, it also referred to the way “the USSR was racing to the maximum capacity of their technological limits.”

The Soviets had difficulty developing vehicles powerful enough to launch a crewed mission to the moon. The US created the Saturn V rocket, a singularly capable technology that was the most powerful ever launched until the first flight of NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket in late 2022. 

Today, multiple nations and even private companies have the technological capability to send spacecraft to the moon. Space itself is now more crowded, too, host to satellites tied into terrestrial economies: carrying communications, providing guidance signals, and observing agricultural water and other resources on the ground. 

The goal is no longer to achieve technological superiority. Instead, nations are rushing to acquire existing technologies that are becoming a prerequisite for economic independence and affluence. “This is part of being in a world in a mature space age, that these are no longer optional programs, they’re no longer pickup games, jockeying to see who’s first,” Lewis says. “These are essential, existential programs for 21st century existence.”

[Related: China’s astronauts embark on a direct trip to their brand new space station]

In this sense, the current wave of moon programs are different from those in the past because they are more internally focused on economies, rather than serving as a non-military proxy contest between two superpowers. China, Lewis notes, has scaled its exploration of space to match its economic development over the past 30 years.

However, that’s not to say it will remain that way. The historical Gold Rush, after all, led to conflict over that valuable resource. Once enough players are regularly operating on the moon with regularity, the opportunities for disputes will increase. 

“Who gets to choose what we do with the moon?” Lewis asks. “We haven’t sorted out issues about who has mining and drilling rights.” 

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 forbids nations from making territorial claims on celestial bodies, but permits using resources there. Whether that use includes mining materials to sell for a profit on Earth is less clear. “We haven’t had to deal with that profit in space,” Lewis says. ”I’m glad I’m not an attorney who specializes in these sorts of things because it’s a part of it that makes my head ache.”

But there may be plenty of time for space lawyers and diplomats to figure that out. Because, when it comes to the moon, even gold rushes move slowly. “We’ve seen missions fail,” Lewis says, such as India’s Chandrayaan-2 mission that crashed on the moon in 2019. “The moon is a lot easier than it was 60 years ago, but it’s still difficult to get there.”

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Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft was supposed to depart Earth last month in a crewed test flight scheduled for July 21. It never left the ground. Problems with the spacecraft’s parachute system and the discovery of flammable tape around internal electronics led NASA, in June, to indefinitely postpone the flight. 

The work to fix the problems with the Starliner won’t be complete until next year, NASA and Boeing officials announced this week. ”We’re anticipating that we’re going to be ready with the spacecraft in early March,” Boeing Starliner vice president and program manager Mark Nappi said during an August 7 press conference. 

It’s just the latest in a long series of problems and delays that have plagued the Starliner since its first test flight. And, in the meantime, SpaceX has been eating the more venerable aerospace giant’s lunch.

In 2014, NASA awarded both SpaceX and Boeing contracts to develop spacecraft for the space agency’s Commercial Crew Program. The goal at the time, according to Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analysis firm Astralytical, was to provide NASA with rides to space after the 2011 retirement of the Space Shuttle, without relying on Russia and its Soyuz spacecraft. Boeing was the clear favorite. 

“They chose to do similar redundant systems, Dragon and Starliner, for the purpose of at least one succeeding. That one was assumed to be Starliner,” Forczyk says. “And it was a question whether SpaceX would even succeed at all.”

SpaceX completed testing of its Crew Dragon spacecraft, and then flew its first official mission with NASA astronauts in November 2020. But computer issues kept Boeing’s spacecraft from completing its uncrewed flight test, the Orbital Flight Test (OFT), in December 2019. 

[Related: Watch SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket explode]

Then, in April 2021, issues with an engine valve—due to exposure to salty air at Cape Canaveral, Florida—led to the cancellation of the re-attempted uncrewed flight test, OFT-2. Boeing wouldn’t successfully complete that test until May 2022. 

The next step in Starliner testing, a crewed flight test, or CFT, was originally scheduled for December 2022. This was delayed multiple times—in February, March, and April—before the July launch date was postponed due to the issues with the parachute and flammable tape. 

According to Nappi, Boeing has redesigned linkages for the parachutes to make them more robust. The aerospace company plans to conduct a “drop test” of the new design in November, releasing a version of the Starliner from 11,000 feet over the Nevada desert. Boeing is also removing the flammable tape where possible, and considering ways to place protective coatings on the tape in areas where it cannot be so easily replaced. 

Despite marking March 2024 as the month when Starliner could be ready, NASA and Boeing do not have an official launch date in mind. And given how the program has run so far, that’s probably a wise decision, according to Forczyk. 

“There’s multiple things that could happen that will continue to delay this,” she says. “Just based on the hardware testing, I do believe that we’d have to see everything go perfectly from now until March in order for them to even optimistically consider March as a date for their next true test mission.” That an aerospace giant like Boeing is still dealing with fundamental engineering troubles this late in the game, while an upstart like SpaceX is about to fly its seventh crewed mission for NASA on August 25, has to be embarrassing for Boeing, she adds. 

More importantly though, it’s costing Boeing money: NASA awarded the company $4.2 billion to develop the Starliner in 2014, and it is on the hook for all costs beyond that amount. CNBC estimates the company has lost around $1.5 billion on Starliner so far. 

[Related on PopSci+: A DIY-rocket club’s risky dream of launching a human to the edge of space]

”This program has been such a money loss for Boeing that it makes me wonder how committed Boeing is going to be to the continuation of this program,” Forcysk says. She notes that Boeing has said it will fulfill its obligations to NASA, which include six crewed flights to the ISS, but the company may no longer be interested in trying to offer Starliner services to other governments or private customers. 

NASA, meanwhile, may soon have alternatives to Starliner. 

“Coming on board, perhaps, is Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser, which has been in development for like 20 years,” Forczyk says. And Blue Origin’s New Glenn spacecraft is expected to begin flying commercial payloads by August 2024. 

With those alternatives or backups to Crew Dragon flights, and NASA’s planned retirement of the ISS by the end of the decade, it could be that Starliner is a very expensive project that flies fewer than 10 missions. 

The end result is that SpaceX, once considered the underdog by NASA, looks to be the primary human space launch contractor for NASA for the foreseeable future. “These other systems that are in development will offer competition, but at what point does SpaceX become less dominant?” Forczyk says. “Right now SpaceX is so far ahead of everyone else in human-rated orbital launch that it’s going to take a lot for other companies to catch up.”

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Sealed safely inside the International Space Station, astronauts dress for comfort and convenience. Their typical getups—short-sleeve collared shirts and long cargo pants—are regular Earth clothes, sourced from retailers that include Cabela’s and Lands’ End. But astronauts require exceptional attire when outside the ISS’s climate-controlled confines. NASA’s chunky spacesuits are, essentially, spacecraft condensed to human size. They protect wearers from an environment that swings from 250 degrees Fahrenheit in the sun to minus 250 degrees in the shade. 

Inside the suits, spacewalkers often work up a sweat, despite cooling tubes that wick away body heat. Extravehicular activities, or EVAs, may involve hours of strenuous labor. To stay warm and pressurized, astronauts also have to wear layers—including an inner form-fitting garment akin to long underwear—that they re-wear and even share. Complicating matters still: There are no laundry machines on the ISS. Because water is so valuable, washing a suit in orbit is not an option. Which is why NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and other organizations have asked textiles experts to investigate the problem of biocontamination in suits and develop fabrics that might solve it.

[Related: Future astronauts and space tourists could rock 3D printed ‘second skin’]

Heavy work in heavy gear leads to filth. After mock EVAs on Earth, technicians who help peel stand-in astronauts out of their suits have learned to turn their heads away on the first unzip to avoid a stinky blast, says Gernot Grömer, director of the Austrian Space Forum, a research group that conducts simulated astronautical missions. “Everybody sees those beautiful, shiny white spacesuits. But nobody knows what it smells like at the ISS.” (It’s not particularly pleasant.)

As these suits are used again and again, worries go beyond foul odors to hygiene and health hazards. The possibility for biocontamination, which includes human debris, bacteria, and other foreign substances, may get worse as spacefarers travel past low-Earth orbit for longer trips to the moon. 

“Washing spacesuit interiors on a consistent basis may well not be practical” in lunar habitats, ESA materials and processes engineer Malgorzata Holynska says in a statement. That space agency is investing in unusual ways to keep suits clean, such as antibiotic chemicals churned out by microbes.

Some of the fabrics were infused with copper, which has impressive antimicrobial properties. When bacteria touch the element, it destabilizes their cell walls and membranes, making the microbes vulnerable to damage from the metal’s ions. The NASA scientists also examined textiles treated with silver—likewise toxic to germs on contact—and silicone.

After observing the gunk that grew on the fabrics for up to 14 days, they found that only one compound kept bacteria and fungi below targets set by NASA’s Constellation program—a now-defunct plan for lunar missions in which a spacesuit would have been reused up to 90 times in six months. The winner was a solution of silver molecules used for disinfecting hospital dressings and other fabrics. But the metal ion was too good at its job. “It kills everything,” Orndoff says. Total sterility can cause even more problems than grime, given than humans need a balanced ecosystem of millions of microorganisms to keep the skin and other organs healthy.

The experiments showed that concentrations of other antimicrobial compounds were generally too low to be effective. Some microbes would initially dip in numbers, but the resistant ones would repopulate the samples. The scientists worried that, at high-enough amounts, antimicrobial particles would irritate anyone wearing the fabric or pollute the space station. “After that we never really revisited antimicrobial treatments,” Orndoff explains, for the “simple reason” that it would present complications for the ISS life-support system that provides clean air and water. 

