After decades of the US government generally avoiding discussion of UFOs, NASA and the Department of Defense have embarked on investigations into mysterious, unexplained sightings, aerial or otherwise: what are now being dubbed unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs. NASA launched a nine-month UAP investigation in October. In the spirit of the space agency’s goal of transparency for that work, on Wednesday it live-streamed a public meeting of its independent UAP study team. The panel concluded it needed quality data, noting the fragmentary nature of what was available to analyze has restricted research into UAPs.  

The subject of UAPs “has captured the attention of the public, the scientific community, and the government alike,” said Daniel Evans, assistant deputy associate administrator for research at NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, at the meeting’s outset. “It’s now our collective responsibility to investigate these occurrences with a rigorous scientific scrutiny that they deserve.” 

The 16-person study group includes planetary scientist David Grinspoon, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, and science journalist Nadia Drake. It’s chaired by David Spergel, an astrophysicist and president of the nonprofit science organization the Simons Foundation.

[Related: Is the truth out there? Decoding the Pentagon’s latest UFO report.]

The NASA team will write a final report by sometime in July. The study team’s mission is not to render a verdict on the nature of UAPs, Spergel said, but to set the stage for later research. They aim to clarify how NASA can go about scientifically investigating UAPs. To that end, in Wednesday’s meeting, they discussed the current knowledge about UAPs (these are not extraterrestrial), standards of evidence for determining just what they might be, and the difficulty of obtaining high-quality human reports. 

“Our role here is not to resolve the nature of these events, but rather to give NASA guidance to provide a roadmap of how it can contribute to this area,” Spergel said. 

The team has sifted through available UAP data and found that many reports can be pinned down to known sources, such as distant aircraft, sensor artifacts, high altitude balloons, or atmospheric events. When it comes to learning more about the persistently unidentifiable phenomena on record, though, the team found the information lacking. 

“The current data collection efforts regarding UAPs are unsystematic and fragmented across various agencies, often using instruments uncalibrated for scientific data collection,” Spergel said. “Existing data and eyewitness reports alone are insufficient to provide conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event.”

[Related: The truth about Area 51 UFO sightings, according to a local expert]

It’s possible that more direct, targeted observations of UAPs could help, using everything from FAA radar installations to sensors on commercial aircraft to government spy installations. But as Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) told the team, “Most people, including the government, don’t like it when I point our entire collection apparatus to your backyard.”

“We’ve got to figure out how to do this only in the areas that I can get high confidence there’s going to be something there,” Kirkpatrick continued, “and high confidence I’m not going to break any laws.”

While AARO may deal with some classified UAP data, the NASA team is only working with unclassified information so that its report can be made fully public. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the data NASA has to work with is inferior to the Department of Defense’s information—many times, the classification of a UAP sighting has nothing to do with UAPs, according to Nicola Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and everything to do with what snapped the photo.

“Unidentified anomalous phenomena sightings themselves are not classified. It’s often the sensor platform that is classified,” she said, to prevent foreign adversaries from understanding those sensor’s capabilities. “If a fighter jet took a picture of the Statue of Liberty then that image will be classified, not because of the subject in the picture, but because of the sensors on the plane.”

There are drawbacks for the NASA investigators working in public, however. Although he did not specify exactly what happened, Evans noted that members of study team “have been subjected to online abuse due to their decision to participate on this panel,” adding that “any form of harassment towards our panelists only serves to detract from the scientific process, which requires an environment of respect and openness.”

Harassment of NASA study team members also highlights another problem with seriously studying UAPs, according to Spergel: the stigma associated with reporting a UAP sighting, especially among some professionals. ”Despite NASA’s extensive efforts to reduce the stigma, the origin of the UAPs remain unclear, and we feel many events remain unreported,” he said. “Commercial pilots, for example, are very reluctant to report anomalies, and one of our goals in having NASA play a role is to remove stigma and get high quality data.”

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Million of years ago, before land connected Earth’s North and South American continents, about 21 million light years away an aged and bloated star gave up the ghost in dramatic fashion, dying in a cataclysmic supernova explosion.

On Friday, May 19, the light from that massive explosion finally reached the telescope of Japanese amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki, who alerted the larger astronomical community: The supernova is now officially named SN2023ixf. 

”Those photons that left that exploding star 20 million years ago have just now washed upon our shores from this long, long voyage through the cosmos,” says Grant Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Institute Center for Astrophysics, who has been actively spreading the word of the supernova on social media. “It’s happening now, in that we’re watching this thing finally explode, but the star has been dead for 20 million years.”

SN2023ixf is the closest supernova of its kind to Earth to pop off in five years, and the second closest in the past decade, according to NASA. That makes SN2023ixf a rare opportunity for astronomers to study the fiery death of a star. While too faint to be seen by the naked eye, the supernova should be visible to modest hobbyist telescopes, according to Tremblay. 

Because the supernova will fade rapidly, stargazers have to seize the opportunity to observe it, including at multiple wavelengths.“The whole global community has rallied, from community astronomers to big multibillion-dollar space telescopes,” Tremblay says. 

How to spot supernova SN2023ixf 

SN2023ixf exploded in M101, also known as the Pinwheel galaxy, which is located in the night sky near the constellation Ursa Major. M101 is a bright spiral galaxy that lies face-on from the perspective of Earth and is a member of the Messier catalog of celestial objects, making it a common target for backyard astronomers. A 4.5-inch telescope should be sufficient to view the supernova, which will appear as a bright point of light, according to Sky and Telescope. You can find M101 by first finding Mizar, the star at the bend in Ursa Major’s tail, and following the five stars that lead away from it. Or, to be more precise, you want to point your telescope at a right ascension of 14:03:38.580 and a declination of +54:18:42.10. 

[Related: Astronomers just confirmed a new type of supernova]

Alternatively, the Virtual Telescope Project, a worldwide network of quality amateur telescopes, will livestream an observation of the supernova beginning at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on May 26. 

“M101 is imaged by human beings every single night, all around the world, from hobbyists to all sky observatories like [The Sloan Digital Sky Survey], and so it was inevitable that this thing would be found eventually. But I just loved that Itagaki found yet another supernova,” Tremblay says. Itagaki is not a professional scientist, but he is the co-author of more than a dozen scientific papers based on his supernova observations. Tremblay says Itagaki has a “legendary” ability to spot supernovas, and he’s collecting these “discoveries like Thanos and infinity stones.” Itagaki’s findings include the 2018 supernova SN 2018zd, which proved to be an entirely new type of supernova in the universe. 

Catching the bright burst of SN2023ixf on May 19, Itagki submitted his discovery to the International Astronomical Union’s transient name server website. From there, professional astronomers picked up the call, and within a few days, researchers began pointing major ground and space telescopes at the supernova, including the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-ray observatory.

All those telescopes will be measuring SN2023ixf’s light curve, “meaning the brightening and fading of this target in multiple wavelengths,” Tremblay says, on the spectrum from X-rays to optical light to infrared.

Lessons from an exploded sun

Those observations will help scientists characterize the star that exploded to create SN2023ixf, and more precisely define the type of supernova it is. Astronomers can already tell that SN2023ixf is a Type II, or “core collapse” supernova. This occurs when a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel. The nuclear fusion reactions in its core can no longer push outward against the force of the star’s own gravity. The star’s core collapses in on itself, and then explodes outward in less than a second. 

“This shock wave propagates outward, and it plows up gas in the ambient surroundings that can light up in all different wavelengths,” Tremblay says. Studying how that afterglow evolves over time will tell scientists about the mass and make up of the late star.

And the makeup of the star is connected to life on Earth—and life anywhere else in the cosmos, if it exists. Stars increase chemical complexity throughout their life cycles: They formed from primordial hydrogen after the Big Bang, fusing it first into helium and then into heavier elements right up to iron. When those stars die in supernovas, the intense heat and pressure form all of the known elements heavier than iron, and seed them throughout the cosmos, providing the raw material for rocky planets and life itself. “The story of life in the universe can be reduced, in many ways, to the story of increasing complexity,” Tremblay says.

The explosion of SN2023ixf is literally shedding light on the process that brought human beings into existence. Though the supernova will rapidly fade, it will remain an object of study for years to come, according to Tremblay. In the meantime, he says, the worldwide excitement around the supernova “is a beautiful illustration of the fact that the global public so effortlessly shares in our wonderment of the cosmos. An exploding star in a distant galaxy just lights up people’s hearts.”

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High altitude balloons have drawn a lot of fire lately. In February, the US military shot down a spy balloon potentially operated by the Chinese government and an “unidentified aerial phenomenon” that was later revealed to likely be a hobbyist balloon.

So, when people caught sight of another large balloon in the southern hemisphere in early May, there was concern it could be another spy device. Instead, it represents the future of astronomy: balloon-borne telescopes that peer deep into space without leaving the stratosphere.

“We’re looking up, not down,” says William Jones, a professor of physics at Princeton University and head of NASA’s Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) team. Launched from Wānaka, New Zealand, on April 15, the nearly 10-foot-tall telescope has already circled the southern hemisphere four times on a football stadium-sized balloon made from polyethylene film. Its three onboard cameras also took stunning images of the Tarantula Nebula and Antennae galaxies to rival those of the Hubble Space Telescope. The findings from SuperBIT could help scientists unravel one of the greatest mysteries of the universe: the nature of dark matter, a theoretically invisible material only known from its gravitational effects on visible objects.

[Related: $130,000 could buy you a Michelin-star meal with a view of the stars]

Scientists can use next-level observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope to investigate dark matter, relying on their large mirrors and positions outside Earth’s turbulent atmosphere to obtain pristine views of extremely distant celestial objects. But developing a space telescope and launching it on a powerful rocket is expensive. Lofting Hubble into orbit cost around $1.5 billion, for instance, and sending JWST to Lagrange point 2 cost nearly $10 billion.

SuperBIT took just $5 million to launch—a price cut stemming from the relative cheapness of balloons versus rockets and the lower barrier of entry for skilled workers to build the system.

“The whole thing is run by students. That’s what makes projects such as these so nimble and able to do so much with limited resources,” Jones says, referring to the SuperBIT collaborative between Princeton, the University of Durham in the UK, and the University of Toronto in Canada. “We have no professional engineers or technicians working on this full time—only the grad students have the luxury of being able to devote their full-time attention to the project.”

SuperBIT is not the first telescope carried aloft with a balloon: That honor goes to Stratoscope I, which was built in 1957 by another astronomy group at Princeton. But SuperBIT is one of a handful of new observatories made possible by 20 years of NASA research into so-called super pressure balloons. That work finally culminated in tests flights beginning in 2015 and the groundbreaking launch of SuperBIT.

Traditional balloons contain a lifting gas that expands as the sun heats it and as atmospheric pressure changes with altitude. That changes the volume of the envelope and, in turn, the balloon’s buoyancy, making it impossible to maintain a constant altitude over time.

Superpressure balloons keep the lifting gas, typically helium, pressurized inside a main envelope so that volume and buoyancy remain constant across day and night. The balloon then uses a smaller balloon—a ballonet—inside or beneath the main envelope as a ballast, filling or emptying the pocket of compressed air to change altitude and effectively steer the ship.

The super pressure balloon carrying SuperBIT can maintain an altitude of 108,000 feet (higher than 99.2 percent of Earth’s atmosphere) while carrying the 3,500-pound payload of scientific instruments. Unlike JWST and other missions, the purpose of the SuperBIT telescope isn’t to see farther or wider swaths of the universe or to detect exoplanets. Instead, it’s hunting for signs of a more ubiquitous and enigmatic entity.  

