Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are enjoying the longest daylight hours of the year ahead of the summer solstice, and across the world many may even be able to see a unique sunspot on the surface of our favorite star.  Summer stargazing season is quickly approaching, but summer skies can be hazy which makes  some celestial events difficult to see. But there is still plenty to see in the mild night skies this June. Here are some events to look out for and if you happen to get any stellar sky photos, tag us and include #PopSkyGazers.

[Related: The Strawberry Moon, explained.]

June 1 and 2- Mars passes through Beehive star cluster

To kick off the month, Mars will be passing through a star cluster called the Beehive cluster or M44. It’s located in the crabby constellation Cancer, and Mars will appear as a brilliant red ruby surrounded by sparkly diamonds.  

To find Mars, first look for the bright planet Venus in the western sky. The two bright stars that are strung out to one side of Venus are the constellation Gemini’s twin stars Castor and Pollux. Mars should be the reddish light just above Venus, Pollux, and Castor. Binoculars and a dark sky will help you see a smattering of stars just beside Mars. 

The Beehive cluster is about 557 light-years away from Earth and is home to at least two planets. 

June 3 and 4- Full Strawberry Moon

June’s full moon will reach peak illumination at 11:43 PM EDT on June 3. Just after sunset, look in the southeastern sky to watch the moon rise above the horizon. June’s full moon is typically the last full moon of the spring or the first of the summer. 

The name Strawberry Moon is not a description of its color, but instead a reference to the ripening of “June-bearing” strawberries that are ready to be gathered and gobbled. For thousands of years, the  Algonquian, Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota peoples used this term to describe a time of great abundance. Some tribal nations in the northeastern US, including the Wampanoag nation, celebrate Strawberry Thanksgiving to show appreciation for the spring and summer’s first fruits. 

Other names for June’s full moon include the Gardening Moon or Gitige-giizis in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), the Moon of Birthing or Ignivik in Inupiat, and the River Moon or Iswa Nuti in the Catawba Language of the Catawba Indian Nation in South Carolina.

[Related: See hot plasma bubble on the sun’s surface in powerful closeup images.]

June 21- Summer Solstice

Summer officially begins in the Northern Hemisphere at 10:58 AM EDT on June 21 which marks the summer solstice. This is when the sun travels along its northernmost path in the sky. At the solstice, Earth’s North Pole is at its maximum tilt of roughly 23.5 degrees towards the sun. It is also the longest day of the year, and you can expect roughly 16 hours of daylight on June 21 in some spots in the Northeast.

After June 21, the sun appears to reverse course and head back in the opposite direction, towards the south, until the next solstice in December. 

June 27- Bootid Meteor Shower Maximum

June’s Bootid meteor shower begins on June 22, but it is expected to reach its peak rate of meteors around 7 PM EDT on June 27. The Bootid meteors should be visible when the constellation Bootes is just above the horizon. The moon will be in its first quarter phase at the shower’s peak, and will set at about 1:30 in the morning, making for minimal light interference later in the night. 

June’s Bootid meteor shower was created by the comet 7P/Pons-Winnecke and expected to last until July 2.

The same skygazing rules that apply to pretty much all space-watching activities are key this month: Go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour. Then, just sit back and let the summer skies dazzle.

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At least 83 moons orbit Saturn, and experts believe its most reflective one could harbor life underneath its icy surface. To find out, NASA scientists hope to send a massive serpentine robot to scour Enceladus, both atop its frozen ground—and maybe even within a hidden ocean underneath.

As CBS News highlighted on Monday, researchers and engineers are nearing completion of their Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) prototype. The 16-foot-long, 200-pound snakelike bot is capable of traversing both ground and watery environments via “first-of-a-kind rotating propulsion units,” according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These repeating units could act as tracks, gripping mechanisms, and underwater propellers, depending on the surrounding environment’s need. The “head” of EELS also includes 3D mapping technology alongside real-time video recording and transmission capabilities to document its extraplanetary adventure.

[Related: Saturn’s rings have been slowly heating up its atmosphere.]

In theory, EELS would traverse the surface of Enceladus towards one of the moon’s many “plume vents,” which it could then enter to use as a passageway towards its oceanic source. Over 100 of these vents were discovered at Enceladus’ southern pole by the Cassini space probe during its tenure around Saturn. Scientists have since determined the fissures emitted water vapor into space that contained amino acids, which are considered pivotal in the creation of lifeforms.

To assess its maneuverability, NASA researchers have already taken EELS out for test drives in environments such as an ice skating rink in Pasadena, CA, and even an excursion to Athabasca Glacier in Canada’s Jasper National Park. Should all go as planned, the team hopes to present a finalized concept by fall 2024. But be prepared to wait a while to see it in action on Enceladus—EELS’ journey to the mysterious moon would reportedly take roughly 12 years. Even if it never makes it there, however, the robotic prototype could prove extremely useful closer to Earth, and even on it. According to the Jet Propulsion Lab, EELS could show promise exploring the polar caps of Mars, or even ice sheet crevasses here on Earth.

[Related: Saturn has a slushy core and rings that wiggle.]

Enceladus’ fascinating environment was first unveiled thanks to NASA’s historic Cassini space probe. Launched in 1997, the satellite began transmitting data and images of the planet and its moons back to Earth after arriving following a 7 year voyage. After 13 years of service, a decommissioned Cassini descended towards Saturn, where it was vaporized within the upper atmosphere’s high pressure and temperature. Although NASA could have left Cassini to cruise sans trajectory once its fuel ran out, they opted for the controlled demolition due to the slim possibility of crashing into Enceladus or Titan, which might have disrupted the potential life ecosystems scientists hope to one day discover. 

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Uranus’ four largest moons could very likely be home to an ocean layer dozens of miles deep between their icy crusts and deep cores. A new analysis from NASA published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, could help determine how a future mission to Uranus might investigate the seventh planet from the sun’s moons, but also has implications that go beyond Uranus.

[Related: Expect NASA to probe Uranus within the next 10 years.]

At least 27 moons circle Uranus. The four largest are about two to three times smaller than  Earth’s moon, with Ariel at about 720 miles across and the largest, Titania, at 980 miles across. Titania’s size has long led scientists to believe that it is the most likely satellite to retain internal heat that is caused by radioactive decay. Uranus’ other moons were believed to be too small to retain the head that is necessary to keep an internal ocean from freezing since the heating created by Uranus’ gravitational pull is only a minor source of heat.  

This new analysis uses data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft and some new computer modeling looked at all of the planet’s five large moons: Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon, and Miranda. Of these large moons, Titania and Oberon orbit the farthest from Uranus, and these possible oceans could be dwelling 30 miles below the surface. Ariel and Umbriel may have oceans 19 miles deep. 

“When it comes to small bodies – dwarf planets and moons – planetary scientists previously have found evidence of oceans in several unlikely places, including the dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto, and Saturn’s moon Mimas,” co-author and planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Julie Castillo-Rogez said in a statement.  “So there are mechanisms at play that we don’t fully understand. This paper investigates what those could be and how they are relevant to the many bodies in the solar system that could be rich in water but have limited internal heat.”

The new study revisited the data from Voyager 2 flybys of Uranus during the 1980s and from more recent ground-based observations. The authors then built computer models using additional findings from NASA’s Galileo, Cassini, Dawn, and New Horizons missions (which all discovered ocean worlds), and insights into the chemistry and the geology of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, Pluto and its moon Charon, and Ceres. These Plutonian and Saturnian moons are all icy bodies about the same size as the Uranian moons.

The team used the modeling to gauge how porous the surface of the Uranian moons are, and found that they are likely insulated enough to retain that internal heat needed to host an ocean. Additionally, the models found a potential heat source in the moons’ rocky mantles. These sources release hot liquid that would help an ocean maintain a warm environment. This warming scenario is especially likely in the moons Titania and Oberon, where the oceans could  even be warm enough to support some sort of lifeforms. 

[Related: Ice giant Uranus shows off its many rings in new JWST image.]

Investigating the composition of these oceans can help scientists learn about the materials that may be found on the icy surfaces of the moons as well, depending on whether or not the substances underneath were pushed up from below by internal geological activity. Evidence from telescopes shows that at least one of the moons (Ariel) has material on it that flowed onto its surface relatively recently, possibly from icy volcanoes. 

Miranda, the innermost and fifth largest Uranian moon, also hosts surface features that may be of recent origin, which suggests it may have held enough heat to maintain an ocean at some points. However, recent thermal modeling found that Miranda likely didn’t host that water for very long, since the moon loses heat too quickly and the ocean is probably frozen now.

Another key finding in the new study suggests that chlorides and ammonia are likely abundant in the oceans. Ammonia can act as an antifreeze, and the author’s modeling suggests that the salts that are likely present in the water would be another source of temperature regulation  that maintains the bodies’ internal oceans.

Digging down into the inner workings of a moon’s surface could help scientists and engineers choose the best instruments to survey them in future missions, but there are still many questions about Uranus’ large moons and work to be done.

“We need to develop new models for different assumptions on the origin of the moons in order to guide planning for future observations,” Castillo-Rogez said.

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On Wednesday and Thursday, a particularly strange “hybrid” eclipse is coming to Australia, Indonesia, and some other parts of Southeast Asia, but you don’t have to be there to watch. Don’t miss it—the next one won’t happen for nearly another decade.

How to see the April 20 solar eclipse in person

The exact time of the eclipse will vary depending on your location, so you’ll need to check when it will be visible for you. Timeanddate.com has a particularly handy tool for figuring this out. To use it, click Path Map at the top of the page and see if you’re going to be under any part of the eclipse’s path. If so, zoom in to pinpoint where you are and click on the map to bring up an information box that shows when the event will be visible in local time.

Even if you’re in the partial eclipse zone, it’s worth stepping outside to take a peek at this celestial happening. “We are going to get coffee and freak out about the sky. It’s going to be fun,” says University of Melbourne astronomer Benji Metha about his eclipse plans. The moon will cover only about 10 percent of the sun where he is in southeastern Australia.

[Related: April 2023 stargazing guide]

If you’re in the eclipse’s path, be sure to come prepared. Never look directly at the sun. Eclipse glasses are readily available online, but make sure the ones you’re buying aren’t fake. Too late to buy? You can make your own eclipse projector instead. Unlike almost every other astronomical event, solar eclipses happen in the daytime, so you won’t really be able to spot other stars or deep sky objects at the same time. The sun and moon will be the only ones on stage.

Timeanddate is also hosting an eclipse livestream in collaboration with Perth Observatory in western Australia, where roughly 70 percent of the sun will be covered. Like Exmouth, Perth is 12 hours ahead of New York City, so live video will start at 10 p.m. ET on April 19 and continue until the partial eclipse ends around 12:46 a.m. ET on April 20.

Tune in, and you’ll be joining solar scientists around the world who are particularly interested in this event and the data they can gather from it. “I look forward to this eclipse, because it is a long-anticipated party,” says Berkeley heliophysicist Jia Huang. “A hybrid eclipse is very rare.”

When is the next eclipse?

If you miss the show, there are sure to be some incredible photos posted from the event, and you will be able to watch recordings online afterward. But if you want to see an eclipse in person, a few are coming to the States soon enough.

First, an annular solar eclipse will travel from Oregon to Texas on October 14, 2023, followed several months later by the next North American total solar eclipse from Texas up through Maine on April 8, 2024.

What to know about the four types of solar eclipses

Solar eclipses happen whenever Earth’s moon gets between us and the sun, aligning to block out the sunlight and cause an eerie daytime darkness. Eclipses are predictable, thanks to centuries of observational astronomy across many cultures, and “we can now forecast these events with incredible accuracy,” Metha says. It’s a good thing we know when they’re coming so we’re not surprised. “Imagine how many car accidents a sudden solar eclipse would cause if people were not expecting it,” he adds.

These celestial events come in a few flavors: total, partial, annular, and hybrid. In a total eclipse, the moon fully blocks out the sun. For a partial eclipse, the sun and moon aren’t quite lined up, so only a chunk of the sun is covered. Similarly, for an annular eclipse, some of the sun remains exposed—but this type happens when the moon is at its farthest point from Earth and appears smaller, creating a ring of light when it lines up with the sun. Hybrid eclipses, like the one happening this week, shift between total and annular due to the curvature of Earth.

Solar eclipses trace paths along Earth’s surface, with a path of totality—where you can see a total eclipse—in the center, surrounded by various shades of partial eclipse. The upcoming April 20 eclipse path of totality clips the northwestern corner of Australia and passes through the islands of Timor, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. The entirety of Australia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and parts of other Southeast Asian countries will experience at least a partial eclipse.

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

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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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Update (April 14, 2023): After rescheduling the launch from April 13 to April 14 due to weather conditions, the European Space Agency successfully launched JUICE at 8:14 a.m. EDT and received its first transmission from the spacecraft around 10:30 a.m.

Space enthusiasts will get to have some JUICE for breakfast on Friday morning. The European Space Agency (ESA) is set to launch the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission (JUICE) on April 14 from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana at 9:14 a.m. local time (8:14 a.m. EDT). Curious viewers can watch the live broadcast beginning at 7:45 a.m. EDT on the ESA’s webpage.

The spacecraft is safe inside its Ariane 5 rocket, the same rocket that launched the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in December 2021. JUICE is Europe’s first-ever mission to the Jupiter system, and the spacecraft should be in our solar system’s largest planet’s orbit by July 2031.

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

According to the ESA, If the mission is delayed, the team can try again to launch JUICE once each day for the rest of April. If the spacecraft fails to launch this month, the next available slot is August 2023.

Once JUICE is launched, it will deploy its antennas, solar arrays, and other instruments. The explorer has two monitoring cameras that will capture parts of the solar array deployment following launch, according to the ESA. The 52 feet-long radar antenna will deploy a few days later. 

Over the eight years that it will take to reach Jupiter, the spacecraft will conduct three Earth flybys and one flyby of Venus. The flybys will give JUICE the spacecraft the necessary gravity assists so it can launch itself towards Jupiter, around 559 million miles away from Earth.

After it reaches Jupiter’s orbit in July 2031, JUICE will make detailed observations of Jupiter and three of its biggest moons, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. In 2034, JUICE is slated to go into orbit around Ganymede and will become the first human spacecraft to enter orbit around another planet’s moon. Ganymede is also the only moon in the solar system that has its own magnetic field. JUICE will study how this field interacts with the even larger magnetic field on Jupiter.

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

NASA will provide the Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) and subsystems and components for two additional JUICE instruments: the Particle Environment Package (PEP) and the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration (RIME) experiment. 

Studying Jupiter and its moons more closely will help astrobiologists understand how habitable worlds might emerge around gas giant planets, according to NASA. Jupiter’s moons are primary targets for astrobiology research, since moons like Europa are thought to have oceans of liquid water beneath their icy surfaces. Astrobiologists believe that these oceans could possibly be habitable for life.

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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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In a sequel to its image of the planet Neptune’s rings in September 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has taken a new image of the ice giant Uranus. The new view of the seventh planet from the sun was taken on February 6 and released to the public on April 6. It shows off Uranus’ rings and some of the bright features in its atmosphere.

[Related: Expect NASA to probe Uranus within the next 10 years.]

The image was taken with NIRCam as a short 12-minute exposure and combines data from two filters, one shown in blue and one in orange. Uranus typically displays a blue hue naturally. 

Of the planet’s 13 known rings, 11 are visible in the image. According to NASA, some of these rings are so bright that they appear to merge into a larger ring when close together while observed with JWST. Nine are classed as the main rings of the planet, and two are the fainter dusty rings. These dusty rings have only ever been imaged by the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it flew past the planet in 1986 and with the Keck Observatory’s advanced adaptive optics in the early 2000s. Scientists expect that future images will also reveal the two even more faint outer rings that the Hubble Space Telescope discovered in 2007.

The new image also captured many of Uranus’ 27 known moons. Many of the moons are too small and faint to be seen in this image, but six can be seen in the wide-view. Uranus is categorized as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior. The majority of Uranus’ mass is believed to be a hot, dense, fluid of water, methane, and ammonia above a small and rocky core.

Among the planets in our solar system, Uranus has a unique rotation. It rotates on its side at a roughly 90-degree angle, which causes extreme seasons. The planet’s poles experience multiple years of constant sunlight, and then an equal number of years in total darkness. It takes the planet 84 years to orbit the sun and its northern pole is currently in its late spring. Uranus’ next northern summer isn’t until 2028. 

[Related: Uranus’s quirks and hidden features have astronomers jazzed about a direct mission.]

Uranus also has a unique polar cap on the right side of the planet. It’s visible as a brightening at the pole facing the sun, and seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight during the summer and vanishes in the autumn. JWST’s data is expected to help scientists understand what’s behind this mechanism and has already noticed a subtle brightening at the cap’s center. NASA believes that JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera NIRCam’s sensitivity to longer wavelengths may be why they can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature, since it has not been seen as clearly with other powerful telescopes.

Additionally, a bright cloud lies at the edge of the polar cap and another can be seen on the planet’s left limb. The JWST team believes that these clouds are likely connected to storm activity. 

More imaging and additional studies of the planet are currently in the works by multiple space agencies, after the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine identified Uranus science as a priority in its 2023-2033 Planetary Science and Astrobiology decadal survey. This 10 year-long study will likely include a study of Saturn’s moons and sending a probe to Uranus. 

“Sending a flagship to Uranus makes a lot of sense,” because Uranus and Neptune “are fairly unexplored worlds,” Mark Marley, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona and director of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, told PopSci last year. Marley also called the future study it “clear-eyed,” and said that learning more about Uranus will help scientists understand both the formation of our solar system and even some exoplanets. 

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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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Years after Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan returned from NASA’s last crewed mission to the moon, he still felt the massive weight of the milestone. “I realize that other people look at me differently than I look at myself, for I am one of only 12 human beings to have stood on the moon,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I have come to accept that and the enormous responsibility it carries, but as for finding a suitable encore, nothing has ever come close.”

Cernan, who died in 2017, and his crewmates will soon be joined in their lonely chapter of history by four new astronauts, bringing the grand total of people who’ve flown to the moon to 28. Today, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency announced the crew for Artemis II, the first mission to take humans beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. The 10-day mission will take the team on a gravity-assisted trip around the moon and back.

The big reveal occurred at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, in front of an audience of NASA partners, politicians, local students, international astronauts, and Apollo alums. NASA Director of Flight Operations Norman Knight, NASA Chief Astronaut Joe Acaba, and Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa White selected the crew. They were joined on stage during the announcement by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science, and Industry Francois-Philippe Champagne. 

“You are the Artemis generation,” Knight said after revealing the final lineup. “We are the Artemis generation.” These are the four American and Canadian astronauts representing humanity in the next lunar launch.

Christina Koch – Mission Specialist, NASA

Koch has completed three missions to the International Space Station (ISS) and set the record for the longest spaceflight for a female astronaut in 2020. Before that, the Michigan native conducted research at the South Pole and tinkered on instruments at the Goddard Flight Space Center. She will be the only professional engineer on the Artemis II crew. “I know who mission control will be calling when it’s time to fix something on board,” Knight joked during her introduction.

Koch relayed her anticipation of riding NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) on a lunar flyby and back to those watching from home: “It will be a four-day journey [around the moon], testing every aspect of Orion, going to the far side of the moon, and splashing down in the Atlantic. So, am I excited? Absolutely. But one thing I’m excited about is that we’re going to be carrying your excitement, your dreams, and your aspirations on your mission.”

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

After the Artemis II mission, Koch will officially be the first woman to travel beyond Earth’s orbit. Koch and her team will circle the moon for 6,400 miles before returning home.

Jeremy Hansen – Mission Specialist, Canada

Hansen’s training experience has brought him to the ocean floor off Key Largo, Florida, the rocky caves of Sardinia, Italy, and the frigid atmosphere above the Arctic Circle. The Canadian fighter pilot led ISS communications from mission control in 2011, but this will mark his first time in space. Hansen is also the only Canadian who’s ever flown on a lunar mission.

“It’s not lost on any of us that the US could go back to the moon by themselves. Canada is grateful for that global mindset and leadership,” he said during the press conference. He also highlighted Canada’s can-do attitude in science and technology: “All of those have added up to this step where a Canadian is going to the moon with an international partnership. Let’s go.”

Victor Glover – Pilot, NASA

Glover is a seasoned pilot both on and off Earth. Hailing from California, he’s steered or ridden more than 40 different types of craft, including the SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule in 2020 during the first commercial space flight ever to the ISS. His outsized leadership presence in his astronaut class was mentioned multiple times during the event. “In the last few years, he has become a mentor to me,” Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman said.

[Related on PopSci+: Victor J. Glover on the cosmic ‘relay race’ of the new lunar missions]

In his speech, Glover looked into the lofty future of human spaceflight. “Artemis II is more than a mission to the moon and back,” he said. “It’s the next step on the journey that gets humanity to Mars. We have a lot of work to do to get there, and we understand that.” Glover will be the first Black astronaut to travel to the moon.

G. Reid Wiseman – Commander, NASA

Wiseman got a lot done in his single foray into space. During a 2014 ISS expedition, he contributed to upwards of 300 scientific experiments and conducted two lengthy spacewalks. The Maryland native served as NASA’s chief astronaut from 2020 to 2022 and led diplomatic efforts with Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. 

“This was always you,” Knight said while talking about Wiseman’s decorated military background. “It’s what you were meant to be.”

Flight commanders are largely responsible for safety during space missions. As the first astronauts to travel on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, the Artemis II crew will test the longevity and stability of NASA and SpaceX’s new flight technology as they exit Earth’s atmosphere, slingshot into the moon’s gravitational field, circumnavigate it, and attempt a safe reentry. Wiseman will be in charge of all that with the support of his three fellow astronauts and guidance from mission control.

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This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

It’s evening at the northern tip of the Red Sea, in the Gulf of Aqaba, and Tom Shlesinger readies to take a dive. During the day, the seafloor is full of life and color; at night it looks much more alien. Shlesinger is waiting for a phenomenon that occurs once a year for a plethora of coral species, often several nights after the full moon.

Guided by a flashlight, he spots it: coral releasing a colorful bundle of eggs and sperm, tightly packed together. “You’re looking at it and it starts to flow to the surface,” Shlesinger says. “Then you raise your head, and you turn around, and you realize: All the colonies from the same species are doing it just now.”

Some coral species release bundles of a pinkish- purplish color, others release ones that are yellow, green, white or various other hues. “It’s quite a nice, aesthetic sensation,” says Shlesinger, a marine ecologist at Tel Aviv University and the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat, Israel, who has witnessed the show during many years of diving. Corals usually spawn in the evening and night within a tight time window of 10 minutes to half an hour. “The timing is so precise, you can set your clock by the time it happens,” Shlesinger says.

Moon-controlled rhythms in marine critters have been observed for centuries. There is calculated guesswork, for example, that in 1492 Christopher Columbus encountered a kind of glowing marine worm engaged in a lunar-timed mating dance, like the “flame of a small candle alternately raised and lowered.” Diverse animals such as sea mussels, corals, polychaete worms and certain fishes are thought to synchronize their reproductive behavior by the moon. The crucial reason is that such animals — for example, over a hundred coral species at the Great Barrier Reef — release their eggs before fertilization takes place, and synchronization maximizes the probability of an encounter between eggs and sperm.

How does it work? That has long been a mystery, but researchers are getting closer to understanding. They have known for at least 15 years that corals, like many other species, contain light-sensitive proteins called cryptochromes, and have recently reported that in the stony coral, Dipsastraea speciosa, a period of darkness between sunset and moonrise appears key for triggering spawning some days later.

Now, with the help of the marine bristle worm Platynereis dumerilii, researchers have begun to tease out the molecular mechanism by which myriad sea species may pay attention to the cycle of the moon.

The bristle worm originally comes from the Bay of Naples but has been reared in laboratories since the 1950s. It is particularly well-suited for such studies, says Kristin Tessmar-Raible, a chronobiologist at the University of Vienna. During its reproductive season, it spawns for a few days after the full moon: The adult worms rise en masse to the water surface at a dark hour, engage in a nuptial dance and release their gametes. After reproduction, the worms burst and die.

The tools the creatures need for such precision timing — down to days of the month, and then down to hours of the day — are akin to what we’d need to arrange a meeting, says Tessmar-Raible. “We integrate different types of timing systems: a watch, a calendar,” she says. In the worm’s case, the requisite timing systems are a daily — or circadian — clock along with another, circalunar clock for its monthly reckoning.

To explore the worm’s timing, Tessmar-Raible’s group began experiments on genes in the worm that carry instructions for making cryptochromes. The group focused specifically on a cryptochrome in bristle worms called L-Cry. To figure out its involvement in synchronized spawning, they used genetic tricks to inactivate the l-cry gene and observe what happened to the worm’s lunar clock. They also carried out experiments to analyze the L-Cry protein.

Though the story is far from complete, the scientists have evidence that the protein plays a key role in something very important: distinguishing sunlight from moonlight. L-Cry is, in effect, “a natural light interpreter,” Tessmar-Raible and coauthors write in a 2023 overview of rhythms in marine creatures in the Annual Review of Marine Science.

The role is a crucial one, because in order to synchronize and spawn on the same night, the creatures need to be able to stay in step with the patterns of the moon on its roughly 29.5-day cycle — from full moon, when the moonlight is bright and lasts all night long, to the dimmer, shorter-duration illuminations as the moon waxes and wanes.

When L-Cry was absent, the scientists found, the worms didn’t discriminate appropriately. The animals synchronized tightly to artificial lunar cycles of light and dark inside the lab — ones in which the “sunlight” was dimmer than the real sun and the “moonlight” was brighter than the real moon. In other words, worms without L-Cry latched onto unrealistic light cycles. In contrast, the normal worms that still made L-Cry protein were more discerning and did a better job of synchronizing their lunar clocks correctly when the nighttime lighting more closely matched that of the bristle worm’s natural environment.

The researchers accrued other evidence, too, that L-Cry is an important player in lunar timekeeping, helping to discern sunlight from moonlight. They purified the L-Cry protein and found that it consists of two protein strands bound together, with each half holding a light-absorbing structure known as a flavin. The sensitivity of each flavin to light is very different. Because of this, the L-Cry can respond to both strong light akin to sunlight and dim light equivalent to moonlight — light over five orders of magnitude of intensity — but with very different consequences.

After four hours of dim “moonlight” exposure, for example, light-induced chemical reactions in the protein — photoreduction — occurred, reaching a maximum after six hours of continuous “moonlight” exposure. Six hours is significant, the scientists note, because the worm would only encounter six hours’ worth of moonlight at times when the moon was full. This therefore would allow the creature to synchronize with monthly lunar cycles and pick the right night on which to spawn. “I find it very exciting that we could describe a protein that can measure moon phases,” says Eva Wolf, a structural biologist at IMB Mainz and Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and a collaborator with Tessmar-Raible on the work.

How does the worm know that it’s sensing moonlight, though, and not sunlight? Under moonlight conditions, only one of the two flavins was photoreduced, the scientists found. In bright light, by contrast, both flavin molecules were photoreduced, and very quickly. Furthermore, these two types of L-Cry ended up in different parts of the worm’s cells: the fully photoreduced protein in the cytoplasm, where it was quickly destroyed, and the partly photoreduced L-Cry proteins in the nucleus.

All in all, the situation is akin to having “a highly sensitive ‘low light sensor’ for moonlight detection with a much less sensitive ‘high light sensor’ for sunlight detection,” the authors conclude in a report published in 2022.

Many puzzles remain, of course. For example, though presumably the two distinct fates of the L-Cry molecules transmit different biological signals inside the worm, researchers don’t yet know what they are. And though the L-Cry protein is key for discriminating sunlight from moonlight, other light-sensing molecules must be involved, the scientists say.

In a separate study, the researchers used cameras in the lab to record the burst of swimming activity (the worm’s “nuptial dance”) that occurs when a worm sets out to spawn, and followed it up with genetic experiments. And they confirmed that another molecule is key for the worm to spawn during the right one- to two-hour window — the dark portion of that night between sunset and moonrise — on the designated spawning nights.

Called r-Opsin, the molecule is extremely sensitive to light, the scientists found — about a hundred times more than the melanopsin found in the average human eye. It modifies the worm’s daily clock by acting as a moonrise sensor, the researchers propose (the moon rises successively later each night). The notion is that combining the signal from the r-Opsin sensor with the information from the L-Cry on what kind of light it is allows the worm to pick just the right time on the spawning night to rise to the surface and release its gametes.

Resident timekeepers

As biologists tease apart the timekeepers needed to synchronize activities in so many marine creatures, the questions bubble up. Where, exactly, do these timekeepers reside? In species in which biological clocks have been well studied — such as Drosophila and mice — that central timekeeper is housed in the brain. In the marine bristleworm, clocks exist in its forebrain and peripheral tissues of its trunk. But other creatures, such as corals and sea anemones, don’t even have brains. “Is there a population of neurons that acts as a central clock, or is it much more diffuse? We don’t really know,” says Ann Tarrant, a marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who is studying chronobiology of the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis.

Scientists are also interested in knowing what roles are played by microbes that might live with marine creatures. Corals like Acropora, for example, often have algae living symbiotically within their cells. “We know that algae like that also have circadian rhythms,” Tarrant says. “So when you have a coral and an alga together, it’s complicated to know how that works.”

Researchers are worried, too, about the fate of spectacular synchronized events like coral spawning in a light-polluted world. If coral clock mechanisms are similar to the bristle worm’s, how would creatures be able to properly detect the natural full moon? In 2021, researchers reported lab studies demonstrating that light pollution can desynchronize spawning in two coral species — Acropora millepora and Acropora digitifera — found in the Indo-Pacific Ocean.

Shlesinger and his colleague Yossi Loya have seen just this in natural populations, in several coral species in the Red Sea. Reporting in 2019, the scientists compared four years’ worth of spawning observations with data from the same site 30 years earlier. Three of the five species they studied showed spawning asynchrony, leading to fewer — or no — instances of new, small corals on the reef.

Along with artificial light, Shlesinger believes there could be other culprits involved, such as endocrine-disrupting chemical pollutants. He’s working to understand that — and to learn why some species remain unaffected.

Based on his underwater observations to date, Shlesinger believes that about 10 of the 50-odd species he has looked at may be asynchronizing in the Red Sea, the northern portion of which is considered a climate-change refuge for corals and has not experienced mass bleaching events. “I suspect,” he says, “that we will hear of more issues like that in other places in the world, and in more species.”

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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April is officially Global Astronomy Month, a month-long celebration of all things celestial by Astronomers Without Borders, a US-based club that connects global skywatchers. The event features a Global Star Party and Sun Day and online lessons to highlight the conjunction of art and astronomy. April also happens to be an exciting month for space happenings in general. If you happen to get any stellar sky photos, tag us and include #PopSkyGazers.

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

April 5 and 6 – Full Pink Moon

The first full moon of spring in the Northern Hemisphere will reach peak illumination at 12:37 AM EDT on April 6. First glimpses of the full Pink Moon will be on April 5, but because it reaches peak illumination so early in Eastern Time, Western time zones will see it peak on the night of April 5.

April’s full moon also goes by many names. The “pink” references early springtime blooms of the wildflower Phlox subulata found in eastern North America. This month’s moon is also the Paschal Full Moon, which determines when the Christian holiday Easter is celebrated. Easter is always celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring, so this year Easter will be on Sunday, April 9.

Every year, the April full moon is also called the Frog Moon or Omakakiiwi-giizis in Anishinaabemowin/Ojibwe, the It’s Thundering Moon or Wasakayutese in Oneida, and the Planting Moon or Tahch’atapa in Tunica, the language of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana.

April 7 – 34P/PANSTARRS comet at its closest point in flyby

The Jupiter-family comet 364P/PANSTARRS will pass within 11 million miles (0.12 AU) of the Earth in early April. The comet will be in the “foxy” constellation Vulpecula and is expected to have a high brightness magnitude of about 12.3. It will be visible in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, but those in Northern latitudes will be able to see it better. 