[Related: Onboard the ISS, nothing goes to waste—including sweat and pee]

While Orndoff’s team did not pursue their idea further, NASA’s commercial contractors have. In 2022, the agency hired US companies Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to develop the next generation of suits for spacewalks. Earlier this year, Axiom unveiled a prototype suit that Artemis III astronauts might use to explore the lunar south pole. In a statement to Popular Science, the company says: “The Axiom Space AxEMU spacesuits will use textiles that have antimicrobial properties to reduce biocontamination.” The suits’ cooling system will also use biocide in its water loops “to prevent microbial buildup.” The company did not share the exact type of the agents, citing their proprietary nature.

One metabolite in particular, named violacein, survived every hostile attack with its antimicrobial properties intact. The purple-black substance can be found in the bacteria that live on the skin of red-backed salamanders. It’s so good at killing microbes that some biologists suspect it protects the amphibians from deadly chytrid fungus infections. The Austrian Space Forum plans to field-test violacein in a simulated Mars mission, in which six astronaut roleplayers will spend four weeks in Armenia’s rugged mountains in 2024. 

Grömer envisions a future where this pigment’s potent defenses leave the planet, not only on treated spacesuits but also towels and other gear. While dirty linens might just sound like a chore, they can be a breeding ground for microbes, which thrive in low gravity and may mutate faster in space. “When you go to Mars, you’re at the edge of what’s technologically possible, so little nuisances can transform into real disaster-prone situations,” Grömer says. “And so if there’s a risk we can control, hell, let’s do it.”

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A team of small, solar-powered rovers are traveling to the moon next year. There, they will attempt to autonomously organize and carry out a mission with next-to-no input from NASA’s human controllers. If successful, similar robotic fleets could one day tackle a multitude of mission tasks, thus allowing their human team members to focus on a host of other responsibilities.

Three robots, each roughly the size of a carry-on suitcase, comprise the Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) project. The trio will descend onto the lunar surface via tethers deployed by a 13-foot-tall lander. From there, NASA managers back on Earth, such as CADRE principal investigator Jean-Pierre de la Croix, plan to transmit a basic command such as “Go explore this region.”

[Related: Meet the first 4 astronauts of the ‘Artemis Generation’.]

“[T]he rovers figure out everything else: when they’ll do the driving, what path they’ll take, how they’ll maneuver around local hazards,” de la Croix explained in an August 2 announcement via NASA. “You only tell them the high-level goal, and they have to determine how to accomplish it.”

The trio will even elect a “leader” at their mission’s outset to divvy up work responsibilities, which will reportedly include traveling in formation, exploring a roughly 4,300 square foot region of the moon, and creating 3D topographical maps of the area using stereoscopic cameras. The results of CADRE’s roughly 14-day robot excursion will better indicate the feasibility of deploying similar autonomous teams on space missions in the years to come.

As NASA notes, the mission’s robot trifecta requires a careful balance of form and function. Near the moon’s equator—where the CADRE bots will land—temperatures can rise to as high as 237 degrees Fahrenheit. Each machine will need to be hardy enough to survive the harsh lunar climate and lightweight enough to get the job done, all while housing the computing power necessary to autonomously operate. To solve for this, NASA engineers believe installing a 30-minute wake-sleep cycle will allow for the robots to sufficiently cool off, assess their respective heath, and then elect a new leader to continue organizing their mission as necessary.

“It could change how we do exploration in the future,” explains Subha Comandur, CADRE project manager for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The question for future missions will become: ‘How many rovers do we send, and what will they do together?’”

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Terms like “cultural heritage” and “archaeology” might conjure Indiana Jones-lie scenes of old and ancient things buried under the sands of time. But even now, each one of us is producing material that could interest future humans trying to record and study our own era.

For those who believe that space exploration and astronauts’ first departures from Earth are culturally significant, then there is a wealth of objects that spacefarers—crewed and uncrewed, past and present—have left in the realms beyond our atmosphere.

“This stuff is an extension of our species’ migration, beginning in Africa and extending to the solar system,” says Justin Holcomb, an archaeologist with the Kansas Geological Survey. “I argue that a piece of a lander is the exact same thing as a piece of a stone tool in Africa.”

This idea is the heart of what Holcomb and his colleagues call “planetary geoarchaeology.” In a paper published in the journal Geoarchaeology on July 21, these “space archaeologists” detail how they want to study the interactions between the items we’ve left around the solar system and the  hostile environments they now occupy. This research, the authors believe, will only become more important as human activity on the moon is set to blossom in the decades to come.

The idea of documenting and preserving what we leave behind in space isn’t a completely new concept. In the early 2000s, New Mexico State University anthropologist Beth O’Leary (who co-authored the paper with Holcomb) cataloged objects scattered around Tranquility Base, Apollo 11’s landing site on the moon. O’Leary later helped get some of those artifacts registered in California and New Mexico as culturally significant properties.

“I would argue that Tranquility Base could easily be considered the most important archaeological site that exists,” says Justin St. P. Walsh, an archaeologist at Chapman University in California who was not involved with the new paper. The base’s lunar soil can’t be declared a cultural heritage site because that would violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prevents any country from claiming the soil of the moon or another world. But scholars can still list objects found there as heritage.

Naturally, O’Leary’s catalog includes the remnants of Apollo 11’s lunar module and its famed US flag, along with empty food bags, utensils, hygiene equipment, and wires. What is space junk to some is precious culture to space archaeologists. Even long-festering astronaut poop has its value—“that’s human DNA,” Holcomb says.

Archaeological sites on Earth are deeply impacted by the processes of the world around them, both natural and artificial. Likewise, Tranquility Base doesn’t just sit in tranquility. The moon’s surface is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays and micrometeoroids; even faraway human landings can kick up regolith showers.

[Related: Want to learn something about space? Crash into it.]

Holcomb and his colleagues want to study the various states objects are left in to learn how sites on the moon and other worlds change over time—and how to preserve them for our distant descendants. “We think in deep time scales,” says Holcomb. “We’re not thinking in just the next five years. We’re thinking in a thousand years.”

That sort of research, the authors say, is still quite new. Holcomb, for instance, wants to study what happens to NASA’s Spirit rover on Mars as a sand dune washes over it. Other planetary geoarchaeology projects might focus on what the moon’s environment has wrought upon artificial materials we’ve left on the lunar surface.

“We can find out more about what happened to [castoffs] in the length of time they’ve been there,” says Alice Gorman, an archaeologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, who also wasn’t a co-author. 

On Earth, Gorman and colleagues plan to replicate Apollo astronauts’ boot prints in simulated lunar soil and subject them to forces like rocket exhaust. Gorman believes even engineers with no interest in archaeology may want to take interest in work like this. “These same processes will be happening to any new habitats built on the surface,” she says. “With the archaeological sites, we get a bit of a longer-term perspective.”

The moon is the immediate focus for both this paper’s authors and other space archaeologists, and it’s easy to see why. After several decades of occasional uncrewed missions and flybys, NASA’s Artemis program promises to spearhead a mass return to the satellite’s surface. The Artemis program is slated to land on the moon’s south pole, far away from existing Apollo landing sites. But a flurry of private companies have emerged with the goal of not just touching the moon as Apollo did, but extracting its resources.

Space archaeologists fear that all this future activity will place past sites at risk. “We barely know how to operate on the moon,” says Walsh.

There are some indications that the broader space community is thinking about the problem. The Artemis Accords (a US-initiated document that aims to outline the ethical guidelines for the Artemis era) and the Vancouver Recommendations on Space Mining (a 2020 white paper by primarily Canadian academics that proposes a framework for sustainable space mining) express a desire to protect space heritage sites.

Of course, these are only words on nonbinding paper, and space archaeologists do not think they go far enough. Holcomb and colleagues want experts in their field to be involved in planning—for instance, steering scientific and commercial space missions away from spots where they might interfere with existing cultural heritage. There is earthbound precedent for such a role: In many countries, archaeologists already assist infrastructure projects.

“We know we’re going to go there someday, so let’s make sure that we have the protections in place before we go and ruin things,” says Walsh.

[Related: What an extraterrestrial archaeological dig could tell us about space culture]

Moves like this can’t protect lunar heritage from every possible harm: A future satellite could very well crash-land on Tranquility Base and wreck the last remnants of Apollo 11 there. But space archaeologists say that it is valuable to take any steps we can.

“I think the paper is a really fantastic demonstration of how any mission to the moon has to be about more than just engineering, and it has to be interdisciplinary,” Gorman notes. “It’s very timely that it’s been published now, while there’s still time to incorporate its recommendations into actual lunar missions.”

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If you want to see a retired NASA space shuttle, you have a few options. You could travel to Virginia and see Discovery, or journey to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida to check out the angled Atlantis. And don’t forget about Enterprise in New York City, a shuttle that never flew into space but did glide through the atmosphere. 

Then there’s Endeavour. Right now, that space shuttle, which made 25 trips to space and back, is on display horizontally at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. But the museum has towering plans for the shuttle: It’s going to move it into a vertical position, and display it with solid rocket boosters and an external fuel tank, all attached together as if the ship was about to blast off into space. When that happens, it’ll be the only shuttle displayed vertically. And instead of having to cope with the forces of a launch, the orbiter assembly will need to withstand any California earthquakes.

As Endeavour is now, “it’s a great display, you can walk under it, look up at the tiles—it’s wonderful,” says Jeffrey Rudolph, the president and CEO of the museum. “But it will be amazing, and we think [a] far better display, when it’s vertical, with the whole stack. This’ll be 200 feet tall—20 stories tall—and you’ll be able to look at it [from] multiple perspectives, multiple views, at multiple levels.” 