“Dark matter is not made of any of the elements or particles that we are familiar with through everyday observations,” Jones says. That said, there’s a lot of it around us: It might make up about 27 percent of the universe. “We know this through the gravitational influence that it has on the usual matter—stars and gas, and the like—that we can see,” which make up around 5 percent of the universe, Jones explains.

Scientists estimate that the remaining 67 percent of the cosmos is made of dark energy, another largely mysterious material not to be confused with dark matter. Whereas the gravity of dark matter may help pull galaxies together and structure the way they populate the cosmos, dark energy may be responsible for the accelerating expansion of the entire universe.

Researchers probe extreme forces where dark matter might exist and calculate its presence by observing galactic clusters so massive their gravity bends the light that passes by them from more distant objects—a technique known as gravitational lensing. Astronomers can use this approach to turn galaxies into a sort of magnifying lens to see more distant objects than they normally could (something JWST excels at). It can also reveal the mass of the galactic clusters that make up the “lens,” including the amount of dark matter around them.

“After measuring how much dark matter there is, and where it is, we’re trying to figure out what dark matter is,” says Richard Massey, a member of the SuperBIT science team and a professor of physics at Durham University. “We do this by looking at the few special places in the universe where lumps of dark matter happen to be smashing into each other.”

Those places include the two large Antennae galaxies, which are in the process of colliding about 60 million light-years from Earth. Massey and others have studied the Antennae galaxies using Hubble, but it “gives it a field of view too small to see the titanic collisions of dark matter,” Massey says. “So, we had to build SuperBIT.”

Like Hubble, SuperBIT sees light in the visible to ultraviolet range, or 300- to 1,000-nanometer wavelengths. But while Hubble’s widest field of view is less than a tenth of degree, SuperBIT’s field of view is wider at half a degree, allowing it to image wider swaths of the sky at once. That’s despite it having a smaller mirror (half a meter in diameter compared to Hubble’s 1.5 meters).

SuperBIT has another advantage over space telescopes. With less time from development to deployment and without complex accessories needed to protect it from radiation, extreme temperatures, and space debris, the SuperBIT team was able to use far more advanced camera sensors than those on existing space telescopes. Where Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 contains a pair of 8-megapixel sensors, Jones says, SuperBIT contains a 60-megapixel sensor. The balloon-carried telescope is also designed to float down on a parachute after the end of each flight, which means scientists can update the technology regularly from the ground.

“We’re currently communicating with SuperBIT live, 24 hours a day, for the next 100 days,” Massey says. “It has just finished its fourth trip around the world, experiencing the southern lights, turbulence over the Andes, and the quiet cold above the middle of the Pacific Ocean.” The team expects to retrieve the system sometime in late August, likely in southern Argentina, according to Jones.

[Related on PopSci+: Alien-looking balloons might be the next weapon in the fight against wildfires]

SuperBIT may just be the beginning. NASA has already funded the development of a Gigapixel class Balloon Imaging Telescope (GigaBIT), which will sport a mirror as wide as Hubble’s. Not only is it expected to be cheaper than any space telescope sensing the same spectrum of light, GigaBIT would also be “much more powerful than anything likely to be put into space in the near term,” Jones says.

As to whether SuperBIT will crack the mystery of just what dark matter is, it’s too early to tell. After a few flights, the grad students will have to pore over the project’s findings.

“What will the [data] tell us? Who knows! That’s the excitement of it—and also the guilty secret,” Massey says. “After 2,000 years of science, we still have absolutely no idea what the two most common types of stuff in the universe are, or how they behave.”

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For more than 22 years, astronauts and cosmonauts have continuously inhabited the International Space Station, making the orbital laboratory the longest flying spacecraft ever. But it’s an achievement that would be impossible if not for an earlier space station, NASA’s Skylab, launched 50 years ago on May 14, 1973. 

Born out of the disappointment and leftovers over the canceled Apollo moon missions, Skylab never captured the public imagination the way the space race had during the decade prior. But the mission was crucial to all human spaceflight that came after, teaching NASA valuable lessons about how to build spacecraft safe for long-term habitation, and how to design missions around the humans that would fly them. 

“Every corner of the ISS has a lesson that’s grounded in Skylab,” says NASA’s Chief Historian Brian Odom. “Skylab is the turning point where humanity says, ‘We’re going to become a species that lives off of Earth for long periods of time.” 

Moonshots and space stations

NASA had always wanted a space station. The plan, according to Odom, was to learn to get off Earth with Project Mercury—in which Alan Shepard became the first American to fly in space—then to rendezvous and dock in orbit with Gemini, and “the next stop from that would be to build a space station,” he says. That space station would be the waypoint from which humans could venture farther out to the moon, and later to Mars. 

But everything changed with President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 speech announcing a race against the Soviet Union to land on the moon.

“Some people talk about Apollo as leapfrogging what was expected, as the natural process or the natural progression in spaceflight,” says Teasel Muir-Harmony, a space historian curator of the Apollo collection at the National Air and Space Museum. “Instead of building a space station, we went right to the moon.”

Immense amounts of money and political capital were spent so Americans got to the moon first. But public support—and congressional funding—began to wane almost immediately after the July 20, 1969, Moon landing. Apollo missions 18, 19 and 20 were canceled by 1971, and the crew of Apollo 17 would be the last humans to touch the moon for decades to come. 

The idea for Skylab originated in 1965, when NASA budgets were plump. The agency decided the program could go forward even after money tightened up, in part because the satellite would use existing Apollo infrastructure. A Saturn V rocket, originally intended to launch the Apollo 12 mission, could place Skylab in orbit. And the space station itself would be constructed out of a rocket’s third stage. 

“It was a really ingenious and practical approach to creating a space station,” Muir-Harmony says. 

[Related: A brief history of space stations before the ISS]

The architecture of Skylab wasn’t the only creative use of materials. During the May 14 launch, Skylab’s micrometeorite shield, which also functioned as a sun shade, was shorn off, leaving the newly orbital space station to roast in the direct sunlight. NASA’s “Mr. Fix It,” Jack Kinzler, officially the chief of the Technical Services Center at Johnson Space Center, used telescoping fishing rods to develop a prototype parasol-like sunshield astronauts could deploy through an airlock on Skylab. They did this in just six days, saving the space station. It was one of the first important lessons of Skylab, according to Odom. 

“It’s one of these remarkable moments that teaches us that you can respond in a crisis” Odom says. 

The lessons of Skylab 

Skylab hosted three crews from 1973 through 1974. The Skylab I crew flew for 28 days, while the Skylab II mission lasted 59 days. 

But Skylab 3, the third and final crew to fly aboard the space station, lasted 84 days, launching on November 16, 1973 and returning to Earth on February 8, 1974. 

This was a huge deal at the time. Later NASA astronauts, such as Scott Kelly and Peggy Whitson, would work for hundreds of days aboard the ISS, but in 1973, no one knew if humans could actually live in space for such a period. The Skylab III crew’s stay was longer “than all of earlier spaceflight combined,” Odom says. 

Skylab affirmatively answered the question of whether humans could endure long-term spaceflight, but it also made clear there were costs. 

“They noticed increased calcium in the urine of the astronauts, tied to bone loss,” Muir-Harmony says, which highlighted the importance of movement while in space. Exercise is now considered a key part of an ISS astronaut’s schedule. 

Skylab also identified small quality-of-life changes that could make orbit more comfortable, such as the cuisine. “The food was generally considered a bit too bland,” Muir-Harmony says. “Your ability to taste is limited by how the fluid in your body blocks your nasal cavity [in microgravity], so it’s important to have more flavorful food in space.” 

And Skylab’s supposedly water-tight microgravity shower, a cylindrical tent-like contraption, will likely be the last shower on a space station, according to Muir-Harmony. “It didn’t work all that well,” she says. “That was an important lesson to learn, that it was better to use wet wipes as opposed to trying to shower in space.” 

Another lasting lesson was that all the clever engineering in the world won’t help you if you don’t pay attention to your crew’s human needs. The Skylab III crew nearly burned out, with barely any time between tasks or to rest, forcing NASA to reassess their work schedule. “You can’t task people with just working themselves full on and then falling asleep, sleeping eight hours, waking up, and immediately going back to work,” Odom says. “They learned those lessons the hard way on Skylab by putting people to some degree through the wringer.”

[Related: 11 of NASA’s most out-of-this-world illustrations]

Skylab’s final teaching might be the most important for anyone operating in space today, particularly as the number of satellites and other spacecraft in low Earth orbit increase. Unlike the ISS, Skylab was not equipped with thrusters. It could not manage its own altitude, because it was assumed that the Space Shuttle would be operational by 1977 and could boost the station higher when necessary. But the development program dragged, and the first shuttle didn’t fly until 1981. With Skylab’s orbit degrading, NASA decided to allow the station to reenter Earth’s atmosphere on July 11, 1979, hoping the station would burn up over the Indian Ocean. Pieces of debris ended up scattered over parts of Western Australia, though no one was hurt. 

The NASA of today would consider such a reentry reckless. It’s a problem, Odom says, if you don’t know exactly where your spacecraft is going to come down. “NASA has definitely learned that lesson from 1979, in a big way.”

Skylab’s enduring legacy

Without regular rides to space, Skylab crews had only what they brought with them. Astronauts flying aboard the ISS today face fewer constraints than Skylab crews did. The ISS recycles most of its water, for instance, and regular cargo resupply missions deliver food to the astronauts there. There are now exercise facilities and more thoughtfully planned out work schedules. 

“Skylab was just a massive step forward from what anyone had experienced before,” Odom says. “Somebody’s got to be the pioneer and put the risk on. And Skylab was all about risk.”

The ISS has hosted astronauts for more than 350 days at a time—a remarkable achievement, and one that would not be possible without Skylab’s experience. 

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NASA officials have talked for years about using the moon as a stepping stone to explore Mars. But now the space agency is finally reorganizing its administration to crystallize that aim in its bureaucratic structure. At the end of March, NASA established the new Moon to Mars Program Office at its Washington, D.C., headquarters. 

This office will unify an array of programs already under way: This includes the goals of NASA’s Artemis Moon mission, such as creating spacesuits for lunar astronauts as well as the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which successfully flew the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in November. These projects will be more formally linked to developing technologies and operations for future human journeys to Mars. 

“This new office will help ensure that NASA successfully establishes a long-term lunar presence needed to prepare for humanity’s next giant leap to the Red Planet,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. 

In the 2022 NASA Authorization Act, Congress mandated that NASA create the Moon to Mars Program Office to ensure that each Artemis lunar mission “demonstrates or advances a technology or operational concept that will enable human missions to Mars.” Following the successful Artemis I test flight, NASA aims to launch four astronauts on a lunar flyby mission for Artemis II in late 2024, and return humans to the moon’s surface in 2025 with Artemis III. Subsequent Artemis missions, at a pace of every other year, should allow astronauts to build a lunar habitat on the moon’s South Pole—with plans to stay for a while. 

[Related: NASA finally got comfier spacesuits, but astronauts still have to poop in them]

“We are going to the moon, we are demonstrating and executing a more sustained presence than we did back on Apollo, historically,” Lakiesha Hawkins, deputy manager of the new office, tells Popular Science. “The demonstrations that we’re doing are setting us up so that we can stay for a long duration; we can, in essence, live off the land.”

NASA astronauts will run experiments to obtain water from ice in lunar craters and to melt lunar regolith, or rocky material, to extract oxygen. They’ll also practice operations and procedures as if they are on Mars, with intentionally prolonged delays in communications to Earth and help all but unavailable. On the moon, these explorers will test the reliability of life support and other systems with an eye toward the Red Planet. “The further we go, the less and less we’ll be able to look back to any capabilities of the home planet in order to help us,” Hawkins says. 