[Related: A total solar eclipse bathed Antarctica in darkness.]

April 20 – Total solar eclipse

Eclipses are always an exciting event, but this one comes with a twist. A total solar eclipse occurs during a rare cosmic alignment of the Earth, moon, and sun. The next solar eclipse will be the first of its kind since 2013 and the last until 2031.

On April 20, a new moon will eclipse the sun, but it will falter a bit. Since it is slightly too far away from the Earth in its elliptical orbit to fully cover all of the sun, the moon will actually fail to cause a total solar eclipse for a brief moment. A ring of fire will be visible for a few seconds over the Indian Ocean, but the moonshadow will completely cover the sun and cause a total solar eclipse by the time it reaches Western Australia. Eclipse chasers in the town of Exmouth and on ships in the Indian Ocean will likely experience about one minute of darkness during the day.

A long display of Baily’s beads around the New Moon and a view of the sun’s pink chromosphere could also appear around the moon during totality on eclipse day. While this eclipse won’t really be visible in the US, we’re only a few months away from the 2023 annular solar eclipse, which will reach totality in the western part of the country this October. 

April 21, 22, and 23 – Lyrid meteor shower

The Lyrids are predicted to start late in the evening of April 21 or April 22 and last until dawn on April 23. The predicted peak is 9:06 EDT on April 23. While the peak of the Lyrids is narrow, the new moon falls on April 19, so it will not interfere with skygazing. 

Ten to 15 meteors per hour can be seen in a dark sky with no moon. The Lyrids are even known for some rare surges in activity that can sometimes bring them up to 100 per hour. The meteor shower will be visible from both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, but is much more active in the north.

The same skygazing rules that apply to pretty much all space-watching activities are key this month: Go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour. 

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I’ve always loved learning about the planets and stars, but it sure takes a lot to get me outside on a cold, dark night to see them with my own eyes. This week, though, there’s a celestial lineup I don’t want to miss—and you shouldn’t either!

What’s the big deal here?

Although there have been some wild theories about strange happenings during planetary alignments—like an increase in natural disasters—those have generally been debunked. Instead, the reason a planetary alignment is a big deal is that it’s simply cool to see. “You get to see pretty much the whole solar system in one night,” says Rory Bentley, UCLA astronomer and avid stargazer.

Usually, the planets are spread across the sky, visible at different times of the night (even into the early morning). They’re technically always in some version of a line—all our solar system’s planets appear on the ecliptic, an invisible arc across the sky tracing the plane where everything orbits the sun. If the planets are close enough together, though, they appear to be in an almost straight line. 

[Related: Astronomers just mapped the ‘bubble’ that envelopes our planet]

That’s precisely what’s happening on March 28. The five planets will come within 50 degrees of each other, a tight bunch compared to their usual spread, giving stargazers of all ages an opportunity to meet our planetary neighbors.

How to see the March 28 alignment

The time to spot this planetary parade is right after sunset on the March 28—no more than about 45 minutes after sundown, since Jupiter and Mercury will both disappear below the horizon fairly quickly. You’ll want to make sure you have a clear view of the western horizon, where the sun sets and Jupiter and Mercury will follow close behind. 

Jupiter will be closest to the horizon, easy to spot even in the lingering sunlight of dusk since it’s so bright. Mercury will be nearby—possibly visible to the naked eye, and definitely visible with binoculars. A bit higher up in the sky you’ll find Venus, shining intensely from its ultra-reflective thick clouds. It’s accompanied by Uranus, just a bit above—and for this one, you’ll definitely need those binoculars. Bringing up the tail end of the parade is Mars, up even higher in the sky near the crescent moon. (Bonus: you can see the moon, too, while you’re at it.)

If you’re not completely sure how to tell what’s a planet, know that the planets you see with your naked eye will generally be brighter than everything around them, and if you look really closely they won’t twinkle quite like stars.

You should be able to spot at least three of the parade participants (Jupiter, Venus, and Mars)—possibly even a fourth (Mercury)—with just your eyes if you’ve got good eyesight and/or a clear sky. Grab some binoculars or a telescope, and you can collect all five planets. Venus and Uranus will be visible until they dip below the horizon about three hours after sunset, and Mars stays out past midnight.

Another benefit to using a decently sized pair of binoculars or a telescope is that you’ll get to see a slew of neat planetary features as the alignment glides by. You should be able to spot Saturn’s famous rings, and possibly even some of the colorful cloud bands of Jupiter. Although you won’t notice any surface features on Venus, you will be able to determine what phase it’s in, since Venus has phases (crescent, full, etc.) similar to our moon. Keep in mind that it’s easier to see details when you have clear, still skies, and are looking overhead. The closer your target gets to the horizon, the more of Earth’s atmosphere you end up looking through, making viewing more difficult.

The Pleiades, a star cluster known across many cultures as the seven sisters, also shines between Venus and Mars. You may recognize this particular arrangement of stars from the logo on Subaru automobiles—it’s no coincidence, because Subaru is actually the Japanese name for this cluster. You’ll likely be able to see this one with just your eyes, even in a big city like Los Angeles.

[Related: Why we turn stars into constellations]

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Water is key for life here on Earth, and it will be key for humans to travel around the solar system as well. It’s a heavy resource to lug aboard a spacecraft, so it’s best to get it from your destination when possible. Thankfully, there’s already some water on the moon—and astronomers just got a better look at where it is exactly.

New observations from the SOFIA airborne observatory (which completed its final flight in September 2022) produced a detailed map of water molecules near the moon’s South Pole. These results, recently accepted to the Planetary Science Journal and presented at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference last week, are answering a critical question for both geology and future human exploration: Where can we find water on the moon?

“We don’t really know the basics of where [the water] is, how much, or how it got there,” says Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado not affiliated with the new research.

[Related: Mysterious bright spots fuel debate over whether Mars holds liquid water]

NASA’s 2010 LCROSS mission first sparked interest in the southern end of the moon when its radar revealed frozen water stored in places where the sun’s light can’t reach, like the bottoms of craters. A slew of follow-up observations by India’s Chandrayaan probes added further evidence for lunar water, but there was a catch—what astronomers identified as possible water molecules (H₂O) could have been a different arrangement of hydrogen and oxygen called hydroxyl (OH). SOFIA, however, had the power to search for a wider range of molecular signatures, meaning it could scan for a surefire sign of water instead of something that could be confused for hydroxyl. 

“These observations with SOFIA are important because they definitively map the water molecules on the sunlit surface of the moon,” says NASA Lunar scientist Casey Honniball, co-author on the new study. An accurate map of the icy areas can help planetary scientists distinguish between different ways water moves across the lunar surface, and learn how the life-giving compound got there in the first place. 

“We see more water in shady places, where the surface temperature is colder,” says William T. Reach, director of SOFIA and lead author on the paper. This is similar to how ski slopes facing away from the sun retain more of their snow here on Earth.

Researchers are considering two main scenarios to explain the origins of lunar water: evaporating water from comets that crashed into the moon, or water trapped in volcanic minerals created long ago. The SOFIA data hasn’t helped them to narrow down the source yet. “These are observations, and they don’t come labeled with a nice, tidy explanation,” adds Reach.

Although his team is still figuring out the provenance of the observed water, detecting it at all could be a boon for future human space exploration. A confident claim of water on the south pole of the moon explains “why we are targeting these regions so intently for the next phase of human and robotic lunar exploration,” says UCLA planetary scientist Tyler Horvath, who was not involved in the project.

Unfortunately, SOFIA can’t continue mapping the moon’s water—the modified Boeing 747 and telescope are now retired to the Pima Air & Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona. “I hope these results help pave the way for another one of these airborne observatories to be developed in the near future,” says Horvath.

[Related: Saying goodbye to SOFIA, NASA’s 747 with a telescope]

Despite the project’s untimely end, SOFIA managed to complete a large number of observations of the moon—among other celestial targets—in its final flights. In fact, it produced so much data that scientists are still sorting through it all. SOFIA’s discoveries “will continue for years to come,” says Honniball, and could prepare teams for future missions, all tackling questions about H₂O. Some prime examples include CalTech’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter launching later this year, NASA’s water-hunting Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), and of course, the US Artemis program, which aims to land humans on the satellite’s southern regions as early as 2025.

These upcoming projects also promise the tantalizing prospect of delivering lunar soil samples back to Earth, something that hasn’t happened (for Americans, at least) since the Apollo program. “In the lab, even a single grain is like a world of its own revealing stories about the history and evolution of the material on the moon,” says Reach. Actually working with samples of lunar ice in a hands-on experiment could finally determine what form water takes on the moon.

Until then, planetary scientists will keep working through SOFIA’s moon maps, squeezing out every last drop of information they can.

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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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This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.

Camilla Rathsach walked along the lichen-covered sand, heading out from the lone village on Denmark’s remote Anholt island—a spot of land just a few kilometers wide in the middle of the Kattegat Strait, which separates the Danish mainland from Sweden. As Anholt Town’s 45 streetlights receded into the distance, moonlit shadows reached out to embrace the dunes. Rathsach looked up, admiring the Milky Way stretching across the sky. Thousands of stars shone down. “It’s just amazing,” she says. “Your senses heighten and you hear the water and feel the fresh air.”

This dark-sky moment was one of many Rathsach experienced while visiting the island in 2020 for work on her master’s thesis on balancing the need for outdoor lighting and darkness. Having grown up in urban areas, Rathsach wasn’t used to how bright moonlit nights could be. And after speaking with the island’s residents, who value the dark sky deeply and navigate with little outdoor light, she realized that artificial lighting could be turned down at night depending on the moon’s phase.

At Aalborg University in Denmark, she worked with her graduate supervisor, Mette Hvass, to present a new outdoor lighting design for Anholt’s church. Rathsach and Hvass picked the church for their project because it is a central meeting place for the community yet it currently has no outdoor lights. They thought lighting would make it easier for people to navigate but wanted to preserve the inviting ambiance of moonlight.

One of the guiding principles of designing sustainable lighting is to start with darkness, and add only the minimum amount of light required. Darkness and natural light sources are important to many species, and artificial light can be downright dangerous.

“Lights can attract and disorient seabirds during their flights between colony and foraging sites at sea,” says Elena Maggi, an ecologist at the University of Pisa in Italy who is not involved in the project. Anholt’s beaches host a variety of breeding seabirds, including gulls and terns, and the island is a stopover for many migrating birds. The waters around the island are also home to seals, cod, herring, and seagrass. Though scientists have made progress in understanding the effects of artificial light at night on a range of species, such as turtles, birds, and even corals, there is still more to learn.

“We still don’t know exactly how artificial light might interact with other disturbances like noise and chemical pollution, or with rising ocean temperatures and acidification due to climate change,” says Maggi.

The scientists’ final design for the church includes path lighting and small spotlights under the window arches, along with facade lighting under the eaves shining downward. To preserve the dark sky, path lighting would turn off on bright moonlit nights, and facade lighting would shut off on semi-bright or bright nights. The window lighting would stay on regardless of the moon’s phase.

The adaptive lighting cooked up by Camilla Rathsach and Mette Hvass would automatically adjust to the availability of moonlight, tweaking this church’s lighting automatically to balance visibility and darkness. Mock-ups show how the church would be lit under no moonlight (first) and a full moon (second). Illustrations courtesy of Camilla Rathsach

“The contrast between the moon’s cold white light reflecting off the church’s walls and the warm orange lights in the windows would create a cozy, inviting experience,” says Rathsach.

The moonlight adaptive lighting design project is part of a growing effort to balance the need for functional lighting in the town and to protect the darkness. Recently, the town’s public streetlights were swapped for dark-sky friendly lamps, says Anne Dixgaard, chairman of Dark Sky Anholt.

Dixgaard also organizes a yearly walk out to Anholt’s beach, where skywatchers can learn about the night sky. “People really value Anholt’s dark sky and want to preserve it,” she says.

Rathsach and Hvass are working on the moonlight adaptive design project in hopes that it will be implemented one day, but they still have some challenges to overcome. Moonlight is a relatively faint light source, so detecting it using sensors is challenging, and lights would need to adjust automatically on nights with intermittent cloud cover. Yet big initiatives often begin with small steps.

“This work is something new and unexpected,” says Maggi. “It’s a very interesting approach to mitigating the negative effects of artificial light at night.”

This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.

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Moon dust is the absolute worst. Not only does electrostatics cause it to cling to virtually everything, but it also has the consistency and feel of finely ground fiberglass. It was a genuine problem for the six Apollo crews who visited the moon’s surface—the silica particles covered their suits, worked their way into engines and electronics, and even ruined a few of their extremely expensive spacesuits. What’s more, many suffered from “lunar hay fever” upon return, leading many to worry that future astronauts on prolonged moon visits could develop symptoms similar to Black Lung Disease, along other issues including “DNA degradation.”

These are all serious issues to consider ahead of NASA’s planned return to the moon’s surface in 2025, but a team of college undergraduates at Washington State University just developed an ingenious solution to pesky moon dust dilemmas—blasting the residue with liquid nitrogen.

[Related: NASA’s Artemis I mission returns successfully.]

According to their findings recently published in the journal Acta Astronautica, the team developed a new spray that takes advantage of the Leidenfrost effect. Named after the its discoverer—the 18th-century German theologian and doctor, Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost—the process occurs when a liquid comes into close contact with a significantly hotter surface, causing it to quickly form a protective layer of vapor that briefly keeps it from evaporating, such as when water forms into droplets and runs across a very hot frying pan.

The same principle works similarly in space. In this case, a liquid nitrogen spray (typically around -320F) comes into contact with a surface’s relatively warmer lunar dust coating, causing the particles to bead and float away on the nitrogen vapors.

To test their concoction, the research team first dressed a Barbie doll wrapped with a material used to make space suits. They then hosed it down with liquid nitrogen in a normal atmospheric condition as well as a vacuum chamber similar to conditions in outer space. Not only did the liquid nitrogen spray perform better in the latter scenario, but it also resulted in minimal damage to the spacesuit material. In past lunar missions, astronauts’ specialized brush for the moon dust task often caused damage after a single use. In comparison, the liquid nitrogen spray took 75 uses before similar issues occurred.

[Related: March skies will bring a lunar illusion and a planetary reunion.]

Going forward, the team hopes to further research the intricacies that make their cleaning process so effective, as well as secure funding to construct testing chambers more closely resembling the lunar surface’s gravity. With any luck, maybe a can of their Moon-be-Gone will be aboard a future Artemis mission, ready to help astronauts avoid one of the lunar surface’s less awe-inspiring traits.

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In one possible future, great maglev lines cross the lunar surface. But these rails don’t carry trains. Instead, like space catapults, these machines accelerate cargo to supersonic speeds and fling it into the sky. The massive catapults have one task: throwing mounds of moondust off-world. Their mission is to halt climate change on Earth, 250,000 miles away.

All that dust will stream into deep space, where it will pass between Earth and the sun—and blot out some of the sun’s rays, cooling off the planet. As far-fetched as the idea is, it’s an idea that received real scientific attention. In a paper published in the journal PLOS Climate on February 8, researchers simulated just how it might go if we tried to pull it off. According to their computer modeling, a cascade of well-placed moondust could shave off a few percent of the sun’s light. 

It’s a spectacular idea, but it isn’t new. Filtering the sunlight that reaches Earth in the hope of cooling off the planet, blunting the blades making the thousand cuts of global warming, is an entire field called solar geoengineering. Designers have proposed similar spaceborne concepts: swarms of mirrors or giant shades, up to thousands of miles across, strategically placed to act as a parasol for our planet. Other researchers have suggested dust, which is appealing because, as a raw material, there’s no effort or expense to engineer it.

“We had read some accounts of previous attempts,” inspiring them to revisit the technique, says Scott Kenyon, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the study’s authors.

Kenyon and his colleagues don’t usually dream up ways to chill planets. They study a vastly different type of dust: the kind that coalesces around distant, newly forming stars. In the process, the astrophysicists realized that the dust had a shading effect, cooling whatever lay in its shadow. 

[Related: The past 8 years have been the hottest on human record, according to new report]

“So we began to experiment with collections of dust that would shield Earth from sunlight,” says Kenyon. They turned methods that let them simulate distant dust disks to another problem, much closer to home.

Most solar engineering efforts focus on altering Earth’s atmosphere. We could, for instance, spray aerosols into the stratosphere to copy the cooling effects from volcanic eruptions. Altering the air is, predictably, a risky business; putting volcanic matter in the sky could have unwanted side effects such as eroding the ozone layer or seeding acid rain.

“If you could just reduce the amount of incoming sunlight reaching the Earth, that would be a cleaner intervention than adding material to the stratosphere,” says Peter Irvine, a solar geoengineer at University College London, who was not an author of the paper.

Even if you found a way that would leave the skies ship-shape, however, the field is contentious. By its very nature, a solar geoengineering project will impact the entire planet, no matter who controls it. Many observers also believe that promises of a future panacea remove the pressure to curb carbon emissions in the present. 

It’s for such reasons that some climate scientists oppose solar geoengineering at all. In 2021, researchers scrubbed the trial of a solar geoengineering balloon over Sweden after activists and representatives of the Sámi people protested the flight, even though the equipment test wouldn’t have conducted any atmospheric experiments.

But perhaps there’s a future where those obstacles have been cast aside. Perhaps the world hasn’t pushed down emissions quickly enough to avoid a worsening catastrophe; perhaps the world has then come together and decided that such a gigaproject is necessary. In that future, we’d need a lot of dust—about 10 billion kilograms, every year, close to 700 times the amount of mass that humans have ever launched into space, as of this writing. 

That makes the moon attractive: With lower gravity, would-be space launchers require less energy to throw mass off the moon than off Earth. Hypothetical machines like mass drivers—those electromagnetic catapults—could do the job without rocket launches. According to the authors, a few square miles of solar panels would provide all the energy they need.

That moondust isn’t coming back to Earth, nor is it settling into lunar orbit. Instead, it’s streaming toward a Lagrange point, a place in space where two objects’ respective gravitational forces cancel each other out. In particular, this moondust is headed for the sun and Earth’s L1, located in the direction of the sun, about 900,000 miles away from us.

There, all that dust would be in a prime position to absorb sunlight on a path to Earth. The 10 billion kilograms would drop light levels by around 1.8 percent annually, the study estimates—not as dramatic as an eclipse, but equivalent to losing about 6 days’ worth of sunlight per year.

[Related on PopSci+: Not convinced that humans are causing climate change? Here are the facts.]

Although L1’s gravitational balance would capture the dust, enough for it to remain for a few days, it would then drift away. We’d need to keep refilling the dust, as if it were a celestial water supply—part of why we’d need so much of it.

That dust wouldn’t come back to haunt Earth. But L1 hosts satellites like NASA’s SOHO and Wind, which observe the sun or the solar wind of particles streaming away from it. “The engineers placing dust at L1 would have to avoid any satellites to prevent damage,” says Kenyon.

Of course, this is one hypothetical, very distant future. Nobody can launch anything from the moon, let alone millions of tons of moondust, without building the infrastructure first. While market analysts are already tabulating the value of the lunar economy in two decades’ time, building enough mass drivers to perform impressive feats of lunar engineering probably isn’t in the cards.

“If we had a moonbase and were doing all sorts of cool things in space, then we could do this as well—but that’s something for the 22nd century,” says Irvine. Meanwhile, a far more immediate way to blunt climate change is to decarbonize the energy grid and cull fossil fuels, with haste. “Climate change,” Irvine says, “is a 21st century problem.”

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The planet Jupiter is famed for its immense size (a radius of 43,440.7 miles or 11 times wider than Earth) and its Giant Red Spot, a storm that has raged on the planet for hundreds of years. The fifth planet from the sun is not only the biggest in our solar system, but it also, according to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center (MPC), has the most moons. 

Astronomers discovered 12 new moons around Jupiter over the past two years, making the total number of Jovian moons 92.

The discovery knocks Saturn and its 83 confirmed moons out of first place. Both Jupiter and Saturn have tons of small moons that are believed to be fragments of bigger moons that have collided with comets, asteroids, and each other. 

[Related: We just got our most detailed look yet at Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa.]

As for the other planets in our solar system, Mercury and Venus are moonless, Earth has one, Mars has two moons, Uranus has 27 confirmed moons, and Neptune clocks in at 14.

The MCP recently added the new moons to their list, team member Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution told the Associated Press (AP). The team’s observations have also been submitted for publication.

“I hope we can image one of these outer moons close-up in the near future to better determine their origins,” Sheppard said in an email to the AP.

Telescopes in Chile and Hawaii discovered the moons in 2021 and 2022 and follow-up observations confirmed their orbits. Sheppard says that they range from 0.6 miles to 2 miles in size. 

According to Sky and Telescope, all of the newly discovered moons circle Jupiter far from its surface and take over 340 Earth days to complete a single orbit. Nine out of the 12 moons are particularly distant, with MPC estimating that they have orbits longer than 550 Earth days. They are also quite small—only five out of the nine distant moons are believed to have a diameter more than five miles.  

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

These same nine moons also have retrograde orbits. The moons circle Jupiter in the opposite direction of its rotation. By comparison, the inner Jovian moons have prograde orbits, or orbits in the same direction of the planet’s rotation. 

The retrograde orbits mean that the huge gravitational influence of the planet may have captured the moons and the smaller ones might be the remains of largest celestial bodies that were broken apart by collisions, according to Sheppard.  

We can also expect to learn more about Jupiter’s moons over the next few years. The European Space Agency (ESA) is sending the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (aka Juice) into space in April to study the gas giant and some of its largest moons. NASA is scheduled to launch the Europa Clipper in October 2024 to explore Jupiter’s icy moon Europa,  which might have an ocean beneath its frozen crust.

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Here are some of the cosmic events to keep your eye on with your Valentine (or groundhog). If you happen to get any stellar sky photos, tag us and include #PopSkyGazers.

[Related: ‘Skyglow’ is rapidly diminishing our nightly views of the stars.]

February 1 and 2 – The ‘Green Comet’ reaches closes point to Earth 

Last month, we told you about Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), a newly discovered comet that has since made a flurry of headlines. This green-tailed comet has drawn closer to the inner solar system and is approaching its brightest magnitude. It will reach its perigee, or closest point to Earth (within 26 million miles) on February 1 and 2 in the Northern Hemisphere. It might be visible with binoculars, but visibility is not a given. Your best bet is to look northward after sunset. 

The comet was discovered in March 2022 by astronomers Frank Masci and Bryce Bolin at the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a part of the  Palomar Observatory in California. Astronomers calculated that it only orbits the sun about every 50,000 years, which means that it was last visible on Earth around the time of the Neanderthals.

February 4 and 5 – Full snow moon

February’s full moon will reach its peak illumination at 1:30 PM EST on February 5. Since it will be below the horizon, the best view of this second full moon of 2023 will best be taken the night before or later on Sunday February 5. The moon will drift above the horizon in the eastern sky  around sunset and will reach its highest point around midnight.

The name snow moon is pretty straightforward, as February is known for heavy snowfall. It is also called the Eagle Moon or Migizi-giizis in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), the Hungry Month or Kagali in Cherokee (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, North Carolina), and the Midwinter Moon, or Tsha’tekohselha in Oneida.

It is also close to the 52nd anniversary of NASA astronaut Alan Shepard hitting the first golf ball on the moon on February 6, 1971. Fore!

February 20 – New moon

If you prefer new moons to full moons, the new moon will rise at 2:09 AM EST. The new moon occurs when the moon is between the Earth and sun, and the side of the Moon that is in shadow faces Earth.

The moon’s diameter is 2,160 miles, which is less than the width of the US (approximately 3,000 miles), and 0.27 of Earth’s diameter (7,926 miles), according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

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

February 26 – SpaceX Falcon 9 scheduled to launch of astronauts to International Space Station

If all goes according to plan, SpaceX and NASA will launch Crew-6 from Kennedy Space Center at the end of this month. 

NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev will be aboard the launch and are scheduled to spend about six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The mission is the sixth contracted astronaut flight that SpaceX flies to the ISS for NASA, but Crew-6 will be the ninth crewed orbital mission for the private space flight company.

As with all launches, this one could be rescheduled and viewing details are still TBD, but can be found here.

The same skygazing rules that apply to pretty much all space-watching activities are key this month: Go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour. 

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How old is Earth? It may seem like a simple question to answer. The typical ballpark estimate is that our planet is around 4.5 billion years old. But the closer planetary scientists look, the squishier that story gets. Nuances about how our planet formed could shift the age of Earth by half a billion years or so. 

“An age is easy to talk about, but it becomes more and more complex as you zoom in,” says geology professor Thomas Lapen, who chairs the University of Houston’s Earth and atmospheric sciences department. As scientists have sought to determine more precise measurements of Earth’s age, they’ve had to grapple with the specifics of how our planet came to be.

“When you’re born, it’s an instant in time,” Lapen explains. But planetary formation is a process that takes millions of years. To assign an age to Earth, astrophysicists, planetary scientists, and geologists have to determine which point in the process could be considered Earth’s birth. 

When was Earth “born”?

About 4.6 billion years ago, gas and dust swirled in orbit around the newly formed sun. Over the first millions of years of the solar system, particles collided and merged into asteroids and the seeds of planets. Those space rocks kept smashing into one another, some growing larger and larger, shaping the solar system as we see it today. 

But planets aren’t simply big rock piles. As they amass material, these celestial bodies also differentiate into the layers of a core, mantle, and crust (at least in the case of Earth and the other terrestrial planets). Accretion and differentiation take time, likely on the order of tens of millions of years. Some might consider a point in that stage of Earth’s formation to be our planet’s birth. But Lapen says he thinks of it as Earth’s conception, and birth came later, when a cataclysmic event also formed the moon.

[Related: June 29 was Earth’s shortest day since the invention of atomic clocks]

According to the widely accepted giant impact theory, during the chaos of the early days of our solar system, the proto-Earth collided with another small body about the size of Mars. When the two slammed together, the debris coalesced into the moon in orbit around Earth. 

This impact also is thought to have essentially “reset” the materials that made up the planet, Lapen says. At the time, a thick magma ocean may have covered proto-Earth. Upon the powerful collision, the material of both bodies mixed together and coalesced into the planet and moon system we know today. Evidence for such a “reset” comes from both terrestrial and lunar rocks that contain identical forms of oxygen, Lapen explains. 

“Proto-Earth was, in all likelihood, destroyed or changed in composition,” Lapen says. “In my mind, the Earth wasn’t the Earth as we know it until the moon-forming event.”

If this event marked our planet’s birth, that would make Earth somewhere between 4.4 billion and 4.52 billion years old. But determining a more specific age for our planet requires sifting through ancient evidence. 

Assigning a number to our planet’s age

Like detectives searching for clues of an old crime, planetary scientists have to look at the evidence that remains today when piecing together our planet’s early history. But with all the turmoil during that chapter—the roiling magma ocean and intense geological turnover—the proof can be hard to find. 

One way to constrain the age of Earth is to search for the oldest rocks on the planet, Lapen explains, which formed right after the magma ocean hardened into a solid surface. For that date, scientists look to zircons discovered in the Jack Hills in Western Australia—the oldest known minerals. 

To determine the age of these crystals, a team of scientists used a technique called radiometric dating, which measures the uranium they contain. Because this radioactive element decays into lead at a known rate, scientists can calculate a mineral’s age based on the ratio of uranium to lead in the sample. This method revealed the zircons are approximately 4.4 billion years old.

These rocks suggest that the Earth-moon system must have formed sometime before 4.4 billion years ago, because the rock record “would be obliterated by the moon-forming event,” Lapen says. So the planet is no younger than 4.4 billion years old. But how much older could it be? To answer that, Lapen says, scientists turn elsewhere—including the moon.

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

Rocks on the Earth’s satellite body are better preserved than the ones here, because the moon does not undergo processes like plate tectonics that would melt and reshuffle its surface. There are two main sources for these clues: in lunar meteorites that fall to Earth and in the samples collected directly from the moon during NASA’s Apollo program. 

Like proto-Earth, the young moon was also covered in a magma ocean. The oldest rocks taken from the lunar surface can indicate when the moon’s crust formed. Scientists have conducted radiometric dating on zircon fragments collected during the Apollo 14 mission, correcting the calculations for cosmic ray exposure, and determined that the lunar crust hardened approximately 4.51 billion years ago. 

There would have been a period of time between the collision and the bodies coalescing, cooling, and differentiating, Lapen says, so this date has a window of uncertainty, too, of about 50 million years. 

“Dating the exact event is very challenging,” he says. Lapen estimates the Earth-moon system likely formed between 4.51 billion and 4.52 billion years ago, but some scientists say calculations could be as many as 50 million years off.

Another way to constrain that window of time is to look at rocks that existed when the proto-Earth was forming. When the planets solidified from the debris around the young sun, not all of the material coalesced into the worlds and their moons we see today. Some remained preserved in asteroids or comets.

Sometimes those solar system time capsules come to us as meteorites that fall to our planet’s surface. The oldest known such space rock, Lapen says, is the meteorite Erg Chech 002. It is thought to be a fragment of an igneous crust of a primitive protoplanet from the early solar system. As such, dating the Erg Chech 002 meteorite provides a snapshot of a time when the proto-Earth was likely at a similar stage in its conception.

“If the ‘birth of the Earth’ is defined as the formation time of the first proto-Earth nucleus or protoplanet that ultimately grew through accretion to form the present-day Earth,” Lapen says, “then perhaps that was as long ago as the age of [Erg Chech 002].” Scientists calculated this chunk of igneous crust crystallized approximately 4.565 billion years ago.

Can Earth’s age be refined?

On human timescales, an uncertainty of 50 million years around when the Earth-moon system formed sounds vast and imprecise. But on planetary timescales, particularly billions of years ago, “it’s a good estimate,” Lapen says.

“The further back we look, oftentimes the less precise things are because of the gaps in the record. It’s a relatively short period of time, where a lot of things were happening—there was the impact, everything had to coalesce, and cool, and differentiate into sturdy rocky bodies that have a core, mantle, and crust,” he says.

However, scientists aren’t done. There is always the opportunity to get more precise and accurate measurements of Earth’s age, Lapen says, particularly as researchers obtain additional samples from the moon, meteorites, and asteroids.

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For years, scientists have been working out ways to navigate across the lunar surface, a task that’s been a herculean undertaking without tools like the GPS we have on Earth. 

Since the moon has a much thinner atmosphere than Earth, it’s difficult to judge both the distance and size of faraway landmarks as there’s a lack of perspective from the horizon. Trees or buildings on Earth offer hazy but helpful points of reference for distance, but such an illusion is impossible on the moon. Additionally, without an atmosphere to scatter light, the sun’s bright rays would skew the visual and depth perception of an astronaut on the moon, making it a real challenge to get around the vast, unmapped terrain. 

On Earth, “we have GPS, and it’s easy to take advantage of that and not think about all the technology that goes into it,” says Alvin Yew, a research engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But now when we’re on the   moon, we just don’t have that.” 

Inspired by previous research on lunar navigation, Yew is developing an AI system that guides explorers across the lunar floor by scanning the horizon for distinct landmarks. Trained on data gathered from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the system works by recreating features on the lunar horizon as they would appear to an explorer standing on the surface of the moon. 

“Because [the moon] has no atmosphere, there’s not a lot of scattering of the light,” says Yew. But by using the outline of the landscape, “we’re able to get a very clear demarcation of where the ground is relative to space.” 

[Related: With Artemis, NASA is aiming for the moon once more. But where will it land?]