To get it into the launch position requires an operation worthy of an actual NASA mission. It kicked off in earnest on July 20, when two components called aft skirts came in via crane and were lowered into position on a concrete pad. Each of those aft skirts are as wide as 18 feet and weigh 13,000 pounds and have both lifted off on actual shuttle flights. 

The aft skirts comprise the base of the solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Other segments, called the solid rocket motors, which are about 116 feet tall, will join them to make up each SRB, as will parts called forward assemblies. Those two SRBs will weigh in at a total of a quarter million pounds together. Before Endeavour can join those SRBs, the 76,000-pound external tank (technically known as ET-94) must be moved into place, too.

The plan holds that early next year, the 176,000-pound Endeavour itself will be lifted into launch position using two cranes, one of which will simply make sure the orbiter’s tail doesn’t hit the ground.  

For this whole assembly operation, “we’re basically following the same process that Kennedy Space Center used,” Rudolph notes, adding that no one has put together a shuttle at a non-NASA facility before. As an example, this incredible time-lapse video shows the space shuttle Atlantis being lifted and then mated with its solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank for the very last shuttle flight in July of 2011. 

Like a real NASA launch, Rudolph adds that weather will play a key role in when they actually carry out that maneuver of lifting the actual orbiter into place. Windy conditions, which could interact with the orbiter, would cause a delay. “It is a glider,” he points out. “It’s got wings.” 

[Related: Astronauts explain what it’s like to be ‘shot off the planet’]

The whole flight assembly—Endeavour, the solid rocket boosters, and the tank—will together weigh just over half a million pounds, according to the California Science Center. “We’ve got the last hardware—the last external tank—so it’s the only place in the world you’ll be able to see a full space shuttle stack in launch position,” Rudolph says.

To mitigate against the possibility of an earthquake, the whole shuttle configuration will be perched on a thick concrete pad that weighs more than 3 million pounds. “It’s a 8-foot-thick concrete pad that is surrounded on all four sides by a 3-foot moat, basically,” Rudolph explains. And under that pad are a half-dozen seismic isolators, which Rudolph compares to “big ball bearings.” The Los Angeles Times has helpful graphics.

“That whole pad can move independently of the building, and will withstand any foreseeable earthquake,” he adds. 

Rudolph says that it will be a couple years before the facility is actually open, and that the entire planned Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center that will house Endeavour and other exhibits costs $400 million. According to a previous NASA estimate, it cost around $450 million to actually launch a shuttle. A more recent estimate via the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the number at well over $1 billion for each launch, in fiscal year 2021 dollars. 

Rudolph says that they had hoped to display a space shuttle in this way starting as early as three decades ago. “I actually have a rendering from 1992 showing a space shuttle in launch position,” he says. With any luck, the shuttle will be moved into place in January of 2024. 

Watch a short video about the new facility, below.

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Before a spacecraft lands on Mars, or futuristic cargo planes soar above our cities, they have to be designed and rigorously tested in wind tunnels. Even passenger airliners, such as Boeing’s 747 jets used by major airlines, are subject to such tests. These facilities allow engineers to “fly” aircraft and spacecraft just a few feet off the ground. NASA, which has a 100-year history of using the machines, is finally building a new one, updated for the 21st century—the agency’s first new wind tunnel in over 40 years.

The NASA Flight Dynamic Research Facility (FDRF), slated to open in 2025 at the Langley Research Center in Virginia, will be over 100 feet tall. NASA leaders think it’s going to be key for creating the spacecraft of the future. The agency plans to use the new wind tunnel to prepare for human spaceflight to the Moon and Mars, plus robotic missions to two solar system worlds with thick atmospheres: Venus and Titan, Saturn’s methane-rich moon. It will also be key for the next generation of Earth-bound aircraft, which NASA hopes to make more sustainable, in line with its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. 

“What we’re going to do with this facility is literally change the world,” said Clayton Turner, director of NASA Langley Research Center, in a press release from the facility’s groundbreaking ceremony. “The humble spirit of our researchers and this effort will allow us to reach for new heights, to reveal the unknown, for the betterment of humankind.” 

Wind tunnels push air past a stationary object, usually using huge fans, to simulate the motion of air around, over, and under flying craft. This allows engineers to tweak their designs based on what they see in the experiment, making vehicles more stable and aerodynamic. The wind tunnel is a safe place to try out new technologies, and a key step in testing the safety of any craft before a human jumps aboard. It’s also key for rockets and spacecraft, where engineers must ensure the vehicle can safely traverse a planet’s atmosphere. (Biologists have even used wind tunnels—though not NASA’s—to observe flying geese.)

Langley’s most recently built wind tunnel is the National Transonic Facility, constructed in 1980. That will remain in operation, but the FDRF will replace two existing wind tunnels, both near 80 years old: the 12-foot Low-Speed Spin Tunnel from 1939, and the 20-foot Vertical Spin Tunnel from 1940. The flying machines tested in the new facility will be beyond what the original builders could have dreamed. “We haven’t tested anything with a propeller on it in decades,” joked NASA Langley chief engineer Charles “Mike” Fremaux at a recent community lecture about the project.

[Related: How to build a massive wind farm]

The first NASA wind tunnel (which was the US government’s first wind tunnel) was built all the way back in 1921 at Langley. It was basically a glorified box with some powerful fans. Since then, the agency has built more than 40 wind tunnels, many with specialized purposes. Some are tiny, meant only for miniature models, and some are large enough to fit a whole jet. Each produces a different temperature, pressure, and speed of wind, meant to simulate the different conditions a craft might encounter in the real world. Some wind tunnels can move air at over 4,000 miles per hour, significantly quicker than a 747’s usual cruising speed of around 600 mph.

Many famous missions have started their journeys in a wind tunnel. The Curiosity rover’s parachute, for example, was first tested in the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex at NASA Ames in California, long before it ballooned open in the Red Planet’s atmosphere. In the past few years, key parts of NASA’s Artemis missions, which aim to return Americans to the moon, including the Orion crew capsule and the SLS rocket, were tested in wind tunnels.

The new wind tunnel at the FDRF will be more efficient than past facilities, cutting down on costs. Plus, it’ll be safer for the staff running the wind tunnel tests, who used to run the risk of getting sucked into the machine as they deployed models. “Just like we do now…a very skilled technician is going to launch the models by hand. That’s not a joke,” said Fremaux in his presentation. In the past, there have only been some minor injuries, and most accidents just damage the facility itself. But, now there will be more fail-safes to minimize the risks.

It really might even pave the way for flying cars, too, by testing the tech for vertical takeoff, as demonstrated by Back to the Future’s hover cars or a classic Jetsons’-style flying car. Those are far-out ideas, but they’d never be able to take off without the help of the time-tested wind tunnel.

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The universe is a dusty place. Cosmic particles can range from the size of a single large molecule up to a bit larger than a grain of terrestrial sand, and these can accumulate in billowing clouds light-years wide. The general scientific understanding was that dust piles up gradually, produced by stars and supernovae over hundreds of millions of years. Dust is usually a fixture of mature galaxies, or so astronomers thought. 

But in a new paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, astronomers found a specific type of cosmic dust, high in carbon, in young distant galaxies just 800 million years after the Big Bang. That accumulation happened far earlier than current theories of dust formation suggest is possible. It’s a finding that could change how astronomers understand the creation of stars and evolution of galaxies in the early universe, and ultimately, how that young universe grew into the cosmos we know today. 

For a long time, astronomers treated the cosmic stuff the way we might view a dust bunny under a sofa: as a nuisance. Scientists tried to look beyond large clouds of cosmic dust, treated more like obstacles than subjects of study in their own right. “The way most astronomers interact with it is that [dust] actually absorbs a lot of the light that we’re trying to observe,” says lead study author Joris Witstok, a post-doctoral researcher with the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at Cambridge, in the UK. 

But that’s changed in recent years, thanks to observatories such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which uses infrared light to see through the clouds. Scientists have also come to appreciate the dust itself, realizing these tiny flecks of carbon, silicon, and other matter are responsible for large-scale processes in the universe, such as new star formation. 

”For example, in the Milky Way, we have these sites where new stars are forming, and they’re very dusty,” Witstok says. “There’s big clouds of gas and dust and the dust really helps to allow the gas to cool and contract and therefore form new stars.”

[Related: 5,000 tons of ancient ‘extraterrestrial dust’ fall on Earth each year]

It’s not that the early universe was dustless. Previous studies had found large quantities of dust in galaxies in the very early universe, according to Witstok. Astronomers are interested in this early dust because it represents when stars began to produce some of the first elements heavier than hydrogen.

“The first stars that started to convert hydrogen into helium, which was the only thing that was around all the way at the beginning, into the heavier elements like carbon, oxygen,” Witstok says. 

Large primordial stars may have expelled vast quantities of dust, made of these heavier elements, toward the end of their life cycles, or during supernovae explosions as they died. 

But previous studies hadn’t been able to detect carbonaceous dust—meaning it’s rich in carbon—at such early times. 

“The thing that is really a new discovery here is that we’re able to pinpoint the type of dust grains that we’re seeing,” Witstok says. ”What we’re actually able to tell is that there’s something producing, specifically, these carbon dust grains on a very short timescale. And that’s where the surprise lies.”

Spectrographic observations of dust nearer to Earth, within the Milky Way galaxy, made this discovery possible. Spectroscopy breaks light into a spectrum and looks for telltale signs of absorbed light at certain wavelengths associated with different elements and compounds—sort of like reading a unique rainbow. 

Carbonaceous dust produces a spectroscopic “bump” at a wavelength of 217.5 nanometers, a wavelength that places it in the ultraviolet portion of the spectrum. At least, that’s the wavelength of the light as it left its home galaxy billions of years ago. 