At the moment, the Moon to Mars Program Office is still getting set up and hiring for key roles, according to Hawkins, but some changes have already begun. 

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

“One of the things that I think is an obvious change is, we used to have three different divisions,” she says, one division for SLS, Orion, and ground systems; another for a planned lunar space station called Gateway, a lunar lander spacecraft, spacesuits, and lunar surface technologies; and then a third division focused on Mars technologies and capabilities. Those are now merged under the Moon to Mars Program Office. Aligning these offices is “going to help set us up for future success,” Hawkins says.

And while the changes so far are largely administrative, Hawkins sees the Congressional mandate as vindication of NASA’s approach to our nearest extraterrestrial neighbors. “We seem to have a clear strategy that has survived and works. It worked its way through now multiple presidential administrations,” she says. “We are no kidding, returning to the moon.” And after that, eventually, on to Mars. 

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Black holes remain among the most enigmatic objects in the universe, but the past few years have seen astronomers develop techniques to directly image these powerful vacuums. And they keep getting better at it.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, the international team that took the first picture of a black hole in 2017, followed up that work with observations highlighting the black hole’s magnetic field. And just this month, another team of astronomers created an AI-sharpened version of the same image.

Now a new study published today in the journal Nature describes how images of that black hole, named after its galaxy, Messier 87 (M87), has a much larger circle of debris around it than the 2017 observations would suggest. 

Though long hypothesized to exist in theory, for many decades astronomers could only find indirect evidence of black holes in the sky. For instance, they would look for signs of the immense gravity of a black hole influencing other objects, such as when stars follow especially tight or fast orbits that imply the presence of another massive, but invisible partner.

But that all changed in 2017, when the EHT’s global network of radio telescopes captured the first visible evidence of a black hole, the supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy 57 million light-years away from Earth. When the image was released in 2019, the orange ring of fire around a central black void drew comparisons to “The Eye of Sauron” from Lord of the Rings.

EHT would go on to directly image Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, releasing another image of a fiery orange doughnut around a black center in May 2022.

Such supermassive black holes, which are often billions of times more massive than our sun—M87 is estimated to be 6.5 billion times bigger and Sagittarius A*  4 million times bigger—are thought to exist at the centers of most galaxies. The intense gravity of all that mass pulls on any gas, dust, and other excess material that comes too close, accelerating it to incredible speeds as it falls toward the lip of the black hole, known as the event horizon.

[Related: What would happen if you fell into a black hole?]

Like water circling a drain, the falling material spirals and is condensed into a flat ring known as an accretion disk. But unlike water around a drain, the incredible speed and pressures in the accretion disk heat the inflating material to the point where it emits powerful X-ray radiation. The disk propels jets of radiation and gas out and away from the black hole at nearly the speed of light.  

The EHT team already figured that M87 produced forcible jets. But the second set of results show that the ring-like structure of collapsing material around the black hole is 50 percent larger than they originally estimated.

“This is the first image where we are able to pin down where the ring is, relative to the powerful jet escaping out of the central black hole,” Kazunori Akiyama, an MIT Haystack Observatory research scientist and EHT collaboration member, said in a statement. “Now we can start to address questions such as how particles are accelerated and heated, and many other mysteries around the black hole, more deeply.”

The new observations were made in 2018 using the Global Millimeter VLBI Array, a network of a dozen radio telescopes running east to west across Europe and the US. To get the resolution necessary for more accurate measurements, however, the researchers also included observatories in the North and South: the Greenland Telescope along with the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array, which consists of 66 radio telescopes in the Chilean high desert.

“Having these two telescopes [as part of] the global array resulted in a boost in angular resolution by a factor of four in the north-south direction,” Lynn Matthews, an EHT collaboration member at the MIT Haystack Observatory, said in a media statement. “This greatly improves the level of detail we can see. And in this case, a consequence was a dramatic leap in our understanding of the physics operating near the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy.”

[Related: Construction starts on the world’s biggest radio telescope]

The more recent study focused on radio waves around 3 millimeters long, as opposed to 1.3 millimeters like the original 2017 one. That may have brought the larger, more distant ring structure into focus in a way the 2017 observations could not.

“That longer wavelength is usually associated with lower energies of the emitting electrons,” says Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who was not involved with the new study. “It’s possible that you get brighter emission at longer wavelengths farther out from the black hole.”

Going forward, astronomers plan to observe the black hole at other wavelengths to highlight different parts and layers of its structure, and better understand how such cosmic behemoths form at the hearts of galaxies and contribute to galactic evolution.

Just how supermassive black holes generate jets is “not a well-understood process,” Loeb says. “This is the first time we have observations of what may be the base of the jet. It can be used by theoretical physicists to model how the M87 jet is being launched.” 

He adds that he would like to see future observations capture the sequence of events in the accretion disk. That is, to essentially make a movie out of what’s happening at M87.

“There might be a hotspot that we can track that is moving either around or moving towards the jet,” Loeb says, which in turn, could explain how a beast like a black hole gets fed.

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It’s time for JUICE to get to work. The European Space Agency’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer blasted off on an Ariane 5 rocket yesterday to begin its eight-year journey to the Jovian system to study Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, three of the largest moons in the entire solar system.

Together with NASA’s Europa Clipper, which will launch in October 2024 but arrive at its destination a year earlier than JUICE, the missions will get the first close-ups of Jupiter’s icy moons since NASA’s Galileo probe visited the gas giant from 1995 and 2003.

“We learned about Europa having a subsurface ocean as a result of the Galileo mission,” says Emily Martin, a research geologist in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian’s National Air And Space Museum. The Galileo finding ignited interest in so-called  “ocean worlds” that have liquid water under their thick surface ice and might be the best place to look for alien life in our solar system. Ganymede and Callisto are likely ocean worlds too.

[Related: Astronomers find 12 more moons orbiting Jupiter]

While Galileo captured some images of the lesser-known siblings, it couldn’t analyze their surfaces as well as originally plannedspacecraft was hamstrung from the beginning, when its high-gain antenna, necessary for sending back large amounts of data, failed to fully deploy. Consequently, when JUICE arrives at Jupiter in 2031, it will begin providing the first truly high-resolution studies of Ganymede and Callisto, and add to the data on Europa collected by the Europa Clipper. JUICE will use its laser altimeter to build detailed topographic maps of all three moons and use measurements of their magnetic and gravitational fields, along with radar, to probe their internal structures.

“Galileo did the reconnaissance,” Martin says, “and now JUICE gets to go back and really dig deep.”

Is there water on Jupiter’s moons?

If people know one Jovian moon, it’s likely Europa: The icy moon’s subsurface ocean has been the focus of science fiction books and movies. But Martin is particularly excited about what JUICE might find at Callisto. Jupiter’s second largest moon, it orbits farther out than Europa or Ganymede. It appears to be geologically inactive and may not be differentiated, meaning Callisto’s insides haven’t separated into the crust-mantle-core layers seen in other planets and moons.

Despite the low-key profile, data from the Galileo mission suggests Callisto could contain a liquid ocean like Europa and Ganymede. Understanding just how that could be possible, and getting a look at what Callisto’s interior really looks like, could help space researchers better understand how all of Jupiter’s moons evolved.

“In some ways, Callisto is a proto-Ganymede,” Martin says.

What comes after Mars?

It’s not just Callisto’s interior that is interesting, according to Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science. It’s the only large moon that orbits outside the belts of intense radiation trapped in Jupiter’s colossal magnetic field—radiation that can fry spacecraft electrics and human explorers alike. “If humanity is to build a base on one of the Jupiter moons, Callisto would be by far the first choice,” Sheppard says. “It could be the gateway moon to the outer solar system.”      

JUICE will fly by Europa, then Callisto, and then enter orbit around Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. With a diameter of around 3,270 miles, it’s larger than the planet Mercury, which comes in at 2,578 miles in diameter.

Geoffrey Collins, a professor of geology, physics and astronomy at Wheaton College, says he’s most excited about the Ganymede leg of the mission. “It will be the first time we’ve orbited a world like this, and I know we will be surprised by what we find.” 

If Ganymede hosts a liquid water ocean beneath its frozen shell how deep its crust is, and whether its suspected subsurface ocean is one vast cistern or consists of liquid layered with an icy or rocky mantle. JUICE will be the first mission to give scientists some real answers about to those questions.

“Even if JUICE just lets us reach a level of understanding of Ganymede like we had for Mars 20 or 30 years ago, it would be a massive leap forward from what we know now,” Collins says. “This will be the kind of thing that rewrites textbooks.”

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

Any clues that JUICE gathers from Ganymede and Callisto could apply to more than just Jupiter and its icy moons. They can tell us more about what to expect when we look further out from our own solar system, according to Martin.

“It contextualizes different kinds of ocean world systems and that has even broader implications to exoplanet systems,” she says. “The more we can understand the differences and the similarities between the ocean world systems that we have here in our solar system, the more prepared we’re going to be for understanding the planetary systems that we’re continuing to discover in other solar systems.”

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On Earth, we’ve decided that some places are worth saving. Whether it’s the pyramids of Giza or the battlefield lands at Gettsyburg, sites that epitomize our cultural heritage are safeguarded by legal frameworks. 

But human history extends beyond our planet. In 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon and left behind that first footprint. Some view it as comparable to any archeological site on Earth—without the same protections. Undisturbed, the footprint could last for a million years. But a revived interest in the moon means the lunar surface is about to be busier than ever. No law specifically defends the footprint or sites like it from being run over by a lunar rover or astronauts on a joyride. 

“Just in this year alone, we have four or five missions planned,” says Michelle Hanlon, a space lawyer and co-founder of the nonprofit For All Moonkind. “Not just from nations, but from private companies.” While some upcoming lunar expeditions will be flybys, others will actually land on the moon. 

In some ways, it’s a race against the clock—and Hanlon is making moves. On March 27, while attending a meeting of the legal subcommittee of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS), she announced the creation of the For All Moonkind Institute on Space Law and Ethics. This new nonprofit organization will go beyond advocating for protecting off-world heritage sites and contemplate the ethics around some activities in space that are not fully covered in existing international law.  

There is some precedent to lunar law. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 governs activities in outer space and sets important boundaries: Anything but peaceful use of the moon is prohibited, and nations are not allowed to claim territory on the satellite or any celestial body.

The Outer Space treaty is also quite vague, according to Christopher Johnson, a space lawyer with the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to space sustainability. You can use resources in space but not appropriate them. In addition, you must give other nations and companies “due regard” and avoid “harmful contamination” of the extraterrestrial environment. 

However, these general principles have never been applied to solving practical problems. “We are realizing that we just have a couple of broad dictums,” Johnson says. “You know, be nice to your neighbor, observe the golden rule, show people a little bit of respect.”

[Related: Say hello to the Commerce Department’s new space traffic-cop program]

Because these rules have not really been tested, Johnson says we can’t be sure people will follow them. The experiment is about to begin: India and Russia plan to launch their unscrewed Chandrayaan 3 and Luna 25 missions to the lunar surface this summer, for instance, while Japanese company iSpace hopes to place a lander on the lunar surface in late April. SpaceX aims to ferry a billionaire customer around the moon in a Starship vehicle by year’s end.

It was with an eye on increasing human activity on and around the moon that Hanlon co-founded For All Moonkind in 2017, an all-volunteer organization dedicated to lobbying for legal protections for areas of cultural heritage on the moon and elsewhere in space. That includes the Apollo program landing sites and the lunar landers left behind by the Soviet Union. These protections could eventually extend to natural wonders like Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars and in the solar system.