Yew’s AI system would be able to navigate using geographic features like boulders, ridges, and even craters, whose distance would normally be difficult to accurately locate for a person. These measurements could be used to match features identified in images already captured by astronauts and rovers, in a similar way to how our GPS spots locations on Earth. Developing GPS-like technology that’s specifically tuned to help explorers get around the moon is especially important for supporting autonomous robotic operations, Yew says. Now that NASA’s Artemis I mission recently finished with a successful splashdown earlier this month, such technology will also be needed for humans to return to the moon in the not-so-distant future. When astronauts of the upcoming Artemis III mission make landfall, having handheld or integral systems to help conquer the new terrain could be the deciding factor in how far (and how well) they can explore, both on the moon and beyond. 

“NASA’s focus on trying to get to the moon, and eventually to Mars someday, requires an investment of these vital technologies,“ says Yew. His work is also planned to complement the moon’s future “internet,” called LunaNet. The framework will support communications, lunar navigation operations, as well as many other science services on the moon. According to NASA scientists, the collection of lunar satellites aims to offer internet access similar to Earth’s, a network that spacecraft and future astronauts can tap into without needing to schedule data transfers in advance, like space missions currently do. 

Cheryl Gramling, the associate chief for technology of the mission engineering and systems analysis division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says the moon is a testbed where we can take lessons learned from our planet, and see how they translate to deeper space exploration. 

“You also don’t have the fundamental infrastructure that we’ve built up on the Earth,” she says. The moon is like a blank slate: “You have to think about, well, ‘what is it that you need?’”

Much like how different internet providers allow their customers access to the web and other services, Gramling says that NASA, as well as other space agencies like the ESA or JAXA, could come together to comprise LunaNet. “It’s extending the internet to space,” she says. These “providers” (in this case, space agencies like NASA, ESA, and JAXA) would be able to communicate with each other and share data across networks, much like different pieces of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) are able to work in tandem. 

“Looking at what we have implemented on Earth and taking it over to the moon is a challenge, but at the same time, it’s an opportunity to think of how we make it work,” says Juan Crenshaw, a member of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s navigation and mission design branch. The goal, he says, is to create a network that isn’t constrained to one single implementation or purpose, and enables standards and protocols for diverse users. “If we build an interoperable service, it allows us to provide better coverage and services to users with less assets, more efficiently.”

[Related: Is it finally time for a permanent base on the moon?]

But LunaNet is still a long way from coming online—it’ll be some time before astronauts can download games or stream their favorite space movie like they’d be able to on Earth. While LunaNet’s service volume is currently being designed to cover the entirety of the moon up to an altitude of 200 kilometers (about 125 miles), Yew says his AI could be a backup to a rover or astronaut’s navigation capabilities when the network experiences disruptions, like power or signal outages. According to NASA, Yew’s work could even help explorers find their way during similar interferences on Earth.

“When we’re doing human expeditions, you always want [backup systems] for very dangerous missions,” says Yew. His AI is “not tied to the internet, per se, but [it] can be.” Though the AI is still only in development, Yew would like to continue making improvements by testing the system in a simulated environment before hopefully utilizing real lunar landscape data from one of the Artemis missions. 

“We want to test the robustness of the algorithm to make sure that we’re returning solutions that are global, meaning I can throw you anywhere on the moon, and you can locate anywhere,” he says. “And maybe if that’s not possible, we want to test the limits of that too.”

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In our solar system, there are worlds of ice and worlds of fire. Jupiter’s moon Io is the best example of a world of fire, freckled with volcanoes and cracked by lava spills. 

There are many competing theories to explain the workings of this fire-orb. New research published in The Planetary Science Journal and presented at the 2022 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting narrows down what could be going on inside the volcanic world using computer simulations, suggesting that it hosts a scorching ocean of magma beneath its surface. 

Magma oceans are thought to have been a common feature of rocky planets and moons earlier in the solar system, but are almost nonexistent now as things have cooled down over time. Io’s searing sea could be the only surviving example, giving scientists the opportunity to observe one up close.

“Whether a magma ocean exists or not essentially changes how Io operates, and it greatly affects the interpretations of various observations of Io,” says Caltech planetary scientist Yoshinori Miyazaki, lead author on the new research paper. 

On Earth, volcanoes are caused by our planet’s shifting tectonic plates. Io’s volcanoes arise from a very different mechanism, called tidal heating. In tidal heating, a large object—in this case, Jupiter—squishes and stretches another object near it through gravity, heating it up with friction. It’s sort of like mushing around clay with your hands until the substance becomes flexible and warm. Thanks to this geological phenomenon, Io has enough warmth to sustain its many volcanoes.

“At Io, tidal heating has run wild, generating one of the most volcanically active worlds in our solar system, with over 100 active volcanoes at any given time,” says James Tuttle Keane, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who is not affiliated with the research team. “Because tidal heating is so extreme at Io, it makes it the best natural laboratory to understand this process.”

There has been long-standing debate on what resides beneath Io. Before we even saw the surface of the hellish moon, scientists speculated there may be a magma ocean raging under the rocky crust due to Io’s wild tidal heating. However, once Voyager and Galileo revealed Io’s rugged terrain, astronomers began to doubt a subterranean magma ocean could support such heavy mountains. 

Scientists then pivoted to suggest the interior is just rock with little melted bits inside. A recent hypothesis proposed the interior could be something in between pure magma and pure rock—a partially molten mass called a magmatic sponge. “Think of a magma sponge like a dish sponge or a coral sponge, where both the solids and the liquids are entirely interconnected,” explains Tuttle Keane. “This means fluids, be it soapy dishwater or magma, can flow through the sponge, but the sponge still has some structural integrity.”

[Related: We just got an up-close look at the largest lava lake in the solar system]

This new work, though, uses computer models to show the interior of Io is unlikely to be a magmatic sponge—and a magma ocean makes much more sense given the existing observations of the Galilean satellite. 

Based on reasonable assumptions about the conditions inside Io, the computer simulations predicted that a magmatic sponge would quickly separate into different layers of magma and rock, creating the magma ocean. “Melt and rock tend to separate rapidly, just like the ice and water do in a slushie if you leave it for a while,” says University of California, Santa Cruz geologist Francis Nimmo, who wasn’t involved with this study. 

Unfortunately, these models can’t definitively prove if Io does have a magma ocean. For that, we’ll need to send a probe back to the fiery little moon. 

Miyazaki is looking forward to the Juno spacecraft’s upcoming flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024, where astronomers will measure a property of the moon called the Love number. This number is a proxy for how rigid or squishy the interior of a planetary body is. “If the Love number is large,” explains Miyazaki, “it will confirm the existence of a subsurface magma ocean on Io.”

Even if a magma ocean is confirmed, “there are still a lot of uncertainties associated with trying to understand Io’s interior structure,” Tuttle Keane says. “We need future missions to explore Io and the Jupiter system…many questions will remain unanswered until a dedicated Io mission is flown that can explore this volcanic moon in detail.”

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An essential part of any space mission is power. If a spacecraft runs out of energy, the communications go down, the craft becomes unsteerable, and life support systems shut off—a scenario that’s the stuff of sci-fi nightmares. 

For a spacecraft, the sun is a particularly vital supplier of energy, and the recent Artemis I mission proved just how powerful it can be to harness solar energy in space. During the nearly month-long flight around the moon, NASA tested all functions of the uncrewed spacecraft, including the Orion crew capsule’s innovative solar panels. The vehicle’s solar panels exceeded expectations, proving themselves to be a key technology for the future of human space exploration.

“Initial results show that the arrays are providing significantly more power than expected,” says Philippe Berthe, an engineer who manages the Orion European Service Module Project Project at the European Space Agency (ESA).

[Related: Welcome back to Earth, Orion]

Engineers from ESA and the European company Airbus collaborated with NASA and Lockheed Martin to build the Orion spacecraft, the component that separates from the launch rockets and will ferry astronauts to their destination and back during subsequent Artemis flights. The Paris-based agency’s main contribution to Orion is the European Service Module, which houses the solar panels and other critical systems. 

Orion has four wings, each nearly the length of a British double-decker bus, that unfolded 18 minutes into its journey while still in low-Earth orbit. Each of these wings holds three gallium arsenide solar panels, a particularly efficient and durable type of solar cell made for space. Together, the four wings generate “the equivalent of two households’” worth of power, according to Berthe. 

This type of solar cell is commonly used by military and research satellites. What’s innovative about Orion’s panels is how they’re maneuvered. “Usually solar arrays have only one axis of rotation so that they can follow the sun,” says Berthe. The ones on the capsule, however, can move in two directions, folding up to withstand the pressures of spaceflight and the heat of Orion’s powerful thrusters.

During Artemis I’s 26-day mission, the combined NASA and ESA team tested all aspects of the solar panels, including their ability to rotate, unfold, and produce power. According to Berthe, the panels worked so well they provided 15 percent more power than what engineers had projected. That has consequences for future Artemis missions: “Either the size of the solar arrays could be reduced,” he says, “or they could provide more power to Orion.” Smaller solar arrays could reduce the cost of missions, but more power could allow for additional capabilities onboard the crewed spacecraft.

These nimble solar panels are also equipped with cameras on their wingtips, which Matthias Gronowski, Airbus Chief Engineer for the European Service Module, likens to a “selfie stick” for the mission. These cameras have provided incredible images of the spacecraft as it cruised between the moon and Earth, and can even help the mission engineers inspect the spacecraft for damage. Because the arrays are maneuverable, they act like robotic arms, providing a “chance to inspect the whole vehicle,” says Gronowski.

[Related: These powerful solar panels are as thin as human hair]

Artemis I is NASA’s first step in testing the technology needed to return humans to the moon, and eventually venture further to Mars using the Orion crew capsule. The new lunar program plans to carry humans beyond low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station resides, for the first time since the 1970s, including the first woman and first person of color to set foot on the moon.

The solar panels are one part of the pioneering technology of Artemis and Orion, and this first test flight proves they are a reliable technology for distant space travel. Moveable arrays like those on Artemis I will be key for future missions that require even more powerful engines, allowing the panels to shift into a protective configuration as the spacecraft speeds up. 

“We are very proud to be part of the program,” says Gronowski. “And we are very proud to be basically bringing humans back to the moon.”

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This story has been updated.

The space industry has blossomed in recent years, with commercial rocket launches sending more craft than ever into orbit. But for private companies to explore destinations beyond Earth, which could catapult the space business into its golden age, a major step is underway: A privately funded lander is headed to the moon to attempt the first commercial soft landing on the lunar surface.

The Tokyo-based Japanese space exploration company ispace built the small, hot-tub-sized lander destined for Earth’s satellite. Though it was originally targeted to fly earlier in November, the craft launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on December 11 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. 

“The most important point is that our mission is not just a lunar landing,” says Jumpei Nozaki, director and chief financial officer at ispace. The eventual goal, the company says, is to create a cislunar economy, or commerce and economic growth that revolves around human space activities on the moon or in Earth’s orbit. 

But before all that, the company needs to touch down on the moon. The M1 lander, part of ispace’s Hakuto-R program, will be the company’s first foray into lunar exploration, essentially acting as a demonstration mission to validate both the lander’s design and its technology. Google’s Lunar X Prize competition, which ran from 2007 to 2018 and was designed to spur affordable access to the moon, in part kicked off ispace’s interest in getting there. Although the competition ended without a team securing the $30 million dollar prize, it succeeded in inspiring many new spacecraft concepts, ispace’s lander included.

Coming in at a dry weight of just under 800 pounds, the craft will carry multiple commercial and government payloads with it along its journey, including the United Arab Emirates’ first lunar rover, Rashid, as well as a baseball-sized lunar robot from the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA), and a music disc containing a song by a Japanese rock band, Sakanaction. 

[Related: NASA could build a future lunar base from 3D-printed moon-dust bricks]

For all the build-up in getting there, neither robotic mission will be especially long-lived. Rashid, which was built by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai, will spend one lunar day (equal to about 14 Earth days) studying the lunar surface, its mobility on the moon’s surface, and how different surfaces interact with lunar particles. Japan’s ultra-lightweight robot, meanwhile, will spend only hours collecting data about the surface, which future missions will use to develop autonomous driving and cruising technology. 

It will take M1 about three to five months to reach the surface of the moon, where the craft will touch down at the Atlas Crater. The crater is a prominent impact site located on the southeastern outer edge of Mare Frigoris, a place astronomers have dubbed the “Sea of Cold.” The company noted in a press release that it chose this site for features that include continuous sun-illumination and communication visibility from Earth. Though there are alternative landing sites in place depending on what may happen to the craft during transit, the current site meets the technical requirements of the demonstration mission as well as the scientific exploration objectives of its mission customers. The craft is expected to land there sometime around the end of April 2023. 

To date, only the US, Russia, and China have landed spacecraft on the moon, but as interest in space dominance heightens, countries and space agencies all over the globe are turning their eyes toward the stars. If ispace is successful, its landing will mark a major milestone in the history of commercial spaceflight, considering that it could be the first private mission to ever make a soft landing on the moon. According to Atsushi Saiki, chief revenue officer at ispace, the company hopes to lay the groundwork to create high-frequency, low-cost transportation services to the moon, eventually working their way up to two or three commercial missions per year after 2025. 

[Related: Is it finally time for a permanent base on the moon?]

Other nations, meanwhile, are spearheading lunar projects themselves. While NASA currently has plans to turn the moon into a bustling base for deep-space missions and other unearthly activities, countries such as Canada, South Korea, and even Turkey have announced initiatives to begin fast-tracking their own lunar exploration efforts. 

Nozaki believes that international cooperation between public agencies and private companies is key to fostering a world where people of all nationalities can work together to achieve an ideal space-faring experience. 

“In the next 10 years, 20 years, a private company needs to take some role to enhance what space [agencies have] done,” he says. “We can support the space agencies together in developing this space world, this is what we are very proud [of].”

Going forward, the company plans to take the lessons it learns from this first experience and apply them to future missions. Plans for a second and third mission are already in development, with M2 scheduled to launch sometime in 2024, and further expeditions launching with increasing frequency soon after. 

“We want to have a new page in the space history book,” says Saiki. “We need support from everybody, every single person on the Earth regardless of [their] nationality or race to support us to really achieve our vision in the long term.”

Correction (December 15, 2022): The story has been updated to specify that Hakuto-R would be the first soft landing by a commercial lander on the moon. In 2019, Israel’s commercial spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the lunar landscape.

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Today, at 12:40 PM EST the Orion spacecraft made its grand entrance back on Earth after an unofficial time of 25 days 10 hours 54 minutes 50 seconds in space. It covered 1.4 million miles through space, orbited the moon, and collected crucial data along the way. Orion safely landed in the Pacific Ocean, off the Baja coast near Guadalupe Island, around 300 miles south of San Diego where the landing was originally planned.

Orion entered the Earth’s atmosphere traveling at about 25,000 miles per hour, before its reentry and its parachutes brought the spacecraft down to roughly 20 mph before splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Orion performed its crucial crew module separation at 12:00 pm EST and began the crucial entry interface stage at 12:20 pm EST. Entry interface was described as the “moment of truth,” for Orion, where the spacecraft’s important heat shield felt the effects of temperatures of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Orion also experienced two expected blackout periods during entry interface when NASA lost communication with the spacecraft for a few minutes.

According to NASA aerospace engineer Koki Machin, Orion’s 11 parachutes are very similar to the ones that accompanied the Apollo missions, with the larger size of Orion’s parachutes being the primary difference. Orion’s parachutes are called hybrid parachutes and they are made of both nylon and kevlar. Kevlar is an extremely strong aramid fiber that is used to make bulletproof vests.

A recovery team comprised of NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems engineers and technicians and Navy divers and sailors from the USS Portland arrived in San Diego, California, just after Thanksgiving to rehearse recovering the space capsule.

The team practiced off the California coast by reeling in a mock capsule and loading it onto the ship. The USS Portland is an amphibious vessel and has both a flight deck and a well deck that leads to the ocean.

“The mission that we’re doing is kind of amphibious in nature; it’s just … normally were recovering marine vehicles or hovercraft, instead of doing that, we’re just grabbing the orbital,” USS Portland Captain John Ryan told NBC 7 San Diego.

Since Orion doesn’t have any crew members onboard (except for its “moonikins“), the team had a roughly six hour long window to retrieve the capsule.

In a press conference on December 5, Orion Deputy Program Manager Debbie Korth said, “We’re really pushing the envelope with this spacecraft to see what we can get out of performance,” referring to longer burn times for the spacecraft’s engines (from 17 seconds to 100 seconds) and thermal response from solar arrays.

Orion will return to Kennedy Space Center later this month, where NASA will remove the vehicle’s accelerometers, mannequins, dosimeters, and microphones for further study.

The Artemis I Mission launched on November 16 and is the first integrated test of NASA’s latest deep space exploration technology: the Orion spacecraft itself, the all-powerful Space Launch System rocket, and the ground systems at Kennedy Space Center. It is the first of three missions, and will provide NASA with more critical information on non-Earth environments, the health impacts of space travel, and more for further research around the solar system. It also showcases the agency’s commitment and capability to return astronauts to the moon.

[Related: Orion will air kiss the moon today during important Artemis exercise.]

Artemis I and II will also pave the way to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon as early as 2025 as part of Artemis III. “When we talk about sustained exploration on the lunar surface and getting onto Mars, Artemis I is that step,” James Free, associate of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development, said in August. “Our next step beyond this is Artemis II, we’re putting a crew on it.”

According to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, the ambitious goal of advancing human space travel to reach Mars will come after Artemis III. NASA hopes to establish a base on the moon and send astronauts to the Red Planet by the late 2030s or early 2040s.

“It is one that marks new technology,” Nelson said about Orion and the Artemis I mission on Sunday following the splash down, “a whole new breed to astronaut, a vision for the future that captures the DNA of particularly Americans, although we do this as an international venture, and that DNA is we are adventurers, we are explorers, we always have a frontier. And that frontier now is to continue exploring the heavens.”

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It’s been half a century since humans last orbited the moon, but SpaceX plans to return next year. The first private, all-civilian lunar loop was first announced in 2018 by Elon Musk and Japanese multibillionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who reportedly bought every seat on an upcoming flight aboard SpaceX’s still-in-development Starship shuttle. Maezawa subsequently put out an open call last year for potential travel mates from around the world, and has just released his official flight roster.

As announced, the eight passengers (who all have multi-role bios on the dearMoon Crew site) will include rapper Choi Seung Hyun, aka T.O.P from the South Korean boy band BIGBANG, DJ Steve Aoki, photographer and host of the popular space-themed YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut Tim Dodd. Two Earth-minded filmmakers, Brendan Hall and Karim Iliya, artist Rhiannon Adam, actor Dev D. Joshi, and designer and non-profit founder Yemi A.D. round out the final eight guests. The voyage’s two alternates are Olympic gold medalist snowboarder Kaitlyn Farrington and the dancer Miyu.

[Related: Meet SpaceX’s first moon tourist, Yusaku Maezawa.]

Maezawa’s project, dubbed dearMoon, is billed as a six-day circumlunar sojourn meant to inspire its passengers’ respective artwork and careers to create art in their respective fields. Maezawa claims his open application received over 1 million entries from “249 countries and regions.”

While a first on many fronts, this actually won’t be Maezawa’s introduction to space. Last year, he rocketed up to the ISS for a 12-day visit, which he documented in a series of YouTube videos. And it’s not the only time an all-citizen team has taken to space, as a four-man all-civilian crew orbited Earth in another SpaceX mission last year.

[Related: With Artemis 1 launched, NASA is officially on its way back to the moon.]

The SpaceX/dearMoon trip is tentatively scheduled to launch sometime next year aboard the private spacefaring company’s massive, 165-foot-tall Starship rocket, which Musk intends to one day utilize for his overarching goal of reaching Mars. Although Starship has not flown since May 2021, SpaceX hopes to conduct a test later this month ahead of next year’s slated dearMoon excursion. NASA is also relying on Starship for its own lunar plans, and intends to use it to reach the moon’s south pole as part of its ongoing Artemis project sometime in 2025 or 2026.

Of course, take all those dates with a grain of moon dust. Musk’s timelines are well-known for their optimism.

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The days are growing shorter in the northern hemisphere, which may not be the best for productive afternoons, but the extra darkness means some more time for looking up at the night sky. December ushers in winter for the northern half of the globe, which is a prime season for stargazing due to the added darkness and the cold air being less hazy than warmer, humid summer air.

Here are some celestial events to keep your eye on while closing out 2022.

December 7-Full cold moon

The last full moon of the year will reach its peak illumination at 11:08 pm EST on December 7. The Old Farmer’s Almanac recommends looking for it just before sunset as the moon begins to peek above the horizon. December’s full moon will will also be above the horizon for longer than most full moons, due to its higher trajectory in the sky.

December’s full moon is called the Cold Moon, or the “time of cold” moon, a Mohawk name that evokes when winter’s chill really grips the northern hemisphere. Some other names for the last full moon of the year are the Snow Moon (Eastern Band of Cherokees), the It’s a Long Night Moon (Oneida), and the Winter Maker Moon (Abenaki).

December 7-Mars at opposition

The same night as the last full moon of 2022, Mars will be in its brightest opposition. According to NASA, Mars and the sun are on directly opposite sides of Earth during opposition. From Earth, Mars rises in the east just as the sun sets in the west, and after staying up in the sky all night, Mars sets in the west just as the sun rises in the east. Astronomers say Mars is in “opposition” because the Red Planet and the sun appear on opposite sides of the sky. If Earth and Mars followed perfectly circular orbits instead of more oval shaped elliptical orbits, opposition would be as close as the two planets could get.

For the best chance to see the Red Planet in all its glory, face east about an hour after dark. Mars will look like reddish-orange star that will rise and appear more to the south as the evening wears on. By midnight, the planet will be high in the south.

In 2018, Mars was the brightest it had been in 15 years and in 2020, the Red Planet was at about 36.8 million miles away from Earth during a close approach.

December 13 and 14-Geminid meteor shower peaks

If shooting stars are more your thing, you won’t want to miss the Geminid meteor shower. It is one of the most reliable meteor showers every year and stargazers can see up to 120 meteors per hour at the shower’s peak if watching from a dark location, with an average of 75 space rocks per hour. The stellar show typically begins as early as 9 pm and peaks around 2 am.

[Related: How to photograph a meteor shower.]

This year, the Geminids will be competing with a bright waning gibbous moon, which might make it more difficult to see the shooting stars due to the extra light in the sky. The Old Farmer’s Almanac recommends trying to face away from the Moon to keep its shine out of your field of view.

On the evening of December 13, the moon will illuminate the sky from late evening on, but it will rise a little bit later on December 14.

December 21-Winter solstice (Northern Hemisphere)

Winter will officially begin on December 21, with the astronomical solstice and the shortest day of the year. The solstice officially occurs at 4:48 pm EST and is the day with the fewest hours of sunlight. After the winter solstice, the days will slowly grow longer as Earth inches towards the summer solstice in June.

Since the Earth is tilted on its axis, on the solstice, one half of planet is pointed away from the sun and the other half is pointed towards it. The solstice technically only lasts a moment, when a hemisphere-in this case, the northern-is tilted as far away from the sun as it can be.

[Related: Why we turn stars into constellations.]

The winter solstice is celebrated by cultures around the world with festivals, parties, and feasting due to its symbolism of light triumphing over darkness.

December 21 and 22-Ursid meteor shower peaks

In case you have to miss Geminid earlier in the month or the moonlight interferes with it too much, the Ursid meteor shower is predicted to peak on December 21 and early in the morning on December 22. Since the moon will be a faint waning crescent moon (only 3 percent illumination) it likely won’t interfere with this year’s Ursids in 2022.

Ursids can produce many as five to 10 meteors per hour, with a dark sky and little to no moonlight. Although, bursts of 100 or more meteors per hour have been observed.

December 21 and 24-Mercury at its greatest elongation and dichotomy

This will be the planet Mercury’s fourth evening apparition of the year. Its greatest elongation occurs when the planet appears to be farthest from the sun. Stargazers can even start looking for Mercury in the evening sky beginning in the second week of December. Mercury, the smallest planet in our solar system, can best be seen looking towards sunset as soon as the sky begins to darken. It will reach its greatest elongation on December 21 and will be 5 degrees away from Venus that night.

On December 24, Mercury will reach dichotomy, or an intermediate half phase, at about the same time that that it appears furthest from the sun. The exact times of the two events may differ by a few days, only because Mercury’s orbit is not quite perfectly aligned with the ecliptic.

The same rules apply to watch this meteor shower and lunar eclipse apply to pretty much all space-watching fun: go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour. Happy stargazing!

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At the heart of nearly all of NASA’’s complex space missions is an unseen quartermaster, a key system often referred to as the agency’s “eyes”: the Deep Space Network.

The largest and most sensitive telecommunications system on the planet, the Deep Space Network, or DSN, is an international array of giant radio antennas. The network is made up of three ground-based facilities around the world, each located 120 degrees apart in longitude (or between 5,000 and 10,000 miles away) from each other, with one based at Goldstone near Barstow, California, another in Madrid, Spain, and the last in Canberra, Australia). This powerful network allows NASA to remain in constant communication with spacecraft that venture far beyond Earth’s orbit. 

[Related: NASA is testing space lasers to shoot data back to Earth]

Operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, the system has played a crucial role in deep space communications since it began continuous operation in 1963. In its youth, the network was an important part of tracking and communicating with the Apollo 11 moon landing mission, and has since contributed to the well-being of dozens of NASA’s most historic projects. For instance, it helped transmit data back and forth from missions like DART, Lucy, the Solar Parker Probe, and the James Webb Space Telescope. As of 2021, the DSN tracks and supports 39 missions regularly, with another 30 more NASA missions in development.  

Jeff Berner, the Deep Space Network’s chief engineer, says that the network still even tracks NASA’s Voyager probes—the twin crafts that launched in 1977 and continue to float far outside the solar system. “As spacecrafts get further away, the power received from a spacecraft goes down,” he says. “So the signal gets weaker and weaker as the spacecraft gets further and further away.” 

For perspective, sending and receiving data to the moon and back (an average of 477,710 miles) would take only a few seconds, but the same signal sent to Mars (about 280 million miles round-trip) could take anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to arrive. For a craft as far out of humanity’s range as Voyager, Berner says a signal’s two-way light time (the time it takes to get to the craft and back to Earth) could take upwards of 29 hours. Additionally, because any mission can be tracked using any of the DSN’s powerful antennas, the easy flexibility of this complex relay network is one of the reasons why the DSN is “truly a multi-mission system,” Berner explains. Each complex is home to a 230-foot-wide antenna and numerous 111-feet-wide ones that, besides communicating with spacecraft as Earth rotates, are also used to conduct radio science, like studying planets and black holes. But a close look at the inner-workings of this system reveals how integral the DSN will be to NASA’s latest push to reach the lunar surface with the Artemis program.

Getting Artemis I to the moon and back

Last week, NASA’s Orion spacecraft kissed the moon, and is now shuffling along right behind our satellite, covertly taking jaw-dropping new high-definition images of its crater-dotted surface. But if Orion is Earth’s latest spy, then the DSN is essentially mission control, the voice in every good hero’s ear. 

According to the JPL, the DSN is currently supporting a large, constant influx of data from the uncrewed capsule, a process which will continue throughout its outbound journey, the mission maneuvers in between, as well as the craft’s much-awaited return. The process will ensure commands can be sent and data can be swiftly returned, even while deftly supporting the many other missions the network tracks. Artemis initially relied on NASA’s Near Space Network (NSN), another relay communications system managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, that can connect with government or commercial missions in near-Earth orbit. But because its antennas aren’t able to get enough energy to support high data rates, or the rapid transmission of data to ground stations once a spacecraft goes beyond low-Earth orbit, the DSN became a better fit for Artemis to go the distance. Without the existence of the DSN, “you would not be able to get the data rates that they are getting for the moon,” Berner says. That means that all of those fantastic photos and images the craft has already sent back would certainly be less precise, and surely, more dull. 

Just before Orion is slated to splash down back on Earth, the DSN will pass the baton back to the NSN once more. This handoff marks a new chapter of human space exploration—together with the Space Communications and Navigation program, the telecommunications systems will lay the groundwork for future crewed Artemis launches to the moon. 

A space network for the future

To keep up with NASA’s jam-packed mission schedule, the nearly 60-year-old network will need a few upgrades. “We’ve got equipment that’s been in the network for 30, 40 years that, needless to say, is very hard to maintain,” says Berner, who was present when the DSN first began converting its analog systems to digital in the early 1990s. But bringing the DSN up-to-date with the latest technology “takes time and money.” 

Berner says there are a number of improvements the network will undergo in the next few years to ensure it has the capability to support new missions, specifically NASA’s Gateway, an outpost that will orbit the moon and provide support for long-term human lunar and deep space exploration. Because many of those future systems will be using higher data rates at higher frequencies than previous missions, antennas at each DSN complex are being upgraded to support much higher data rates at uplink and downlink, or transmissions to and from a craft. 

[Related: NASA is launching a new quantum entanglement experiment in space]

But as humanity once again seeks to plant its flag on the moon (hopefully more permanently this time), Berner notes that the success of a spacecraft mission often depends on the ground-based tracking system that supports them, a concept that can sometimes get lost in the mix and pushed to the shadows in celebration of new discoveries. Ultimately, behind every far-reaching, data-hungry spacecraft is a harmony of capable antennas enabling it to go further. 

“When you see the pictures in the newspaper about the discoveries, [if] we didn’t have the network’s on the ground, you wouldn’t see any of this stuff,” Berner says. 

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While Americans were busy basting their Thanksgiving turkeys or making a list of the best Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, NASA’s Orion spacecraft was orbiting the moon and taking some images. NASA released the beautifully detailed images on the sixth day of Orion’s 25.5-day journey and they show moon’s mysterious surface and its craters frozen in time.

When asteroids and other space rocks hit the lunar surface, the collision forms an impact crater remains intact for billions of years. The moon doesn’t have weather like rain or wind or storms that can cover up the hole left behind, so the holes just stay on there. NASA believes that some of the moon’s craters have water and ice, which will be a necessary resource in the deep space missions planned over the next several years. Some of the images even have craters within craters like a bull’s-eye on an archery target.

[Related: Why it’s hard to tell if moon craters are holes or bumps.]

The images were captured about 80 miles above the surface of the moon with Orion’s onboard optical navigation camera. It is one of 16 cameras onboard the spacecraft and it does more than just snap these incredible images. It helps Orion with navigation, by taking images of both the Moon and the Earth at various phases and distances. According to NASA, the optical navigation camera images will provide an “enhanced body of data to certify its effectiveness under different lighting conditions as a way to help orient the spacecraft on future missions with crew.”

The Moon was formed more than 4 billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object collided with Earth. It is estimated that roughy 225 new impact craters are formed on the lunar surface about every seven years.

[Related: With Artemis 1 launched, NASA is officially on its way back to the moon.]

After blasting into space on November 16, the Orion spacecraft’s journey will cover about 1.3 million space miles and will fly farther than any other spacecraft built for humans. The capsule is scheduled to splash back down on Earth at the end of its mission on Sunday, December 11.

Artemis I is the first integrated test of NASA’s latest deep space exploration technology: Orion, the all-powerful Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and the ground systems at Kennedy Space Center. It is the first of three missions, and will provide NASA with more critical information on non-Earth environments, the health impacts of space travel, and more for further research around the solar system. It also showcases the agency’s commitment and capability to return astronauts to the moon.

You can track Orion during its mission around the Moon and back in real time and view a live stream from Orion’s cameras.

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The Orion spacecraft is set to make its closest approach to the moon today, passing behind the orb for a little more than 30 minutes before skimming 80 or so miles above its surface. The flyby will take place at 7:44 am EST, and can be viewed over the NASA Artemis I stream.

Flight controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston had a busy weekend maneuvering Orion between Earth and its satellite. The team performed three trajectory correction burns with thrusters to nudge the capsule into the perfect spot and speed for the Artemis I mission’s milepost. As a result, the vehicle moved into “the lunar sphere of influence,” or more simply put, the moon’s gravitational field.