“Since it’s been traveling over roughly 13 billion years, while the universe is expanding, the light really gets stretched with that expansion,” Witstok says, a phenomenon known as redshift. Light that was ultraviolet gets stretched longer, so that the wavelength—about 1.5 to 2 micrometers—is now in the infrared, the part of the spectrum JWST is fine-tuned to measure. 

“That’s exactly why we couldn’t do this before,” Witstok says. “Because with JWST, we’re now for the first time able to look and make these very precise measurements in the infrared.”

[Related: Physicists figured out a recipe to make titanium stardust on Earth] 

Now that researchers have measured this carbonaceous dust at an earlier time in the universe than expected, they’re left trying to figure out what process could be producing it. There are two theories, Witstok says, though neither are perfect. 

The first is that supernovae in early galaxies make the dust, with dying stars expelling the material before their final fiery death throes. But the problem there, he says, is that violent forces unleashed by the supernovae might also destroy much of that dust.

Another source of the dust could be Wolf-Rayet stars, massive, hot, and fast-burning stars that can expel a large portion of their mass into space in less than a million years’ time. “But again, it’s the question of how much can they actually produce?” Witstok says. “Is it enough to explain what we’re seeing in the early universe?”

Witstok and his colleagues hope to answer those questions with computer simulations. Theorists can try to tweak models of supernovae and Wolf-Rayet stars to try to find the conditions that produce the carbonaceous dust seen in the JWST observations. 

And further observations of early galaxies may net answers as well, he says. “We could start to look at what might be hints of an unusual number of Wolf-Rayet stars within those galaxies, for example.”

Whatever is driving carbonaceous dust creation in the early universe may hold clues for understanding how galaxies in the more recent universe evolved, and how stars and planets form, too. ”Dust is this really key component of how galaxies evolve,” Witstok says. ”That we’re now starting to see more and more evidence of it forming very early on is telling us that perhaps this evolution is taking place more quickly than we previously thought. That then has a knock-on effect, down the line, as to how we get to the present.”

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In milliseconds, Google can serve up a fact that long eluded many of humanity’s deepest thinkers: The universe is nearly 14 billion years old. And many cosmologists continue to grow more confident in that number. In December of 2020, a collaboration of researchers working on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile published their latest estimate: 13.77 billion years, plus or minus a few tens of millions of years. Their answer matches that of the Planck mission, a European satellite that made similar observations between 2009 and 2013.

The precise observations of ACT and Planck come after more than a millennium of humans watching the sky and pondering where it all could have come from. Somehow, primates with lifespans of less than a century got a handle on events that took place eons before their planet—and even the ancient stars and atoms that would form their planet—existed. Here’s a brief account of how humanity came around to figure out how old the universe is.

Antiquity: The beginning of creation

Every culture has a creation myth. The Babylonians, for instance, believed the heavens and the Earth to be hewn from the carcass of a slain god. But few belief systems specified when existence started existing (one exception is Hinduism, which teaches that the universe reforms every 4.3 billion years, not so far off from the actual age of the Earth).

The idea that stuck, at least in the West, came from the Greek philosophers, and it was actually something of a scientific step back. In the fourth and third centuries BCE, Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers went all in on the notion that the planets and stars were embedded in eternally rotating celestial spheres. For the next millennium or so, few expected the entire universe to have an age at all.

The clash between the night sky and the infinite universe became known as Olber’s paradox, named after Heinrich Olber, an astronomer who popularized it in 1826. An early version of the modern solution came, of all people, from the poet Edgar Allan Poe. We experience night, he speculated in his prose poem “Eureka” in 1848, because the universe is not eternal. There was a beginning, and not enough time has elapsed since then for the stars to fully light up the sky.

1900s: The early and modern universes come into view

But the resolution to Olber’s paradox took time to sink in. In 1917, when Einstein’s own theory of gravity told him that the universe likely grew or shrank over time, he added a fudge factor into his equations—the cosmological constant—to get the universe to hold still (allowing it to endure forever).

[Related: From the archives: The Theory of Relativity gains speed]

Meanwhile, larger telescopes had brought clearer views of other galaxies to astronomers’ eyepieces, prompting a fierce debate over whether they were looking at far-off “island universes,” or nearby star clusters inside the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble’s keen eyes settled the argument in the late 1920s, measuring intergalactic distances for the first time. He found that not only were galaxies immense and distant objects, they were also flying away from each other.

The universe was expanding, and Hubble clocked its expansion rate at 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec, a constant that now bears his name. With the expansion of the universe in hand, astronomers had a powerful new tool to look back in time and gauge when the cosmos started to grow. Hubble’s work in 1929 pegged cosmic expansion in such a way that the universe should be roughly 2 billion years old.

“The expansion rate is telling you how fast you can rewind the history of the Universe, like an old VHS tape,” says Daniel Scolnic, a cosmologist at Duke University. “If the rewind pace is faster, then that means the movie is shorter.”

But measuring the distances to far-flung galaxies is messy business. A cleaner method arrived in 1965, when researchers detected a faint crackling of microwaves coming from every direction in space. Cosmologists had already predicted that such a signal should exist, since light emitted just hundreds of thousands of years after the universe’s birth would have been stretched by the expansion of space into lengthier microwaves. By measuring the characteristics of this Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), astronomers could take a sort of snapshot of the young universe, deducing its early size and contents. The CMB served as unassailable evidence that the cosmos had a beginning.

“The most important thing accomplished by the ultimate discovery of the [CMB] in 1965 was to force us all to take seriously the idea that there was an early universe,” wrote Nobel prize laureate Steven Weinberg in his 1977 book, The First Three Minutes.

1990 to present: Refining the calculation

The CMB let cosmologists get a sense of how big the universe was at an early point in time, which helped them calculate its size and expansion today. Scolnic likens the process to noting that a child’s arm appears one foot long in a baby picture, and then estimating the height and growth speed of the corresponding adolescent. This method gave researchers a new way to measure the universe’s current expansion rate. It turned out to be nearly 10 times slower than Hubble’s 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec, pushing the moment of cosmic genesis further back in time. In the 1990s, age estimates ranged from 7 to 20 billion years old.

Painstaking efforts from multiple teams strove to refine cosmology’s best estimate of the universe’s expansion rate. Observations of galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993 pegged the current Hubble constant at 71 kilometers per second per megaparsec, narrowing the universe’s age to 9 to 14 billion years.

[Related: Stellar telescopes for your space-loving kids]

Then in 2003, the WMAP spacecraft recorded a map of the CMB with fine features. With this data, cosmologists calculated the universe’s age to be 13.5 to 13.9 billion years old. About a decade later, the Planck satellite measured the CMB in even more detail, getting a Hubble constant of 67.66 and an age of 13.8 billion years. The new independent CMB measurement from ACT got basically the same numbers, further bolstering cosmologists’ confidence that they know what they’re doing.

“Now we’ve come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree,” said Simone Aiola, a cosmologist at the Flatiron Institute and member of the ACT collaboration, in a press release at the time. “It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.”

Up next: A cosmological conflict

But as measurements of the early and modern universes have gotten more precise, they’ve started to clash. While studies based on the CMB baby picture suggest a Hubble constant in the high 60s of kilometers per second per megaparsec, distance measurements of today’s galaxies (which Scolnic compares to a cosmic “selfie”) give brisker expansion rates in the low to mid 70s. Scolnic participated in one such survey in 2019, and another measurement based on the brightness of various galaxies came to a similar conclusion (that the modern universe is speedily expanding) in January 2021.

Taken at face value, the faster rates these teams are getting could mean that the universe is actually around a billion years younger than the canonical 13.8 billion years from Planck and ACT. Or, the mismatch may hint that something deeper is missing from modern astronomy’s picture of reality. Connecting the CMB to the present day involves assumptions about the poorly understood dark matter and dark energy that appear to dominate our universe, for instance, and the fact that the Hubble constant measurements aren’t lining up could indicate that calculating the true age of the universe will involve more than just rewinding the tape.

[Related: How to weigh the universe, according to astronomers]

Another controversial estimate claims the universe could be 26.7 billion years old, so twice as ancient as currently thought. This is based on the unconfirmed notion that redshift light from distant galaxies can be altered by physical constants other than the expansion of space. One way to test this is through finite measurements from the James Webb Space Telescope.

“I am not certain about how we are deriving the age of the universe,” Scolnic says. “I’m not saying that it’s wrong, but I can’t say it’s right.”

This story has been updated. It was originally published on January 13, 2021.

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Yesterday, electric vehicle maker Canoo announced in a press release that it had delivered three new Crew Transportation Vehicles (CTVs) to NASA. The cute-looking and totally electric vehicles will transport astronauts to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the Artemis lunar missions.

Designed as a big update to shuttle-era Astrovan, the CTVs were made specifically for the requirements of the Artemis missions, NASA says. Each vehicle can accommodate up to four astronauts in their brand-new Orion spacesuits, plus a spacesuit technician, on the drive to Launch Pad 39B. There’s also “room for specialized equipment,” NASA says. 

“The collaboration between Canoo and our NASA representatives focused on the crews’ safety and comfort on the way to the pad ahead of their journey to the Moon,” Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the Artemis launch director, said in a press release. 

Although safety and comfort were obviously important, NASA also put a lot of thought into the visual design of the CTVs, which is meant to pay “homage to the legacy of the agency’s human spaceflight and space exploration efforts.” Apparently, everything “from the interior and exterior markings to the color of the vehicles to the wheel wells” was carefully chosen. 

[Related: With Artemis 1 launched, NASA is officially on its way back to the moon]

“I have no doubt everyone who sees these new vehicles will feel the same sense of pride I have for this next endeavor of crewed Artemis missions,” Blackwell-Thompson, who was involved in the design process, added. Canoo intends to reveal the interior and exterior in more detail later this year.