Together with For All Moonkind, the Secure World Foundation produced a Lunar Policy Handbook, which they distributed at the United Nations in Vienna during the For All Moonkind Institute announcement at the end of March. Both For All Moonkind and the Secure World Foundation are official observer organizations at COPUOS and are allowed to sit in on meetings. 

The new institute and the handbook represent a modern interest among policymakers, space lawyers, and private companies to create clearer rules of the road for how humans will actually behave on the moon when there are multiple parties present around the same time. These are issues Johnson says policymakers need to be wary of and that they should think through the precedents that could be set by actions that are not necessarily against international law but might not be a good idea.

“This is why we created the Institute on Space Law and Ethics because there are people who want to know what it means to be responsible,” Hanlon says. “The problem is we don’t have a blueprint for that.”

Johnson points to the 2019 crash landing of the Israeli Beresheet lunar lander as an example, where unknown to the other parties of the mission, the nonprofit Arch Mission Foundation had included freeze-dried tardigrades, also known as water bears, in the payload. Tardigrades are hardy and known to be able to survive in the vacuum of space, so their spilling onto the lunar surface could present a form of biological contamination, although some follow-up research suggests the microscopic creatures did not survive the violent impact. 

“Smuggling tardigrades to the moon doesn’t seem to clearly violate any international law that I can point to,” Johnson says. “The ethical component steps in to fill a gap about the law to say, ‘Well, is it a good idea?’” 

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

Protecting cultural heritage sites like the Apollo landing sites, on the other hand, could actually be interpreted as violating the probation on claiming territory in space, according to Hanlon. That’s why For All Mankind is involved in discussions around the ethics of lunar activity generally, she says.  The hope is that—if the world’s nations can agree that there’s significant, shared cultural heritage on the moon—the aftereffect could be better relations between major players in the current space race. 

“The ultimate goal is a new treaty, not an amendment to the Outer Space Treaty, that recognizes cultural heritage beyond Earth,” Hanlon explains. “It’s going to be a long time, especially now with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for us to all agree on something here at the UN. But we think it can start with that heritage, that kinship that way.”

Or as US President Lyndon Johnson put it when signing the Outer Space Treaty, we “will meet someday on the surface of the moon as brothers and not as warriors.”

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After more than 50 years, NASA is going back to the moon. If all goes as planned, the Artemis III mission will see two astronauts stepping foot on the lunar surface sometime in 2025. Subsequent Artemis missions involving the construction of a lunar space station and a permanent base on the lunar south pole could follow every one to two years, funding permitting.

But before the 21st-century moon landing, NASA wants to ensure its astronauts’ ride, the Orion spacecraft, is up to the task. The successful, uncrewed Artemis I put the new Orion space capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s propulsion and navigation systems to the test. The recently announced crew of four astronauts for Artemis II, scheduled for November 2024, will take the next leap by giving Orion a full shakedown of its manual flight and life support systems.

“We’ll be the first humans to fly on the spacecraft,” says Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman. “We need to make sure our vehicle can keep us alive when we go into deep space.”

That makes the Artemis II mission unique, in that its primary focus is not exploration nor science experiments, but technical preparation for the astronauts on subsequent Artemis exploits. “Our focus is on what we can do to enable our co-workers to operate in the lunar environment, whether it’s on the Gateway outpost [a space station NASA plans to build in lunar orbit beginning in 2024] or the lunar surface,” Wiseman says.

To achieve that goal, Wiseman and his crewmates, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover, as well as Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, will kick off their 10-day flight with a series of highly elliptical orbits around the Earth. These rounds are designed to give them about 24 hours to test out their spacecraft and allow for an easy mission abort path to return home if any problems arise.

“That first 24 hours is really going to be intense. Looking at the crew timeline, you can barely fit everything in,” Wisemans says of all the spacecraft testing his team will conduct. “And then when we get finished with all of that, our reward is translunar injection,” the engine firing maneuver that will set the spacecraft on a course out of Earth’s orbit and toward the moon.

[Related: NASA’s uncrewed Orion spacecraft will get a hand from a Star Trek-inspired comms system]

About 40 minutes after launching from the Kennedy Space Center, the upper stage of the SLS rocket known as the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS) will boost Orion into an ellipse that will carry the crew about 1,800 miles above the Earth at its highest point, and about 115 miles at its lowest.

After initial checks during that roughly 90-minute first orbit, the ICPS will fire again to boost the spacecraft into a much higher ellipse around the planet, this time reaching as high as 46,000 miles above it—far outstripping the 250-mile altitude where the International Space Station usually flies. This second orbit will take nearly 24 hours and is where the crew will do the most serious assessments on Orion’s systems.

“We’re gonna try to test out every manual capability that we have on Orion: manual maneuvering, manual targeting, manual communications set up,” Wiseman says. In effect, they’ll be simulating what it takes to prepare the capsule for a lunar landing—but in the Earth’s orbit, not the moon’s.

A crucial part of the testing will involve what NASA calls a ”proximity operations demonstration.” Orion and the European-built service module, which carries life support, power, and propulsion systems, will detach from the ICPS as the crew practices manual maneuvering to align their spacecraft with the discarded upper stage of the rocket. While they will not actually dock with the ICPS, they will run the systems that future Artemis crews need to dock with a lunar lander or the Lunar Gateway before journeying to the moon’s surface.  

Next, the crew will conduct support and communications checks to ensure the Orion spacecraft is ready to head into deep space. If given the go-ahead by mission control, they will use the Orion spacecraft’s main engines to conduct a translunar injection burn designed to carry the spacecraft on a looping path around the moon, reaching a peak distance of about 230,000 miles from Earth. It will take about four days just to travel to and from the moon.

Artemis II stands out from the other missions in its series in that the Orion main engine will carry out the translunar injection burn, rather than the ICPS, which will have used up its fuel boosting the capsule into the high elliptical orbit around the Earth for testing. And because Artemis II will not involve landing on the moon, the crew doesn’t have to perform an orbital insertion burn, and will instead simply loop around the moon, ultimately passing around the far side of the satellite at about 6,400 miles altitude, relying on Earth’s gravity to pull the spacecraft home without the need for another engine burn.      

The crew will have plenty of other tests during the long lunar tour to keep them occupied, according to Wiseman. While the exact science packages for the mission have yet to be announced, the astronauts’ bodies will serve as mini laboratories over the course of the flight—and after.

[Related: Artemis I’s solar panels harvested a lot more energy than expected]

“As a human explorer, there’s going to be a load of science on us, like radiation and how we handle the deep space environment,” Wiseman says. “We know a lot about humans operating in space on the International Space Station; we don’t know as much about humans operating in deep space.”

The crew leader says he is honored to be commanding Artemis II, even if that means he may not fly on Artemis III or subsequent missions. “Personally, what I really want to do is I want to go fly Artemis II, I want to come back, and I want to help my crewmates train for their missions,” he explains. “Then I want to be the largest voice in the crowd cheering for them when they get assigned to Artemis III or IV.”

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When NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope takes an image of a star field, it usually looks more like an abstract painting than a real piece of the universe. In the case of globular cluster M14, those drops of white, blue, and orange paint are more than 150,000 stars packed at the periphery of a spiral galaxy 29,000 light-years away from Earth.

Of course, NASA has shared many stunning views of the universe since Hubble was launched in 1990, but this newly processed image has another claim to fame—it’s known as Messier 14, one of the dozens of celestial objects cataloged by French astronomer and comet hunter Charles Messier beginning in 1758. The objects are bright and relatively easy to see with small ground telescopes, and so are popular with the amateur astronomy community.

But five years ago, the NASA Hubble team decided to begin posting the legendary space telescope’s observations of the vintage catalog online “to give people a chance to view the Messier objects in a way that they might not otherwise be able to do, especially since in many cases we can see colors of light that don’t get through the atmosphere,” says Hubble Operations Project Scientist Kenneth Carpenter. “People can’t see the ultraviolet, for instance, when they look with their ground telescopes.”

Messier was born in 1730 and developed a fascination with comets, ultimately discovering the “Great Comet” of 1769, which exhibited an extremely long tail as it passed near Earth. His catalog grew out of his notes on sightings from the Northern Hemisphere that could be confused as streaking balls of ice and dust to keep other comet seekers from wasting their time. The series includes globular star clusters like M14, nebulae such as the Eagle Nebula (M16) and Crab Nebula (M1), and even the Andromeda galaxy (M31). The numbers indicate the order in which Messier discovered the objects, though he only found 103 of the current 110—additions were made by other astronomers in the mid-20th century.

[Related: Your guide to the types of stars, from their dusty births to violent deaths]

The Hubble Messier Catalog is much newer, according to James Jeletic, NASA’s deputy project manager for Hubble. In 2017, his team was brainstorming ways to get the amateur astronomy community involved and feeling more connected with Hubble science. ”So we said, ‘Well, let’s go back to that Messier catalog,” he recalls. “That way, amateur astronomers can look at an object in their telescope, and then compare it to what Hubble sees.”

The scavenger hunt is not yet complete—the Hubble Messier Catalog currently exhibits images of 84 of the 110 Messier objects and plots them on an interactive map—but that’s partly because of the way in which the Hubble team has gone about building out the collection. They don’t purposefully take new images of Messier objects to add to the catalog; rather they wait for a scientific proposal that overlaps with the targets. That, or they comb through the Hubble archive looking for suitable scenes that haven’t been published yet and process them (as was the case with M14). “We think we found all the ones, for the most part, that are worthy of creating an image out of,” Jelectic explains. “We’re going to search one more time, you know, just to make sure.”

The Hubble team shared the image of M14 on March 19 as part of what’s called a Messier Marathon, an attempt by amateur astronomers to observe all 110 objects in a short time frame; the skygazing conditions in March and early April are considered particularly conducive to Messier Marathons because all of the objects can be seen in a single night around the spring equinox. “If you can view all 110, no matter how long it takes, you become a member of the [official Messier club] and get a certificate and pin,” Jelectic says.

For those in the Southern Hemisphere, the NASA Hubble website also includes images from the Caldwell Catalog, a collection of 109 objects visible compiled in the 1980s by English amateur astronomer Patrick Moore as a counterweight to the Messier Catalog.

[Related: Researchers found what they believe is a 2,000-year-old map of the stars]

Reflecting on the fact that astronomers, both professional and amateur, and the general public are still fascinated by objects first cataloged more than 200 years ago, Carpenter says it illustrates how science progresses over time.

“Every time you build a new telescope, whether it be on the ground or in space, that’s either larger in size so it’s more sensitive, or sensitive to a different color of light than we’ve had previously, you make wonderful new discoveries,” he says. Even after years in the field it still astonishes him what telescopes can seek. “It is just absolutely incredible, both in terms of the science and just in terms of the sheer beauty. I think a telescope is really as much a tool of art, of the creation of art, as it is of the creation and interpretation of science.”

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The suit was designed and built by Houston-based company Axiom Space, using some heritage NASA technology, plus a large glass fishbowl helmet and black outer cover with orange and blue highlights. During the livestream, an Axiom engineer walked out on the stage in the redesigned suit and demonstrated the enhanced mobility offered by new joints in the legs, arms, and gloves compared to the Apollo- and Space Shuttle-era suits, twisting, turning, and kneeling down with relative ease. The suits are also designed with modular components in a range of sizes to better fit astronauts of different body shapes and weights.

“We’re developing a spacesuit for a new generation, the Artemis generation, the generation that is going to take us back to the moon and onto Mars,” NASA Associate Administrator Bob Cabana said at the reveal. “When that first woman steps down on the surface of the moon on Artemis III, she’s going to be wearing an Axiom spacesuit.”