But the work doesn’t end there. The flyby will require precision in both navigation and propulsion to get maximum assistance from the moon’s gravity (which is only about a sixth as powerful as Earth’s). To enter the optimal elliptical pathway, Orion will use its main engine to push away from the celestial body and essentially, slingshot around it. The spacecraft is currently traveling at 547 miles per hour, though its velocity will change dramatically as lunar forces take over.

[Related: Have we been measuring gravity wrong this whole time?]

At 80 miles from the moon, Orion will snap images of its vantage point with its 16 onboard cameras. Other missions have made closer contact: The US, former Soviet Union, and China have combined for 21 successful lunar landings since the 1960s. But it’s important to remember that Artemis I is forging a path, somewhat literally, to exploring new regions of the moon. It will help NASA scientists finetune their measurements and procedures for sending more space systems, and one day, astronauts, to the satellite’s south pole.

Orion’s route over the next 19 days involves maximum coasting. One of the mission’s objectives is to see how well the capsule will fare in distant retrograde orbit, or DRO. This high-altitude, clockwise movement will bring the spacecraft around the moon 1.5 times—with minimum fuel use. Orion is already loaded with four first-of-their-kind solar arrays, which have been producing enough electricity to run two average-sized US homes. DRO, however, will let it cut down power use and save the energy for instruments and additional trajectory burns.

On the opposite end of its travels, the capsule will edge 40,000 miles past the far side of the moon, which is the farthest any habitable vehicle has gone in space. At that point of the orbit, it will be close to 300,000 miles away from Earth. Orion should hit that milepost in early December, and then start making its circuitous way back home.

Watch this morning’s action here:

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With Artemis I now well underway, NASA is ready to dive into lunar exploration like never before. The game plan includes new tools, new experiments, and new landing sites, all leading up to a new generation of astronauts walking on the moon again.

But modern missions are only possible with the regolith-breaking research of the past, including decades of trial and error by NASA and other space agencies to get us closer and closer to Earth’s satellite. While Apollo might get most of the credit, there were plenty of attempts before the Saturn V rocket made it to the launch pad—and plenty of successes after the program was retired. Here’s what we’ve learned from some of those moonshots.

[Related: Is it finally time for a permanent moon base?]

Pioneer 0 (Able 1)

August 1958

The US Air Force was the first group from any nation to attempt to launch a rocket beyond Earth’s orbit and to the moon. It failed catastrophically: The booster carrying the probe exploded barely a minute after blastoff. Thankfully, the craft was uncrewed and was carrying relatively crude astronomy gear. NASA was created just a few months later. The Air Force ran its space ballistics programs under many different name though the 2000s, until the US government finally established a new military branch called Space Force.

Luna 1

January 1959

The USSR edged out the US in the 1950’s by successfully launching a lunar aircraft—that just kept going. The Soviet machine was essentially a silver ball studded with antennas, but lacking any kind of engine. While it was apparently designed to smash into the moon, it missed the satellite by about 1.5 times the lunar diameter and wound up orbiting the sun instead. That in itself was a milestone first.

Luna 2

September 1959

Luna 2 was successful where Luna 1 failed: The USSR smashed an uncrewed metal sphere into the moon, making it the first time anyone landed anything on the lunar surface. It was also the first time a human-made object touched something else in the cosmos. The mission’s precise final destination isn’t known, but it was somewhere near the northern Palus Putredinis region (which translates to “marsh of decay”), famous for hosting Apollo 15 in 1971.

Ranger 7

July 1964

This space probe, made at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which had recently pivoted to robotic extraterrestrial craft, was NASA’s first success at a lunar impact mission—after 13 straight failures. Before crashing (on purpose) into the moon’s Sea of Clouds plains, the probe took more than 4,300 photos of the lunar surface. The images were used to identify future landing sites for Apollo astronauts.

Luna 9

February 1966

When the USSR’s automatic lunar station touched down on the moon, it was the first artificial object to survive its visit. Airbags helped cushion its impact near a 82-foot-deep crater, though it still bounced around a fair bit before stabilizing. Over the next three days, the craft sent back images through its TV camera system, which were later stitched together into panoramic views. The first “soft landing” on another world was followed shortly by Luna 10, which was the first successful lunar orbiter.

Zond 5

September 1968

The first living things to travel around the moon were the two Russian steppe tortoises (and some worms) aboard a Soyuz capsule that circled the satellite for six days. The unnamed reptiles survived the journey, splashing down in the Indian Ocean before being retrieved by Soviet rescue vehicles. Since then, we’ve launched dogs, an “astrochimp,” and more benignly, baby bobtail squid into space.

Apollo 8

December 1968

Not long after the tortoise brigade, NASA’s Apollo 8 mission put the first people, American or otherwise, in lunar orbit. Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders spent Christmas Eve flying around the moon 10 times in a 13-foot-wide capsule. Anders also famously took the photo “Earthrise” on the trip.

Apollo 11

July 1969

The Apollo missions progressed in quick succession, with the climax being the first steps on the moon. Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins logged some choice quotes as they made history in a voyage that was documented down to the last heartbeat. (Fun fact: Because NASA didn’t know whether there were microbes on the moon, the crew had to be quarantined for three weeks after their return.)

Chandrayaan-1

October 2008

India’s first deep-space mission made a big splash. The lunar probe, which kicked an ambitious new program into gear, carried NASA’s Moon Minerology Mapper, which, as a set of 2009 Science papers described, confirmed there were water molecules locked in our neighbor’s craters. Chandrayaan’s engineers lost contact with the machine 10 months into its orbital journey, following a sensor failure that caused it to overheat and killed its power supply. By then, though, the mission had completed 95 percent of its research objectives.

Chang’e 4

December 2018

The Chinese National Space Administration’s lander Chang’e 4 was the first craft to land on the moon’s far side. It touched down in a basalt crater in January 2019 and delivered a small rover, Yutu-2, that’s still exploring to this day. It also had some other special cargo: a cotton seedling that successfully germinated in a chamber on the moon, the first and only plant to do so.

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After a two-and-a-half month delay, NASA’s Artemis I mission blasted off from Kennedy Space Center today at 1:48 am EST. The launch ushers in a new era of human space exploration on the moon.

The launch came down to the wire after engineers discovered another liquid hydrogen leak in the mobile launcher about four hours before the planned go time. This prompted a “red team” to head to the blast danger zone to tighten the relevant valve, after which fueling resumed. The mission hit one more snag when the Range Flight Safety crew had to replace a faulty ethernet switch. The launch was put in a 10-minute countdown hold until a little after 1:30 am EST, when the green light finally came through.

The Orion spacecraft’s journey will cover about 1.3 million space miles and will fly farther than any other spacecraft built for humans. The mission is expected to last 25 days, 11 hours, and 36 minutes, with the capsule scheduled to splash back down on Earth on Sunday, December 11.

Artemis I is the first integrated test of NASA’s latest deep space exploration technology: Orion, the all-powerful Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and the ground systems at Kennedy Space Center. It is the first of three missions, and will provide NASA with more critical information on non-Earth environments, the health impacts of space travel, and more for further research around the solar system. It also showcases the agency’s commitment and capability to return astronauts to the moon.

While Artemis I is uncrewed, three test dummies named Commander Moonikin Campos, Helga, and Zohar are on board to collect data on acceleration, vibration, radiation exposure, and other potential effects on the human body. The mission will also pave the way to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon as early as 2025

[Related on PopSci+: NASA astronaut Victor J. Glover on the cosmic ‘relay race’ of the new lunar missions]

Artemis I was originally scheduled to launch August 29, but was postponed due to weather an an engine bleed. Launch controllers were unable to chill down one of the the rocket’s four RS-25 engines (identified as Engine #3). It was showing higher temperatures than the other engines, and ultimately, the countdown was halted at T-40 minutes.

According to NASA, the engines needed to be thermally conditioned before a super-cold rocket propellant flowed through them before the liftoff. The launch controllers increased the pressure of the core stage liquid hydrogen tank to send a small amount of fuel to the engines and prevent any temperature shocks in the engines. This is the “bleed” the engineers were referring to. But they couldn’t get Engine #3 down to the needed launch temperature.

In a news conference on August 30, John Honeycutt, manager of the Space Launch System Program at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, said that the liquid hydrogen fuel used in the SLS rocket is about -423 degrees Fahrenheit. Engine #3 was about 30 to 40 degrees warmer than the other engines, which all reached about minus 410 degrees Fahrenheit. But the team didn’t find any technical issues with Engine #3, so the launch was rescheduled for the next available window.

During the scrubbed attempt, launch controllers faced several additional issues that were detailed by the NASA recap, including “storms that delayed the start of propellant loading operations, a leak at the quick disconnect on the 8-inch line used to fill and drain core stage liquid hydrogen, and a hydrogen leak from a valve used to vent the propellant from the core stage intertank.”

A second launch attempt was scrubbed on September 3 after the team encountered a liquid hydrogen leak while loading the propellant into the core stage of the SLS rocket. On September 26, another launch attempt was scrubbed as Hurricane Ian approached Florida.

[Related: Why the SLS rocket fuel leaks weren’t a setback]

Tropical weather also had an effect on today’s launch, which was originally scheduled for early November 14. NASA delayed it due to Hurricane Nicole and the SLS remained on the launchpad while the Category 1 late-season storm made landfall only 70 miles away.

“We design it to be out there,” said NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems Jim Free, in a news conference following the storm. “And if we didn’t design it to be out there in harsh weather, we picked the wrong launch spot.”

On Monday, NASA gave the “go” to proceed to launch and detailed their analysis of caulk on a seam between Orion’s launch abort system and the crew module adapter. Additionally, technicians replaced a component of an electrical connector on the hydrogen tail service mast umbilical. The mission passed the final decision gate at 3:22 pm EST on November 15.

“That’s the biggest flame I’ve ever seen,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson about finally getting the SLS rocket off the ground. He also reflected on the legacy of the Apollo missions, and how Artemis will open up a new chapter of lunar research and exploration. “We’re going back, we’re going to learn a lot of what we have to, and then we’re going to Mars with humans,” he said. “It’s a great day.”

About eight minutes into the launch this morning, the space capsule successfully separated from the rocket boosters. Nineteen minutes in, Orion unfurled its four solar arrays, each 63 feet long and embedded with cameras. As it entered Earth’s orbit, it was traveling at a speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour. NASA will share more mission updates throughout the day as the vehicle nears its destination and starts beaming back photos and other data.

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Liftoff for NASA’s next moon mission, Artemis 1, is T-minus one day after being postponed three times—twice due to engine problems and once to avoid an approaching storm. Boosted by the space agency’s most powerful rocket ever, this uncrewed expedition will bring us another step closer to human lunar exploration, and you can watch the launch from the comfort of your own home. 

It’s too late to purchase tickets to the main visitor complex, but you can watch the SLS rocket soar into the sky on NASA TV, NASA’s official live broadcast, the official NASA Twitch stream, or NASA’s mobile app. You can also register for free online to let the agency know that you’re hosting a watch party through their Virtual Guest program. (This will be especially exciting if you’re interested in receiving a virtual passport as a memento for the occasion, though this is not official documentation and will not guarantee you access into space. Stamps will be mailed after the event to registered guests.)

If you’d like to get your launch coverage in Spanish, you can listen en español on NASA’s YouTube page. Coverage of the launch itself will begin there at 12 a.m. Wednesday and will include interviews with Hispanic members of the mission. You can find a detailed breakdown of NASA’s coverage schedule on the space agency’s website.

And if you just can’t wait, NASA TV has been broadcasting on a regular schedule, and you can tune in at any time to learn more about outer space while we all wait for the countdown to hit zero.

This story was originally published on August 16, 2022 and has been updated regularly to keep pace with the mission’s frequent changes.

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ONLY A SELECT FEW get the chance to escape Earth’s bubble, fewer will set foot on another orb, and fewer still will sit at the helm of a spacecraft. Of the 18 travelers NASA has tapped for its Artemis missions, which will bring people to the moon for the first time in more than a half-century, it is the pilot who must ferry the crew safely, pulling off historic landing maneuvers in an untried spaceship.

A likely candidate to sit in that chair is Victor J. Glover, who’s spent much of his 20-year career soaring across the heavens as a Navy test pilot and is among a new generation of astronauts aiming to create a permanent base camp on the moon’s surface. Artemis 3, which NASA intends to launch in 2025, will land two travelers for a six-day reconnaissance survey. The goal is to search our satellite’s southern craters for pure frozen water and scope out ideal spots for a way station.

Despite NASA’s return to form, Glover himself knows that this decade’s moonshot will look vastly different from the Apollo missions, which ran from 1968 to 1972. Though the midcentury launches established the technology needed to achieve US preeminence in space, “We’ve learned a lot in those 50 years,” Glover says. “So there are lots of ways that we have advanced hardware, software, and even people, policy, and procedures.” To level up, the Artemis cohort will undergo much more intense and extensive drilling than any Americans launched beyond Earth in the past.

After completing advanced flight training for the US Navy, Glover earned his “wings of gold” to become an official aviator in 2001. Later, he was selected as one of the eight members in the 2013 NASA astronaut class and became the first Black engineer to finish a long-duration mission on the International Space Station. More recently, he served as second-in-command on the original flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon, the craft that would later carry everyday people into orbit. In late 2020, NASA announced he’d made the list of those eligible for the new lunar program, though the agency has yet to announce the actual assignments.

When training to survive beyond the safety of Earth’s atmosphere, potential crew members have to be ready for almost every possibility. That is to say, there are no typical days when you’re going through spaceflight drills. Sometimes Glover and the other trainees would spend six hours submerged in a pool to prime their bodies for death-defying spacewalks aboard the ISS. Now he curls his brain around long-winded Russian lessons for multinational missions, and he will soon be performing simulated moonwalks in NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab.

But the best preparation he’s had for venturing into the solar system is piloting here on Earth. He’s logged 3,000 flight hours on more than 40 kinds of jets and planes, including the F/A-18 and the Boeing EA-18G Growler. That versatility, which includes handling war craft in perilous situations like the Iraq War, should help him steer a brand-new Orion capsule and SpaceX Starship landing system to an untouched part of the moon.

Setting the craft down also presents challenges. Once Artemis 3 enters lunar orbit, the crew will have to vertically orient the Starship rocket, which is streamlined to maneuver in thinner air and on a powdery surface. It’s one of the reasons the mission’s astronauts have been learning to fly helicopters, which use similar mechanics to descend and ascend.

The Artemis 3 journey will be double the length of Apollo 11’s, so its technologies have to facilitate endurance. The Orion vehicle is powered by solar arrays, will be able to transport four people (one more than its Apollo counterpart), and has a heat shield reinforced with carbon fiber and titanium to protect against the hostile temperatures and radiation of reentry. Lastly, in contrast to the analog setups of the last lunar program, Orion’s guidance, navigation, and control system includes advanced automated software that will free up the astronauts to complete other tasks, such as doing research and getting exercise.

While it’s still up in the air whether Glover will be the pilot for the next moon landing, he’s already adapting to the challenge. In fact, much of his confidence comes from being guided by former NASA flight controllers and directors, who are happy to see their wisdom being used to reach for new heights. “You often hear people talk about going to space and they say it is a marathon, not a sprint,” Glover says. “I actually will say no, this is a relay race, and they have handed us the baton.”

This story originally appeared in the High Issue of Popular Science. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Heads up, space cadets—there are some with some very exciting sky gazing opportunities to take advantage of this week. Luckily, you should be able to watch them without a telescope.

First up is Tuesday’s full blood moon lunar eclipse. Stargazers in North America, Central America, most of South America, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia will see the moon turn a reddish hue very early tomorrow morning. In the United States, stargazers in the western part of the country will get the best views.

[Related: We’ve been predicting eclipses for over 2000 years. Here’s how.]

NASA predicts that at 3:02 a.m. EST, the moon will encounter Earth’s outer shadow in what’s called a penumbral eclipse. The partial eclipse phase will start at 4:09 a.m. EST. This is where the darker shadow (or umbra) is cast on a portion of the moon while the rest is still shining. Then, from 5:17 a.m to 6:42 a.m. EST, the eclipse will reach totality. This is when the moon will really live up to its blood moon name and take on a red tint.

If you prefer to sleep, especially after this weekend’s clock change, rather than watch the skies, you can still watch the event with NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio’s simulation of the eclipse and a livestream.

Full moons throughout the year have names tied back to Native American and European traditions. This November’s full moon is named a Beaver Moon, which comes from the time of year before winter when beavers take shelter, according to the Old Farmer’s Almanac. The other names for the full November moon also refer to this time of preparing for the cold and dark winter months ahead. It’s also called the Digging or Scratching Moon, in reference to animals foraging for nuts and greens and while bears dig their dens.

This will be the last total lunar eclipse until March 14, 2025.

Next up, we have the southern and northern Taurids meteor shower. The southern Taurids peaked over the weekend on November 4 and 5, but the northern is estimated to peak this Friday and Saturday. The Taurids occur annually in the months of October and November.

[Related: How to photograph a meteor shower.]

Shooting stars, or the product of super small debris and sand grains entering the Earth’s atmosphere and burning up after a meteor passes by the Earth, are common. The Taurids are special in part because of just how bright the meteors are. It produces pebble-sized debris instead of the minuscule dust-sized debris created in other meteor showers, which create a bright streak of light when it hits the Earth’s atmosphere, according to NASA Meteor Watch. For the Taurids, the debris was likely left behind by comet Encke, whose last close approach to Earth was in 2015.

There is a chance that some very fast meteors known for their fireballs will be visible during this years shower because it is a potential Taurid Swarm Year. Meteor expert David Asher from Armagh Observatory and Planetarium discovered that Earth encounter swarms of larger particles shed by the comet Encke in certain years. 2022 is predicted to be one of those particularly stellar years. Encke also has the shortest known orbital period for a comet, at only 3.3 years for one complete trip around the sun.

The same rules apply to watch this meteor shower and lunar eclipse apply to pretty much all space-watching fun: go to a dark spot away from the lights of a city or town and let the eyes adjust to the darkness for about a half an hour. Viewing this meteor shower doesn’t require a telescope or binoculars, just eyes and a curious mind.

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Mars is lucky enough to have two confirmed moons, and both have some scary names. Deimos, the smaller of the two moons, is named for the Roman god of dread. Phobos is larger, and its name comes from from the Greek words for “fear” or “panic.”

However, excitement and joy reigned supreme when the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft closely encountered the Red Planet’s larger moon. The flyby in September allowed the scientists to test one of the 19-year-old spacecraft’s newest tools.

[Related: Two NASA missions combined forces to analyze a new kind of marsquake.]

Aboard the Mars Express is the MARSIS instrument, which was originally designed to study Mars’ internal structure. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the University of Rome, and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) built it so that it would be used more than 155 miles away from the surface of Mars, or the typical distance between the Red Planet’s surface and the spacecraft. A major software upgrade allows the Mars Express to travel closer to a celestial body’s surface. This update could shed light on the moon Phobos’ mysterious origin by peering inside the moon.

“During this flyby, we used MARSIS to study Phobos from as close as [about 51 miles],” Andrea Cicchetti from the MARSIS team at INAF said in a statement. “Getting closer allows us to study its structure in more detail and identify important features we would never have been able to see from further away. In future, we are confident we could use MARSIS from closer than [about 24 miles]. The orbit of Mars Express has been fine-tuned to get us as close to Phobos as possible during a handful of flybys between 2023 and 2025, which will give us great opportunities to try.”

MARSIS is famous for its role in discovering signs of liquid water on Mars in 2005. It sends low-frequency radio waves to Phobos or Mars with a 131-foot-long antenna. Most of the waves are reflected off the surface, but some travel through, reflecting at the boundaries between layers of different materials below the moon’s surface.

[Related: What is a ‘Martian flower’?]

Studying the reflected signals can help scientists map the structure below the surface, revealing the thickness and composition of the material, among other features. The waves can also show evidence of different water, rock, ice, or soil layers. However, more mysteries lie in the internal structure of Phobos, and the MARSIS upgrade could help solve the puzzle.

“Whether Mars’ two small moons are captured asteroids or made of material ripped from Mars during a collision is an open question,” ESA Mars Express scientist Colin Wilson said in a statement. “Their appearance suggests they were asteroids, but the way they orbit Mars arguably suggests otherwise.”

“We are still at an early stage in our analysis,” Cicchetti added. “But we have already seen possible signs of previously unknown features below the moon’s surface. We are excited to see the role that MARSIS might play in finally solving the mystery surrounding Phobos’ origin.”

MARSIS is operated by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Italy and is funded by the ASI. The ESA and its Member States are part of the upcoming Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission to land on Phobos and return a sample of its surface materials to Earth. The MMX mission is led by the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA) and is scheduled to launch in 2024 and return its samples to Earth in 2029.

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NASA hopes to take us back to the moon for an extended stay via its Artemis lunar program, but lots of logistics still need to be worked out before we can safely set up on the moon for the long haul. One such hurdle is the actual material astronauts will use to construct a permanent lunar base, which will require a host of engineering considerations we normally never need to think about down here on Earth. Thanks to recent breakthroughs, however, Artemis organizers could at least save themselves a lot work of schlepping materials back and forth between Earth and the moon by 3D-printing base camp building blocks directly on the lunar surface using debris and saltwater.

[Related: What’s next for Artemis 1.]

According to an announcement earlier this week via the University of Central Florida, a team from the school’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering developed a new construction material composed partly of lunar regolith—the loose rocks, dust, and other debris covering the Moon’s surface. Using both 3D printing and a method called binder jet technology (BJT) in which a liquid binding agent (in this case saltwater) is infused into a bed of moon powder supplied by UCF’s Exolith Lab, Associate Professor Ranajay Ghosh’s group was able to produce bricks capable of withstanding pressure of up to 250 million times greater than our own atmosphere.

Although the initial cylindrical bricks produced are comparably weak, blasting them with 1200 degrees Celsius heat strengthened them enough to be a viable tool in the eventual structures NASA hopes to establish on the Moon, such as a modular cabin and mobile home. “This research contributes to the ongoing debate in space exploration community on finding the balance between in-situ extraterrestrial resource utilization versus material transported from Earth,” Ghosh said in UCF’s announcement. “The further we develop techniques that utilize the abundance of regolith, the more capability we will have in establishing and expanding base camps on the moon, Mars, and other planets in the future.”

[Related: Why NASA’s Artemis is aiming for the moon’s south pole.]

Apart from the structural stability, one of the chief benefits would be a dramatic reduction in material costs for the Artemis lunar base. It’s a lot cheaper to hypothetically produce at least some of your needs on the moon instead of lugging them up via extremely expensive shuttle launches. As such, the regolith bricks could also bode well for future bases on Mars, too. It definitely beats a suggestion last year from a Manchester University student that involved constructing abodes using human blood and urine as their binding agent.

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Jupiter’s moon, Europa, might have one of the best chances of supporting life in our solar system. And now, scientists at NASA have captured the closest images of the natural satellite in over two decades.

On Thursday, NASA’s Juno spacecraft came within 219 miles of the moon, allowing its camera, the JunoCam, to capture high-resolution images of Europa’s terrain. At the same time, Juno collected data about the geologic features and atmosphere, including its interior and ice shell structure. The photo and data gathering will help close gaps in understanding Europa’s surface and subsurface ocean. “The JunoCam images will fill in the current geologic map, replacing existing low-resolution coverage of the area,” Candy Hansen, a lead developer and operator of the JunoCam, said in the news release.

[Related: Europa’s icy surface may glow in the dark]

Scientists have long been interested in Europa, one of Jupiter’s 80 moons, as a prime candidate for extraterrestrial life because of its massive, potentially liquid ocean. Although the moon would need many more factors to support life than just liquid water, its icy crust and ocean floor could foster essential elements like hydrogen. The Juno mission will help scientists learn more about the moon, getting one step closer to understanding if simple organisms can survive on the icy satellite. 

Although Juno resulted in breathtaking images of Europa, it did so by working under immense constraints, with only two hours of time to collect data. Still, the spacecraft accomplished its goal as it flew by at roughly 14 miles per second. 

These photos of Europa aren’t Juno’s first big accomplishment, and NASA scientists hope they won’t be its last. The spacecraft launched in 2011, originally on a five-year trip to study Jupiter. But after traveling 1.7 billion miles and successfully orbiting the gaseous giant, scientists decided the spacecraft was not done, and Juno went on its way to study the entire Jovian system. But even after the mission ends in 2025, its impact is far from over. The Juno mission will help inform the upcoming Europa Clipper mission, scheduled to launch in 2024 and arrive at Europa in 2030. 

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The moon’s soil is filled with small spheres of glass. These pieces of glass, often called beads, formed millions of years ago when asteroids slammed into the lunar surface, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. 

But these microscopic lunar glasses–which range in size from a few tens of micrometers to a few millimeters–don’t just tell the moon’s story. They also offer a window into meteorite impacts on Earth, too. The research team found that the moon’s collisions occurred around the same time as many of Earth’s most notorious impacts—including the one that scientists say was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs (except for birds).

“The moon is kind of our witness to what the history of large impacts really is in our neighborhood of the solar system,” says Rhonda Stroud, director of the Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University who was not involved in the news study. Understanding the impact history of our corner of the solar system, Stroud adds, could help improve scientists’ models to anticipate the frequency of asteroids that hurtle toward us.

The tiny glass orbs at the center of this new research came directly from the moon. They were brought to Earth via China’s Chang’e-5 moon mission, which returned samples to scientists’ waiting hands and labs in December 2020. These fresh moon rocks were shared in research collaborations around the globe, and the international team behind the new Science Advances paper quickly began analyzing the spheres in the lunar samples.

[Related: The asteroid that created Earth’s largest crater may have been way bigger than we thought]

The team determined that these glasses formed anywhere from 2 billion to just a few million years ago, says Katarina Miljkovic, associate professor in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University and an author on the new paper. 

When an impactor such as an asteroid slams into a world’s surface, she explains, the energy of that collision ejects material out. Some of the kinetic energy can heat up that matter while it’s in flight. Some of it melts, if it heats up enough. Because it is in flight when it melts and then cools again, Miljkovic says, that molten material hardens into a spherical shape, falling back to the ground as glass beads. 

The researchers analyzed the glass beads brought back by Chang’e-5 to determine their age, size, and other characteristics. They also looked at remote sensing data of craters on the moon to determine which impact events might have thrown out the specific lunar glasses that they studied. 

Though the team found a large span of ages for the beads and their associated craters, some periods were richer in beads. “There were actually peaks of ages, clusters of beads at a certain age,” Miljkovic says. 

Those peaks, Miljkovic says, likely identify significant events. Perhaps, she says, simply more asteroids traveled through the area and hit the moon at once, or maybe a big asteroid broke up nearby and sent a flurry of impacts raining down on the moon. 

The team also noticed the peaks’ timing often aligned with significant impact events on Earth. For example, Miljkovic says, one peak seems to coincide with the ages of a large collection of meteorites found on our planet. 

“The moon is our satellite, and relatively speaking, on an astronomical scheme of things, the Moon and Earth are close. They occupy almost exactly the same space in the solar system,” Miljkovic says. So if a group of space rocks were to come hurtling our way, it would make sense that both celestial bodies would be hit around the same time.

The challenge, however, is that Earth does not retain a clear record of impacts. That’s because, unlike the moon, our planet undergoes erosion, weathering, and planetary processes that bury craters, impact glasses, and other evidence, Stroud says. “Earth is also covered with oceans and trees and soil and cities,” they add. “A lot of craters are still hidden. It takes a long time to recognize them and some of their signatures are just gone.”

Meanwhile, on the moon, the evidence of impacts is littered across the surface in the form of craters and these glass beads. So the lunar surface is a helpful tool for researchers piecing together our own planet’s history.

One of the most famous impact sites on Earth is the Chixculub crater in the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. That 6-mile-wide crater is thought to be where an asteroid slammed into the Earth some 66 million years ago, triggering a mass extinction event that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. 

It turns out, one of the peaks in the lunar impact data in the new study corresponds to that timing. “We’re just showing that the ages are coinciding,” Miljkovic says. But it’s possible that there might have been companion asteroids flying along with the dinosaur-killing space rock when it encountered the Earth-Moon system and some of them hit the lunar surface, too.

What happened on the moon at that time isn’t the only evidence that there were multiple asteroids causing collisions in our neighborhood around 66 million years ago. In August in a different paper in Science Advances, another research team described what might be another impact crater on Earth formed at the same time offshore of West Africa. If it’s confirmed, this crater could support the idea that a large asteroid broke into pieces and those fragments crashed into both Earth and the moon at the end of the Cretaceous period.

[Related: A second asteroid may have crashed into Earth as the dinosaurs died]

Tying craters on the moon to impact sites on Earth is tricky business, Stroud cautions. “It’s interesting and promising,” they say, but “the links to the craters on Earth are still speculative.” The “smoking gun,” Stroud says, would be to be able to match the composition and age of impacting material from both worlds. But, though the study authors can’t directly connect any moon craters to ones here, this research “shows the power of well-planned sample return” that provides the geologic context of the samples. 

“Maybe we’re onto something,” Miljkovic says. “We can only look at evidence and estimate the likelihood of something happening, but that’s the kind of story that, if true, is really cool.”

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From cities in the sky to robot butlers, futuristic visions fill the history of PopSci. In the Are we there yet? column we check in on progress towards our most ambitious promises. Read the series and explore all our 150th anniversary coverage here.

Lately, all eyes are turned towards the moon. NASA has another launch attempt tentatively scheduled next week for the highly-anticipated Artemis 1 uncrewed mission to orbit Earth’s satellite, one of the first steps to set up an outpost on the lunar surface. But humans—and science fiction writers—have long imagined a moon base, one that would be a fixture of future deep space exploration. About five years before Sputnik and 17 years before the Apollo missions, the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, Arthur C. Clarke, penned a story for the 1952 April issue of Popular Science describing what he thought a settlement on the moon could look like. Clarke, who would go on to write 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, envisioned novel off-Earth systems, including spacesuits that would “resemble suits of armor,” glass-domed hydroponic farms, water mining and oxygen extraction for fuel, igloo-shaped huts, and even railways. 

“The human race is remarkably fortunate in having so near at hand a full-sized world with which to experiment,” Clarke wrote. “Before we aim at the planets, we will have had a chance of perfecting our techniques on our satellite.” 

Since Clarke’s detailed moon base musings, PopSci has frequently covered the latest prospects in lunar stations, yet the last time anyone even set foot on the moon was December 1972. Despite past false starts, like the Constellation Program in the early 2000s, NASA’s Artemis program aims to change moon base calculus. This time, experts say that the air—and attitude—surrounding NASA’s latest bid for the moon is charged with a different kind of determination. 

“You can talk to anyone in the [space] community,” says Adrienne Dove, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida. “You can talk to the folks who have been around for 50 years, or the new folks, but it just feels real this time.” Dove’s optimism doesn’t just come from the Artemis 1 rocket poised for liftoff at Kennedy Space Center. She sees myriad differentiating factors this time, including the collaboration between private companies and NASA, the growing international support for the space governance framework, the Artemis Accords, and the competition from rival nations like China and Russia to stake out a lunar presence. Perhaps one of the biggest arguments from moon base supporters is the need for a stepping stone to send humans even deeper into space. “We want to learn how to live on the moon so we can go to Mars,” Dove says.  

[Related: How Tiangong station will make China a force in the space race]

Mark Vande Hei, a NASA astronaut who returned to Earth in March 2022 after spending a US record-breaking 355 consecutive days on the International Space Station (ISS), underscores the opportunity. “We’ve got this planetary object, the moon, not too far away. And we can buy down the huge risk of going to Mars by learning how to live for long durations on another planetary object that’s relatively close.”