Canoo is one of the more interesting electric vehicle manufacturers in the US. It has developed a “skateboard” modular EV platform (other EV makers use the skateboard approach too). Basically, it consists of four wheels, a battery, a motor or two, and a drive-by-wire steering wheel on a 9.35-foot wheelbase, allowing the company to develop different vehicles from the same chassis. So far, it has a van-style Lifestyle Vehicle (which the NASA CTVs are based on), a delivery-van, and a pickup truck, which the US Army is currently testing. 

Of course, developing a brand-new platform like this is never a smooth process. Canoo’s press release boasts of an “on time” delivery, hinting at some of its past troubles. As recently as May last year, the company only had enough cash on hand to last another three months. It seems a spate of binding orders for more than 15,000 vehicles from companies like Walmart and two fleet leasing companies, Zeeba and Kingbee, were enough to keep it in the clear. It’s a big reminder that the EV space is still very new, and some of the companies making headlines right now might not be the ones that we are talking about in 10 year’s time.

Although they were delivered this week, the CTVs won’t have their big day until at least November of 2024. That’s the current planned launch date for NASA’s first crewed mission to the moon in 53 years, Artemis II. The little CTVs will drive the four astronauts the first nine miles of their trip into space, though the hulking Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft will take them for the rest of their 10-day mission. Until then, the three EVs will be used for astronaut training exercises. 

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Few scientific tools get introduced in a press conference by the commander-in-chief. But NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is no ordinary instrument. President Biden unveiled the first image from JWST in July 2022, revealing the sharpest, deepest infrared view of the universe ever taken. And that was only the beginning. 

The solar-powered device, which drifts at a stable point 930,000 miles away from Earth, has since captured giant galaxies from the cosmic dawn; helped researchers discover the most distant and active supermassive black hole; snapped glowing views of Saturn and Jupiter; and found a new world beyond our solar system. It has teased out the details of the atmospheres above exoplanets and made the first-ever in-space detection of a molecule called methyl cation, a building block for the more complex carbon compounds found on Earth. 

The telescope was built on several aerospace innovations. Its mirrors are plated in a microscopic film of gold, optimized to reflect light. Its imagers, which include the Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument, allow JWST to look beyond cosmic dust and sense weak and ancient light from up to 13 billion years ago, just 800,000 years after the universe was born. And thanks to far more recent technology, it’s also incredibly easy to set up alerts for when the JWST has captured a new image, so you never miss out.

These remarkable James Webb Space Telescope images show stars, galaxies, and space in all their sparkling glory. What are your favorites?

[Related: The best telescopes for kids]

This post has been updated. It was originally published in July 2023.

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It’s no simple feat to send a rover to space, land it on a celestial body, and get the wheels rolling. NASA has used all kinds of techniques: The Pathfinder rover landed on Mars in 1997 inside a cluster of airbags, then rolled down its landing vehicle’s “petals,” which bloomed open like a flower, to the dusty surface. Cables attached to a rocket-powered “sky crane” spacecraft dropped the Perseverance Mars rover to the Red Planet’s surface in 2021. On the moon, Apollo 15, 16, and 17 astronauts pulled mylar cables to unfold and lower their buggies from the vehicles’ compact stowage compartments on lunar landers. 

But NASA’s first-ever rover mission to the lunar south pole will use a more familiar method of getting moving on Earth’s satellite: a pair of ramps. VIPER, which stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, will roll down an offramp to touch the lunar soil, or regolith, when it lands on the moon in late 2024. 

This is familiar technology in an unforgiving location. “We all know how to work with ramps, and we just need to optimize it for the environment we’re going to be in,” says NASA’s VIPER program manager Daniel Andrews.

A VIPER test vehicle recently descended down a pair of metal ramps at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, as seen in the agency’s recently published photos, with one beam for each set of the rover’s wheels. Because the terrain where VIPER will land—the edge of the massive Nobile Crater—is expected to be rough, the engineering team has been testing VIPER’s ability to descend the ramps at extreme angles. They have altered the steepness, as measured from the lander VIPER will descend from, and differences in elevation between the ramp for each wheel. 

”We have two ramps, not just for the left and right wheels, but a ramp set that goes out the back too,” Andrews says. “So we actually get our pick of the litter, which one looks most safe and best to navigate as we’re at that moment where we have to roll off the lander.” 

[Related: The next generation of lunar rovers might move like flying saucers]

VIPER is a scientific successor to NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS mission, which in 2009 confirmed the presence of water ice on the lunar south pole. 

“It completely rewrote the books on the moon with respect to water,” says Andrews, who also worked on the LCROSS mission. “That really started the moon rush, commercially, and by state actors like NASA and other space agencies.”

The ice, if abundant, could be mined to create rocket propellant. It could also provide water for other purposes at long-term lunar habitats, which NASA plans to construct in the late 2020s as part of the Artemis moon program. 

But LCROSS only confirmed that ice was definitely present in a single crater at the moon’s south pole. VIPER, a mobile rover, will probe the distribution of water ice in greater detail. Drilling beneath the lunar surface is one task. Another is to move into steep, permanently shadowed regions—entering craters that, due to their sharp geometry, and the low angle of the sun at the lunar poles, have not seen sunlight in billions of years. 

The tests demonstrate the rover can navigate a 15-degree slope with ease—enough to explore these hidden dark spots, avoiding the need to make a machine designed for trickier descents. “We think there’s plenty of scientifically relevant opportunities, without having to make a superheroic rover that can do crazy things,” Andrews says.

Developed by NASA Ames and Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic, VIPER is a square golf-cart-sized vehicle about 5 feet long and wide, and about 8 feet high. Unlike all of NASA’s Mars rovers, VIPER has four wheels, not six. 

”A problem with six wheels is it creates kind of the equivalent of a track, and so you’re forced to drive in a certain way,” Andrews says. VIPER’s four wheels are entirely independent from each other. Not only can they roll in any direction, they can be turned out, using the rover’s shoulder-like joints to crawl out of the soft regolith of the kind scientists believe exists in permanently shadowed moon craters. The wheels themselves are very similar to those on the Mars rovers, but with more paddle-like treads, known as grousers, to carry the robot through fluffy regolith.

“The metaphor I like to use is we have the ability to dip a toe into the [permanently shadowed region],” Andrews says. ”If we find we’re surprised or don’t like what we’re finding, we have the ability to lift that toe out, roll away on three wheels, and then put it back down.”

But VIPER won’t travel very far at all if it can’t get down the ramp from its lander, which is why Andrews and his team have been spending a lot of time testing that procedure. At first, the wheels would skid, just momentarily, as the VIPER test vehicle moved down the ramps. 

”We also found we could drive up and over the walls of the rampway,” Andrews says. “That’s probably not desirable.”

[Related on PopSci+: How Russia’s war in Ukraine almost derailed Europe’s Mars rover]

Together with Astrobotic, Andrews and his team have altered the ramps, and they now include specialized etchings down their lengths. The rover can detect this pattern along the rampway, using cameras in its wheel wells. “By just looking down there,” the robot knows where it is, he says. “That’s a new touch.”

Andrews is sure VIPER will be ready for deployment in 2024, however many tweaks are necessary. After all, this method is less complicated than a sky crane, he notes: “Ramps are pretty tried and true.”

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The odds that you will ever travel to one of Jupiter’s moons is next-to-zero, but getting your name to icy Europa is only a few keystrokes away. Earlier this month, NASA and the Library of Congress announced their collaboration, Message in a Bottle—a project offering anyone the opportunity to co-sign their name alongside an original poem penned by US Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

In doing so, each signee reserves a free, guaranteed spot for their name to be laser etched into a microchip mounted aboard the solar powered Europa Clipper robotic spacecraft. Following its October 2024 scheduled launch, participants’ names will then travel the approximately 6-year, 1.8-billion-mile voyage alongside Limón’s new, moon-inspired ode, “In Praise of Mystery” also to be engraved onto Europa Clipper.

[Related: We just got our most detailed look yet at Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa.]

Europa’s icy surface alongside the likely existence of an internal ocean have long intrigued scientists as potential locations that could support extraterrestrial life. Although it won’t actually touch down on the moon’s surface, Europa Clipper’s dozens of flybys will allow it to amass detailed information on its composition, geology, and vaporous geyser eruptions.

According to NASA, Europa Clipper will span roughly 100 feet after its solar arrays are deployed, and weigh-in at approximately 13,000 pounds—half of which is solely the propellant needed to get it to its final destination. Following its scheduled October 2024 launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket, the craft will first travel around Mars before soaring once again past Earth to gain some much needed “gravity assist” momentum. After another three years of travel, Clipper will pass by Europa almost 50 times beginning in 2030, transmitting data back home while observing “nearly the entire” moon to gain a better sense of its potential to support life.

This isn’t the first time NASA has encouraged the public to add their names to objects bound for space, including those aboard Artemis I, as well the Preservation Rover and InSight on their multiple trips to Mars. In 1977, Voyager 1 and 2 both launched with gold-plated phonographic records aboard featuring 90 minutes of music, including a concerto by Bach and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.”

At the time of writing, over 305,000 people from nearly every nation across the world have already signed the Europa Clipper’s roster, and earthbound participants have until the end of 2023 to enter in their names. Until then, you can also tune into regular livestreams of the Europa Clipper’s construction and assembly.

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Astronauts aboard the International Space Station just achieved a milestone in water recycling that could prove crucial to expanding human presence in the solar system—if you can stomach it.

According to an announcement from NASA last week, the space station’s Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) has accomplished the “significant goal” of recovering nearly 98 percent of all water brought aboard by the crew through the successful harvesting and filtration of astronauts’ breath, sweat… and yes, pee.