NASA had spent years developing its own next generation of spacesuits through its Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (eXMU) program, but in June 2022, the space agency awarded contracts to both Axiom and Collins Aerospace to develop spacesuits for future missions. Unlike the getups still in use on the International Space Station, NASA will only lease the suits, according to Lara Kearney, manager for NASA’s Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program.

“Historically, NASA has owned spacesuits,” Kearney said at the event. The spacesuit contract with Axiom is more like the arrangement NASA makes with SpaceX for flying crew and cargo to the space station aboard Falcon 9 rockets and Dragon spacecraft; the company owns and operates the equipment, and the agency simply pays for services.

Financial arrangements aside, the new spacesuits include an array of improvements and advancements, many derived from NASA research and others unique to Axiom. The suit consists of an inner bladder layer that holds pressurized air in, covered by a restraint layer that holds the shape of the bladder layer, according to Axiom deputy program manager for Extravehicular Activity, Russel Ralston. An outer flight insulation layer provides “cut resistance, puncture resistance, thermal insulation, and a variety of other other other features,” he explained at the event, and consists of multiple layers of material, including aluminized mylar.

The more mobile joints, which will allow astronauts to better handle tools and maneuver around the rocky, heavily shadowed lunar South Pole, were developed at Axiom, Ralston said. Other features, such as the rigid upper torso of the suit—useful for attaching the life support system and tools—and a visor placed further back on the helmet to allow for more visibility, were initially conceived by NASA.

The design also features an entirely new cooling system compared to older suits, will carry a high-definition camera mounted on the helmet, and allows astronauts to enter and exit the suit through a hatch on the back rather than coming as separate lower and upper body segments, as with the current spacesuits.

Importantly, given NASA’s commitment to seeing a female astronaut lead the way back to the moon, the new suits are designed to fit a wide range of body sizes for across sexes, according to Ralston. “We have different sizes of elements that we can swap out—a medium, large and small if you will—for different components,” he said at the press conference. “Then within each of those sizes, we also have an adjustability to where we can really tailor the suit to someone: the length of their leg or the length of their arm.”

Axiom is continuing to build on the spacesuit ahead of the Artemis III mission, including an outer insulation layer that will include pockets and other attachments for tools, and which will be made in white to reflect the harsh sunlight on the moon. The the black, orange and blue cover seen today is just a temporary protective cover to prevent damage to the suit’s inner layers while testing, and, per an Axiom press release, hides “proprietary design” elements.

Despite all the technological advances compared to the Apollo spacesuits of the 1960s and ‘70s, some core technologies are immune to improvement. Asked about whether Axiom found a better way for astronauts to use the restroom while wearing the new shells for up to eight hours on the lunar surface, Ralson didn’t sugarcoat it.

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Water is an essential ingredient for life as we know it, but its origins on Earth, or any other planet, have been a long-standing puzzle. Was most of our planet’s water incorporated in the early Earth as it coalesced out of the material orbiting the young sun? Or was water brought to the surface only later by comet and asteroid bombardments? And where did that water come from originally? 

A study published on March 7 in the journal Nature provides new evidence to bolster a theory about the ultimate origins of water—namely, that it predates the sun and solar system, forming slowly over time in vast clouds of gas and dust between stars.

”We now have a clear link in the evolution of water. It actually seems to be directly inherited, all the way back from the cold interstellar medium before a star ever formed,” says John Tobin, an astronomer studying star formation at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and lead author of the paper. The water, unchanged, was incorporated from the protoplanetary disk, a dense, round layer of dust and gas that forms in orbit around newborn stars and from which planets and small space bodies like comets emerge. Tobin says the water gets drawn into comets “relatively unchanged as well.”

Astronomers have proposed different origins story for water in solar systems. In the hot nebular theory, Tobin says, the heat in a protoplanetary disk around a natal star will break down water and other molecules, which form afresh as things start to cool.  

The problem with that theory, according to Tobin, is that when water emerges at relatively warm temperatures in a protoplanetary disk, it won’t look like the water found on comets and asteroids. We know what those molecules look like: Space rocks, such as asteroids and comets act as time capsules, preserving the state of matter in the early solar system. Specifically, water made in the disk wouldn’t have enough deuterium—the hydrogen isotope that contains one neutron and one proton in its nucleus, rather than a single proton as in typical hydrogen. 

[Related: Meteorites older than the solar system contain key ingredients for life]

An alternative to the hot nebular theory is that water forms at cold temperatures on the surface of dust grains in vast clouds in the interstellar medium. This deep chill changes the dynamics of water formation, so that more deuterium is incorporated in place of typical hydrogen atoms in H₂O molecules, more closely resembling the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratio seen in asteroids and comets.  

“The surface of dust grains is the only place where you can efficiently form large amounts of water with deuterium in it,” Tobin says. “The other routes of forming water with deuterium and gas just don’t work.” 

While this explanation worked in theory, the new paper is the first time scientists have found evidence that water from the interstellar medium can survive the intense heat during the formation of a protoplanetary disk. 

The researchers used the European Southern Observatory’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a radio telescope in Chile, to observe the protoplanetary disk around the young star V883 Orionis, about 1,300 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Orion. 

Radio telescopes such as this one can detect the signal of water molecules in the gas phase. But dense dust found in  protoplanetary disks very close to young stars often turns water into ice, which sticks to grains in ways telescopes cannot observe. 

But V883 Orionis is not a typical young star—it’s been shining brighter than normal due to material from the protoplanetary disk falling onto the star. This increased intensity warmed ice on dust grains farther out than usual, allowing Tobin and his colleagues to detect the signal of deuterium-enriched water in the disk. 

“That’s why it was unique to be able to observe this particular system, and get a direct confirmation of the water composition,” Tobin explains. ”That signature of that level of deuterium gives you your smoking gun.” This suggests Earth’s oceans and rivers are, at a molecular level, older than the sun itself. 

[Related: Here’s how life on Earth might have formed out of thin air and water]

“We obviously will want to do this for more systems to make sure this wasn’t just that wasn’t just a fluke,” Tobin adds. It’s possible, for instance, that water chemistry is somehow altered later in the development of planets, comets, and asteroids, as they smash together in a protoplanetary disk. 

But as an astronomer studying star formation, Tobin already has some follow up candidates in mind. “There are several other good candidates that are in the Orion star-forming region,” he says. “You just need to find something that has a disk around it.”

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On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed into the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos at 13,000 miles per hour, altering the extraterrestrial rock’s orbit around its larger companion asteroid, Didymos. A triumphant success of planning, targeting and autonomous flight that covered 7 million miles, the impact served as the first proof of concept for kinetic impactors—spacecraft that could be used to redirect any future asteroids on a collision course with Earth.

But to understand how a DART-like mission would work in a real apocalyptic scenario, astronomers and national security experts need lots of data and detailed analysis. Data they had almost immediately, as just about every telescope and sensor that could be trained on Dimorphos, was, prior to impact. And now, detailed analyses of what happened are going public, starting with five papers published in the journal Nature on March 1.

1. Kinetic impactors like DART can make a real splash

In a study of Dimophos’s orbit led by Northern Arizona University Astronomer Cristina Thomas, an international team calculated just how much DART’s crash landing changed the asteroid’s orbital period. Using radar and light curves, measured from changes in Dimorphos’s brightness over time, they showed the space rock slowed down in its orbit by 33 minutes, give or take about three minutes.

“To serve as a proof-of-concept for the kinetic impactor technique of planetary defense, DART needed to demonstrate that an asteroid could be targeted during a high-speed encounter and that the target’s orbit could be changed,” Thomas and her colleagues write in the paper. “DART has successfully done both.”

The researchers note, however, that there were probably several reasons why DART was able to slow Dimorphos down by a full half hour. If the only factor were the spacecraft’s mass, the asteroid’s orbit should have changed by no more than seven minutes. Any other explanations would “require modeling beyond the scope of this paper,” they explained.

2. DART got a big assist from the asteroid itself

A second paper led by Andy Cheng, chief scientist for planetary defense and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, dug into why Dimorphos’s orbit shifted so dramatically.

His team’s research found that the “ejecta,” the material shaken loose from Dimorphos by the force of DART’s impact, amplified the transfer of kinetic energy from the spacecraft and the change in the asteroid’s orbit by 2.2 to 4.9 times. In fact, the authors write in the paper, “significantly more momentum was transferred to Dimorphos” from the escaping ejecta than DART itself.

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

Determining how much momentum a spacecraft can transfer to an asteroid and how that affects the asteroid’s orbit were key questions the DART mission sought to answer, and this study gives scientists the parameters they were waiting for. It illustrates the range of effectiveness kinetic impactors might have on hazardous asteroids given their makeup. Asteroids that respond to a strike with more ejecta may allow a DART-type spacecraft to deflect larger asteroids than it could otherwise, or to deflect an asteroid with less warning time.

3. Planning ahead is key to saving the planet

The key takeaway of the third paper, led by Terik Daly, Carolyn Ernst, and Olivier Barnouin of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, is that despite DART’s successful strike and the helpful amplification by the impact ejecta, planetary protection remains a game of observation and early warning. “Kinetic impactor technology for asteroid deflection requires having sufficient warning time—at least several years but preferably decades—to prevent an asteroid impact with the Earth,” the researchers write in the paper.

Early warning, thankfully, is something NASA has been investing in since long before the DART mission. The NASA Authorization Act of 2005 directed the space agency to catalog 90 percent of all near-Earth asteroids of 460 feet in diameter or greater, a task that is now complete. NASA is now building an infrared space telescope scheduled for launch in 2028 that will help scan the skies for unseen asteroids.

“NEO Surveyor represents the next generation for NASA’s ability to quickly detect, track, and characterize potentially hazardous near-Earth objects,” Lindley Johnson, NASA’s planetary protection officer, said in a statement.

4. DART was also secretly a planetary-science mission

Dimorphos’s ejecta not only affected the orbit of the asteroid, they gave it a dust tail that strutted more than 900 miles from the asteroid within three hours of the impact, according to a fourth study led Jian-Yang Li, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute.

Thought comets are better known for their brilliant tails, asteroids can also become “active,” as scientists put it, and form a little train on their backsides. It’s thought that this happens after some kind of impact, though the idea has never been put to the test. 

The September mission gave scientists a “detailed characterization” of the ejecta-to-tail-making process serving double duty as a planetary-protection and a planetary-science mission. “DART will continue to be the model for studies of newly discovered asteroids that show activity caused by natural impacts,” the researchers write.

5. DART really lit Dimorphos up

The last paper also falls into the planetary-science bucket with a close look at Dimorphos in its post-DART hangover. A study with ground-based telescopes in Africa and an Indian Ocean island led by SETI Institute astronomer Ariel Graykowski found it took the asteroid more than 23 days to return to its pre-impact levels of brightness in the night sky.

The analysis also found that ejecta appeared reddish at the time of impact, which is somewhat mysterious. “Typically, active bodies appear bluer in color on average than their inactive counterparts,” the researchers write in the paper, giving the examples of active comets versus inactive Kuiper Belt objects. “Some of these redder observed surface colors may be due to irradiation of organics,” they add, noting that lab experiments have shown space radiation can cause redden some of the same minerals probably found in asteroids like Dimorphos.

[Related: ‘Phantom’ mannequins will help us understand how cosmic radiation affects female bodies in space]

The five studies are just the first wave of an ongoing campaign to analyze the DART mission from different angles. The European Space Agency’s HERA mission, for instance, will rendezvous with Dimorphos sometime in 2026 to better assess the aftermath of DART’s impact in detail. Until then, NASA and other collaborators can continue to celebrate a major milestone in humanity’s relationship with the space around us.