Ever since Sputnik made its debut as the first artificial satellite in 1957, the Soviet Union deployed several short-lived space stations; NASA’s Apollo Missions enabled humans to walk on the moon; NASA’s space shuttle fleet (now retired) flew 135 missions; the ISS has been orbiting the Earth for more than two decades; more than 4,500 artificial satellites now sweep through the sky; and a series of private companies, like SpaceX and Blue Origin, have begun launching rockets and delivering payloads into space. 

But no moon base. 

That’s because exploring the moon is not like exploring the Earth. Besides being 240,000 miles away on a trajectory that requires slicing through dense atmosphere while escaping our planet’s gravitational grip, and then traversing the vacuum of space, once on the moon, daily temperatures range between 250°F during the day and -208°F at night. Although there may be water in the form of ice, it will have to be mined and extracted to be useful. The oxygen deprived atmosphere is so thin it can’t shield human inhabitants from meteor impacts of all sizes or solar radiation. There’s no source of food. Plus, lunar soil, or regolith, is so fine, sharp, and electrostatically charged, it not only clogs machinery and lungs but can also cut through clothes and flesh. 

“It’s a very hostile environment,” says Dove, whose specialty is lunar dust. She’s currently working on multiple lunar missions, like Commercial Lunar Payload Services or CLPS, which will deploy robotic landers to explore the moon in advance of humans arriving on the future crewed Artemis missions. While Dove acknowledges the habitability challenges, she’s quick to cite a range of solutions, starting with the initial tent-pitching location: the moon’s south pole. “That region seems to be rich with resources in terms of ice, which can be used as water or as fuel,” Dove says. Plus, there’s abundant sunlight on mountain peaks, where solar panels could be stationed. She adds that “there might be some rare earth elements that can be really useful.” Rare earth elements—there are 17 metals in that category—are, well, rare on Earth, yet they’re essential to electronics manufacturing. Finding them on the moon would be a boon.

A PopSci story in July 1985 detailed elaborate plans proposed by various space visionaries to colonize the moon and make use of its resources. Among the potential technologies were laboratory and habitat modules, a factory to extract water and oxygen for subsistence and fuel, and mining operations for raw moon minerals—a precious resource that could come in handy and provide income for settlers. While NASA may provide the needed boost to get a moon base going, it’s the promise of an off-world gold rush for these rare, potentially precious elements that could solidify and expand it. 

“My hope is that this is just the beginning of a commercial venture on the Moon,” Vande Hei says. He’s looking forward to seeing how businesses will find ways to be profitable by making use of resources on the moon. “At some point, we’ve got to be able to travel and not rely on the logistics chain starting from Earth,” Vande Hei adds, taking the long view. “We’ve got to be able to travel places and use the resources.”

[Related: Space tourism is on the rise. Can NASA keep up with it?]

And space is lucrative. In 2020, the global space industry generated roughly $370 billion in revenues, a figure based mostly on building rockets and satellites, along with the supporting hardware and software. Morgan Stanley, the US investment bank, estimates that the industry could generate $1 trillion in revenue in less than two decades, a growth rate predicted to be driven in no small part by the US military’s new Space Command branch. But those rising numbers mostly reflect economic activity in Earth’s orbit and what it might take to get set up on the moon—but they do not reflect the potential to begin converting the moon into an economic powerhouse. What happens next is anyone’s guess. The big dollar signs are one reason, no doubt, that the tech moguls behind private ventures like SpaceX and Blue Origin are investing heavily in space now.

The progress towards deeper space travel—and potential long-term human colonization on the moon or beyond—begs for larger ethical and moral conversations. “It’s a little bit Wild West-y,” says Dove. Although the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the more recent Artemis Accords strive “to create a safe and transparent environment which facilitates exploration, science, and commercial activities for all of humanity to enjoy,” according to NASA’s website, there are no rules or regulations, for instance, to govern activities like mining or extracting from the moon valuable rare earth elements for private profit. “There’s a number of people looking at the policy implications and figuring out how we start putting in place policies and ethics rules before all of this happens,” Dove adds. But, if the moon does not cough up its own version of unobtanium—the priceless element mined in the film Avatar—or if regulations are too draconian, it will be difficult for a nascent moon-economy to sustain itself before larger and more promising planetary outposts, like Mars, come to fruition and utilize its resources. After all, the building and sustainability costs and effort have been leading obstacles of establishing a moon base ever since the Apollo program spurred interest in more concrete plans.

Dove’s not really worried that private companies will pull out of the space sector—there’s little doubt they will find a way to profit. Rather, she views politics as the moon base program’s chief vulnerability. “Politics always concerns me with any of these big endeavors,” she adds. Not only domestic politics but international politics will be at play. “We see that with the ISS.”

As a retired military officer who was living on the ISS with Russian cosmonauts when Russia invaded Ukraine, Vande Hei also worries about international conflicts derailing space programs. “If we have a world war in Europe, if we’re just struggling to exist [on Earth], exploring space is not going to be at the top of the priority list.” But he also sees a bright side. He views international competition—or a moon base race—as a healthy way to create a sense of urgency. Vande Hei estimates that “a moon base is something we could do within [this] generation.”

Dove also sees the opportunities that laboratory facilities on the moon could open up for future space research—including her own. “The moon is very interesting in terms of understanding the history of Earth,” she says. “I would love to go do science on the moon.”

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The colorful rings that swirl around Saturn’s mid-section aren’t the only characteristic that makes it stand out among the planets of our solar system. Called a “belted giant,” the second largest planet is also spinning at a bit of a tilt: a 26.7-degree angle relative to the plane in which it orbits the sun, to be exact (compared to Earth’s 23.4 degree angle).

So why does the belted giant lean? Astronomers surmise that Saturn’s tilt is due to gravitational interactions with its planetary neighbor Neptune. Saturn’s tilt precesses (a circular motion similar to a spinning top) at nearly the same rate as the orbital spin as Neptune.

A new study published today in the journal Science finds that Saturn and Neptune’s gravity may have once been in sync, but Saturn has since escaped Neptune’s pull due to a missing moon. 

The team first modeled the interior of Saturn and found a distribution of mass that matched its gravitational field. This newly identified moment of inertia placed Saturn close, but just outside resonance, with Neptune. “Then we went hunting for ways of getting Saturn out of Neptune’s resonance,” said Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary sciences at MIT and lead author of the new study, in a press release.

[Related: Here’s why Saturn’s ‘ocean moon’ is constantly spewing liquid into space.]

The team ran simulations to determine the characteristics of a satellite (properties such as its mass and orbital radius) and what it would be required to knock Saturn out of the resonance or path. Enter a mysterious, previously unknown moon of Saturn.

The authors suggest that Saturn (currently home to 83 moons) once had at least one more in its orbit that they named Chrysalis, which was about the same size as Iapetus, Saturn’s third-largest moon. The research suggests that Chrysalis and its moon (or satellite) siblings orbited Saturn for several billion years, pulling and tugging on the giant planet in a way that kept its tilt (also called obliquity) in resonance with Neptune. 

Sometime between 200 and 100 million years ago, Chrysalis entered a chaotic orbital zone, and experienced a number of close encounters with the moons Iapetus and Titan, and eventually came too close to Saturn in a “grazing encounter,” which means the moon came into some contact with another object in space. 

This celestial swipe broke the moon into pieces with enough force to remove Saturn from Neptune’s grasp, leaving it with its present-day tilt. It’s also possible that a fraction of Chrysalis fragments could have remained suspended in orbit, eventually breaking into small icy chunks to form the planet’s signature rings. The rings were previously estimated to be about 100 million years old, much younger than Saturn’s suspected age of about 4.5 billion years.

“Just like a butterfly’s chrysalis, this satellite was long dormant and suddenly became active, and the rings emerged,” said Wisdom.

[Related: These gorgeous photos of Saturn’s rings are Cassini’s ‘Grand Finale.’]

The new study used some of the latest observations taken by Cassini in its Grand Finale: the concluding phase of the 20 year-old mission when the spacecraft made an extremely close approach to precisely map the gravitational field around Saturn. This data helped the team pin down Saturn’s moment of inertia and determine the gravitational field and the planet’s mass.

“It’s a pretty good story, but like any other result, it will have to be examined by others,” Wisdom said. “But it seems that this lost satellite was just a chrysalis, waiting to have its instability.”

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After years of mounting anticipation, NASA’s first full-scale moonshot since 1972 finally towered over its Florida launchpad in late August—only to go nowhere due to a persnickety fuel leak.

It’s just the latest delay for Artemis 1—an uncrewed flight slated to launch from Earth, shoot itself around the moon, and return. The recent setbacks mark a renewed bout of uncertainty over when, exactly, the mission will actually launch.

So what’s causing these hold-ups, what are NASA engineers doing to fix it, and will it affect NASA’s long-term lunar dreams? (Spoiler: the answer to that last question is probably no.)

What caused the delay?

More than just a lunar launch, Artemis 1 was set to be the first test of the 21st century’s Saturn V: the Space Launch System (SLS), the behemoth rocket designed to be the backbone of the Artemis program. While flying around the moon and back is certainly very cool, testing the rocket that will power future launches is perhaps even more important.

SLS uses hydrogen as a propellant, storing it in a super-chilled liquid form, below minus 423°F. While engineers were cooling the fuel lines down to that temperature, they accidentally raised the pressure. Later, as engineers began filling up the rocket’s fuel tanks in preparation for the launch, they noticed a leak in one fuel line where it met the rocket. Whether the two issues are related isn’t yet known.

Even a simple leak could be a disaster in waiting, because it could spew out hydrogen gas: a highly flammable substance, as the Hindenburg fire demonstrated. 

(SLS is no stranger to such fueling problems. Back in April, when NASA engineers were conducting dress rehearsals of the rocket on the pad, engineers ran into recurring issues with leaking propellant while they tried to fill up the rocket’s tanks.)

[Related: With Artemis, NASA is aiming for the moon once more. But where will it land?]

NASA engineers are now trying to fix the leak, replacing seals along the fuel line. Over the next several weeks, they’ll retest on the pad.

Importantly, a scrubbed launch isn’t a failed launch. Instead, it’s a decision to abort and try again later, once engineers have sorted out the problems at hand. “They’re much more keen to scrub or delay a launch than to have something catastrophic that would really harm the mission,” says Makena Young, an aerospace analyst at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

What happens next?

Once the engineers finish their retests, NASA can’t instantly try to launch again. To complete its mission, Artemis 1 needs the moon to be in a proper place in its orbit around Earth. That opportunity has passed by, and the next launch window doesn’t begin until late September: either the 23rd or the 27th.

Those dates are not arbitrary. Even though Artemis 1 is high-profile, it has to share support systems with other missions. In this case, it would share a deep-space tracking network with DART, an uncrewed probe that aims to change an asteroid’s course by crashing into it like, well, a dart. DART’s big day is on September 26, give or take a day. It isn’t becoming for Artemis 1 to step on DART’s toes.

A September launch isn’t certain. Another unanswered question is whether engineers will need to roll Artemis 1 back into the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), the enormous skyscraper-sized hangar where NASA assembles its rockets. The question stems from something called the Flight Termination System, a battery-powered system that causes the rocket to self-destruct if it veers off-course, avoiding collisions. 

The US Space Force—who actually has authority over NASA’s rocket launches—certified the batteries for a 25-day-long period that ends before that late September window begins. Normally, NASA would need to roll the rocket back into the VAB and replace the batteries. NASA is seeking special permission from the Space Force to swap out the batteries on the pad instead.

If NASA does need to return to the VAB, the September window might become trickier to hit. The next window won’t start until later in October. In that case, NASA would need to work around a solar eclipse on October 25 that could throw a wrench into the communication systems NASA relies upon.

What does the future hold?

By all indication, it’s not a matter of whether Artemis 1 will launch, but rather a matter of when. Still, for viewers on the ground, some of whom have been waiting decades to see Artemis materialize, the delays might feel like assembling a piece of furniture only to find that the final parts are missing.

But such is the nature of any complex aerospace project. “It’s never assumed that those things are going to go perfectly,” says Young. “So, sometimes, these delays are just the cost of doing business.”

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

It does help, in this case, that the other Artemis missions are well into the future. Artemis 2, which plans to take three Americans and one Canadian around the moon’s orbit and back, a la Apollo 8, is currently slated for 2024. Artemis 3—the long-awaited first boots on the Moon in over half a century—won’t launch until 2025 at least. 

The long downtime between missions, irritating as it might be for impatient Earthlings, do give NASA some slack. It means that future missions won’t pay the price of these delays.

“[Artemis 1] would have to slip much further into the winter, or even next year, to start having impacts on the rest of the program,” says Young.

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Artemis 1, a massive research craft intended to test whether the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is capable of sending astronauts to the moon, failed its first launch attempt early Monday morning. Despite the engine bleed that stopped the countdown, NASA continues to troubleshoot the mission and could try again Friday September 2 at the earliest. 

“This is an incredibly hard business,” said Mike Sarafin, the mission manager for Artemis, during a NASA conference about the scrubbed launch on Monday. “We’re trying to do something that hasn’t been done in over 50 years, and we’re doing it with new technology.”

The last time humans stepped on the moon was during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. If and when Artemis 1 is able to launch, the first flight will conclude a half a century hiatus and a new era of long-term human exploration on Earth’s satellite. Over the next decade the Artemis program will roll out missions to establish a permanent lunar outpost. And NASA already has their eye on an ideal spot: the moon’s untrodden south pole. 

Artemis 2, the second scheduled flight and the first crewed flight of the Artemis program, is currently slated for launch in May 2024. The first batch of lunar astronauts won’t be making landfall. Instead they’ll be embarking on an 8 to 10 day flyby of the satellite before making their way back to Earth. If all goes well, Artemis 3, the second crewed flight of the program, will launch in 2025 for NASA’s well-awaited return to the lunar surface. Once astronauts do reach their destination, the crew, which includes the first female and first astronaut of color on the moon, will set down for about a week at one of 13 potential landing sites.

[Related: The elements we might mine on the moon]

Even as humans set foot back on the moon, the Artemis crew will head to vistas beyond those initial strolls of the Apollo missions 50 years ago. All of the possible lunar locales lie near the moon’s south pole, an area of our satellite that until now, has been drenched in mystery. 

“Some of the oldest rocks that we know to exist on the moon could be found there,” says Noah Petro, chief of planetary geology at NASA and one of the scientists who helped identify these potential regions. The moon’s south pole is a very different environment than what Apollo astronauts explored; all their missions took place near the equator. Petro says that depending on where they go, Artemis astronauts could be trudging across moon rocks that are at least 4.3 billion years old. 

“Figuratively, they’ll be transported back in time, to an early era of our history,” Petro says. And it’s that exploration that could reveal not just the history of the moon, but the history of the solar system, as well as the universe, he says. 

[Related: We now have proof that plants can grow in moon dirt]

Because of the tilt of the moon’s axis, the south pole is rife with both light and shadowed regions, which means some areas could be harder to explore than others. But it is rich with resources, such as lunar ice water, which could be used for life support systems and fuel—supplies that would be extremely helpful to NASA’s long-held goal of creating a habitable moon base. Each region is also home to its own unique geologic features and will be able to provide near continuous sunlight throughout the duration of the Artemis 3 mission. Building a base in a sunny spot is particularly imperative as solar energy provides a power source, and would help astronauts weather the moon’s freezing temperatures.  

As each site is connected to a potential launch window, it’s hard to guess exactly which of the 13 areas will bear the next lunar flag, especially with NASA’s history with scrubbing launches in favor of astronaut’s safety. Still, past flights—launched or scrubbed—are lessons for current and future mission scientists. Petro even notes that while earlier generations learned much from Apollo, people have been asking new questions in the decades leading up to Artemis. 

By teaching ourselves how to conquer the moon once more, we’re in a position to do far greater things both on Earth, and in space. 

“It’s a very exciting moment in our history,” he says. “We did not answer everything when we first explored, but now we have that place to start.”

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At around 8:35 a.m. EST today, NASA scrubbed the planned launch of Artemis 1. According to NASA officials, the team couldn’t get past an engine bleed in Engine 3 of the Space Launch System that wasn’t showing the right temperature. This fuel bleed is a separate issue from the fuel loading leaks that the team previously encountered during tests.

According to NASA, a liquid hydrogen line did not adequately chill one of the rocket’s four core-stage engines, which are part of the preparations needed before ignition.

The countdown was halted at T-40 minutes, as engineers continued to troubleshoot. Earlier in the morning, NASA stopped and restarted the fueling of the Space Launch System rocket with nearly 1 million gallons of super-cold hydrogen and oxygen because of a leak. Thunderstorms off of Florida’s Kennedy Space Center had already delayed the fueling by nearly an hour.

[Related: Get ready to watch NASA’s most powerful rocket head for the moon.]

Technical issues during a launch like this are not uncommon. In 1986, the space shuttle Columbia launch was postponed a staggering seven times.

The earliest availability to launch is Friday September 2, but no determination has been made as to what the plan is to go forward to remedy the engine bleed.

[Related:“Counting down to the Artemis 1 launch, NASA’s biggest moon mission in decades.”]

The launch will be the first flight of the Space Launch System, a 322-foot-tall rocket that will take astronauts to the moon for the first time in over 50 years. Artemis 1 will be an un-crewed flight test and will also pave the way for missions to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon.

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When NASA’s Artemis 1 mission launches to the moon later this month, on board the Orion space capsule will be two special passengers: Helga and Zohar. 

The pair are actually mannequin torsos, called phantoms, that are inspired by hospital training tools and are made to mimic human bones, soft tissues, and the internal organs of an adult female. They were borned out of a collaboration with the Israel Space Agency and the German Aerospace Center, and are designed with sensors that can map radiation exposure levels throughout the body. Zohar, specifically, will wear a radiation protection vest designed to protect the real astronauts slated for future Artemis missions—including the first women to go to the moon.

The last time people set foot on the moon or even traveled beyond low Earth orbit was at the end of the Apollo program in 1972. Back then, the US astronaut corps did not admit women. That changed when the first American female astronaut candidates were selected in 1978, with a young Sally Ride among them.

Today, NASA astronauts are much more diverse. But that isn’t reflected in the data informing their safety protocols because of decades of male dominance in the field. So, the agency and its collaborators are firing up new experiments to understand how different human bodies respond to the extreme environment of space—and best enable all astronauts to do their jobs safely.

[Related: A brief history of menstruating in space]

“We stand on the shoulders of giants, and we’ve made a lot of progress. But there’s a lot of progress still to be made to understand [the biological nuances between astronauts],” says Jennifer Fogarty, chief scientific officer for the Translational Research Institute for Space Health, which is supported by the NASA Human Research Program and led by the Baylor College of Medicine. The goal, she says, is to build spaceflight tools and healthcare regimens for astronauts “around the human body to give it the ability to do the job you’re expected to do, and reduce the possibility of getting into conflict with that body.”

Wear and tear in zero-g

To look for patterns, researchers like Fogarty have been collecting data on how sex differences might influence astronauts’ health in space. So far, however, the research on how female bodies respond to the extreme environment of space has been “pretty limited,” she says. To date, more than 600 people have flown in space; fewer than 100 of them have been women. Tools like Helga and Zohar can help gather data in a way that isn’t reliant on historic trends.

Scientifically, it’s difficult to extrapolate trends in sex differences or sex-specific healthcare that can be trusted based on those numbers because some characteristics could simply be from individual variation. For example, when a female astronaut developed a blood clot while on the International Space Station in 2020, it prompted an investigation into whether the use of hormonal contraceptives for menstrual cycle control increased the risk of clotting during spaceflights. A review of 38 female astronaut flights published later that year concluded that it does not. But given such a small sample size and how rare blood clots associated with hormonal contraceptives are, that question remains open.

In some ways, women have proven particularly “resilient” during spaceflight, Fogarty says. For example, male astronauts’ eyesight seems to be more affected by swelling around the optic nerve in zero gravity than female astronauts’. But according to a 2014 study, female astronauts have statistically experienced greater orthostatic intolerance (the inability to stand without fainting for a long period of time) upon returning to Earth.

Radiation poisoning from space

Beyond short-term conditions and changes to bodies, a lot of the focus on human health out in space is focused on exposure to cosmic radiation from stars and galactic explosions. Most of the data we currently have comes from laboratory research on rodents or observations on atomic bomb survivors, Fogarty says: It shows a pattern of female survivors being more susceptible to developing lung cancer than male ones. 

Because women seem to carry more side effects from radiation damage than men, NASA recently updated its standards for acceptable levels of exposure to be uniform, limiting all astronauts to what was previously the allowable dosage for a 35-year-old woman.

Galactic cosmic rays are different from nuclear weapon radiation, however. For one, in nuclear accidents or acts of war exposure is two-dimensional, which means certain organs might be hit with more radiation than others. But, in space, the radiation is “considered omnipresent,” Fogarty says—you’re exposed in every direction. Some calculations suggest that the radiation exposure rate on the moon is about 2.6 times higher than that experienced by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Even then, in one week on the ISS, astronauts can be exposed to the same amount of radiation as humans are over one year on the ground.

With radiation coming from all angles in space, devising a physical barrier like a spacesuit or protective vest can be tricky. It makes understanding how all human organs are affected by radiation exposure important—whether they be sex-specific reproductive organs or not. 

That’s where Helga and Zohar come in. The female “phantoms” are part of the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE). Internally, they have a grid of 10,000 passive sensors and 34 active radiation detectors that will gather data for researchers on which parts of the body make the most contact with electromagnetic waves during spaceflight. Some organs may be protected by the layers of soft tissue over them, while others may not be—this will help engineers build more targeted systems to protect the most at-risk areas of the body from harmful radiation. 

“What we will get besides the difference between a man and a woman when it comes to biological effects, we will get the difference between different body organs. The difference between brain and uterus, for example,” said Ramona Gaza, MARE science team lead at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in a press teleconference this week.

The two torsos won’t be the only Artemis 1 experiment designed to study the effects of radiation. There will also be a suite of live organisms, including yeast, fungi, algae, and plant seeds, aboard the mission. In a NASA project called BioSentinel, the Orion capsule will release a CubeSat into orbit around the moon carrying yeast cells to test on how the organisms survive the deep-space environment.

[Related: Long spaceflights could be bad for our eyes]

In total, the Artemis 1 mission will launch 10 CubeSats: The rest will study aspects of the lunar environment that will prove important to characterize for the safety of future human travel to the moon. They include tools to study space weather and bursts of solar radiation, map stores of water ice on the lunar surface, as well as a tiny lander from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Helga and Zohar also won’t be the only “passengers” on Artemis 1. In addition to a stuffed a sheep, they will be joined by a male-bodied mannequin equipped with sensors to measure various aspects of the environment around the moon during the flight, including radiation exposure. While Helga and Zohar won’t be wearing spacesuits, Commander Moonikin Campos will be dressed in a first-generation Orion Crew Survival System, which Artemis astronauts will use when real humans return to the moon.

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After facing cancellation, resumption, Congressional hearing drama, COVID-19, technical delays, and more technical delays, NASA’s decades-long push to return to the moon is finally about to get off the ground.

If all goes well, the Artemis 1 flight is about a month away. It’s slated to launch in late August or early September, put itself into the moon’s orbit, then return to Earth. On top of being the first entry in NASA’s newest spaceflight program, it’s an important test of the long-awaited Space Launch System (SLS)—a heavy-lifter of a rocket comparable to the old Saturn V—and the Orion command module that will one day house astronauts.

“The team is beyond excited,” says Cliff Lanham, an operations manager at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s east coast, where Artemis 1 will launch. “We still have a few weeks of work to do, so we gotta temper that.”

Here’s what’s going on with the launch—and what has to happen first.

Last season: Learning from rehearsals

You might remember that, a few months ago, NASA had some issues with fuel leaks that called off test runs.

NASA engineers called those tests “wet-dress rehearsals” (WDR). They were what they sound like: placing the rocket on the pad and going through the motions of launch day. The WDRs’ other purpose was to suss out issues like those very leaks, which aren’t exactly uncommon with highly complex systems such as large rockets.

The WDRs are quietly very useful; workers at NASA use the results to write the checklist for the Artemis 1 launch. It’s perhaps not the most glamorous step of launch prep. But without these trials, the rocket launch likely couldn’t happen.

[Related: In pictures: NASA’s powerful moonshot rocket debuts at Kennedy Space Center]

After some tinkering, NASA held the final tests in June. Despite another fuel leak, engineers elected to call it there and end the tests, believing they could resolve the issues by returning the rocket to its assembly building for repairs.

One month to launch: Readying the rocket

Engineers still need to complete a few tasks before they can send Artemis 1 on its way.

A critical one is to charge up the rocket’s batteries, whose power SLS draws upon to control its components. But those batteries have a limited life, and engineers can’t fill them too early. Lanham says that charging those batteries is a careful balancing act of planning for an uncertain launch date.

Furthermore, although Artemis 1 won’t have any human crew, its Orion capsule will carry a trio of passengers: three mannequins, dummies that’ll test the elements human astronauts will face on their lunar journeys.

Already, the first of those has boarded. Its name is Moonikin Campos. It bears accelerometers and vibration sensors to test how rocky the ride will be, as well as detectors that measure radiation exposure on the lunar flightpath. Before the launch, two fake torsos will join, outfitted with test vests that future astronauts might wear in order to mitigate that radiation.

NASA will also load a Snoopy plushy—the zero-gravity indicator, which will float when the rocket is in space—and a Shaun the Sheep doll that’ll ride with the mannequins around the moon and back. 

One week to launch: Checking the calendar

NASA can’t just plop the 5.8-million-pound Artemis 1 on the pad at a whim. Many factors have to come together for a successful launch, and the rocket is only one of them. Earth, moon, and sun have to be in the right spots so the spacecraft’s flight maneuvers get it to the proper place. The sun is especially critical, because Artemis 1 is powered in part by solar panels.

NASA planners have identified three possible dates that fit the requirements: August 29, September 2, and September 5.

Selecting one of those dates will likely happen just days before launch. The US Navy, which recovers the fallen husks of discarded rocket stages, has to be ready. The pad, also used by SpaceX vehicles, has to be clear of other rockets. And the weather has to be cooperative. “We’re in hurricane season down here in Florida,” Lanham says.

[Related: This is why rocket launches always get delayed]

If none of those dates pan out, the next opportunities will come in late September or early October. If that again doesn’t work out, there’s another set of openings in late October. NASA officials hope it won’t come to that. Artemis would have to dodge a partial solar eclipse that could compromise its solar power.

After the launch: A lunar future

“NASA’s had a number of lunar return programs that have never made it past PowerPoint slides,” says Casey Dreier, a space policy adviser for the Planetary Society.

Artemis 1, if it’s successful, will refute that pattern. And Dreier says there’s good reason to be optimistic about this particular attempt. Despite the Artemis program’s ballooning costs, returning to the moon is a prospect that enjoys broad support in Washington that crosses political party lines and presidential administrations. They’ll no doubt be happy to see their support finally paying off.

Then, assuming Artemis 1 is successful, it will be just the first mission of a much larger list. “This is not really the culmination,” says Lanham. “It’s just the beginning.”

The timeline of the first crewed Artemis 2 mission—which will fly around the moon and return to Earth, much like Apollo 8—is still hazy, but current plans have it launching around 2024. After that would come the first human steps on lunar soil since 1972.

“The lunar landings have almost receded into myth at this point,” says Dreier. “For the first time, we have a real, viable chance at seeing humans walk on the moon again.”

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Once astronauts return to the moon, they might encounter a new geographical feature, if they venture to its far side: an unusually shaped crater caused by a rocket crash. In March, a used-up spacecraft smacked into the moon. While astronomers knew a collision occurred, the site and shape of the impact had been a mystery.  

But on June 24, astronomers who combed through images from a lunar satellite spotted not only the location of the crash but a double crater—two gaps superimposed on each other—left behind on the moon’s surface. The discovery may help space agencies learn what happens when something artificial strikes the moon.

Two overlapping divots make up the double crater. An eastern crater 19.5 yards in diameter overlays a 17.5-yard-wide western one. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter—a robotic spacecraft orbiting the moon that has been photographing its surface since 2009—took a picture of the crater that formed on March 4. However, it did not observe the exact moment of collision, forcing astronomers to scrutinize before and after pictures of the enormous impact. 

Rocket parts have dug holes into the lunar surface before. The Apollo-era Saturn 5 rockets, which transported the first moon explorers, created craters. None left behind the newly found twin shape, however. 

“It’s cool, because it’s an unexpected outcome,” Mark Robinson, a professor of geological sciences at Arizona State University who reported the discovery Friday, told The New York Times. “That’s always way more fun than if the prediction of the crater, its depth and diameter, had been exactly right.”

In January, amateur astronomer Bill Gray was the first to detect space junk on a collision course to the moon’s far side. The space junk turned out to be the upper stage of a discarded rocket, though no country has taken responsibility for it yet. Gray initially predicted the parts came from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which launched the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) in 2015. A NASA engineer later disproved this theory, because DSCOVR did not follow the same orbit as the discarded ship. 

[Related: NASA finally fully fueled up its Artemis moon rocket]

Instead, the debris may have belonged to the Long March 3C rocket, which China launched in October 2014. Researchers from the University of Arizona confirmed the idea; the crashing object emitted wavelengths of light similar to those of other Chinese rockets. However, China denies its vehicle caused the crash, arguing the rocket stage used to launch the Chang’e-5 T1 spacecraft burned up when re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. 

Regardless of the rocket’s origin, the double crater it made suggests the craft had large masses at both ends. Usually, a used-up rocket stage is heaviest at the bottom, where engines are located. Spent rockets should be lighter at the top, if their fuel tanks are empty. But something at this rocket’s upper end had enough heft to leave a dent—making this an odd but extraordinary case.

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In a few years, if all goes well, NASA astronauts will ride to the moon aboard an Orion capsule, an 8.5-ton shelter that fills up a large room. But on the other end of the size spectrum—yet, in many ways, no less important to those lunar exploration goals—sits a spacecraft that could fit, neatly, on an office desk.

That craft is the Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment—CAPSTONE, for short. It will launch for the moon in late June, potentially becoming the first lunar satellite of its class. And it’s going on a test run where future, perhaps shinier missions are planned to follow. CAPSTONE may help NASA create a communications hub that, not too far in the future, will circle the moon. 

The fellowship of the CubeSat

Despite its size, CAPSTONE is remarkable for a few reasons, many of which have to do with the satellite’s class: CubeSat.

CubeSats are, well, cubic: The common base models are about 4 inches to a side and weigh no more than 4.5 pounds. You could hold one in your hand; you might even build one by hand, too, since most use off-the-shelf components. You can stack them into larger satellites. CAPSTONE combines 12 CubeSats, shy of the largest to date (which used 16). 

From 1998 to the start of June 2022, 1,862 CubeSats have launched—and that number is set to more than double by 2028. CubeSats’ low cost means that they’re within reach of amateurs, university groups, fledgling startups, small developing countries, and others who lack the resources of SpaceX or the world’s big space agencies.

But CubeSats’ low cost has made them appealing for other missions, too. In 2019, NASA contracted private firm Advanced Space to build CAPSTONE for $13.7 million. (For comparison, even the most rudimentary large lunar probe can cost an order of magnitude more.) Advanced Space chose to use CubeSats to put the probe into space cheaply and quickly.

[Related: This satellite has high hopes—the transformation of Finland’s space industry]

The vast majority of CubeSats live in Earth orbit. Only a few have gone beyond that. In 2018, two arrived at Mars alongside NASA’s Mars InSight mission. Absolutely none have gone to CAPSTONE’s destination in the moon’s orbit.

“To date, there have not been lunar cubesats,” says Jekan Thanga, an engineer at the University of Arizona, who isn’t involved with CAPSTONE. “CAPSTONE is actually going to be a first in that respect.”

Other CubeSats are riding with the Artemis 1 uncrewed test flight. Depending on when they launch—currently scheduled for no earlier than August—they may outrace CAPSTONE to the moon.