There’s really no way to overstate how crucial water supplies will be for human space travel beyond the Earth’s orbit. Extended, or even permanent, stays on the moon and Mars will require constant access to potable water—a requirement neither environment is particularly known for. Because of this, researchers and astronauts need to get not only creative, but flexible, when it comes to water sources.

[Related: The ISS’s latest delivery includes space plants and atmospheric lightning monitors.]

Case in point: The ECLSS Water Recovery System aboard the ISS combined multiple components to pull off the “pretty awesome achievement,” said Christopher Brown, a team member at Johnson Space Center managing ISS life support systems.

First, the Water Processor Assembly (WPA) handles wastewater to produce drinkable liquid, while state-of-the-art dehumidifiers capture cabin air moisture generated by the crew’s exhalations and perspiration. Meanwhile, a Urine Processor Assembly (UPA) relies on a method known as vacuum distillation to recover astronaut pee. As NASA details, the distillation produces two liquids—water, and a urine brine that technically still includes some reclaimable hydration.

Previously, there wasn’t much that could be done with the brine, but breakthroughs for a new Brine Processor Assembly (BPA) can now extract that remaining, usable water in a microgravity environment. To pull it off, the BPA runs the brine through a “special membrane technology” before subjecting it to warm, dry air to evaporate the water. That resulting humid air, alongside astronauts’ breath and sweat, is then collected by the previously mentioned ECLSS systems to be purified and stored for future usage via special filters and a “catalytic reactor” that destroys any trace contaminants. Iodine is then added to prevent any future microbes from growing within the new, clean water reserves.

[Related: Before the Artemis II crew can go to the moon, they need to master flying high above Earth.]

The new recovery percentage is a huge step forward according to Jill Williamson, the ECLSS water subsystems manager. Prior to implementing the BPA, the system could only retrieve between 93-to-94 percent of overall onboard water, compared to the milestone 98 percent benchmark.

Williamson goes on to explain that the processing is “fundamentally similar” to some water distribution systems here on Earth, only within a microgravity environment. As gross as it may sound to some, the water that is reclaimed, filtered, and cleaned from astronauts’ urine aboard the ISS is actually better than most available municipal water.

“The crew is not drinking urine; they are drinking water that has been reclaimed, filtered, and cleaned such that it is cleaner than what we drink here on Earth,” Williamson says.

Cheers, ISS.

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NASA said today in a conference call with reporters that it would not ever be flying its experimental electric aircraft, the X-57, citing safety concerns that are insurmountable with the time and budget they have for the project. The X-57 program will wind down without the aircraft ever going up into the sky. 

The agency had previously hoped to fly the aircraft, which would be powered by batteries and electric motors, sometime this year. While the original plans had called for the research plane to eventually have more than a dozen propellers, NASA had scaled back those plans too, intending to fly the plane in what they called Modification 2 form. Mod 2 involved the plane having just two propellers, with one on each wing. The news today means that the plane will never fly, not even in Mod 2 form. 

NASA said that the reason behind permanently scrubbing the flight is safety and time. “Unfortunately, we recently discovered a potential failure mode in the propulsion system that we determined to pose an unacceptable risk to the pilot’s safety, and the safety of personnel on the ground, during ground tests,” Bradley Flick, the director of NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, said in the call. “Mitigation of that failure would take the project well beyond its planned end at the end of this fiscal year, so NASA has decided to end the project on time without taking the vehicle to flight.” 

[Related: NASA’s ‘airliner of the future’ is now officially an X-plane]

The project had previously seen challenges. For example, transistor modules in the electrical inverters kept failing and “blowing up” in testing, Sean Clark, the project’s principal investigator told Popular Science in January. That problem was solved, Clark said. 

The problem that led them to scrap the plan to fly the aircraft stemmed from motors that power the propellers. Clark said today that analysis of the issue is ongoing. “As we got into the detailed analysis and airworthiness assessment of the motors themselves, we found that there were some potential failure modes with the motors mechanically, under flight loads, that we hadn’t seen on the ground,” he said. “We’ve got a great design in progress to fix it, it’s just [that] it would take too long for us to go through and implement that.” 

The NASA team emphasized that they are still proud of the ways in which they’ve contributed openly to the broader industry—private companies continue to work on electric flight—pointing towards a raft of technical papers. “It doesn’t feel great to not go to flight,” Flick conceded. The sense of disappointment, he added, doesn’t lessen “the game-changing lessons that this project team has contributed to the industry.” 

NASA has two other X-plane programs in the works—a designation that means that the aircraft is experimental and for research, and that comes from the Department of Defense. (The X-57 received its X designation in 2016.) One of the others is the X-59, which NASA intends to fly this year, hopefully demonstrating that supersonic flight can be quieter than it has been in the past. The other is the newly-designated X-66A, which is also called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator. The current timeline for that plane has it flying in 2028. 

Flick cautiously estimated that if they had more budget and more time to get the X-57 aircraft into the sky, they could have potentially done so safely. “We have a design that would have overcome the current difficulty that we’ve had—it has not been fully analyzed and reviewed yet,” he added. “We were confident that it could have solved this problem. Whether there were other problems out there that we haven’t discovered yet is unknown.”

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Scientists have translated data from cosmic bodies and events into spectacular audio renditions for years, but NASA’s latest releases may be the first to feature accompanying real-time visual aides. Unveiled on Tuesday, a trio of brief “sonifications” derived from information gleaned by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, and Spitzer Space Telescope showcase the interplay between infrared light, space gas, and other interstellar materials to create gorgeous ambient soundscapes. Taken as a series, NASA’s “cosmic harmonies” provide new, awe-inspiring ways to view the universe.

“Because different telescopes can detect different types of light, each brings its own pieces of information to whatever is being observed,” NASA explained in its June 21 announcement. “This is similar in some ways to how different notes of the musical scale can be played together to create harmonies that are impossible with single notes alone.” According to NASA, the collaboration was overseen by Chandra X-ray Center visualization scientist Kimberly Arcand, astrophysicist Matt Russo, and musician Andrew Santaguida.

NASA offers three videos with each sonification shown via a moving cursor, rendering the telescopes’ 2D images into something akin to written musical scores. An image depicting the two-star system R Aquarii, for example, is shown with a radar-esque tracker moving clockwise from a central point around the picture. As the cursor passes over Hubble’s visible light and Chandra’s X-ray images, the volume increases. Meanwhile, the music pitch rises and falls depending on the sources’ distance from the image center.

“The ribbon-like arcs captured by Hubble create a rising and falling melody that sounds similar to a set of singing bowls (metal bowls that produce different sounds and tones when struck with a mallet), while the Chandra data are rendered to sound more like a synthetic and windy purr,” explained NASA scientists.

[Related: What we learn from noisy signals from deep space.]

Another image depicts “Stephan’s Quartet,” a cluster of four galaxies moving one another via gravitational pull, along with a fifth galaxy located at a different distance. As a tracking line moves downward across the image, additional background galaxies and stars are punctuated as different glass marimba notes alongside a host of other ambient, representational tones. Finally, the Messier 104 galaxy located within the Virgo cluster received its own sonifications based on multiple light readings—infrared, X-ray, and optical.

Check out the clips below:

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This post has been updated.

Earlier this year, NASA announced that it would be working with Boeing to create an aircraft with a dramatic new look, and it could be strutting down a runway in about five years. Called the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator, it has long, thin wings that are supported by trusses to give them the stability they need. Between those wings and other efficiency tweaks, the plane could be 30 percent more fuel efficient than similar-sized aircraft today, like the single-aisle Boeing 737 or Airbus A320, according to the aeronautics and space agency. 

This week, NASA said that the aircraft, which doesn’t yet exist, has received an X-plane designation from the Department of Defense. It’s now officially the X-66A, meaning that it’s an experimental research aircraft. NASA already has two ongoing X-plane programs, so the X-66A makes three of them. Here’s what to know about all three. 

The X-66A aircraft aims for fuel efficiency

The purpose of the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator is baked into its name: to be as sustainable as it can be. While no aircraft that burns traditional fossil fuel can truly be thought of as sustainable, the goal is to make it as efficient as possible with the fuel it does consume. 

The aircraft will be the result of a collaboration between NASA and Boeing, and the agency stresses that one of the reasons they sought the X-plane designation from the Pentagon was to make the plane’s purpose apparent.

“We really wanted to make sure it was clear that this is a research airplane,” says Brent Cobleigh, the program manager for the Sustainable Flight Demonstrator at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center. “We’re really trying to learn with this airplane—it’s not a prototype, it’s not a production airplane.”

Another reason for getting the X-name is to reflect the fact that the entire design of the aircraft is something new, as opposed to NASA testing out a smaller new technology on an existing aircraft design. 

“There’s a long history that goes along with the X-plane designation,” Cobleigh reflects. Projects that have carried that label have been “some of the most interesting and innovative airplane designs.” Take a look at a list of NASA X-planes here.

NASA had to apply to the Pentagon to receive that X label. The letters that are found in aircraft names imply something about that aircraft—the F in F-16 stands for fighter, and the B in B-21 is for bomber, and in this case, the X says something too. “It’s a research airplane,” Cobleigh says. “That’s what the X means.”

The plane’s most noticeable feature is its long, skinny trussed-braced wings, which are designed to create less drag as they move through the air while giving the plane the lift it needs to fly. That efficiency boost happens because a long wing can help mitigate the vortices you might sometimes notice forming at a plane’s wingtips. Those are “almost like a tornado coming off the wingtips—that’s a lot of energy created that doesn’t really do us much benefit,” Cobleigh says. The X-66A’s wings could weaken those. 