“I cheered when DART slammed head on into the asteroid for the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration, and that was just the start,” NASA administrator for its Science Mission Directorate, Nicola Fox, said in a statement on March 1. ”These findings add to our fundamental understanding of asteroids and build a foundation for how humanity can defend Earth.”

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On Friday, February 17, a part of the sun erupted. A piercingly bright flash of light—a solar flare—shone briefly from the left limb of our star, where it was captured in an ultraviolet image by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft.

“It wasn’t the largest in history by any means, but it was a significant X flare,” Thomas Berger, a solar physicist and director of the Space Weather Technology, Research, and Education Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. (The “X” refers to the letter grading system of solar flare intensity, which ranges from minor A-class to severe X-class flares. “Solar flares of that magnitude will generally cause some radio-interference on the sunlit side of the Earth for an hour or two,” he says. Ultimately, this one was fairly mild—the most powerful solar flare ever recorded, in 2003, was more than 100 times more powerful by comparison—and did not cause any major problems. 

That said, we’re about to enter a more volatile chapter in the sun’s 11-year cycle of magnetic activity. Solar flares are one of three major forms of solar-eruption activity, along with coronal mass ejections and radiation storms, which are likely to increase in frequency over the next few years, according to Berger.

”We are in the rising phase of Solar Cycle 25, and it is expected that activity is going to increase,” he says. (It’s known as Solar Cycle 25 because scientists first began keeping detailed records of sunspots in 1755, and there have been 25 cycles since that time.) The peak of this period, known as the solar maximum, should occur around 2025. The last solar maximum was in 2014.

[Related: How worried should we be about solar flares and space weather?]

That rise in activity that could majorly impact planned space activities, such as the rapidly growing constellations of low-Earth orbit satellites. And a 2025 solar maximum would coincide with NASA’s Artemis III, which aims to return humans to the surface of the moon—not the safest place to be during a solar radiation storm.

 “It’s going to be a really interesting time if we get an extreme storm in this solar cycle,” Berger says.

What is the solar magnetic cycle?

The sun is a giant sphere of roiling, superheated plasma that is essentially electrically charged gas with monstrously powerful magnetic fields.

For reasons astronomers don’t yet understand, the activity of these magnetic fields increases and decreases over an 11-year cycle. The cycle also includes changes in the dark areas on the star’s surface, otherwise known as sunspots, with more spots appearing as the sun moves toward solar maximum.

“Sunspots are the source of solar magnetic eruptions,” Berger says. “The bigger the sunspot, the bigger the explosion. The more active the sun, the more sunspots, and the bigger the sunspots get.”

The current solar cycle stands out so far in a big way: So far, it’s more active than forecast by groups like the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, with more sunspots showing up on the sun that predicted.    

“We don’t know if it will continue to be more active than the forecast,” Berger says. “It’s fairly early on in the game here and could regress back to that weak forecast any month.”

Will solar eruptions disrupt Earth in 2025?

Solar eruptions occur when the magnetic field lines in a sunspot get twisted and snap, Berger says, causing an explosion with three possible outcomes.

The first is a solar flare, like that seen on February 17, which is primarily a release of photons. The second is a coronal mass ejection, or a large release of plasma into interplanetary space. And the third is a radiation storm fueled by accelerating energy particles like protons, elections, and ions. Coronal mass ejections can also sometimes generate a radiation storm by pushing charged particles in front of them as they speed through space.

Solar flares, if intense enough, can cause radio interference on the sunlit side of the Earth. Coronal mass ejections are the outbursts that really cause issues. The charged plasma can generate a geomagnetic storm when it hits our planet’s magnetosphere, resulting in awe-inspiring auroras at the poles, while also wreaking havoc on both power grid technology and satellite technology, Berger says. A big geomagnetic storm can heat the atmosphere so that it swells, dragging on low-flying satellites and even pulling some from orbit, as was the doomed case of 40 newly launched Starlink satellites on February 4, 2022.

Not every coronal mass ejection will reach Earth, however. Many, like the ejection associated with the February 17 eruption, fly off into space away from our planet. The question is whether any more will be aimed our way as we hurtle toward the solar maximum.

“Recent research is really beginning to confirm that almost every solar cycle has a really, really big eruption,” Berger says, “So it’s really just a matter of what direction in space it’s going.”

How do we plan for the sun’s unruly future?

Really  powerful solar eruptions can lead to geomagnetic storms that damage electronics on the ground, such as the the storm in 1989 that knocked out some power grids. But the risks are higher today than in 1989, if just because there’s a lot more technology, and people, in space on a regular basis. For instance, there were more than 5,700 satellites in orbit at the end of 2022, while there were less than 500 satellites in 1989.

“If we do get an extreme geomagnetic storm now, there’s so much stuff up there that’s going to be moving all over the place,” Berger says. “We are concerned with an elevated risk of collision from the next one.”

[Related: What happens when the sun burns out?]

With NASA planning on heading back to the moon and eventually to Mars, scientists will need to get a lot better at forecasting solar eruptions. Physicists like Berger and researchers at the Space Weather Prediction Center can currently predict solar eruptions, but with what meteorologists would consider fairly lousy accuracy and detail compared to 10-day forecast of sunshine and rain.

“We can tell you when the coronal mass ejection will hit, roughly, plus or minus 10 hours,” Berger explains, “But we don’t have a good way to forecast what is going to happen in the low-Earth orbit environment.” In other words, it’s tough to say how much a geomagnetic storm will affect the operation and trajectory of satellites and regular electrical operations on the ground.

The sticking point for better forecasts is that while NOAA runs an ongoing simulation of the Earth’s upper atmosphere, that model isn’t yet able to assimilate real-time data the way terrestrial weather forecast models can. “That is a research program that will take several years to come to fruition,” Berger says.

In the meantime, the sun will keep climbing toward solar maximum in 2025. But even after that peak, it doesn’t mean satellites and astronauts are out of the woods as far as solar storms are concerned. “Really any time between now and 2028 or 2029, we could potentially get a large eruption beginning to hit the Earth,” Berger says. That probably won’t affect daily life, but NASA and satellite operators will need to keep an eye toward the sun.      

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The next private mission to the International Space Station will carry a private paying customer and three trained astronauts, with two members of Saudi Arabia’s nascent space program coming along for the ride.

Expected to launch sometime in the spring from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, the Axiom Mission 2 will carry four crew members: Former NASA’s astronaut Peggy Whitson will command the mission, civilian John Shoffner of Knoxville, Tennessee, will be the pilot, and Rayyanah Barnawi and Ali Alqarni from Saudi Arabia will serve as mission specialists for a day-long stay on the ISS.  

[Related: What to expect from space exploration in 2023]

Ax-2 will mark the first time in the still relatively new world of commercial space missions where government and private astronauts fly together. It’s also the first time a woman is commanding a private mission. Axiom Mission 1, which launched to the ISS in April 2022, carried Israeli and Canadian men, but as paying private customers of Axiom Space, not representatives of either nation’s space programs.

“Axiom Space’s second private astronaut mission to the International Space Station cements our mission of expanding access to space worldwide,” Axiom Space CEO Michael Suffredini said in a prepared statement.

That may be more than a corporate platitude about democratizing outer space: Axiom could find there is a ready market of countries hoping to make their mark with astronauts of their own. “To date, fewer than a quarter of the countries of the world have sent even one representative to space,” says Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analytical firm Astralytical. “Most cannot afford the expense and infrastructure to train and launch government astronauts on their own soil.”

While Axiom didn’t reveal the price paid by Shoffner to fly on the upcoming mission, each of the three Axiom-1 astronauts paid around $55 million for their time on the ISS. It’s a lot of money for most people, but not that much for a nation, and almost a bargain compared to building a space program from scratch.

Saudi Arabia, for instance, began training astronauts in September 2022 as part of the kingdom’s Vision 2030 strategic plan to diversify its economy and move away from dependence on oil production. A February 12 release by the Saudi Press Agency noted the kingdom hopes its astronauts participating in the Axiom-2 mission will “​​empower national capabilities in human spaceflight geared towards serving humanity and benefiting from the promising opportunities offered by the space industry.” Barnawi and Alqarni, a cancer researcher and fighter pilot, respectively, will become the second and third Saudi astronauts to fly in space following the flight of Sultan bin Salman Al Saud aboard the US Space Shuttle in 1985.

The decades-long gap shows that flights on existing government space programs can be hard to come by. Forcyzk notes that even among European Space Agency member states, very few ESA astronauts are selected to fly, with crewed launch vehicle seats via NASA even more precious since ESA ceased working with Roscosmos for launch services in 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. NASA is also “limited by the agreements that the US government has in place in terms of which countries to partner with in space and in what ways,” she says, detailed in bilateral agreements such as the Artemis Accords. “Commercial companies are not so limited.”

[Related: Ukraine was about to revive its space program. Then Russia invaded.]

That could work out well for Axiom Space, as the company is interested in more than just being an orbital outfitter and could use the expertise of trained astronauts on missions. Axiom is developing the first private station module to be added to the ISS with the intention to eventually expand that structure so it can one day be cut loose as a free flying space station. The company is one of the participants in NASA’s Commercial Destinations in Low-Earth Orbit program, in which the agency is encouraging private companies to develop private space stations that NASA can rent for certain periods of time after the planned retirement of the ISS in 2030.

In a future with multiple private space stations where NASA is just one of many tenants, there could be more opportunities for private and government trained astronauts from nations that haven’t yet had much chance to board a rocket in nearly 70 years of spaceflight. “Commercial human spaceflight has the potential to open up the doors to space globally in a way that government space agencies cannot do,” Forczyk says.

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Scientists have discovered a ring system around a small object beyond the orbit of Neptune, a surprising discovery in itself. But the observation comes with a mystery to boot: How is this ring system possible when, by all accounts, it shouldn’t exist?

The ring in question orbits Quaoar, a small dwarf planet that lies more than 4 billion miles from the sun—roughly 44 times the distance between Earth and our star. Detecting a dense ring around such a small, distant object was no easy feat, but what really stunned the international group of researchers who made the discovery was this: The ring appears to orbit Quaoar too far away. At that distance, the dwarf planet’s gravity should be too weak to tug on the individual particles in the ring to keep them from forming into a moon or moons. 

“This ring is not where we would expect it to be,” Bruno Morgado, an astronomer at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the lead author of a new paper published in the journal Nature, tells Popular Science in an email. “This may change what we know about how rings were formed.”

As University of Idaho physicist Matthew Hedman put it in a commentary published in the same edition of Nature, this places Quaoar’s ring system “at odds with our current understanding of how such rings are maintained.”

[Related: This weird dwarf planet at the edge of our solar system has a new origin story]

Rings are made of chunks of dust, ice, and other materials, orbiting in a disk around a planetary body. For many years, the large, beautiful rings of Saturn, first observed and characterized in the 1600s, were the only ones known to astronomers. It wasn’t until Voyager 1 passed by Jupiter in 1979 that it was determined the largest planet in our solar system also possessed a ring system, albeit less striking than Saturn’s. It’s now known that all of the solar system’s gas giants possess ring systems. Rings have also been found among a few distant bodies, such as Humea, which like Quaoar—and Eris and Pluto, for that matter—are considered trans-Neptunian objects. 

All of these ring systems but Quaoar’s have one thing in common—the rings orbit within what is known as the Roche limit of their planetary body. This is the distance beyond which the gravitational pull of the planetary body can no longer keep the ring material from forming into larger chunks, which would eventually coalesce into a moon. Inside the limit, the varying strength of gravity on ring particles at different altitudes would keep them spread out. 