CAPSTONE’s two missions

CAPSTONE will launch from the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand on an Electron rocket, built by private space company Rocket Lab, who mainly launch little satellites into Earth orbit. CAPSTONE will be Electron’s first attempt to reach for the moon. “That’s also a bit of precedent,” says Thanga.

In early November, after a 3.5-month-long voyage, CAPSTONE will insert itself into a peculiarly elongated loop around the moon, called a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO). This swings from 1,000 miles above one pole to 43,500 miles above the other pole. Entering NRHO is more than just a fun curiosity. CAPSTONE will test this orbit for the future Lunar Gateway, a moon-orbiting space station planned as part of the Artemis program.

“There’s no real uncertainty that the math works,” says Cheetham, but CAPSTONE will give spacecraft operators practice for getting into that orbit.

While it’s orbiting the moon, CAPSTONE will try to do something else: talk to a spacecraft without contacting ground control on Earth. CAPSTONE’s onboard computer will try to link with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, an earlier NASA spacecraft that’s been mapping the moon’s surface since 2009, and calculate the positions of both spacecraft. When communication from Earth to the moon, even at light speed, takes more than 1 second, being able to chat with local satellites is a useful ability.

Future CubeSats, Thanga says, might be able to make that ability more permanent. For instance, it would enable easier communication to the lunar far side, currently out of Earth’s reach. When the Chinese lander Chang’e-4 touched down on the moon’s far side last year, it needed another satellite to relay messages to and from Earth. 

Lunar satellites that talk with each other can more easily avoid collisions, and they won’t have to hail Earth’s ground control for their every need. “What we want to do is prioritize that ground contact,” Cheetham says, removing routine location checks in favor of transmitting important operational data,

Communication is king

The world’s attention will likely be on the crewed Artemis fights—whenever they actually get off the ground, with the first set for 2024. But small-scale missions like CAPSTONE are necessary to lay the groundwork (or spacework, as it were) for those astronauts.

More moon missions are in the pipeline, potentially launching as soon as the end of this year. NASA has tapped a handful of companies to build an armada of lunar landers—fitted with science experiments for measuring things like subsurface water, the composition of the moon’s surface, and the strength of its magnetic field—that test the prospects for future lunar living.

[Related: We could actually learn a lot by going back to the moon]

As more and more Artemis flights and astronauts make it to the moon, they’ll rely on infrastructure like the Lunar Gateway, which will act as a communications center and a delivery hub for astronauts on the surface. That plan has faced criticism—some commentators have suggested sending moon landings through Gateway will make missions require more energy and expensive fuel.

But Gateway is only the start. The space agencies and their partners behind Artemis are planning everything from lunar mines to lunar satnav to lunar nuclear power plants.

“The feeling is there’s going to be a lot more traffic to the moon,” says Thanga, “and that requires a lot more infrastructure, including systems like the Gateway.”

Correction (June 24, 2022): The CAPSTONE launch location was changed from the Chesapeake Bay to Mahea, New Zealand. Also, the company behind the Electron rocket is called Rocket Lab, not Rocket Labs.

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“Driving on the moon is like driving on ice,” warns Jeff Vogt, the advanced program lead for vehicle dynamics at General Motors. “If you can imagine the worst ice storm ever, that is what it is like.”

I was interrogating Vogt in preparation for my turn at the wheel of GM’s lunar rover simulator, an experience that promised to virtually fulfill a dream of mine since I watched the Apollo astronauts as a kid.

The Apollo 17 crew of astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt roved the surface in search of geologically significant rocks, a mission made more productive by their trusty 4×4. But the notion of wheeling an off-roader across the pockmarked surface of the moon has been dormant since Cernan and Schmitt blasted off from the moon in the ascent stage of their lunar lander in December, 1972.

Now, General Motors, the company that built the original Lunar Roving Vehicles, aims to return with a new Lunar Mobility Vehicle (LMV) in partnership with Lockheed Martin.

A critical development tool in this program is GM’s simulator, which helps engineers test designs for a vehicle that cannot realistically be physically tested on Earth. That’s because of the moon’s weaker gravity, which is one-sixth that of Earth’s. The LMV has all of the 1,500 kilograms of mass it has on Earth, but only one-sixth the weight, which is why traction is so poor on the dusty surface.

I slide behind the simulator’s wheel. The aim is to avoid abrupt moves. No hard starts, stops, or turns. And most especially, take it easy driving out of craters, says Vogt. “We learned pretty quickly that if you accelerate too hard to climb an incline, with lower gravity, you launch into space.”

Noted.

It turns out that when driven gently, like you would on ice, the LMV is perfectly docile and responsive. The main challenge is an artifact of driving in a simulator with a 2D-screen standing in for reality. Despite its 270-degree wrap-around display of the one square kilometer of the lunar south pole that is loaded into GM’s computer, there is very little sensation of inclination, like you would feel in reality if you were going up or down a crater. 

Operating the sim, you are wrapped within a 26-foot-diameter high-definition display situated in a darkened room. You drive from a car’s cockpit section that is mounted atop a pedestal that tilts side to side and pitches fore and aft, but most of that motion is imperceptible while driving the moon program because of the gentle driving motions. Presumably the ride gets a bit rougher when it is simulating the latest Corvette tearing around a track!

When the LMV seems oddly sluggish in response to the accelerator pedal, that’s the clue that you’re climbing. When it doesn’t seem to slow down when you lift off the accelerator, that’s because you’re going downhill.

The available photography of the Moon’s south pole is low-resolution, so large features are accurately represented. Smaller craters and rocks were generated statistically, based on an understanding of their prevalence on the moon. The LMV proves to have enough ground clearance that it easily straddles the small-looking rocks. Without a frame of reference, I have no idea how big they really are, but I now know that the rover will be able to drive right over most of the rocks it encounters.

The LMV’s top speed is 25 kph, but I never venture above 12 kph. A crash would be harmlessly virtual, but the time needed to reset the simulator would mean an instant end to my moon-driving fantasy. The Apollo LRV topped out at 13 kph, but astronauts tended to drive at about 5 kph to avoid breaking the rover and to minimize the dust kicked up by its wheels.

It is important to model the LMV’s capabilities because, unlike the Apollo LRV, the LMV is expected to spend most of its time driving autonomously between jobs carrying live crews. The 3-second round-trip time of radio signals from Earth makes remote piloting impractical, especially at the speeds the LMV can achieve. 

GM is applying the know-how from its Cruise autonomous vehicle division to the LMV so that it can work when the astronauts aren’t there. Lockheed Martin’s design is for a dedicated lander to deliver the LMV to the Moon’s surface, rather than having it stow away with the astronauts on their flight, as the LRV did.

Autonomy means that the LMV can begin working as soon as it lands, exploring the terrain and conducting experiments without waiting for the Artemis lunar mission astronauts to arrive. The LMV will employ Ultium electric drivetrain components that are the same ones that are going into GM’s terrestrial EVs. It will have the same electric motors, and although the Ultium battery cells used so far in the GMC Hummer EV we tested previously and the new Cadillac Lyriq are the pouch-style prismatic cells, GM’s Ultium road map also includes the cylindrical cells the LMV will use. These AA-like cylindrical cells are better suited to the extreme 500-degree temperature swings between the Moon’s two weeks of daylight and two weeks of nighttime, according to the company.

GM’s know-how from the Hummer EV’s control programs for its three electric motors have informed the programming for the LMV’s four motors. This means that the motors will be able to maximize the paltry available traction, and they will also let the rover do nifty tricks like the super-tight turns the Hummer can execute by routing power to the outside wheels.

Design details to notice about the LMV include the seating position, which puts the two astronauts ahead of the front wheels rather than plopping them into the middle of the vehicle as they were in the LRV. This reduces their exposure to the abrasive dust kicked up by the front wheels, which sticks to everything because of its electrostatic charge.

Models that GM designers show me have the astronauts sitting in the open, but they explain that the latest versions feature body panels that enclose the seats and the LMV’s cargo bed to help further block the dust.

Knowing that GM has gone to such measures to help keep my future spacesuit pristine makes it all the easier to volunteer for the mission to drive the LMV on the moon. Who else has already practiced?

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Lunar phases come and go, but the one passing through Earth’s shadow this weekend will take its time in the limelight.

From Sunday evening to early Monday, our pearly satellite will lapse into a total lunar eclipse, as well as its “super flower blood moon” phase. The first hints of darkness will appear on its surface around 10 p.m. Eastern on May 15. The totality part, when the moon is completely overshadowed, will last from about 11:30 p.m. Eastern on May 15 to 1 a.m. Eastern on May 16.

Total lunar eclipses, which happen when the sun, Earth, and moon land in a neat line, are usually seen twice a year in some regions. The Western Hemisphere will glimpse another one in November 2022—but the eclipse this weekend overlaps with maximum wax, which upgrades it to a blood moon (or what PopSci calls “the most metal moon”). As the orb moves through Earth’s shadow, sunlight refracted by atmospheric gases will bathe it in a penny-like glow. In effect, the moon will loom in the sky for the entire event, and look adequately bloody for at least half of it.

[Related: A total solar eclipse bathed Antarctica in darkness]

The “super flower” bit of the phenomenon is less scientific. A super moon refers to when the satellite’s orbit brings it closer to Earth, making it seem like it’s hanging larger in the heavens. The flower is just a seasonal label for the peak of the lunar cycle in May.

All this combined makes the upcoming eclipse almost unmissable, even with the naked eye. (A telescope or spotting scope will make for more comfortable viewing, but unlike in a total solar eclipse, you don’t have to protect your sight.) If you can’t pop outside for the late-night special, NASA will be live streaming the phenomenon from several cities in North America, Chile, and Italy. Or just check your social media feeds in the morning for the photos and time lapses.

In terms of astronomy, 2022 has been all about the moonshots. As NASA readies its lunar rocket for the Artemis I mission, other scientists have been digging into rock and soil samples from the Earth’s pock-marked companion. Earlier this month, a team from China modeled a process for producing oxygen and water from the moon’s minerals. And just yesterday, researchers from the University of Florida announced that they’d successfully germinated plants in regolith.

Thankfully, you don’t need a spacecraft taller than the Statue of Liberty to appreciate a lunar eclipse—an open window and clear night sky will do just fine.

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More than 50 years after Apollo 11 touched down on the moon’s rocky surface and scooped up vials of lunar soil, scientists have announced that they’ve kept the mission alive in a fresh way. A geologist and horticulturalists from the University of Florida (UF) successfully grew plants in regolith, or lunar soil, collected during the original Apollo landings. The team published their findings today in the journal Communications Biology; the results may impact NASA’s return to the moon in 2024. 

Obtaining the regolith itself was an arduous task, as Anna-Lisa and Paul Rob Ferl of the UF Space Plants Lab petitioned NASA three times over 11 years to be able to work with the soil. Regolith is in limited supply on Earth and is carefully stored in NASA’s Johnson Space Center, where it is kept in nitrogen to prevent oxidation and contamination. Scientists around the world are able to receive samples on loan, but NASA space biologist Sharmila Bhattacharya says that the substance is considered a very precious material. 

Regolith is notably different from Earth’s soil, partially because it’s bombarded by radioactive solar winds. Growing plants in it requires a fertilizing mixture called “Murashige-Skoog medium” on top of regular watering. These additions are to make up for the lack of essential nutrients in the regolith.

[Related: Lunar soil could help us make oxygen in space]

“On Earth, ‘soil’ connotes a lot of additional things. It also has organic materials, microbial samples, remnants of other plants, and so on,” Bhattacharya says. “Whereas regolith, strictly speaking, is this material on the surface of the moon or on the surface of Mars.” 

NASA, who helped to fund the research, provided the team with 12 grams of regolith in 2021. These teaspoons of soil were divided into thimble-sized plastic wells typically used for cell research. After planting the seeds, scientists moved the plates of wells into terrariums within a tightly controlled growth room. Initially, the UF researchers were unsure if any seeds would sprout, as the experiment was the first of its kind. But within just 60 hours of being planted, every seed in the regolith germinated and had tiny shoots.

Part of the team’s success might have come from the seeds they chose. “The Arabidopsis plant that was used for this is actually a very commonly used model organism for research on Earth’s surface, as well as in space,” Bhattacharya says. “In the past, for example, even from the NASA side, we have flown Arabidopsis on the International Space Station.” Those experiments have looked at everything from the extraorbital life cycle of greenery to the effect of gravity on plant parts.

Arabidopsis plants are easy and inexpensive to grow, but they are also suitable for research thanks to their genome. The species’ entire genetic sequence is much smaller compared to other plants and is well-mapped, making it a go-to for comparative studies. When the plants in lunar regolith appeared to struggle more than the control plants (which were planted in a regolith simulant called JSC-1A), researchers took a close look at the RNA from both batches.

“When this team looked at the changes in RNA, it [was] very clear that while the plant is managing to grow in this material, there were elements of stress,” Bhattacharya says. “The cells were turning on these responses like when they’re exposed to oxidative stress.”

Cellular stress indicators were only one sign of growth problems. The plants grown in regolith also showed stunted growth, shorter roots, and pigmentation on the plant. The stress of growing in lunar soil manifested externally, as well as internally in the plants’ RNA.

Bhattacharya says that in recent decades, the field of molecular biology has developed new tools to change cellular components in plants. If researchers are able to see exactly which gene pathways appear stressed, they can utilize genetic engineering  to help plants thrive in stressful environments. Engineering or finding plants better suited for regolith growth could be the key to lunar agriculture, which Bhattacharya says is a step toward longer space flights and maybe even off-Earth settlements.

[Related: NASA has big plans for space farms]

But the moon isn’t quite ready for terraforming yet. Since it lacks an atmosphere, any plants grown in the vacuum of space would need to be cultivated in an enclosed space alongside humans with access to oxygen and water. With further research on proper planting procedures and the wonders of lunar soil, the moon could very well host food and oxygen by the time humans step on the moon again.

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A team of scientists in China analyzed moon rocks recently collected by the country’s Chang’e-5 mission—the first moon rocks returned to Earth since the last Apollo mission in the 1970s.

Experimenting on the new moon rocks in a lab revealed that they contain materials possibly useful as catalysts to make fuel and oxygen on the moon. The team has proposed a strategy for how future lunar explorers could use these catalysts to create critical resources, instead of packing those supplies, one potential way to minimize the cost of long-term space exploration. They published their results on Thursday in the journal Joule.

The fact that the team was able to use data from the new moon rocks and “do this sort of calculation, I think is very impressive,” says Jeffrey Hoffman, former NASA astronaut and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT who wasn’t involved with the research. However, when it comes to the materials and energy needed to create fuel and oxygen, the study lacks any thorough estimates of how the process would scale up, Hoffman says.

The proposed process requires water, carbon, and chemical catalysts taken from the lunar soil. Those catalysts would help split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen, also with the help of catalysts, could be converted into a hydrocarbon fuel–methane or methanol–to be burned with the newly made oxygen. 

But carbon isn’t available on the lunar surface, so the team’s plan requires collecting it from the air of a crew cabin. That process, known as carbon capture, is difficult and energy intensive—and a sought-after technology to mitigate climate change. Questions of how astronauts would separate the carbon dioxide from the air, and how much they can acquire, are still unaddressed, Hoffman says. The process would also rely on water and metals collected from lunar soil, which is another challenge.

The team intends to use synthetic photosynthesis to drive the process, but Hoffman is unsure that a small solar array could provide enough power to create sufficient fuel for something like a return journey.

Hoffman was a member of the team who worked on the MOXIE experiment, designed to generate oxygen from Martian carbon dioxide, onboard the Perseverance rover. The MOXIE experiment needs 300 watts of power—enough to run a small vacuum—“just to make a few grams of oxygen per hour” from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Hoffman says. The end result is just a few breaths’ worth of oxygen.

The new lunar study has some clever ideas, such as using the moon’s day-night cycle to heat and cool the reactants and drive part of the process, says Julie Stopar, a planetary scientist who studies the moon’s surface and geology at the Lunar and Planetary Institute of the Universities Space Research Association. The challenge will be to “find a way to scale up and make it practical,” she says.

For a system such as this to work on the moon with only local resources, explorers would have to be able to supply just the right ratios of raw materials and be able to minimize waste in the process, she says. Ultimately, it’s a lab experiment that needs to prove it can be scaled, which may take several revisions and adaptations to moon-like conditions. The team assumes that astronauts can get the water necessary for this process from the regions of lunar craters cloaked in permanent shadows. 

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

“We have no ground truths there yet,” Hoffman says, regarding how much water there is and how accessible it will be. The water could be in the form of hydrated minerals, or ice crystals, concentrated in clumps, or dispersed in deposits inconveniently far apart, he says. NASA prefers flat landing sites far from craters, which are hazardous–but also the only place where water is likely to exist in useful quantities.

Even if obtainable water exists, harvesting the ice would entail “a mining operation in really, really cold regions,” Hoffman says: 40 to 60°C above absolute zero. “We right now don’t have equipment that works at those temperatures.”

The use of local resources on the moon or Mars would require “a long-term commitment” by NASA, Stopar says. At present, NASA is still in the early stages of figuring out designs for such projects, she says.

Stopar thinks space agencies could start with simpler goals for extraterrestrial materials—for instance, building radiation shelters on the moon from lunar regolith. Then those agencies could demonstrate, at a small scale, how to process lunar soil for water. Mining on other worlds will be very challenging, but MOXIE has already shown it’s possible to make fuel from Mars’s atmosphere.

In the near term, NASA may just send all the oxygen needed to fuel a return journey to Mars. But the agency will literally “pay the price,” Hoffman says. It will be less risky, though require an additional few billion dollars, to ship fuel rather than produce it on the Red Planet. Yet Hoffman is convinced of one thing: If NASA is going to have a sustained Mars exploration program, then sooner or later astronauts will have to start using what they find far from Earth.

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On its 40th pass over Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft caught a unique and magnificent sight: the shadow of Jupiter’s most mammoth moon, Ganymede, lurking over the marblesque planet. 

At the moment of capture, the spacecraft, which entered orbit around Jupiter in July 2016, was hovering about 44,000 miles above the Gas Giant’s clouds, according to a NASA press release. In comparison, Ganymede circles Jupiter from about 666,000 miles away.

According to the NASA blog, viewing Ganymede from the top of these clouds wouldn’t be too different from a total solar eclipse—which are far more common on Jupiter than on Earth. The planet has four major moons, for starters, that orbit on an incline similar to the giant planet, casting dramatic shadows over its stormy surface.

[Related: Jupiter’s largest moon sounds like a friendly robot.]

This also probably won’t be the last time you’ll hear about Ganymede in the near future. A new European Space Agency (ESA) Icy Moons Explorer named JUICE will set off on an eight-year journey next April to study Jupiter and some of its most famous satellites, including Callisto, Europa, and of course, Ganymede. The spacecraft will further examine the biggest moon’s internal ocean as “not only a planetary object, but also a possible habitat,” according to an ESApress release from March. 

The image above was created by citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos by enhancing the color of a raw capture from JunoCam in February. Visuals and other data from the JunoCam are available online for anyone to download and get creative with.

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NASA is about to take its first baby steps back to the moon. Phase one of the plan, fittingly called Artemis 1, plans to dispatch an uncrewed test flight around the moon and back. It will be the first flight of the Artemis program, which aims to put humans on the moon again by the mid-2020s.

But before Artemis 1 can happen, NASA needs to ensure that its highly touted rocket—known as the Space Launch System (SLS)—is fully operational. That still hasn’t happened; the rocket’s latest dress rehearsal ended prematurely earlier this month. It’s the third in a sequence of unsuccessful practice sessions for the team of engineers.

One of the key problems is that NASA hasn’t been able to pump all of the Artemis rocket’s fuel reserved into its tanks. As NASA engineers tested filling up the tanks on the Kennedy Space Center launch pad, technical issues and leaks prevented the process from being completed. It might sound bad, but this sort of obstacle rings all too familiar in space launches.

“I’m hopeful that there won’t be too many delays, and they’ll figure out what is causing the problems pretty quickly and be able to get back on a better track pretty soon,” says Makena Young, an associate fellow in space at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

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

When the Obama administration green-lit the SLS rocket concept a decade ago, NASA said it would be ready for launch by 2016 or 2017. But experimental rockets in this stage of their development are almost expected to have major difficulties. A rocket is a highly complex operation—it’s not good enough to just plop one atop a pad and light it like a firework. A multitude of intricate subsystems have to work together in it for it to help astronauts and other precious cargo reach space.

The pad itself, for instance, is far more than a temporary resting site for a rocket before it takes off. In the case of SLS, it’s a mobile launch tower that rolls onto the launchpad and plays several critical roles.

Sprouting from that toweris a mass of tendrils, called umbilicals, latched onto the rocket. One umbilical allows astronauts to board the rocket when the crew capsule is hundreds of feet in the air. Others act as stabilizers that keep the rocket steady on the launchpad. Still others include cables that provide vital electrical and communications links between the ground and the rocket.

And all of those umbilicals, which operate and separate in different ways, must effortlessly detach at liftoff. That’s a big ask when the object they’re anchored too is a fiery 365-foot-tall beast that can set off car alarms from miles away. “It’s a violent, violent atmosphere for those components to be in,” says Kevin Miller, an engineer at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “It’s an interesting environment unlike anything else in the world, and we have to make sure it operates flawlessly.” 

Not all umbilicals attach to the tower of the spacecraft. On the other side of the rocket, two more tendrils rise from the ground and link up near its bottom. One of the chief functions of these Tail Service Mast Umbilicals (TSMUs) is to help fill SLS’s fuel tanks as the rocket sits on the launchpad.

When it finally comes time to fly, the SLS propels itself with two some simple elements: hydrogen and oxygen. Pump them into the same chamber, ignite them, and the subsequent reaction creates water and massive amounts of energy that allow the rocket to push past Earth’s atmosphere and gravitational field. (That’s just the main stage. The SLS also relies on a pair of boosters like crutches to help push it farther up into the sky. These burn aluminum-based solid fuel through an entirely different process.)

But because gases are not very dense, trying to store that hydrogen and oxygen in their room-temperature forms would require fuel tanks far too large to be practical on a rocket. Instead, these elements must be kept in chilled liquid states. That cold is nothing to sneeze at. Oxygen liquifies at -297 degrees Fahrenheit (-183 degrees Celsius). Meanwhile, liquid hydrogen’s boiling point is a more biting -423 degrees F (-253 degrees C).

In its latest test, NASA filled up 49 percent of the liquid oxygen and 5 percent of the liquid hydrogen before technicians spotted a hydrogen leak and halted filling.

[Related: Astronauts explain what it’s like to be ‘shot off the planet’]

“A small quantity of liquid hydrogen becomes an absolutely huge gaseous hydrogen cloud,” says Miller. That flammable fallout could be disastrous if it’s not fixed before takeoff.

“Many launches have been scrubbed by propellant leaks over the years, either with launch vehicle or ground system hardware,” says Jeff Foust, a space writer who has been following SLS since the project’s inception. Throughout history, numerous space shuttle launches have faced problems with leaks. “These problems are tracked down and fixed, and the vehicles eventually launch,” says Foust.

But just as the TSMUs need to function properly to fuel the rocket, they also need to pump it flush with nitrogen gas. Doing this purges the rocket’s system of the aforementioned hydrogen, minimizing potential fire hazards. Nitrogen also acts as climate control to keep the rocket’s components at a steady temperature and low humidity—something that’s especially important in Florida’s subtropical climate.

“It keeps all the electronics and such happy when they’re nice and cool and dry,” says Miller.

Still, even at this stage, such errors are expected. Dress rehearsals and other tests are designed to catch finicky problems before they can plague actual launches involving astronauts and pricy space instruments.

[Related: We could live in caves on the moon. What would that be like?]

As for what this means for the future of Artemis launches, the timetable isn’t certain. Successful tests are necessary before the first full uncrewed launch can be schedule. At this rate, Artemis I might not speed off to the moon until June or early July.

If launching Artemis flights to the moon is anything like launching arrows from the bow of its namesake goddess, then it will be another few weeks before NASA knows that the bow works at all. Only after that can the mission lift off.

“It’s not a good thing that it’s being delayed, but it’s a good thing that they’re taking every precaution to make sure that this will be a safe and successful launch,” says Young.

That said, any delays to Artemis 1 will put pressure on the scheduling of Artemis 2: the first crewed mission, which will put three US and one Canadian astronaut in lunar orbit for 10 days. Artemis 2 is currently slated to launch in May 2024, but it will take roughly two years to prepare after Artemis 1. The longer Artemis 1’s launch slips, the longer humans will have to wait to visit the far side of the moon.

Only after that comes phase three: placing boots back in moon dust for the first time since 1972.

Correction (April 27, 2022): The story previously mixed up the percentage levels of liquid oxygen and hydrogen levels that were injected into the SLS rocket during NASA’s most recent wet dress rehearsal. It also incorrectly stated that there was a nitrogen leak during that test. Both of those lines have now been updated.

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For two space architects who spent two months in a remote Arctic habitat to simulate lunar exploration, getting personal and spending time on leisure helped keep them happier and pass the time quicker, according to a new study.

The study, published last month in Acta Astronautica, found that the two architects had an increasing desire for social connection over the course of the experiment, a 61-day mission in a small capsule-like habitat in Northern Greenland. The shelter, which they designed, is an egg-shaped pod that collapses using origami folds to become portable. Their only access to the outside world was a satellite phone limited to 160-character messages. 

They didn’t increasingly feel more resigned, however, as might be expected. The voluntary social isolation that explorers deal with in spaceflight, typically with a known end date, may impact people differently than the isolation some experience in day-to-day life. 

 “Our research shows that being socially isolated and confined in an extreme environment when you are motivated to achieve a goal…might have fewer negative consequences compared with other episodes of social isolation and social exclusion,” says Luca Pancani, a social psychologist at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy and an author on the paper.

For the purposes of simulating a longer space mission, two participants is too few people to be realistic, says Peter Suedfeld, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia who has studied how people respond to space and other isolated environments and wasn’t involved in the study. But the 61-day duration is more accurate than many other too-short experiments, because NASA plans to have a sustained presence on the moon.

“There’s a serious question as to the validity of simulation studies,” Suedfeld says, because the conditions of space exploration can’t really be mimicked on the ground. Though he thinks there’s still a place for them in space research. Essentially no psychological research has been done on astronauts on the moon, so good simulations are useful in studying how people might react during real lunar missions.

In this experiment, the participants had to suit up for the cold whenever they left their small pod to collect ice for water or to film the area for a documentary.

As for the finding that time flew while the architects were having fun—or at least doing anything recreational—that has been well documented in other situations, he says. This happened while the architects watched films together or exercised.

The Chinese Space Agency is doing a lunar simulation as well, though it isn’t focused on the outside environment at all, Suedfeld says. By contrast, many other experiments have tried to simulate Martian conditions such as the Hi-seas project in Hawaii and Russia’s Mars 500 experiment, which was entirely indoors in Moscow.

Even though there were only two participants, the study was conceptually robust, says Valerie Olson, an environmental anthropologist at the University of California Irvine, who has authored a book on the culture of spaceflight and wasn’t involved with the work. It is a nice example of exploring the relationship between social and psychological factors, she says.

[Related: We could live in caves on the moon. What would that be like?]

For a long time, the psychological study of individual astronauts has been central to the study of human spaceflight. But in the last decade or two, more emphasis has been put on social psychology and more qualitative sciences, she says. In this case, the study analyzed the results of a regular, self-reported psychological questionnaire. It found that when the architects–who knew each other well prior to the mission–talked about personal matters, that seemed to lessen feelings of resignation and hopelessness while increasing their desire for social contact.

Olson has a general criticism for simulations in extreme or isolated environments. Psychological researchers are often interested in finding universal human traits—attributes and experiences that can be generalized for large groups of people. But humans are “both biological and cultural beings,” Olson says, who can’t be separated from their cultural upbringings. So how individuals will react to these extreme environments depends a lot on what they think of the environments to begin with. She’s curious about the participants’ backgrounds: “Two young Danish male architects—what are their attitudes and experiences about the Arctic or about coldness?” she says.

The Arctic is typically described by experts in this kind of research as “as being a place of isolation and extremity,” Olson says. But the Arctic is also home to many indigenous peoples—for them, what seems extreme to Western researchers is home, and what seems like isolation is just a smaller social circle. The barren, rugged, unforgiving landscape could feel alien to one group and comforting to another.

Astronauts, including those from the US and former Soviet Union, have held different attitudes about what was good and bad about their time in space and different values about what space means to them, Olson says. She’s interested in what emerging space agencies, especially in the global South will focus on—how different cultures will explore the questions of “what is loneliness, what is sociality, what is belonging?”

If humans are to thrive in space, they may need to give more merit to what the astronautics community calls the squishy stuff—how people feel and what is meaningful to them.

This story has been updated to clarify there have been no psychological studies of astronauts on the moon.  

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Enceladus, the sixth moon of Saturn, is roughly the size of the United Kingdom and covered in miles-thick ice. Underneath is a liquid ocean, which bursts out of the surface through a series of cracks at the southern pole, sending a constant geyser spraying out into space. That geyser contains traces of undersea vents, saltwater, and even methane, a sign that the pitch-black sea could contain life.

The moon is unique in the solar system, says Maxwell Rudolph, a geophysicist at the University of California, Davis. A new study he led, published in Geophysical Research Letters, proposes an explanation for the “tiger stripes,” and the geyser that burst through them. As Enceladus heats and cools down in orbit, its icy crust buckles under pressure, allowing water to spill towards the surface.

[Related: Saturn has a slushy core and rings that wiggle]

The cycles of heating and cooling are driven by the movement of the moon itself. Every hundred million years or so, the shape of Enceladus’s orbit around Saturn changes, from more circular to more oval and back. When the orbit is more oval, the moon is squeezed tighter by Saturn’s gravity and then released. “It causes the entire ice shelf to be stretched out, almost like it’s being kneaded,” says Rudolph. Just the slight heaving of that ice is enough to heat up the entire moon and melt the shell slightly.

Then, when the moon’s orbit becomes circular, its crust cools down again. The ice shelf expands downward into the hidden ocean. What happens next should be “obvious to anybody who has ever put a bottle of soda into the freezer,” says Rudolph. “The volume change as water freezes to ice causes the pressure to build up. [On Enceladus], this happens on a global scale.”

When the pressure gets too intense, the outer ice cracks, in the same way that a bread’s crust splits as the soft interior expands. The buildup takes millions of years, but the fissure appears  in seconds, starting at the surface and shooting down about nine miles to the underground ocean.

The cracks can only make it down to the ocean at the poles, where the ice is thinnest. “It’s kind of a matter of chance whether the first crack forms at the [Enceladus’s] north pole or the south pole,” says Rudolph. “But once it does, it sets up a series of events that lead to the tiger stripe fissures.” It’s possible that the process has happened repeatedly during each cold cycle.

But the pressure alone doesn’t quite explain the geyser. According to the models run by Rudolph and his team, even all the newly formed ice isn’t enough to squeeze water to the surface. And photos of Enceladus don’t show telltale traces of liquid water spilling out across the moon’s smooth exterior.

Here, a process described by Miki Nakajima, a planetary scientist at the University of Rochester who was not involved in the new study, might come into play. In 2016, Nakajima demonstrated that if liquid water pushed part of the way up a crack in the ice, it could begin to spontaneously boil in the vacuum of space. “We know the crack thickness on the surface, but we don’t really know what’s going on inside,” Nakajima says. “It could be a straight line; it could be weird.” Vapor could escape anyway because the boiling can happen in even the narrowest of fissures.

Any one crack leading to the ocean wouldn’t produce much water. Deep in the fissures, the water probably simmers, and a person standing on the surface would be surrounded by a fine mist, not a jet. It would take many crevasses and tubes to produce the geyser humans have photographed from space. Nakajima says that if the explanation is correct, there are many cracks smaller than the tiger stripes on Enceladus that astronomers haven’t gotten close enough to see yet.