Another way it could be more fuel efficient comes from the engines. Because the wing on the X-66A will be higher off the ground than the wing on a plane like a 737, that means it could employ larger engines that don’t risk bumping their bottoms on the runway or inhaling debris. Colloquially known as jet engines, turbofan engines are at their most efficient when they can be large, so that they can have a high bypass ratio—when a great deal more air bypasses its core than goes through it. Or the fan that propels the air could possibly have no covering on it at all. 

The goal is to have the plane first fly in 2028, but it also makes sense to expect delays in programs like these.

The X-59 aircraft aims for quieter supersonic flight

If the X-66A’s first flight is at least five years away, the NASA X-plane most likely to fly this year is called the X-59. That plane, which NASA is creating with Lockheed Martin, exists to test a hypothesis: If an aircraft is designed the right way, could it fly faster than the speed of sound but do so quietly enough to not bother people below? 

Supersonic flight by civilian aircraft is not allowed over the United States because of the boom issue. Ideally, the X-59 could demonstrate that it’s possible for an aircraft to slice through the air faster than the speed of sound, but not create the powerful shock waves that lead to people hearing boom sounds. Here’s more on why supersonic flight creates sonic booms, and how the X-59 could change that.

A NASA spokesperson notes via email that the goal is still to get this bird airborne this year: “We are still targeting 2023 for the X-59’s first flight, and we’ll have a better idea of a date once we have completed some critical testing. We are currently gearing up for weight on wheels next and then moving to the flight line and planning to start ground vibration tests and structural coupling tests.”

The X-57 aircraft aims for electric flight 

The cleanest way for an aircraft to fly would be for it to produce no direct emissions whatsoever, and an electric plane can accomplish that. That is NASA’s target with the X-57. But batteries are heavy, and they are not as energy dense as fossil fuels are, meaning that an electric aircraft won’t have anywhere near the range their fuel-burning cousins have. The challenges of this new type of flight haven’t stopped companies from getting experimental electric flying machines airborne, though, with Beta Technologies repeatedly flying an electric aircraft, Joby Aviation doing the same and teaming up with Delta Air Lines, and Eviation flying the Alice aircraft for the first time last year, to name only three examples. (Another approach is to use hydrogen.)

But the X-57 Maxwell, NASA’s electric aircraft, has had technical issues to cope with. The agency had originally wanted for the plane to undergo several different design phases, or modifications, but now plans for it just have a simple design: one propeller, powered by electricity, on each wing. 

While the plan had held for NASA to get the plane in the sky in that configuration this year, a NASA spokesperson cast a shadow of doubt on that timeline in an email to PopSci: “We are working to overcome technical challenges associated with flight tests for this aircraft and are currently evaluating our schedule and budget to determine when first flight would occur. In the meantime, the X-57 project continues to produce knowledge that benefits the aviation industry, researchers, and regulators.”

Update on June 23, 2023: NASA has officially announced that the X-57 will not be flying.

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From space, Saturn’s moon Enceladus might not seem like a hospitable place for life. Its cold surface is caked thick with fresh ice, marked by craters and active cryovolcanoes that spew ice crystals. But scientists believe beneath that frozen exterior hides a salty liquid ocean. With energy from geothermal vents on the ocean floor, and a smattering of the right ingredients, it might just provide a place for life to evolve and take hold. A new analysis of data from NASA’s Cassini mission reveals that the moon has, in theory, all the chemicals it needs to support living things. 

Plumes of water erupting from Enceladus contain phosphorus, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature by an international team of researchers. They found the phosphorus by examining data collected by the Cassini probe from its 13-year survey of the Saturian system. It’s the first time this element—an essential component of being alive—has been found in an ocean not on Earth. 

“Phosphorus in the form of phosphates is vital for all life on Earth,” says study author Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at the Free University of Berlin. “Life as we know it would simply not exist without phosphates. And we have no reason to assume that potential life at Enceladus—if it is there—should be fundamentally different from Earth’s.”

The discovery does not provide any evidence for aliens on Enceladus. But the presence of phosphorus removes a major obstacle to any life that might evolve there. Previous studies had suggested Enceladus’s ocean might not contain any phosphorus, according to Postberg. This discovery changes how scientists must think about the moon’s potential habitability, and it may guide research on other icy moons with subsurface oceans, such as Jupiter’s moon Europa.

[Related: NASA hopes its snake robot can search for alien life on Saturn’s moon Enceladus]

Cassini was launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004. It stayed there to study the ringed gas giant and its moons, until NASA ordered the probe  to plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere to destroy itself at the end of its mission in 2017. During its mission, Cassini flew past Enceladus several times, including a 2005 flyby when the probe discovered plumes of icy material, capturing crystals that the moon had ejected. Those plumes probably represent ocean water escaping to space—planetary scientists believe that a global ocean of liquid water lies beneath the moon’s icy shell.  

Researchers had looked at data from the ice grains during the Cassini mission primarily to hunt for inorganic and organic compounds, according to Postberg. But in 2017, his research team received a grant from the European Research Council to examine  a larger set of Enceladus ice grain data. After four years of work, they discovered phosphorus in salt form: phosphates.  

Phosphorus is one of six key elements of life as humans know it needs to exist, says Morgan Cable, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was not involved in the study. The other five key elements are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen. “Those elements, when you combine them in different organic molecules, they allow biochemistry, certain reactions to happen that cells need to stay alive,” Cable says. 

Phosphate is particularly important because it is the backbone of the DNA molecule. It’s also  a crucial component of cell membranes and of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, which provides the energy for cellular activity.  “That’s the energy-carrying molecule for all known life, the energy currency,” Cable says, an arrangement likely to be used by any life that arises on Enceladus too, though perhaps in different combinations with the other elements.

[Related: Here’s why Saturn’s ‘ocean moon’ is constantly spewing liquid into space]

Enceladus’s ocean is somewhat chemically different from Earth, according to Mikhail Zolotov, a planetary geochemist at Arizona State University and the author of a commentary on the study also published Wednesday in Nature. “In our ocean, it’s mostly table salt, like sodium chloride,” Zolotov says. On Enceladus, the salt is baking soda—the same stuff you’d find in a kitchen. 

Plenty of marine Earth life could survive Enceladus’s waters just fine, according to Cable. But if any life has evolved, or ever does evolve, on the icy moon, it’s likely to be microorganisms rather than the extraterrestrial equivalent of fish or whales. That has less to do with the chemistry of the Enceladean ocean than the energy available there for life. 

“On Earth the dominant energy source that all life uses, either directly or indirectly, is sunlight. You either photosynthesize directly, or you eat the plants that do it, or you eat the animals that eat the plants,” she says.  Sunlight doesn’t reach the moon’s waters through its icy shell, so energy likely comes from geothermal sources—the structure of ice crystals caught by Cassini suggests the grains formed near geothermal vents on the ocean floor, where water meets a rocky interior. 

“If you look at the net amount of energy that you get from that versus from sunlight, it’s orders of magnitude less,” Cable says. “That means you can either support a community of microbial cells, or you can have a handful of more energy-hungry organisms.” Enceladean whales are not entirely out of the question, but it would likely be “a lonely whale singing a sad, sad song all by itself,” she says with a laugh. “How terrible would that be?”  

To know whether any kind of life exists on Enceladus will require another mission to the moon. Nothing is immediately in the works, though the influential Astrobiological Decadal Survey has recommended a flagship NASA mission to Enceladus in the next 10 years. 

But two missions are heading to worlds similar to Enceladus. The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, or JUICE, mission launched in April and will arrive at Jupiter in 2031 to study the gas giant and its icy moons Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. In 2024, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper mission, which should arrive at that moon by 2030. The recent findings on Enceladus give a tantalizing glimpse of what might lurk beneath those other icy surfaces: All three of the satellites are believed to contain subsurface oceans, too.

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The Boeing Starliner, a space capsule that was scheduled to launch in July for its first crewed test flight, will remain on the ground for at least this summer—if not indefinitely. 

At a joint press conference on Thursday, NASA and Boeing officials explained they had discovered possible flaws in the Starliner’s parachute system. Even more alarmingly, hundreds of yards of potentially flammable tape were used to wrap electric wires throughout the spacecraft. The new problems were revealed after a parade of other hiccups: a software glitch put an early end to an uncrewed December 2020 Starliner test without people aboard, and an engine valve issue scrubbed an April 2021 follow-up attempt. 

The latest problems, though, may be the most surprising. “Just, wow,” was the response to the most recent Starliner news from Wendy Whitman Cobb, a space policy expert and instructor at the US Air Force School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Design issues with parachutes are common within the space industry, she says, but the discovery of the tape almost a decade into the development of the spacecraft is grave. “The fact that they have essentially put off the next flight test indefinitely speaks to the seriousness of that matter,” Whitman says. 

[Related: NASA is spending big on commercial space destinations]

Boeing should have caught the software and valve issues sooner, Whitman Cobb says, and she believes the flammable tape and parachute issue are under the microscope now out of an earned abundance of caution. “Because if something goes bad on this next one, who knows?” she says. “You might put the entire program in jeopardy.”

Boeing’s craft was meant to be the aerospace giant’s answer to competitor SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, a family of capsules that have been used for more than a decade to carry cargo to space and has begun ferrying crew in recent years. The long-awaited crewed test flight of the Starliner could still happen by this fall, officials said at the news conference, but it’s not clear yet what and how much work will need to be done. With the future of the Starliner hazy—and US-Russian relations at a generational low—NASA may be forced to rely on SpaceX alone for crewed space launches to the International Space Station.