But Quaoar’s Roche limit is about 1,100 miles from its center. The dense ring orbits at 2,500 miles from the dwarf planet’s center. “This means that the mutual gravitational attraction of chunks of water ice [in the ring] should easily overwhelm the variations in Quaoar’s gravitational pull,” Hedman writes. “We therefore need some other explanation for why this material hasn’t aggregated into a moon.”

Morgado and his colleagues consider several explanations. One is that the ring material is relatively new, resulting from an impact with a moon orbiting Quaoar, and simply hasn’t had time to re-coalesce. But this is unlikely, they write in the paper, as their computer models suggest this material would condense into a new moon within a matter of decades. 

It’s also possible the ring material itself is bouncier than models predict. If so, each chunk would be more likely to bounce off another than to stick, even without the tug of Quaoar’s gravity to keep them apart. 

[Related: Jupiter formed dinky little rings, and there’s a convincing explanation why]

Another possibility is that the ring system is regularly perturbed by the gravity of some other object, such as Quaoar’s moon, Weywot, or another, yet-to-be-discovered moon. It is, after all, very difficult to study trans-Neptunian objects. This ring discovery was only made possible because the research group brought a wide array of cutting-edge telescopes to bear on Quaoar. That includes the European Space Agency’s ESA’s CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (Cheops) mission, a space telescope that was able to detect Quaoar’s ring by watching for changes in the intensity of background starlight as it monitored the dwarf planet. 

“Now we need to keep observing Quaoar, to better determine this ring, and also see if (and how) it changes with time,” Morgado says. “Also more dynamical studies and simulations need to be done to see under which circumstances a ring is stable so far outside the Roche limit.”

The results of further study could force astronomers to change their understanding of the Roche limit. It’s also possible Quaoar is an exception to the rule—but one that enables a deeper understanding of the orbital dynamics of other large structures, Morgado says, “even other objects such as exoplanets, galaxies.” 

Correction (March 2, 2023): The article originally said Quaoar is more 6 trillion miles away from the sun. The correct distance is more than 4 billion miles.

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On January 27, a discarded Russian rocket stage and a defunct Russian satellite passed within yards of each other in orbit over Earth, narrowly avoiding a collision that would have generated hundreds or thousands of bits of dangerous space debris. 

Had either object been a working satellite, its owners and operators would have received an advanced warning, in the form of an email, from The 18th Space Space Control Squadron of the US Space Force. The US military has been the de facto global space traffic controller for more than a decade—but that role may be coming to an end, with plans for the US Department of Commerce to take over that job. 

The day before the near-miss, the Commerce Department issued a Request for Information asking for public and industry comment on a list of proposed services for the department’s Traffic Management System for Space, or TraCSS program—a civilian-run system planned to track objects in space and avoid collisions. Situated in the department’s Office of Space Commerce, TraCSS will predict when objects reenter the atmosphere, forecast space weather, and warn of potential collisions, among other services. The Commerce Department wants feedback on how it can best implement those services to “enable a competitive and burgeoning US commercial space sector,” according to the request. 

[Related: This meteor-tracking system could prevent a falling-rocket debris disaster]

Whether run by the military or by a civilian agency, some form of traffic coordination and space junk monitoring is essential to the rapidly growing commercial space industry. There are now more than 4,800 functioning satellites in orbit, and SpaceX alone plans to launch up to 60 of its Starlink satellites roughly each week this year—they launched 53 satellites into low Earth orbit on February 2. 

Add to the mix roughly 20,000 pieces of space debris of varying size traveling at tremendous speeds, and the hazards of uncoordinated space flight become clear, according to Robin Dickey, a space policy and strategy analyst with The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research organization that has advised the Commerce Department on space traffic issues. 

“In low Earth orbit, objects are traveling as fast as 17,000 miles per hour,” she says. “So the actions of any one actor, any one satellite in space can affect everyone.”

The sheer volume of objects that need tracking, and potential collision alerts, led to the Trump Administration’s Space Policy Directive 3 in 2018, which directed the Commerce Department to begin preparing to take over space traffic management from the military. The directive cited the need for the US military to focus on protecting its space assets rather than managing civilian space traffic. 

In December 2020, Congress passed legislation directing the Office of Space Commerce to begin working on the project; the incoming Biden Administration picked up the nascent program. Two years later, the department announced pilot program contracts for commercial contractors to assess their ability to aid in space traffic management. The current deadline for the office to take over from the military is fiscal year 2024. 

That may be a tough deadline to meet, according to Moriba Jah, an aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and co-founder and chief scientist of orbital debris tracking company Privateer Space. 

“I like the fact that things are moving in this direction, but sometimes it’s good to move quickly without haste,” Jah says. “I feel that there is haste going on in putting this stuff together.” 

[Related on PopSci+: How harpoons, magnets, and ion blasts could help us clean up space junk]

The TraCSS program will be able to access military space tracking data and take advantage of information from commercial space companies, which have their own sensors and instruments. But the real challenge for TraCSS, Jah says, will be combining all of that information in a way that is understandable and consistent for space operators. These managers, found in civilian and government space organizations, must make decisions on whether to move a satellite to avoid a potential collision. 

With these ambitions, the engineers and developers behind TraCSS have a lot of work to do. “That’s not going to happen in a matter of months or a couple of years,” Jah says. “That’s really hard.”

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The last time Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passed by Earth, our human cousins the Neanderthals still roamed the Earth.      

Discovered in March 2022 by US-based astronomers, the comet, which sports an emerald green coma, is believed to have last passed through the inner solar system some 50,000 years ago. It made its closest pass by the sun on January 12 and will fly within a mere 27 million miles of Earth on February 1 on its way out of the solar system. This is why University of Maryland Astronomy graduate student Carrie Holt and US Naval Academy professor of astronomy Matthew Knight were in Flagstaff, Arizona, to observe the comet from Lowell Observatory last week.

“Because this comet travels fairly close to the Earth, we are presented with a great opportunity to study a more detailed view of the composition and structure of the coma, the cloud of gas and dust that surrounds the comet nucleus,” Holt says.

Comets consist of icy volatiles, such as water and carbon dioxide ice, around a nucleus of rocky material pulled from the protoplanetary disc that formed the planets billions of years ago. They can be difficult for astronomers to find until they get close enough to the sun for the volatiles to begin to sublimate, the process by which the off-gassing materials generate the comet’s coma and form its tail.

“They get really bright when they start evaporating water ice from their surface,” says Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science. He notes most comets don’t even get warm enough to begin off-gassing until they’re in Saturn’s orbit.

[Related: Scientists finally solved the mystery of why comets glow green]

The contents of a comet’s ice can also determine its appearance. The green hue of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is common among its kind, according to Holt, and is due to the presence of diatomic carbon, which “emits green light when it interacts with ultraviolet radiation from the sun,” she says.

While there was a time centuries ago when professionals and amateur comet hunters shared similar stargazing equipment, most comets today are discovered by professional digital sky surveys. Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility in California, for instance, an observatory that scans the entire northern sky every two days looking for changes—such as the appearance of a suddenly brightening comet.

“The few comet discoveries outside of these surveys are usually found by amateur astronomers searching in regions of the sky where surveys don’t typically reach, like near the sun,” Holt explains. In 2020, amateur astronomer Michael Mattiazzo discovered C/2020 F8 (SWAN) by combing through data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO satellite, a joint project by NASA and the European Space Agency.

There are two main populations of comets in the solar system, according to Sheppard. There are the Jupiter family comets, which have short orbits of around 20 years or so and rarely travel much further out than the orbit of the gas giant. And then there are long period comets, a category that includes C/2022 E3 (ZTF).

“Their orbits take them beyond the orbit of Neptune,” Sheppard says. “They have these very elongated orbits” that can take thousands of years to traverse. Compared to short period comets, long period comets also travel much faster relative to Earth during their time in the inner solar system, reaching speeds of about 40 miles per second. Shorter period comets average closer to 10 miles per second.

When a phenomenon like C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is discovered, the coordinates are submitted to the Minor Planet Center, an international organization dedicated to tracking comets, asteroids, and other small bodies in the solar system. The center uses software to take the location of the new comet and project an orbit path and length, or period, for it, according to Knight. This can also allow scientists to project when a comet will past closest to the sun and to Earth.

“It takes a good bit of data to reliably determine just how long the period is,” he says. “The length of data needed varies by object, but usually weeks or months are needed before we have a confident handle on the period.”

Having observed Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) since last March, astronomers are fairly confident it is a long period comet with an orbit period of about 50,000 years. This means it likely originated in the Oort Cloud, a far-off shell of icy bodies enveloping our solar system at a distance 2,000 times greater than that of the sun from the Earth.

“The Oort Cloud has never been observed directly, but it is thought to be made up of many comets on circular orbits,” Holt says. “Gravitational interactions of passing stars or galactic tides can perturb these comets inward into an elliptical orbit.”

[Related: Our universe mastered the art of making galaxies while it was still young]

And it’s this origin at the periphery of our solar system that makes comets an interesting focus of research, Holt explains. “We study comets because they are the leftover building blocks of planet formation, spending most of their lifetime relatively unprocessed in the cold, outer solar system. When a comet enters the inner solar system and begins to outgas, we are able to gain insight into the conditions that existed during planet formation. We want to understand how our solar system came to be.”

Should you be lucky enough to catch sight of comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)—look for a greenish glow in the northern sky after sunset with binoculars or a small telescope—keep in mind you’re witness the slow unsealing of time capsule from before the Earth was formed.

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On Sunday, January 15, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off to orbit with a payload for just the fifth time since the company began flying the 70-ton capacity vehicle in 2018.

Launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 5:56 p.m. EST, the partially reusable rocket carried USSF-67, a classified US Space Force mission consisting of two main payloads. The first held a military communications satellite destined for geosynchronous orbit, the Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM, or CBAS-2, according to a Space Force media release.

The second payload, the Long Duration Propulsive ESPA, or LDPE-3A, is a craft the Space Force uses for deploying multiple smaller payloads into low Earth orbit. In this case, the LDPE-3A carried five payloads, including a prototype of a secure space-to-ground communications device and another prototype designed for “enhanced situational awareness,” as per the Space Force announcement.

The most recent prior Falcon Heavy launch was also a Space Force mission, USSF-44, which launched from Kennedy Space Center on November 1. That was the first flight for the 229-foot-tall rocket since June 2019, a surprising slow pace given the sleeker Falcon 9 rocket launched a record-setting 48 times in 2022 alone.

What’s next for Falcon Heavy?

That the January 15 launch was only the fifth for the Falcon had nothing to do with Falcon Heavy itself, says Laura Forczyk, founder of the space industry analysis firm Astralytical. Instead, it was a result of delays in payloads for both NASA and the US military, including the USSF-44 mission launched in November, that kept the pace of launches low.

“It’s actually very common for payloads to be delayed,” Forcyzk notes. Meanwhile, the majority of SpaceX’s clientele don’t need a rocket as powerful as the Falcon Heavy, and so can fly on the more affordable Falcon 9, which the company uses to launch its own Starlink satellites. A Falcon 9 launch costs $67 million, according to SpaceX pricing, while a Falcon Heavy launch rings up to $97 million.

The Falcon Heavy is the most powerful launch vehicle SpaceX currently operates and consists of three of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket boosters strapped together side-by-side. The combined 27 Merlin engines provide 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, and when combined with an upper stage atop the middle booster, can lift up to 141,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

That makes the Falcon Heavy “SpaceX’s current solution for launching medium- and large-sized payloads to orbit or beyond,” Forczyk says, but it’s not necessarily a long-term option. SpaceX’s massive Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster are still under development; as they become operational, there will be less and less need for Falcon Heavy launches. The company claims the more powerful Starship will generate 17 million pounds of thrust at liftoff and be capable of hauling more than 220,000 pounds into low Earth orbit.