Other forces could be at play, too. Dissolved carbon dioxide or other gases could bubble up to the surface like the carbonation in soda, shooting water to the surface. Unpublished work presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting last year also suggests that water could be released by melting ice in the crevasse, rather than from the buried ocean.

“I think everything is on the table,” says Nakajima.

Rudolph’s study also examined Europa, one of Jupiter’s most famous moons, which has both an ice crust and a liquid, subsurface ocean. But Europa is about five times the radius of Enceladus, and hot-cold cycles from gravity just aren’t big enough to pierce its thicker crust.

“I’m really intrigued by the model being able to explain Enceladus, but not Europa,” says Nakajima. 

[Related: NASA’s next Jupiter mission will hunt for life’s ingredients under Europa’s frozen shell]

Elodie Lesage, an expert on Europa at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, writes in an email to Popular Science that there’s no direct evidence of cryovolcanoes on Jupiter’s moon, though certain plains of its surface look like they could be the result of liquid water But based on the new findings, she notes, any potential ice volcanoes on Europa probably form for completely different reasons than on Enceladus. “It seems unlikely that liquid water could rise from Europa’s ocean to its surface,” she explains. Instead, pockets of water could be embedded in the crust, and explode out when they begin to freeze, again “like a can of soda someone forgot in a freezer.”

Enceladus was last investigated by the Cassini space probe in 2015—it flew 30 miles above the moon’s surface—while the data on Europa’s ice eruptions mostly comes from far away telescope images. The next mission to Europa is planned to launch in 2024. “Whatever’s going on [there] is less understood,” says Rudolph.

That difference means that any hunts for alien life would unfold in separate ways on the two moons. If there are organisms living deep under the ice, Enceladus’s geyser appears to give us direct access to their world. Whatever lies inside Europa could be much harder to understand.

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NASA’s most powerful rocket, called the Space Launch System (SLS), rolled to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center on March 18 and is wrapping up its first “wet dress rehearsal” in the next day or two. The moon-bound SLS will shuttle the uncrewed Orion spacecraft during the Artemis I mission (currently scheduled for May 2022) and a crewed capsule with the Artemis II mission (slated for 2024, but likely launching much later). At 322 feet tall and 3.5 million pounds, it’s one of the largest rockets ever built—and will produce 15 percent more thrust than the Saturn V vehicle behind the final Apollo lunar missions.

The wet dress rehearsal involves fueling drills and a mock clocking system, according to a NASA update on the mission page. “Now at the pad for the first time, we will use the integrated systems to practice the launch countdown and load the rocket with the propellants it needs to send Orion on a lunar journey in preparation for launch,” Tom Whitmeyer, deputy associate administrator for Common Exploration Systems Development at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in the post. The SLS has four liquid-propellent engines and a pair of 17-story-tall boosters that can burn close to 3 million gallons of fuel in under eight minutes—the amount of time it will take to push Orion into low Earth orbit. Those boosters give it enough heft and thrust to carry 59,500 pounds of cargo for hundreds of thousands of miles, earning it the title of a heavy-lift, deep-space rocket.

[Related: Hermes will be NASA’s mini-weather station for tracking solar activity]

Building the SLS has been a decade-long process for NASA and its manufacturing partners. The space agency first shared the rocket’s design with the public back in 2011. Initially, NASA had planned the maiden mission for 2017—but that date was pushed back several times due to issues with the power unit and other parts in the Orion spacecraft. If all goes well with the wet dress rehearsal, however, the vehicle could hit the launch pad for real in another few weeks.

The one downside to the system is that it isn’t completely reusable. At $23 billion, construction expenses have already exceeded the original budget; the cost per-mission is estimated to be around $2 billion. A salvageable vehicle, like SpaceX’s stainless steel Starship prototype, could fly people and payloads over long distances for far less money. But for now, NASA has its sights set on putting its most heavy-hitting rocket a little closer to the moon, and someday Mars.

See some NASA photos from the SLS launchpad rollout below.

Correction (March 21, 2022): The story first incorrectly reported that the SLS rocket is more than double the height of the Saturn V. That measurement was taken from the Saturn V’s height without boosters: All together, the older rocket is actually slightly taller than the SLS.

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NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return the first humans to the moon since 1972, is severely over budget and delayed, the space agency’s inspector general warned recently. Speaking during a meeting of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology on March 1, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin took issue with the performance of private contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin, saying that industry contracts favored the companies to the agency’s detriment. 

Meanwhile, Congress recently released the 2022 federal budget, setting NASA’s yearly funds at $24 billion–lower than the agency had hoped, but with more money earmarked for the Artemis program than NASA had originally requested.

The issues with Artemis have been well known and frequently discussed in the space community for a long time, says John Logsdon, an professor emeritus at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University who founded the university’s Space Policy Institute. Three years ago, Vice President Mike Pence announced 2024 as Artemis’s accelerated goal to return humans to the moon. That date “was never realistic, it was a political artifact,” Logsdon says.

An inspector general’s report published last year described the same complaints raised in the March committee meeting. “In November 2021, NASA’s inspector general reported that Artemis has experienced three years of delays and cost increases of $4.3 billion for the three key programs—Space Launch System, Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, and Exploration Ground Systems,” a spokesperson for the Office of the Inspector General says. These are the rocket that will take astronauts to the moon, the new spacecraft that will ride atop it, and the support for rocket assembly and launch here on Earth, respectively.

Yet few people outside the space industry noticed that report until the inspector general’s recent testimony, says Marcia Smith, editor of Space Police Online, and a longtime space policy analyst who previously worked for the Congressional Research Service. Smith says she cannot “point to a single individual” she knows who thought the 2024 timeline was feasible. That time pressure helped usher in the current era of space privatization, as NASA couldn’t meet every demand alone, she says.

[Related: The US return to the moon gets a schedule change—again]

President Donald Trump signed Space Policy Directive-1 in late 2017, which entailed new lunar missions slated to begin in 2025 at the earliest. In fact, most people thought 2028 was more reasonable for the first launch, Logsdon says. Then, in 2019, Pence announced that the missions would begin even earlier, in 2024.

When Pence announced it, “Artemis was a big surprise to everybody,” Smith says.

Yet “NASA has to salute their bosses,” Logsdon says. “If Pence says 2024…then NASA says ‘Yes, sir, we’ll work towards 2024.’” He doubts anybody at NASA ever believed that timeline. “The inspector general’s kind of late to the game,” Logsdon says.

But Artemis may not be overdue–from a certain point of view. If you go by a pre-Pence goal of 2028, “then we’re going to beat the timeline,” Logsdon says. If you go with 2024, which Logsdon says nobody in the space community thought was feasible, then it’s overdue. But saying NASA is “delaying” beyond an impossible schedule is a “somewhat meaningless” criticism, he says.

What about the over budget part?

Over budget and overdue projects are actually “pretty standard” for all big government research and development programs, Smith says. Other agencies such as the US Department of Defense and Department of Energy have the same problem.

Compared to the recently-launched James Webb Space Telescope, which ended up costing $10 billion after starting with an optimistic goal of $1 billion to $3.5 billion, “this is only slightly over budget,” Logsdon says.

Smith says she thinks the Inspector General had a more nuanced point: That NASA isn’t being transparent about Artemis’s costs. 

There isn’t one big, clear program cost, or even an explicit ticket-to-the-moon cost. Instead all the costs are divided among different projects supporting the mission. “He’s an auditor, he’s trying to pull it all together,” Smith says of the inspector general. NASA disagrees with how the costs were tallied, but with a project this big, it’s fair that Congress “should know what they’re getting themselves into,” she says.

[Related: Jeff Bezos is suing NASA. Heres why.]

It’s not clear how influential this report will be. The inspector general’s office produces “excellent reports…but they really don’t move the needle much,” Smith says. The Artemis program has a long, complicated history–but at this point, Congress is committed, she says, and unless the SLS rocket “explodes on the launch pad,” things aren’t likely to change.

The Artemis missions are an extension of a Bush-era space program started in 2004, which then became the Constellation program, which then became Artemis. The goals weren’t always the same, either. “Between 2011 and 2016 this was a program to go to Mars,” Logsdon says.

The US could have prioritized a crewed mission to Mars. As recently as June 2019, Trump had talked about going to Mars instead of the moon. But, Logsdon says, “the people advising him on space were lunatics [who] were convinced that the moon should be the first destination.”

Trump decided to “reinsert the moon as a destination” when he signed Space Policy Directive-1, Logsdon says. This directed NASA to explore the moon and other parts of the solar system, focusing on our nearest celestial neighbor with long-term plans to use it as a stepping stone to Mars.

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Paul Hayne is an assistant professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder. This story originally featured on The Conversation.

On March 4, 2022, a lonely, spent rocket booster will smack into the surface of the moon at nearly 6,000 mph. Once the dust has settled, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will move into position to get an up-close view of the smoldering crater and hopefully shed some light on the mysterious physics of planetary impacts.

As a planetary scientist who studies the moon, I view this unplanned impact as an exciting opportunity. The moon has been a steadfast witness to solar system history, its heavily cratered surface recording innumerable collisions over the last 4 billion years. However, scientists rarely get a glimpse of the projectiles—usually asteroids or comets—that form these craters. Without knowing the specifics of what created a crater, there is only so much scientists can learn by studying one.

The upcoming rocket impact will provide a fortuitous experiment that could reveal a lot about how natural collisions pummel and scour planetary surfaces. A deeper understanding of impact physics will go a long way in helping researchers interpret the barren landscape of the moon and also the effects impacts have on Earth and other planets.

When a rocket crashes on the moon

There has been some debate over the exact identity of the tumbling object currently on a collision course with the moon. Astronomers know that the object is an upper stage booster discarded from a high-altitude satellite launch. It is roughly 40 feet (12 meters) long and weighs nearly 10,000 pounds (4,500 kilograms). Evidence suggests that it is likely either a SpaceX rocket launched in 2015 or a Chinese rocket launched in 2014, but both parties have denied ownership.

The rocket is expected to crash into the vast barren plain within the giant Hertzsprung crater, just over the horizon on the far side of the moon from Earth.

An instant after the rocket touches the lunar surface, a shock wave will travel up the length of the projectile at several miles per second. Within milliseconds, the back end of the rocket hull will be obliterated with bits of metal exploding in all directions.

A twin shock wave will travel downward into the powdery top layer of the moon’s surface called the regolith. The compression of the impact will heat up the dust and rocks and generate a white-hot flash that would be visible from space if there happened to be a craft in the area at the time. A cloud of vaporized rock and metal will expand from the impact point as dust, and sand-sized particles are thrown skyward. Over the course of several minutes, the ejected material will rain back down to the surface around the now-smoldering crater. Virtually nothing will remain of the ill-fated rocket.

If you are a fan of space, you may have experienced some déjà vu reading that description—NASA performed a similar experiment in 2009 when it intentionally crashed the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, into a permanently shadowed crater near the lunar south pole. I was a part of the LCROSS mission, and it was a smashing success. By studying the composition of the dust plume lofted into the sunlight, scientists were able to find signs of a few hundred pounds of water ice that had been liberated from the moon’s surface by the impact. This was a crucial piece of evidence to support the idea that for billions of years, comets have been delivering water and organic compounds to the moon when they crash on its surface.

However, because the LCROSS rocket’s crater is permanently obscured by shadows, my colleagues and I have struggled for a decade to determine the depth of this buried ice-rich layer.

Observing with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

The accidental experiment of the upcoming crash will give planetary scientists the chance to observe a very similar crater in the light of day. It will be like seeing the LCROSS crater in full detail for the first time.

Since the impact is going to occur on the far side of the moon, it will be out of view for Earth-based telescopes. But about two weeks after the impact, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will begin to get glimpses of the crater as its orbit takes it above the impact zone. Once conditions are right, the lunar orbiter’s camera will start taking photos of the impact site with a resolution of about a 3 feet (1 meter) per pixel. Lunar orbiters from other space agencies may also train their cameras on the crater.

The shape of the crater and ejected dust and rocks will hopefully reveal how the rocket was oriented at the moment of impact. A vertical orientation will produce a more circular feature, whereas an asymmetric debris pattern might indicate more of a belly flop. Models suggest that the crater could be anywhere from around 30 to 100 feet in diameter and about 6 to 10 feet deep.

The amount of heat generated from the impact will also be valuable information. If observations can be made quickly enough, there’s a possibility the lunar orbiter’s infrared instrument will be able to detect glowing-hot material inside the crater. This could be used to calculate the total amount of heat from the impact. If the orbiter can’t get a view fast enough, high-resolution images could be used to estimate the amount of melted material in the crater and debris field.

By comparing before and after images from the orbiter’s camera and heat sensor, scientists will look for any other subtle changes to the surface. Some of these effects can extend for hundreds of times the radius of the crater.

Why this is important

Impacts and crater formation are a pervasive phenomenon in the solar system. Craters shatter and fragment planetary crusts, gradually forming the loose, granular top layer common on most airless worlds. However, the overall physics of this process are poorly understood despite how common it is.

Observing the upcoming rocket impact and resulting crater could help planetary scientists better interpret the data from the 2009 LCROSS experiment and produce better impact simulations. With a veritable phalanx of missions planned to visit the moon in the coming years, knowledge of lunar surface properties—especially the quantity and depth of buried ice—is in high demand.

Regardless of this wayward rocket’s identity, this rare impact event will provide new insights that may prove critical to the success of future missions to the moon and beyond.

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Update (February 14, 2022): A correction was released that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will not crash into the moon—but another craft, China’s Chang’e 5-T1 booster, is instead bound for the lunar collision. On Saturday, February 12, Bill Gray, creator of near-Earth object tracker Project Pluto, posted the correction on his website. The error was initially spotted by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer, Jon Giorgini, who prompted Gray to take another look at earlier space missions and the spacecrafts’ trajectories.

Part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be crashing into the moon in March—an unintended lunar collision that is likely the first of its kind. 

The piece is a booster from a Falcon 9 rocket that SpaceX launched in February 2015 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The rocket carried NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite on what was supposed to be SpaceX’s first deep space mission. While DSCOVR made it to its target—a point thousands of miles from Earth that provides a stable orbit for the observatory—Falcon 9 faltered at its second stage. 

After releasing its satellite, Falcon 9 was originally supposed to return to Earth. But the rocket had gone too high and lacked the energy to escape Earth’s atmosphere. It is now space junk, and has been circling Earth in a chaotic orbit since then. 

Now, the rocket is on route for “certain impact” with the moon on March 4, writes Bill Gray, the creator of the Project Pluto software, which is used by both professional and amateur astronomers worldwide to track near-Earth objects, asteroids, minor planets, and comets. When the second stage crashes, it will be “the first unintentional case” of space junk impacting the moon that he is aware of, Gray writes in a blog posted last week. Based on his analyses, he believes the rocket, traveling at about 5,770 miles per hour, will slam into the far side of the moon near its equator.

[Related: SpaceX Starships keep exploding, but it’s all part of Elon Musk’s plan]

While this may sound frightening, astronomers assure that this is nothing to worry about. Asteroids and comets have pummeled the moon for as long as there has been a moon, which is the reason for its cratered surface. There have also been previous, deliberate crashes into the moon, like the LCROSS collision of 2009, which helped lead to the discovery of lunar subsurface water.

“For those asking: yes, an old Falcon 9 second stage left in high orbit in 2015 is going to hit the moon on March 4. It’s interesting, but not a big deal,” tweeted Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. When asked what happens if the rocket punctures the moon, he later tweeted a reply: “Just another hole in the green cheese.”

It is unlikely the collision will be observable from Earth, since it will occur on the far side of the moon, and just days after the new moon. Satellites and other spacecraft in the area are also poorly positioned and will also probably miss the event. But the aftermath of the collision could yield potentially interesting findings, like what lunar subsurface material gets ejected upon impact. Gray, who writes that he is “rooting for a lunar impact,” is hoping for something to hit the moon in an area that would be visible from Earth, but “we’d have to get very lucky for that.” 

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Update (January 12, 2022): After a month of trekking across the moon’s surface, Yutu 2 finally got close to the unidentified object and found it was a funny-shaped rock. Foreign news reports shared images of a rabbit-like piece of the Von Kármán crater last week. The similarity was drawn because Yutu itself translates to “jade rabbit” in Chinese. Once you see it, though, you’re stuck with it.

China’s Yutu 2 Rover, which was crossing a crater on the far side of the moon, spied a mysterious, cube-like structure in November as it scanned the skyline. The unidentified structure seemed to be located around 260 feet away from where the Rover traversed, which was making its way across the Von Kármán crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon. 

Our Space, associated with the Chinese National Space Administration which controls Yutu 2, first noted the object in a post on December 3rd; the story dubbed the object “mystery hut.” Yutu 2 has since adjusted course to check out the cube, and will spend the next 2 to 3 lunar days (which takes up 2 to 3 months time on Earth) investigating this mysterious moon feature. Researchers expect the weirdly shaped structure to simply be a large boulder. The particularly geometric shape of this mysterious object may simply be from pixelation in the photo itself.

[Related: Check out the first images of Mars from China’s Tianwen-1 probe]

The Yutu 2 Rover launched with China’s Chang’e 4 mission in 2018, and reached the moon in January 2019. The mission aimed to discover more about the far side of the moon, or as pop culture calls it, the “dark side” of the moon. Contrary to this nickname, the far side of the moon is not actually always dark, it just faces away from the Earth. The rover, solar powered, goes into a kind of hibernation when the sun sets on the far side of the moon, and wakes up to work when the sun rises over the crater. 

Yutu 2 has seen plenty of interesting moon features in its travels already, including a strange gel that turned out to be some rocks melted together, and some perplexing shards that were likely hurled from the impact of a meteor. The Chang’e 4 mission has also brought forth some fascinating new discoveries like what could be pieces of the moon’s mantle. 

Whatever this structure turns out to be, Yutu 2 will continue uncovering other secrets the “dark side” of the moon is holding.  

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The European Space Agency will soon send JUICE, or the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer on a mission to scout out Jupiter and three of its 79 moons: Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede.  

Scheduled to launch in April 2023, JUICE will blast off from an Ariane 5 rocket before embarking on a 7.6-year journey to reach the gas giant. Broken up by multiple gravitational assists—or pushes that help adjust a spacecraft’s speed and trajectory—from Venus and Earth, the explorer will carry some of the most powerful remote sensing and geophysical instruments ever flown to the outer solar system. 

Last month, a 1:18 scale model of JUICE was employed at the ESA’s testing center in the Netherlands to try out one of the instruments, RIME, also known as the Radar For Icy Moons Exploration. RIME will use ice-penetrating radar and a 52-foot-long antennae to map the subsurface structure of these moons, up to about 5.6 miles down.

To test, the model was placed in a chamber lined with metal walls that blocked incoming radio signals and black, spiky foam coating that absorbed internal radio signals, or outgoing transmissions. This dichotomy helped the JUICE team simulate both the vast emptiness of space and the challenges the craft could run into during the mission. 

“We don’t go to Jupiter all the time, in particular with the European Space Agency. So it’s a big mission for us,” says Olivier Witasse, project scientist for the JUICE mission. “The vision is really to understand whether [the target places] have what we call ‘habitable places’ around Jupiter.”

[Related: Researchers just measured Jupiter’s stratospheric winds for the first time—and they’re a doozy]

Mars has long been a hot research destination in the search for life, but icy worlds also have a legacy of promising conditions, Witasse says. “Twenty years ago, we discovered that there is a lot of liquid water underneath the surface [of icy worlds], and it wasn’t a big surprise.” 

Space probes have been sent to study Jupiter since the early 1970s, but next year, JUICE will be the first to orbit around the planet’s moons. The mission, along with NASA’s JUNO which was recently extended through 2025, will bring the total number of Jupiter space probes up to 10, making it one of the most visited locations in our cosmic neighborhood. 

One reason Jupiter and its satellites remain popular research destinations is because of their location in the Jovian System—known for its wide diversity of environments. By studying Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede, places which scientists already suspect harbor internal oceans, we could learn details that reveal new clues about the habitability of icy worlds. 

Along with investigating conditions for how these habitable environments may have come about, the spacecraft’s main objective will be to observe Jupiter’s atmosphere and its magnetosphere, the region dominated by the planet’s magnetic field. But that’s where things will get tricky. In order to achieve mission success, JUICE will have to be able survive the physical strain of being so close to the gas giant. 

“On the Earth, the magnetosphere shields us from charged particles from the sun,” says Michael Summers, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at George Mason University. “But on Jupiter, you’ve got a magnetic field that’s vastly larger than that of the Earth.”

According to Summers, Jupiter’s larger magnetosphere, or radiation belt, is so powerful that it can deal significant damage to the sensitive instruments a spacecraft carries onboard. To make sure this scenario is avoided, JUICE was specifically designed with Jupiter’s harsh environment in mind. Hundreds of pounds of thick aluminum shielding protects its most sensitive areas, and by never dipping below Europa’s orbit, it plans to stay outside of the planet’s main radiation belt for most of its mission operations. 

But as with any experiment, the perfect scenario isn’t guaranteed to happen. “Even though we know we’re going to be surprised, and we try to think of all the things that might surprise us, we’re still surprised,” Summers says. 

He says that a decade ago, a mission like JUICE would’ve been almost impossible to achieve. But with new technological advancements and the advent of similar deep-space projects like New Horizons, Summers is optimistic that the mission, while challenging, will be a successful one. 

“Everybody that’s interested in science at all wants to know if we’re alone in the universe,” Summers says. And with JUICE, researchers expect the day we’re able to answer that question may be closer than we think. 

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NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew by Jupiter’s moon Ganymede in June. Using data from that rendezvous, scientists have created an audio track of the sounds of Ganymede’s atmosphere. 

During Juno’s 38th orbit around Jupiter, the craft soared around Ganymede and recorded the moon’s electric and magnetic radio waves. Juno sensed the waves, produced in Ganymede’s magnetosphere, with its Waves instrument. NASA scientists shifted the frequencies of those recordings to produce a 50-second track audible to human ears. The result sounds like something from Star Wars, with high chimes and whistles reminiscent of R2-D2. 

“This soundtrack is just wild enough to make you feel as if you were riding along as Juno sails past Ganymede for the first time in more than two decades,” Juno Principal Investigator Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio said in a statement. “If you listen closely, you can hear the abrupt change to higher frequencies around the midpoint of the recording, which represents entry into a different region in Ganymede’s magnetosphere.”

Analysis of Ganymede’s wave recordings are still ongoing, but “it is possible the change in the frequency shortly after closest approach is due to passing from the nightside to the dayside of Ganymede,” William Kurth, lead co-investigator for the Waves investigation, said in a statement.

Ganymede is our solar system’s largest moon, with a diameter 41 percent of Earth’s. It’s also the only moon known to have its own magnetic field. 

Juno is NASA’s mission to understand how gas giants formed and their role in the solar system’s creation. Launched in 2011, Juno began orbiting Jupiter in 2016, and is the first spacecraft to penetrate the thick gas that covers the giant planet. 

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

Using Juno’s magnetometer, NASA’s team also recently produced the most detailed map ever of Jupiter’s magnetic field. Comparing the readings from the spacecraft’s five years in the gas giant’s orbit, scientists can see that the Great Blue Spot, Jupiter’s magnetic anomaly at the equator, is drifting eastward. It’s traveling about 2 inches per second relative to the rest of the planet’s body, which means it will lap the planet in about 350 years. The Great Red Spot–the anticyclone just south of Jupiter’s equator–is drifting westward and will circle the planet in about four-and-a-half years.

“This is really the first time that we’ve seen a magnetic field getting affected by the atmosphere,” Bolton told The Washington Post. “It really demonstrates that its deep atmosphere is very dynamic, much more than people had thought.”

The team also released new images of Jupiter and its swirling storms. Jupiter’s vortices resemble those in Earth’s oceans—astronomers believe they emerge spontaneously, and researchers have no idea when, or if, these storms will dissipate. The new images and readings contribute to a more complete understanding of Jupiter and of our solar system at large. The formation of such a huge gas planet surely influenced the way our solar system pulled itself together, but Jupiter’s genesis is still poorly understood by astronomers. These data bring planetary scientists a little closer to piecing together how the mass of gas called Jupiter came to be. 

“We’re trying to understand where we came from, how we got here,” Bolton told The Post. “And Jupiter is a big part of that story.”

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest Dallas Taylor—he’s a sound engineer and the host of Twenty Thousand Hertz. Make sure to check it out!

FACT: At least one very unlucky astronaut claims he had an allergic reaction to lunar dust

By Sara Chodosh

Lunar dust is, at least according to some NASA experts, the number one challenge facing missions to the moon. That may be hard to believe, but only if you know nothing about moon dust. Here’s the 411: it’s both wildly sharp and incredibly powdery, which turns out to be a terrible combination. 

Even worse is that you can—maybe, possibly—be allergic to it. There’s not exactly a large sample size of people who have ever breathed in moon dust, but at least two people have had what appears to be an allergic reaction to it. Cruelly, the first was a geologist who flew on Apollo 17, only to arrive on the moon and realize he was allergic to the very thing he studied. There’s a beautiful kind of poetry to that, I think. 

You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out some of the wilder facts about lunar dust, but I’ll leave you with this tease: astronauts and miners have a lot more in common than you’d think.

FACT: An Ancient Egyptian statue supposedly sung at dawn

By Rachel Feltman

The Colossi of Memnon were built near what’s now Luxor around 1350 BCE, and they originally stood guard over the palatial memorial grounds of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III. Depicting Amenhotep in the style of Osiris, the statues stood 26 feet high and were carved from a single block of quartzite sandstone that came from hundreds of miles away.

The temple and other structures around the complex didn’t last very long: around 1200 BC, an earthquake did away with everything but the Colossi. In 27 BC, another earthquake hit and shattered the northern Colossus, collapsing it from the waist up and cracking the lower half.

But the legacy of the Colossi was actually just getting started. Around the time of the BCE to AD switch, the Greek historian Strabo reported that one of the Colossi was known to sing.

This phenomenon—which occurred only at the break of dawn—sparked a tourist craze, and visitors left ancient Yelp reviews in the form of graffiti on the statue’s base. Julia Balbilla, a Roman noble who visited in 130 A.D., wrote a poem on the statue’s leg comparing the sound to “ringing bronze.” Others described it as sounding like a broken harp or lyre string.

Many of the visitors to the site suspected some kind of supernatural significance to the sound, especially since it always happened at the same time of day—as dawn broke—but wasn’t otherwise consistent. People put a lot of stock in whether the statue sang on the day they visited.

But the best guess for how this “singing” occurred comes from what we know about when the Colossus stopped singing.

In either 196 or 199, the Roman emperor Septimus Severus visited the site and heard nothing. In an attempt to curry favor with whatever power controlled the singing statue, he supposedly paid for a repair job on it. We know that the sound stopped for good around this time. The best theory: cracks in the stone had previously collected dew, creating sonic vibrations as morning temperatures rose and warmed the liquid. Ironically, when Severus had those cracks repaired, he shut the singing up for good.

We’ll never know for certain whether the Colossus really sang, how it managed to carry a tune, or why it stopped. You can find out more about mysterious sounds that science has yet to solve here.

FACT: Animal sounds make surprising cameos in movies and TV shows

By Dallas Taylor

When you think of the roar of a T. rex, what sound comes to mind? A tiny puppy squeal? No? Well, you may be surprised to learn that the sound designers of Jurassic Park mixed that very noise into a slew of other animal yips and yaps to create the iconic dinosaur’s bellow. On this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, we get into the use of real-world animal sounds for creating everything from the purr of an engine to the sci-fi whoosh of a TIE fighter. Stick around for one particularly surprising fact about Netflix’s signature sound (spoiler alert: it involves a goat).

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

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A lunar “treasure map” could guide explorers to frozen resources on the moon, providing key ingredients for fuel and other essentials, according to the authors of a recent study.

Using more than a decade of surface temperature data taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a team of researchers mapped out the “cold traps” on the moon—areas where the temperature is low enough for solid carbon dioxide (CO2) to exist, the same material as the dry ice you can get in a supermarket. These caches could potentially be used to make rocket fuel, food, materials, and oxygen for lunar explorers.

Cold traps have been a recent focus of lunar explanation because they’re where experts expect to find water, says lead study author Norbert Schorghofer, a planetary scientist in Hawaii who works for Arizona’s Planetary Science Institute.

No one has yet been able to verify whether there is CO2 ice in any of these cold traps, but this study supports the idea that there are regions so shaded and perpetually cold that ice could survive. There is direct evidence that CO2 exists on the moon, too. In 2009, NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) deliberately threw a piece of rocket debris into a lunar crater at high speed to create a plume of material that reached into space. The probe then analyzed the plume and detected CO2 and water molecules.

This fact, paired with the new map of cold regions means that, “these cold traps should really contain CO2,” Schorghofer says. But the next step would be for a mission to go out and verify that by exploration.

Above a certain temperature, water and CO2 ice in space will sublimate, changing phase directly from a solid to a gas. In some of these cold traps, the sublimation of CO2 ice slows to a crawl—at most a few centimeters of depth lost every billion years. Which would mean, crucially, that ice should accumulate on the moon because the moon collects ice faster than it disappears.

There are about 6,000 square miles of water ice traps in the south polar region alone. But CO2 needs even lower temperatures to stay frozen, and those colder areas are harder to find. Schorghofer’s team found 79 square miles of ice traps where solid CO2 might exist, in shadowed craters around the south pole, as they reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. They also learned something that sounds obvious—any ice that’s there should melt faster in the summer, when the moon heats up slightly.

These regions—some of the moon’s coldest places—represent a large area where CO2 can be stable, considering how volatile it is, says Paul Hayne, planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who is particularly interested in ice on the lunar poles and was not part of the study.

The traps lie in “shadows within shadows” and haven’t seen sunlight in at least a billion years, Hayne says. Scientists knew these regions existed before, but not how cold or how extensive they were.

[Related: The moon is (slightly) wet, NASA confirms. Now what?]

Though the study provides “a treasure map” of cold traps, getting to and extracting the CO2 is a different story, he says.

Future lander and astronaut missions will likely find many smaller cold traps which were too small to see from orbit, Hayne says. Carbon is rare on the moon, but it’s an incredibly useful element. Methane—the fuel of choice for recent SpaceX rockets—can be made from CO2, he says.

Precisely where the lunar CO2 comes from isn’t certain. Most of it is probably deposited by comets that are rich in different kinds of ice, Schorghofer says, adding that impacts of carbon-rich meteors onto the lunar surface might create CO2 through chemical reactions, too. The moon could also be “outgassing,” allowing CO2 trapped deep underground to slowly make it to the surface. 

There’s so little carbon on the moon that the search for it could be “like the search for oil was on earth in the early days,” Schorghofer says. Back then, people were looking for concentrated hydrocarbons, “now we’re looking for concentrated carbon.”

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Set your early-morning alarms now for the second lunar eclipse of 2021. This spectacular event—known as a Beaver Moon lunar eclipse—will be visible early Friday across North America, the Pacific, and some of Eastern Asia and South America. It will be just shy of a total eclipse, and it’s expected to be the longest lunar eclipse in 580 years, Space.com reports. 

Here’s everything you need to know about this almost total eclipse. 

What does an ‘almost total’ lunar eclipse mean?

When the Earth, sun, and moon line up for a lunar eclipse, the Earth blocks the light of the sun from reaching the moon. Watchers see the moon slowly grow darker as the Earth inserts itself between the moon and sun. Sometimes, the Earth will completely block the sunlight, but in this case, Earth’s shadow will be covering roughly 97.4 percent of the moon. This makes for an “almost total” eclipse, as it will leave the southernmost portion of the moon still visible to onlookers. 