In 2014, NASA contracted the two commercial spaceflight operators to ensure the space agency always has a ride into space. Boeing and SpaceX received $4.2 billion and $2.6 billion, respectively, to develop spacecraft and launch services for what would become NASA’s Commercial Crew program. Under those contracts, Boeing produced the Starliner and SpaceX made the Crew Dragon. But, now, there’s a risk that “SpaceX runs away with [the space launch market] and then you really are left with one company,” Whitman Cobb says. “Even if and when they do get Starliner going, I think they’re going to face stiff competition from SpaceX especially.” 

NASA previously experienced the uncomfortable position of relying on only one other party—Russia—for ferrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The agency didn’t like it. And, had SpaceX not been able to begin service with its Dragon spacecraft, then that reliance would have become even more difficult following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

[Related: Say hello to the Commerce Department’s new space traffic-cop program]

From the start, Boeing, with its decades of experience building sophisticated aircraft and spacecraft, was presumed to have a lock on the Commercial Crew service. NASA “wanted to give SpaceX a chance, but they did not consider them at the time to be the most reliable option for the future,” Whitman Cobb says.

This is why it came as something of a shock when Starliner’s first uncrewed orbital test flight in December 2019 failed to dock with the ISS as planned due to a software problem. SpaceX, meanwhile, flew its first official astronaut-ferrying mission with a Dragon spacecraft in November 2020. Boeing, though, didn’t successfully complete the uncrewed test flight until May 2022. 

Despite these setbacks, it’s unlikely Boeing will pull the plug on Starliner, barring some other disaster. ”Policy tends to continue on the trajectory that it is on unless and until something major happens,” Whitman Cobb says. ”Unless something goes horribly wrong, they’re going to make Starliner work.”

NASA, at least, almost certainly wants the Starliner to launch to provide redundancy, in case something happens with SpaceX. That could even lead to a strange situation where NASA pays Boeing for Starliner flights, even though the space agency could more easily hire a launch from SpaceX. “I know it doesn’t make much sense to any of us economically,” Whitman Cobb says, but in terms of having that assured access to space, “this gets NASA there.”

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In Overmatched, we take a close look at the science and technology at the heart of the defense industry—the world of soldiers and spies.

VLADIMIR PLETSER stands in front of an eclectic audience—a group of people attending the Analog Astronaut Conference in Arizona. Analog astronauts are folks who simulate the lives of spacefarers, for science, while remaining on Earth. For days or weeks or months, they inhabit and experiment in facilities that mimic cosmic conditions, living as quasi-astronauts. Sometimes those facilities are settlements in the Utah desert that look like the Red Planet, such as the Mars Desert Research Station, run by the nonprofit Mars Society; others are mocked-up astro-habitats inside NASA centers, like the Human Exploration Research Analog at Johnson Space Center. 

But Pletser, on this Saturday in May, is here to discuss a new analog facility courtesy of Blue Abyss, a company where he serves as space operations training director. That’s an appropriate position, as he’s managed microgravity research for the European Space Agency, he’s worked in support of China’s space station, and he is an astronaut candidate for Belgium.

Blue Abyss, a company focused on enabling research, training, and testing in extreme environments, is planning to build the second-deepest pools in the world. (The deepest pool is in Dubai, built for recreation and filming.) The proposed bodies of water will be 160 feet deep and about 130 to 160 feet wide. They’ll be the largest pools in the world by volume. Giant bodies of water like these will be useful to astronauts who want to practice in an environment analogous to space—an oxygen-deprived place with neutral buoyancy. They’re also of interest to deep-sea divers and people in the offshore energy sector. Then there are operators in the defense industry who find themselves in the ocean for tasks like reconnaissance, search and rescue, and mine hunting. Blue Abyss aims to serve them all.

Diving in 

The pools will be built in Cornwall, England, and Brook Park, Ohio, near Cleveland, if all goes according to plan. And they won’t just be super-size swimming holes. They will have multiple underwater levels for research and provide enough room for big instruments and vehicles to enter the buildings and the water. 

“We envisage that the size and flexibility of our pools will enable some of the more complex planetary [extravehicular activity] that will be undertaken in the future on the moon and Mars to be practiced here on Earth, something that is still quite difficult to conduct in the neutral buoyancy pools that exist today, which weren’t developed with this in mind,” says John Vickers, Blue Abyss’ CEO. The facility will also be able to mimic the tides and currents of the real world and the varied lighting conditions people might find in the ocean or outer space. Specific chambers will simulate the pressure found at depths of up to thousands of meters. 

While Blue Abyss’ plans for facilities are not limited to big pools, they will be the centerpieces. Pools like these are not a totally unique idea in the astronaut world; NASA has a similar aqueous facility, called the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, in Houston—but it goes down only 40 feet. Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, hosts its own Hydro Lab, of similar depth. China’s Neutral Buoyancy Facility in Beijing and the European Space Agency’s in Germany both dip down 33 feet. Blue Abyss’ pools will be bigger, and perhaps better able to accommodate the needs of future astronauts, who will likely be doing complex missions outside their spacecraft. 

Analog oceans aren’t exactly a new idea in the defense sector either; the US Navy, for instance, has an “indoor ocean” in Maryland, called the Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin. It is 35 feet deep at its lowest point and is used to test scale models of subs. But existing facilities weren’t necessarily made for the seagoing vehicles of today, which are often autonomous, drone-like, or both.

Water worlds 

If they succeed, Blue Abyss’ projects will provide access via the private sector to the same types of facilities that are today, in some cases, run by governments. The pools will be for humans (be they space explorers or divers or small-craft conductors) and robots (be they remotely operated vehicles or autonomous underwater vehicles). “Centers will provide training, certification, and technology demonstration, ensuring that divers, operators, and other underwater professionals have the skills and knowledge to operate safely and effectively in challenging circumstances,” says Vickers.

Or at least, that’s the idea. “We’re still in the phase of trying to find funding,” Pletser tells those at the conference. “So the project that we have in England, in Cornwall, is going much slower than the one that we have here in the States.”

The Cleveland area—an aerospace hub—has been supportive of the venture, says Vickers, but the company has had a harder time in its home territory of England, the original proposed site. “Brexit, the pandemic, and a lack of sufficient vision within parts of government have meant that what should have been the world’s first site may now come second,” he says.

It likely isn’t the interest of the analog astronauts gathered to hear Pletser speak that makes the general idea feasible, regardless of what country the pools are constructed in. After all, the world doesn’t have that many astronauts to train. 

But Blue Abyss is hoping to attract a much larger potential pool of people, and of money, from other contexts. Those in the offshore energy sector could practice working with cables and pipes, inspecting the foundations of wind turbines, and checking out vessels—without the serious dangers that come with conducting operations in the open ocean, where unpredictable currents, sea creatures, and other X factors can provide potentially deadly complications. Divers could train regardless of the weather. Scientists could test undersea research tools before sending them into an actual oceanic abyss. And makers of submersibles could test their craft and practice tricky maneuvers in a controlled environment. “So we not only address the space sector, but also the marine sector,” says Pletser. 

Importantly, that marine sector includes the defense field, where contractors help navies and coast guards make sense of the ocean’s mysteries.

Wet work 

One contractor that does such military work is General Dynamics. “We have a number of programs of record with the US Navy,” says Michael Guay, director for autonomous undersea systems. (A subsidiary, General Dynamics Electric Boat, makes nuclear subs for the Navy.) One of General Dynamics’ programs, Knifefish, has created a vehicle that can detect, classify, and identify mines placed underwater. Similar autonomous vehicles are also useful to the military for surveillance, reconnaissance, and even anti-submarine warfare.

Autonomous vehicles can also do hydrographic surveys. Such vehicles, which use sensors to measure aspects of the water like turbidity, salinity, and fluorescence, are useful for exploring for new oil and gas drilling sites and doing scientific assessments of the oceanic environment. 

General Dynamics has its own “full-ocean-depth-simulating pressure test tank,” says Guay, and its tanks can test full vehicles or just their parts. One of its facilities is in Quincy, Massachusetts, “So we have rapid access to Boston Harbor and Massachusetts Bay,” he says. 

Another company, called SEAmagine, sells small submarines and submersible boats—specifically those that require human drivers, which has been going out of fashion. “We didn’t believe that we were going to know our oceans by simply putting cameras and robots in the water,” says Charles Kohnen, SEAMagine’s co-founder. “Somehow the human element has to remain for us to understand.”

Today, SEAmagine, based in California, offers its craft to tourists, scientific researchers, yacht operators, and the defense sector. Its manned marine craft are specifically of interest to coast guards, which use them for search and rescue. Argentina’s, for instance, uses a SEAmagine vehicle to recover bodies from the ultra-deep water in the mountainous country. “They have these lakes that are 500 meters deep in the Andes,” says Kohnen. “And they’re very full of tourists because it’s beautiful. There’s a lot of tourists, and then lots of accidents.” These diminutive subs can ride on trailers on highways and be backed into the water like regular boats—not the case for your typical submersible.

But before either company does any of that fieldwork, its vehicles have to undergo rigorous testing. “The first, most important part of testing before you go in the ocean is going to be the pressure testing of the hull,” says Kohnen. 

That happens in pressure chambers, like the ones Blue Abyss’ facilities will include. “There aren’t that many in the world that are large enough and deep enough,” says Kohnen. Today, SEAmagine uses a variety of different chambers in the US to test its hulls and other components, but Kohnen says there’s room for more. “I’d like to see more testing facilities that can do the under-pressure testing,” he says. “As you build more of a blue economy for all these marine industries, the world could use some more labs.”

Blue Abyss hopes its facilities will be useful in certifying early-stage technology—the kind of tech that companies may not want to experiment with in the actual sea—validating and demonstrating sensors and components and autonomous capabilities at work in their relevant environments. That way, they can know that the technology either works or needs a tweak, and then they can demonstrate to agencies or customers that the parts and systems are ready. 

And analog astronauts may be eager to take the plunge, too.

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