[Related: SpaceX’s new Starshield program will supply satellite networks to the military]

But Starship has yet to fly in orbit, and in the meantime, Falcon Heavy launches are ramping up, with at least five scheduled so far in 2023. Those launches consist of another Space Force mission and two commercial satellite launches in the spring. NASA’s Psyche mission to an asteroid of the same name is also scheduled to launch sometime in October. That means we’ll probably be seeing a lot more of the Falcon Heavy before it fades away.

“The very fact that Falcon Heavy still exists and is still getting customers means there is a demand for it,” Forcyzk says. “They’re going to be launching more customer payloads, which is going to bring in more revenue for the company. They will absolutely need that as they are ramping up development of Starship.”

What’s next for SpaceX?

SpaceX is working steadily on developing the Starship vehicle, which when paired with the reusable Super Heavy Booster, will make it the largest rocket ever flown. Work had been delayed by years due to a prolonged Programmatic Environmental Review between SpaceX and the FAA necessary for the regulator to issue SpaceX a license for orbital Starship launches from Boca Chica, Texas. The process was finally completed in June 2022 with the FAA requiring some safety changes for the company’s site and protocols. 

The next major milestone for Starship would be an uncrewed orbital test flight, but it’s unclear when that may take place, according to Forczyk. “A year ago, in January 2022, I gave a prediction that SpaceX would have its first orbital launch of Starship in 2022. And I was wrong,” she says. “So I want to say that they’re gonna have their first successful orbital Starship mission in 2023, but I don’t want to be wrong again.”

[Related: Dark matter, Jupiter’s moons, and more: What to expect from space exploration in 2023]

The company will need to get a move on, however. Not only is SpaceX contracted to fly a group of private citizens around the moon in the 2024, but NASA has contracted the company to create a lunar lander variant of Starship for use by NASA astronauts during the Artemis III mission scheduled for 2025.

In the meantime, SpaceX will continue launching everything from satellites to Crew Dragon spacecraft bound for the International Space Station atop its Falcon 9 rockets. In August, its CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter that the company was aiming for 100 Falcon 9 flights in 2023. Less than a month in, it’s already successfully completed four Falcon 9 flights.    

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A Russian Soyuz spacecraft damaged by a micrometeorite while docked at the International Space Station (ISS) will return to Earth uncrewed, NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos announced today. Investigations by both space agencies found no damage to the ISS or any of the other spacecraft connected to it.

In a teleconference with reporters, Roscosmos Executive Director for Human Spaceflight Sergei Krikalev and NASA’s ISS Program Manager Joel Montalbano said Russia will launch another uncrewed Soyuz spacecraft on February 20 to provide a ride home for the two cosmonauts and single astronaut that flew to the ISS in September 2022 aboard the now stricken Soyuz MS-22.

Both officials stopped short of calling the coming launch a rescue mission, however. “I’m calling it a replacement Soyuz,” Montalbano told reporters Wednesday. “This is the next Soyuz that was scheduled to fly in March; it will just fly a little earlier.”

[Related: 2 astronauts survived a ‘ballistic descent’ in a Russian rocket]

Soyuz MS-22 carried Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio to the ISS last fall. The trio had expected to return home aboard that same spacecraft this March after a new Soyuz, MS-23, delivered a replacement crew to the space station.

But on December 14, the MS-22 began leaking coolant from a radiator system. Visual inspection of the spacecraft, modeling, and experiments on the ground in Russia using a hyper-velocity gun suggest the damage came from a micrometeorite about 1 millimeter in diameter, Krikalev told reporters Wednesday. Roscosmos officials believe it was a tiny chunk of rock and not a piece of space debris, he explained, because the material was traveling at an estimated 4.3 miles per second—too fast to have maintained an orbit shared by the ISS.

Without a functioning radiator system, Krikalev said, temperatures within the Soyuz spacecraft could rise to as high as 104 degrees Fahrenheit during the roughly six hours necessary for a normal reentry process in Earth’s atmosphere. That heat, along with high humidity, is considered too risky to bring astronauts home.

The MS-22 spacecraft could be used in the highly unlikely event of an emergency requiring evacuation of the ISS. But Montalbano noted that in such a situation, NASA would consider bringing one crew member home on the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that is also currently docked to the station. This carries its own problems, however, as spacesuits are specific to each spacecraft, and a suit fitted to an astronaut for flight on a Soyuz may not fit optimally when flying aboard a Crew Dragon.

Although Petelin, Prokopyev, and Rubio will get a new vehicle to ride home in late February, they may stay aboard the space station on an extended mission into September. That’s when Roscosmos plans to send the next crew rotation up to the ISS on another Soyuz spacecraft. As Montalbano stressed to reporters Wednesday, the risk lies in going forward with a normal crewed reentry on the MS-22 Soyuz, not the daily operations on the space station itself. “There is no immediate need for the crew to come home today,” he said. “They are excited to be in space.”

While the damage done to MS-22 appears to have come from a micrometeorite, the situation illustrates the kinds of problems even miniscule pieces of uncontrolled material can cause in orbit. The ISS has maneuvered to avoid space debris more than 30 times since 1999, for instance, including a close encounter with fragments from an anti-satellite missile test by the Russian military that destroyed a Soviet-era spy satellite in November 2021.

[Related on PopSci+: How harpoons, magnets, and ion blasts could help us clean up space junk]

The extended mission for Petelin, Prokopyev, and Rubio is also far from the first time an astronaut or cosmonaut has had to stay in space for longer than expected. NASA’s Mark Vande Hei set a US record of 355 consecutive days in space after heading to the ISS on April 9, 2021 and returning on March 30, 2022. His original flight home in October 2021 was canceled to allow a Russian filmmaker and an actor to shoot a scene aboard the space station. 

Krikalev, meanwhile, was a cosmonaut with extensive flight experience on the ISS and the Russian Mir space station before taking on an executive role with Roscosmos. He once boarded the Mir space station in May of 1991 and didn’t come home until March 1992 due to the fall of the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991.

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The past few years have been a space launch boom: Late 2021 saw the long-awaited arrival of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and in 2022 NASA finally launched its massive new Space Launch System Moon rocket. This year will continue that trend, as several scientific and commercial craft zoom off our world to orbit and beyond.

This year’s historic flights include missions to Jupiter and the asteroid belt, robotic moon landings, and the maiden flight of a new spacecraft to take astronauts to and from the aging International Space Station (ISS). Here are some of the major launches to look forward to in 2023.

Asteroids and icy moons

Both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have big plans for studying celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Mars that kick off in 2023.

ESA’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, or JUICE mission, will study the icy Galilean moons of Jupiter, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Of the three moons, Europa has so far garnered the lion’s share of scientific interest due to the global liquid water ocean beneath the moon’s icy crust, an environment that could host alien life. But evidence now suggests Callisto and Ganymede may also host subsurface liquid water oceans. JUICE, which is scheduled to launch atop an Ariane 5 rocket from French Guiana sometime in April and will arrive at Jupiter in 2031, will fly by each of the three moons to compare the three icy worlds.

[Related: Jupiter’s moons are about to get JUICE’d for signs of life]

The JUICE spacecraft will enter orbit around Ganymede in 2034, the first time a spacecraft has circled a moon other than Earth’s, where it will spend roughly a year studying the satellite in greater detail. Ganymede, in addition to its potential subsurface ocean and potential habitability, is the only moon in the solar system with its own magnetic field. JUICE will study how this field interacts with Jupiter’s even  larger one.

NASA’s Psyche mission, meanwhile, will blast off no earlier than October 10 on a mission to rendezvous with its namesake asteroid, when it arrives in the belt between Mars and Jupiter in August 2029. The Psyche mission was originally scheduled to launch in August 2022, but was delayed due to problems developing mission-critical software at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The asteroid 16 Psyche is a largely metallic space rock that scientists believe could be the exposed core of a protoplanet that formed in the early solar system. If that theory bears out, the Psyche spacecraft could end up traveling millions of miles to give scientists a better understanding of the Earth’s iron core far beneath their feet.

India returns to the moon

The Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO, is going back to the moon with its Chandrayaan-3 mission, which is scheduled to launch over the summer. The space agency’s Chandrayaan-2 mission carried an orbiter and lander to the moon in 2019, but a software glitch caused the lander to crash on the lunar surface. The Chandrayaan-3 mission is ditching the orbiter in favor of a redesigned lander and rover intended for the lunar South Pole. Carrying a seismometer and spectrographs, among other instruments, the lander and rover will study the chemical composition and geology of the polar region. 

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

The hunt for dark matter

Astrophysicists believe dark matter and dark energy shape the structures of entire universes—and drive the accelerated expansion of ours. But experts don’t understand much about these enigmatic phenomena. ESA’s Euclid space telescope, scheduled to launch sometime in 2023, will measure the effects of these dark forces on the cosmos over time to try and discern their properties.

After launch, Euclid will make its way to the same operational location as JWST, entering an orbit around Lagrangian Point 2, about 1 million miles behind Earth. From there, Euclid will use its nearly 4-foot diameter mirror, visible light imaging system, and near-infrared spectrometer to survey a third of the sky out to a distance of about 15 billion light years. That will give a view  some 10 billion years into the past. By studying how galaxies and galaxy clusters change over eons and across much of the sky, Euclid scientists hope to grasp how dark matter and dark energy shape galactic formation and the evolution of the entire universe.

Boeing catches up to SpaceX

Boeing will finally launch a crewed test flight of its Starliner spacecraft sometime in April 2023. Boeing developed the Starliner, a capsule that holds up to seven people, as a competitor to the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Like Dragon, Starliner will ferry astronauts and cargo to and from the ISS as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

[Related: ISS astronauts are building objects that couldn’t exist on Earth]

But while Crew Dragon began flying astronauts to the ISS in November 2020, the Starliner ran into many delay-causing problems, beginning with a software glitch that kept the spacecraft from rendezvousing with the ISS during an uncrewed test flight in December 2020. Boeing kept at it, however, and completed a second attempt at an uncrewed rendezvous with the ISS in May 2022, paving the way for the coming crewed test flight.

If all goes well, NASA will integrate Starliner flights alongside Crew Dragon launches within the Commercial Crew program, providing the space agency some redundancy in case of problems with either type of spacecraft.

The (private) enterprise

As NASA becomes more and more reliant on Boeing, SpaceX, and other contractors for flights to the ISS, private space operators have big plans of their own for 2023.

Axiom Space plans to send a crew of private citizens for a two-week stay on the ISS in the  summer, following the company’s first mission in April 2022 when four private astronauts spent more than two weeks aboard the space station. Axiom Space plans to build a new habitat—first connected to the ISS, then separated to create a free-flying space station when NASA retires the ISS in 2031.

[Related: SpaceX’s all-civilian moon trip has a crew]

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded the first ever all-private orbital space flight in September 2021 with the Inspiration 4 mission, will also be back at it in 2023. The Polaris Dawn mission is scheduled to launch no sooner than March and will once again see Isaacman fly aboard a chartered SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft along with three crewmates. Unlike Inspiration 4, at least two of the Polaris Dawn crew plan to conduct the first-ever private astronaut spacewalks outside a spacecraft.

The Jeff Bezos-founded Blue Origin, meanwhile, will attempt to launch the first test flight of its orbital rocket, known as New Glenn, sometime in 2023. While the company has flown celebrities such as Bezos and William Shatner to the edge of space aboard its suborbital New Shepard rocket, the company has yet to make an orbital flight. This year, it’s aiming higher.

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