When and how can I see the lunar eclipse?

The lunar eclipse will reach its peak around 4:00 a.m. Eastern Time, according to NASA, but the whole event will last from roughly 2:19 a.m. to 5:47 a.m. Eastern Time. It will be visible to the naked eye, though binoculars and telescopes will make it easier to see the southern portion of the moon remain visible. The eclipse can be seen in all of North America, as well as in parts of Australia, eastern Asia, and South America, although some places will only see the beginning or end of the eclipse. The United States is positioned to see the whole thing, so prep your Friday morning schedule now for this spectacular event. 

Why is this eclipse so long?

This eclipse is expected to last 3 hours, 28 minutes and 23 seconds, according to NASA, an incredibly long duration for an eclipse. The moon is at its slowest orbital speed at the time of this eclipse, making for a relaxed stroll in Earth’s shadow. Its sluggishness is because the moon is at its apogee, the furthest point from Earth.  

How is this different from the other lunar eclipse of 2021?

The last lunar eclipse happened during what’s known as a Flower Moon. This eclipse is happening during the Beaver Moon. These names are mostly based on old traditions, primarily coming from the names that Native Americans gave the various full moons during the year. 

The previous eclipse happened on May 26th, called a Super Flower Blood Moon—Blood for the color during a total eclipse, Flower for the May full moon, and Super for the moon being at its closest point to Earth. The Beaver Moon marks the approximate start of the beaver trapping season. November 19th’s lunar eclipse is also much longer, and will be “almost total,” unlike the total eclipse of the Flower Moon. 

Remind me: what’s the difference between a lunar and solar eclipse?

It’s all about the lineup. Lunar eclipses such as this one occur when the moon rests in the shadow of the Earth, causing the moon to go dark with a reddish hue. This red color comes from sunlight that bounces around Earth and still reaches the moon, despite the direct light being blocked. It shows red because Earth’s atmosphere filters out the bluer light. Solar eclipses, which are much more dramatic, happen when the moon blocks the light of the sun from reaching the Earth altogether. This causes the sky to go slightly or totally dark, depending on the totality of the eclipse.

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The little asteroid Kamo’oalewa, a small and puzzling piece of rock, orbits around the sun. It’s a quasi-satellite, meaning its path is near the Earth’s, too. The ferris wheel-size chunk of space rock was discovered in 2016, but based on new observations, astronomers finally have a clue as to its origins.

Kamo’oalewa, which is less than 200 feet across, never gets closer to Earth than 9 million miles, remaining 38 times farther away than our moon. Its wee size and dim reflectiveness mean Kamo’oalewa is extremely difficult to observe. The asteroid comes closest to our planet every April, giving astronomers a few precious weeks to observe the tiny celestial body. Using the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in southern Arizona, astronomers analyzed the light reflections of the asteroid and found that the resulting spectrum closely matched those of lunar rocks from NASA’s Apollo mission, indicating that Kamo`oalewa might be an ancient fragment of our moon. The findings were published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday.

“My first reaction to the observations in 2019 was that I probably had made a mistake,” lead author and University of Arizona astronomer, Benjamin Sharkey, told The New York Times. He and his team expected Kamo’oalewa to be like other asteroids, but “the data didn’t care what we thought,” he said.

This asteroid was clearly unique. And when Sharkey parsed through data for every near-Earth asteroid spectrum he could find, nothing seemed to align with what they observed, which makes sense—no other asteroids have been found with lunar origins. 

“We doubted ourselves to death,” University of Arizona astronomer and co-author Vishnu Reddy said in a statement. But after follow-up observations this year, the team is sure that Kamo’oalewa is moon rock.

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

“Asteroids are made of minerals that have unique spectral signatures when you look in the infrared light,” Reddy told Gizmodo. “When we first looked at Kamo’oalewa we detected a mineral called pyroxene…that is very similar to what we seen on the Moon. That sent me thinking that we should look at the Apollo samples.”

Researchers are not yet sure how the asteroid broke off from our moon, but they think it was probably due to some large impact event 100,000 to 500 years ago. But finding out precisely when or where it came off the moon is a tricky question, one that could only be answered by analyzing a sample of the asteroid itself. The China National Space Administration, in fact, is planning to launch such a mission in the mid-2020s.

Co-author and astronomer Renu Malhotra’s lab is studying Kamo`oalewa’s orbit to further investigate its origins and its future lifespan. “It is very unlikely that a garden-variety near-Earth asteroid would spontaneously move into a quasi-satellite orbit like Kamo`oalewa’s,” she said in a statement, adding that it’s likely this asteroid will only stay in its current orbit for about another 300 years. 

That gives scientists 300 years of future observations to tease out the answer of this asteroid. If Kamo`oalewa is indeed a chunk of moon, “it’s a kind of missing piece of the puzzle,” Reddy told New Scientist. “We have meteorites on the Earth, we have holes on the moon where some of those rocks came from, and this might be the piece in between.”

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NASA has announced that returning American astronauts to the moon will have to wait until 2025. 

Artemis, NASA’s mission to land the first woman and person of color on the moon, was supposed to launch in 2024. Vice President Mike Pence announced the deadline for the new mission in 2019 during a meeting with the White House’s space council, catching many at NASA and in the space industry by surprise—the space agency’s original return to the moon had been slated for 2028. 

NASA’s delay announcement Tuesday is the first official acknowledgement that the 2024 target is unrealistic. “The Trump administration’s target of 2024 human landing was not grounded in technical feasibility,” said Bill Nelson, former Florida senator and current NASA Administrator, according to CNBC.

Legal complications have muddied Artemis’s progress. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin sued NASA twice after the agency awarded its competitor, SpaceX, a $2.9 billion contract to build NASA’s Human Landing System program—a decision Blue Origin alleges was prejudiced and unfair.

NASA’s lawsuit surrounding the moon lander deal, delays with developing the Orion capsule that will take the astronauts to the moon, and difficulties securing adequate funding all contributed to the decision to push back the moon landing timeline, Nelson told The New York Times. “We’ve lost nearly seven months in litigation, and that likely has pushed the first human landing likely to no earlier than 2025,” Nelson said, adding that NASA still needs to work out the particulars for the new timeline.

In preparation for the 2025 flight, NASA will be sending one uncrewed and one crewed flight test around the moon (but not landing on it) in February and May 2024 respectively. The third flight will be the one to ferry astronauts to the moon’s surface.

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

While pushing the timeline of its flights back affords NASA a bit more time, it is still a tight, optimistic schedule. Space flights are expensive, and NASA’s Orion costs have increased to $9.3 billion. According to The Washington Post, Nelson says the space agency will need significant spending increases to meet its goals in the coming years—NASA needs an additional $5.7 billion from Congress over the next six years. “All these ambitious plans are contingent on funding,” he said. “And I’m going to continue to fight for sustained funding.”

Without adequate funding, Nelson said he was worried about NASA’s future, especially as China races against the US to the moon, Mars, and beyond. Nelson told The New York Times that “after having taken a good look under the hood these past six months, it’s clear to me that the agency will need to make serious changes for the long-term success of the program.”

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At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, at a place called the Challenger Deep near Guam, 36,000 feet beneath the surface of the ocean, the pressures from the water above reach a crushing eight tons per square inch—about a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. Some comparisons ask us to picture 100 adult elephants standing on your head, which would no doubt be painful if you even survived long enough while exposed to that kind of pressure to feel anything at all. 

But that has not prevented humans from venturing to this inhospitable place. Explorers have done so only a handful of times, with both crewed and uncrewed systems, in specially-designed craft that can handle the pressure. However, they’ve never done so in a long-term, systematic way—but that is about to change. 

At the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts, a small team of scientists and engineers are developing a new class of autonomous robotic systems called Orpheus, named for a figure in Greek mythology who ventured through the depths of Hades. They will soon be able to reach any part of the deepest, darkest reaches of the sea. 

The idea is to develop a small fleet of autonomous craft that can stay down for hours, perhaps days, collecting vast amounts of data and samples that will help researchers better understand everything from climate change to how life can survive at such extremes. It’s no wonder that when scientists contemplate the next frontier where such technology might be used, they look to space.  

Exploring oceans here—and on other worlds

The planet’s deep ocean is the least explored and understood place on Earth. In the so-called hadal zone, from 20,000 to 36,000 feet beneath the surface, the pressures are immense, the darkness absolute, and the mysteries of life are bountiful. 

It is believed that if life exists elsewhere in the solar system, it will be found on one of the ice-caked moons of Jupiter (Europa) or Saturn (Enceladus), both of which also have oceans beneath their ice. If there is life, scientists say, most likely it would take the form of microbes like the ones found at great depths in our own oceans. Or maybe there would be something else entirely. A new form of life. We simply have no idea. 

[Related: Is something burping methane on Saturn’s ocean moon?]

NASA is currently contemplating missions to find life on other moons by landing craft and exploring beneath the ice, but they likely remain decades out. In the meantime, as we develop the technology that will be required for a craft to land and submerge in an icy foreign ocean, we are looking to the great depths of our own seas as the closest analog. That work is being done now. 

Diving in with Orpheus

Two Orpheus vehicles have already been built and are being tested at various deep ocean spots around the United States, including a vast, underwater canyon along the New England continental shelf, and off the coast of Florida at a place called the Blake Plateau. Each robot is about the size of a Harley Davidson motorcycle, is shaped like a hoagie sandwich, and costs less than $200,000 to build—far cheaper than other underwater robotic systems with similar capability. They can operate autonomously, which they’ll do at the hadal depths, but can also work while connected to a tether.

The Orpheus project is part of a larger program to explore the deep ocean at WHOI called HADEX, short for Hadal Exploration. The project promises to open up a new frontier in deep ocean science and to help marine biologists better understand how organisms can survive the deep ocean’s crushing pressures. The conditions are so different down there, the adaptations required to survive must also be very different, scientists believe. The exploration of the deepest part of the ocean may lead to the discovery of entirely new life forms, possibly new Kingdoms of life. 

[Related: NASA’s next Jupiter mission will hunt for life’s ingredients under Europa’s frozen shell]

“Once you get past 6,500 meters, everything seems to change,” says Timothy Shank, a deep-sea biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and head of the Orpheus project. “The microbial system seems to change. The animal life that’s in the water column changes. The things on the seafloor change.” 

“I mean, they’re reminiscent sometimes of what we see elsewhere,” he continues. “There are worms, there are shrimp. There are things like that, but they have different adaptations. You have different bio-molecules inside their bodies. They do different things in order to live there. And so there’s a whole host of questions about how they live there with their metabolism, their physiology, and what we can learn from that.” 

This will not be Shank’s first time exploring the deepest part of the ocean. A previous robot called Nereus, designed within the Deep Sea Submergence Lab at WHOI, ventured down to the Mariana Trench back in 2009 and was expected to be a workhorse for deep-sea/hadal exploration. However, on a dive at the Kermadec Trench near New Zealand in 2014, the Nereus vehicle lost contact with its mothership and disappeared. It is thought that the staggering ocean pressure likely caused the robot to implode. 

“It was a $14 million project,” says Shank. “We’d had over a dozen publications of novel findings just based on four dives that we had. Tremendous. New species, all kinds of stuff discovered.” 

Since the loss of Nereus, the deepest part of the ocean has largely been closed to long-term exploration by researchers. Until now. 

[Related: Inside Five Deeps’ record-setting quest to reach the bottom of each ocean]

“The idea now is to build an autonomous underwater vehicle [that’s] lightweight, [and] cheap to make. We can have a fleet of them and throw them out, and they would go and survey the seafloor in the deepest parts of our ocean,” says Shank. “Let them traverse vast distances and bring that information back to us.” 

It’s not easy creating vehicles that can navigate under immense pressures, in total darkness, in undersea canyons that can sometimes be just a few hundred yards wide. To do so with autonomous robots that act on their own is even harder. That’s why Shank turned to the folks who have vast experience building autonomous robots that can handle extremely harsh conditions: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Sensing the landscape and seascape

For decades, scientists at JPL have been developing systems that can operate autonomously on other planetary bodies. They’ve sent them to Mars and distant asteroids, but most of those systems have been relatively simple by the standards of what they hope to eventually accomplish. None will be as challenging and complicated as those we want to send beneath the ocean of another planet’s moon. The challenges are so enormous that only recently have researchers had both the computing power and the expertise to write algorithms that may be able to deal with all the contingencies and complexities of exploring in such extreme environments.   

“Autonomy is a major multiplier for what we’ll be able to do with exploration,” says Andrew Klesh, the lead Orpheus systems engineer at JPL. “It will allow us to be more audacious in our scientific questions and queries and our goals of returning data back.”  

Part of that effort will depend on a sensory capability not often employed by autonomous vehicles in the deep. Most underwater systems depend on sonar for navigation, measuring the reflection of sound waves hitting an object to determine location, size, and shape. But the Orpheus system uses visual capability, employing small cameras that can map and record the local terrain. 

[Related: Mars may have had recent volcanic eruptions—which is great news for finding life]

“It’s essentially a set of eyes that can look across the ocean floor for features we can recognize and then use these features to determine how to move forward,” says Klesh. “And not only moving forward, but how our attitude and orientation changes. We do this all the time on Mars.” But another incredibly useful feature of the system is that it is built to remember where it’s been.

On Mars and at the bottom of the ocean, navigation systems like the Global Positioning System (GPS) are obviously unavailable, so spacecraft exploring other bodies in space or at ocean depths need to use different techniques to determine where they are. By memorizing various features in an environment and accessing them while in motion, these new vehicles can understand where they are, and provide that information to future expeditions. 

As Orpheus traverses the bottom, it will take high-resolution, overlapping images that create a three-dimensional picture of the seafloor. It will also carry a vast array of sensors that will allow it to detect the chemical signatures of hydrothermal vents or low-temperature seeps. 

“So then, as we talk about doing revisits to areas, we’re identifying interesting sites for scientists to send samplers down and then get the most interesting things back,” says Klesh. 

Right now, the state-of-the-art set of algorithms for autonomous vehicles is called Terrain Relative Navigation (TRN), and it is currently working on the surface of Mars. The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover, which landed on Feb. 18, 2021, at the Jezero Crater on the Red Planet, was programmed to allow NASA to land the rover safely by quickly and autonomously sensing its location relative to the Martian surface and modifying its trajectory as needed during descent. It also allows the vehicle to navigate hazardous terrain on the surface by building a 3D visual map of the surroundings. 

By using a similar system in Orpheus vehicles, which can perform many missions and have that data available for analysis, the engineers are able to further train the system for the future, a future that they hope will include missions to space, including a potential mission to Europa.     

“The environments are very similar between Europa and Earth,” says Russell Smith, the lead JPL software engineer on Orpheus, referring to the pressures in the two oceans. “After getting through the ice, the exploration is going to be very similar to what we are doing now with Orpheus.” 

Plunging down to enormous depths 

So far, the Orpheus platform is still in its testing phase, but Shank says that a dive at one of the planet’s deep trenches could take place as early as 2022. The tests that have been performed so far offer hope that the vehicle will perform well at great depths. The results of the most recent test, launched from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Okeanos Explorer in May, were encouraging, says Shank. 

“We had eight dives with a [Orpheus] vehicle. It performed fantastically,” he says. “We were looking at altitude-hold, turns, just the ability of this thing to hold heading. And it was extremely successful. We went over 24 kilometers [15 miles] on eight dives. We imaged the seafloor, making 3D mosaics of it. We had a chemical sensor on board that senses things in situ, and was sensing differences in the oxygen content of the water as we were driving.”

As the Orpheus system continues to make strides, the scientists at JPL are beginning to look skyward, but making the leap from the deep ocean to deep space will not happen overnight. 

“We are several decades out from being able to send vehicles to explore the oceans of Enceladus and Europa,” says Klesh. Several projects are underway, such as the Europa Clipper program, which will conduct a detailed survey of Europa to determine whether it harbors the conditions suitable for life. But, says Klesh, “There’s a lot of work yet to come.” 

According to Shank, there is so much to learn, and now is the time to do it with a system that is cheaper and more flexible than those of the past. 

“There are so many questions—it’s mind-boggling,” says Shank. “The plan is to usher in a new era, and it’s not just an era of discovery of science, but also of technology.”

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The first delivery of lunar rocks and soil since the Cold War is already showing traces of intense surface conditions in the moon’s ancient past.

The Chinese National Space Administration’s Chang’e 5 lander touched down on the moon on Dec. 1, 2020. A little more than two weeks later, it brought back samples of lunar rock and regolith which it had drilled and scooped from the landing site in the Oceanus Procellarum region—a massive dark swath a few thousand kilometers wide, visible on the nearside of the moon. Within this lowland area, the landing site is one of the geologically younger regions of the moon, and the samples are the youngest ever to be returned to Earth for analysis.

Apollo 11 returned the first lunar samples to Earth in July 1969. But no mission has brought moon rocks or soil back to Earth labs since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 mission in 1976, making Chang’e 5’s samples the first in 45 years. The mission is the fifth in the country’s moon exploration history, and is named after a goddess of the moon in Chinese mythology.

“Chang’e 5 mission is a milestone, after [the] Apollo and Luna missions, of human’s exploration of the moon,” says Yuqi Qian, a planetary geology Ph.D. student at the China University of Geosciences who was part of the team that did the preliminary analysis of the samples.

Qian announced the team’s results at the recent Europlanet Science Congress, an international planetary science conference.

[Related: The moon is (slightly) wet, NASA confirms. Now what?]

Scientists’ knowledge of the moon has changed dramatically since the previous sampling missions, Qian says, and this is the first time they’ll be able to compare their knowledge with new samples to see “whether we have a correct understanding of the moon.”

China’s space agency decides which proposed experiments will get to make use of the almost two kilograms of fresh samples. “We are so lucky because the Chang’e 5 sample application is so competitive,” Qian says.

The China University of Geosciences applied for the first batch of returned samples and acquired just 200 milligrams of Chang’e 5 cargo in July. The Chinese National Space Administration received 85 proposals and only 31 of them were approved, Qian says.

Before Chang’e 5 returned the samples, Qian tried in a previous study to judge the age of the landing site, and arrived at an estimate of 1.8 to 2.2 billion years old, based on remote sensing data. When the team obtained the samples, they found that the area was right in the middle of his estimate’s range—about 2 billion years old, Qian says, which was a big relief.

The team found that about 90 percent of the sample were mare basalts—rocks local to the lowland region—with the remaining 10 percent a mix of exotic materials from rarer sources. 

These exotic materials included “non-mare materials” like distant impact ejecta, glassy volcanic beads, remains of fallen meteorites, and silica-rich matter from lunar shield volcanoes.

This sample makeup allowed the team to guess at the history of the region using geological forensics. They found that the impact that caused the 39 kilometer wide Harpalus crater probably threw ejecta all the way to the Chang’e-5 landing site 300 kilometers away, which made up a large amount of the exotic material. Two more huge and far off craters, called Copernicus and Aristarchus, 1300 and 600 kilometers away, respectively also added a significant amount of exotic material. Though they are distant from the landing site, all three craters were caused by huge impacts that could have flung material across the moon.

[Related: Enjoy breathing oxygen? Thank the moon.]

The volcanic beads also provide a geological record of an ancient, hot moon which still harbored erupting volcanoes. These little droplets fell and cooled in the surrounding space, then rained down onto the lunar surface. The Apollo missions returned some of these beads and scientists learned in 2008 that samples of them contained ancient moon water from deep underground.

Chang’e-5’s samples were also important for determining the age of lunar features because the current aging model works well for features more than 3 billion years old or less than 1 billion years old, but isn’t as accurate for the period in between, Qian says. With these 2 billion-year-old samples, scientists will be able to better calibrate the dating model for the gap, Qian says.

The international science community’s precious trove of moon rocks will hopefully continue to grow soon, with NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions set to bring back many more lunar samples.

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If time travelers could venture back to the ancient Earth, say around three billion years before present day, they’d be wise to bring life support. That’s because the planet had so little oxygen at the time, they’d quickly suffocate. Without breathable air, the temporal explorers wouldn’t survive long enough to witness another peculiarity of early Earth—that the sun would rise perhaps every 16 to 17 hours. Now, a new theory holds that the overlap between short days and minimal oxygen could be more than pure coincidence. 

Researchers have long puzzled over the way Earth’s oxygen appears to have risen haltingly over time. The planet started out with almost no oxygen, but then seems to have abruptly jumped up to roughly a few percent of its current abundance around two billion years ago—an episode dubbed the Great Oxidation Event. 

Next, oxygen leveled out for a timespan scientists call the boring billion years, before another sharp increase. Who can we thank for all this breathable oxygen? Biologists assume credit should go to photosynthesizing microbes, which release oxygen while making energy from sunlight. 

Except the timing is all wrong. Such microbes likely evolved long before beyond the first oxygen jump, and it isn’t clear what could have slowed them down during the boring billion.

“If oxygenic photosynthesis is driving the increase in oxygen, then why did it stop increasing for such a long time and restart again?” says Arjun Chennu, an ecologist and data scientist at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research in Germany. 

How the moon could have oxygenated the Earth

Over the years, many ideas have emerged to explain the oxygen jumps. Volcanic gas, which soaks up oxygen, could have diminished. Or perhaps the early environment lacked the nutrients necessary for the cyanobacteria (those oxygen-producing microbes) to thrive. 

But one suggestive coincidence piqued the curiosity of Judith Klatt, now a microbiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology: as oxygen levels rose, the days were getting longer. 

[Related: Lakes around the world are losing oxygen]

Near the beginning of its existence, the Earth completed a full rotation once every six hours or so. But as oceans formed, and the moon’s gravitational pull sloshed those oceans back and forth across the crust, friction has incrementally lengthened the planet’s rotation to our present 24 hours (and the days continue to lengthen, growing by one one-hundred-thousandth of a second each year). 

But that extremely gradual slowdown hasn’t been constant. One common theory holds that two types of tides, some in the ocean and others in the atmosphere, may have opposed and neutralized each other and held the day steady at 21 hours long for perhaps a billion years—a truce that happens to coincide with the boring billion, and the oxygen increases that bookended it. 

Klatt approached Chennu to work out the details of how the microbes of the era might have responded to longer days. From postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan, she was intimately familiar with microbial mats, millimeter-thin layers of cyanobacteria and a multitude of other organisms that clung to coastal rocks and sediments for much of Earth’s history. She suspected that their oxygen production might depend on day length. 

The model Chennu came up with suggested that it did. Crucially, the oxygen production depended on how fast the daylight changed. When the Earth spun around too quickly, the cyanobacteria couldn’t ramp up to their maximum oxygen production before dusk came. But as the Earth’s daily rotation slowed, they were able to achieve their full oxygen-producing potential.  

“It’s a very small effect, but working on every sunlit day for millions of years, it can produce changes that we think are global in significance,” Chennu says. The team published their results on Monday in Nature Geoscience. 

To test their simple model against the messiness of reality, divers retrieved sample microbial mats from Lake Huron. These were complex colonies with many types of microbes, including some that compete with the cyanobacteria for prime sun-absorbing position at the top of the mat.

When the researchers simulated day lengths of 12, 16, 21, and 24 hours using artificial light, the mats expelled the most oxygen on the longest days—more, in fact, than the initial model predicted.

Looking to the future for more clues to the past

The researchers point out that their conclusions rest on several assumptions. Microbial mats must have been plentiful, for instance, as the fossil record suggests. But researchers’ knowledge of Earth’s rotation rate and oxygen abundances that far in the past is also quite fuzzy and circumstantial. 

“It’s a long time ago,” Klatt says. “The oldest rocks are 3.8 billion years old and they’re very rare.

[Related: Diamonds contain remnants of Earth’s ancient atmosphere]

But if the pause in Earth’s spin down truly lines up with the boring billion, their theory handles the rest. Longer days led to more oxygen, until the cyanobacteria were able to overcome Earth’s natural ability to absorb oxygen, prompting the Great Oxidation Event. Then the spin stabilized for the boring billion. Finally, the days started lengthening again and oxygen rose once more. Much later, sprouting forests took over and boosted oxygen to its modern levels. 

Previous theories explaining the Great Oxidation Event could have contributed, too, Klatt says. The new day length idea adds to their effects, rather than competing with them. “There are probably a zillion other mechanisms operating at the same time,” Klatt says.  

Next the team hopes that other researchers will refine their straightforward estimate of how daily oxygen production could lead to long-term changes in the atmosphere. They also look forward to still-uncovered stashes of ancient rocks that might serve as sharper snapshots of the early Earth. And lunar rocks, to be retrieved on future missions, could hold a more detailed record of how the moon has slowed the Earth through tides over time. Any one of these lines of evidence could illuminate the connection between the spinning of the planet and the air we breathe.  

“We’re hoping that this mechanism might be kind of a linchpin to think about this boring billion years problem,” Chennu says. 

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Jupiter’s icy moon Ganymede already holds the distinction of being the largest moon in our solar system; it’s nearly 40 percent as big as Earth! Now, astronomers have found that Ganymede can claim another achievement: having water vapor in its atmosphere.  

[Related: NASA’s Juno orbiter captured striking close-ups of Jupiter’s biggest moon]

Analyzing both new and archival data from the newly mended Hubble Space Telescope, scientists realized that previous assumptions about Ganymede’s atmosphere were incorrect. Back in 1998, NASA researchers took UV images of the moon’s atmosphere, which revealed ribbons of electrified gas known as auroral bands. Scientists at that time attributed the patterns to oxygen. 

Cut to 20 years later: Researchers now know that Ganymede’s atmosphere contains much less oxygen than previously thought. Combining that knowledge with new Hubble measurements, scientists have now concluded that those auroral bands are due to water vapor in the Jovian moon’s atmosphere, sublimated (or turned directly from a solid to a gaseous state) from the icy surface below. The findings were published in Nature Astronomy. 

“It was a challenging measurement and it was surprising that our technique worked, but we had every expectation that [water vapor] would be there,” said study coauthor Kurt Retherford, a professor at the Southwest Research Institute’s graduate program for space physics and instrumentation. 

Retherford is also a deputy principal investigator for the European Space Agency’s upcoming Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission, which will observe the planet’s three largest satellites, including Ganymede, for at least three years. The mission is slated for launch in 2022, and should arrive at Jupiter in 2029.

“A lot of [JUICE] experiments ultimately try to understand just how much liquid water is in Ganymede’s ocean, and whether Ganymede is a habitable world, whether that liquid water there could support life.”

Prior research suggests that Ganymede might contain more water than all of Earth’s oceans combined. But the moon’s surface temperatures are so cold that you would have to go 100 miles beneath its crust to find liquid water. 

The water vapor confirmation is an exciting prelude for ESA’s upcoming Ganymede visit, and will help scientists further refine their planned experiments for the JUICE mission, Retherford said. 

“It’s exciting for the JUICE mission overall goals of trying to look for this subsurface water environment on Ganymede. It’ll help us refine our measurements. And it also informs just how much material is coming into our mass spectrometers that’ll sniff the composition of those gases coming off the surface and help us understand what Ganymede is made of.”

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Another full moon makes an appearance this weekend. This one, dubbed the Buck Moon by Algonquin tribes from the northeastern United States, was so named for the time when adolescent deer sprout velvety new antlers in the summer. 

NASA’s Gordon Johnston writes that the Buck Moon goes by several different names. Indigenous tribes sometimes call it the “thunder” moon because of early summer’s frequent storms. Back in the day, Europeans sometimes called this moon the “hay” moon after summer haymaking activities, or the “mead” moon. 

[Related: What is a full moon, anyway?]

This year the Buck Moon will likely shine with a reddish-orange glow, but not for typical reasons. There are normal astronomical causes for vividly-colored moons: The rusty hue of blood moons are caused by total lunar eclipses, for example. But the Buck Moon’s unusual color will arise from earthly events—namely, the smoke and haze drifting across North America from the wildfires out West.

According to the US National Interagency Fire Center, 79 fires are currently burning through at least 13 states, extending as far north as British Columbia, Canada, as well. 

The red skies in the aftermath of a fire are due to smoke particles interfering with how sunlight travels through the air. Light comes in a spectrum of wavelengths. Fire smoke blocks out the shorter wavelengths of blues, greens, and yellows, while allowing the longer waves of red and orange through. Since the glow of the moon is just reflected sunlight, smoke interferes with moonlight as well. 

[Related: Rainbows are (literally) in the eye of the beholder]

Fires aside, this summer will be full of great skygazing opportunities, according to Johnston. Saturn will be close to Earth and shining brightly on August 2, while Jupiter will do the same on August 19. The Southern Delta-Aquariids meteor shower, most clearly seen from the Southern Hemisphere, is also currently visible. It will peak on July 30, but folks will be able to see it until about August 23. The Perseid meteor shower has already started as well, and can be witnessed hanging around the constellation Perseus until August 24.

The full Buck Moon, however, will only appear for about three days, from Thursday night to Sunday morning, by Western Hemisphere times, and will peak on Friday night. If you’re looking to get a glimpse of the full Buck Moon this weekend, be sure to check for your local moonrise and moonset times to ensure the best views.

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When Neil Armstrong pressed the first bootprint into the Sea of Tranquility, most of humanity watched the televised low-res blob and felt pride welling up in their chests. But a few watchers felt something entirely different—an unconfirmed, squinty-eyed skepticism that something about the whole deal smelled fishy. How could the United States, which could barely put a chimp into space in 1961, get two full-grown men on the surface of the moon eight years later? How could anyone confirm that men actually made it to the moon? And, how, exactly, had that $25 billion Apollo budget been spent?

Five years, and five lunar landings later, the nebulous idea that the government faked the whole moon shot on a soundstage somewhere in the Southwest finally coalesced when, in 1974, Bill Kaysing, a former technical writer for Rocketdyne, a company that worked on the Atlas V launch vehicle, self published a book_ We Never Went to the Moon: America’s $30 Billon Swindle_. Kaysing claimed that the Apollo program was faked to allow the U.S. to secretly militarize space, and that the astronauts, who were put through sessions of “guilt therapy” to help deal with the deception, were actually at a strip club in Nevada the night of the moon landing.

Far from being the work of an exhaustive investigative journalist, its notable lack of evidence, sources, and logical reasoning kept the tome from hitting the bestseller list (or any list). But mistrust of the government—1974 was the height of frustration with Vietnam and the Watergate scandal—gave Kaysing’s semi-formed ideas enough to nudge the Apollo Hoax out of the ether and into the near fringe of pseudo-science. The seed was slow to germinate, but Capricorn 1—a popular 1978 film starring OJ Simpson (who later theorists have implicated in the Apollo coverup) in which the government fakes a manned Mars landing—kept Kaysing’s ideas alive and helped spawn a cottage industry of Moon hoaxers who gathered and presented evidence to one another throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Despite this, the Apollo Hoax remained fringe, and was on the verge of likely evaporation when the nexus of the Internet and a February 2001 special on the Fox network called Conspiracy Theory: Did We Ever Land on the Moon? put the theory on the public display for the first time. In Fox’s shockumentary era (see When Animals Attack and Temptation Idol), the Moon Hoax documentary and a replay a month later were ratings successes, and became water cooler fodder across the country with people asking “why weren’t there stars in the photos?” And “How could the astronauts have survived the radiation of the Van Allen Belts?” Aided with a blossoming of Internet conspiracy sites, the Apollo Hoax made its first true toehold in the mainstream press.

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Footprint on the Moon

At the same time Fox was giving credence to Kaysing’s ideas, astronomer Phil Plait was preparing the defense. On his Web site Bad Astronomy and in a later book of the same name, the professional astronomer refuted the claims of the Fox show and Kaysing (who passed away in 2005) point by point. Plait’s refutations spawned dozens of other debunking sites, setting off a veritable Internet war between hoax believers and their critics. There have been a few notable events since then—in 2002, Bart Sibrel, who appeared in the Fox special, was punched in the face by astronaut Buzz Aldrin after poking Aldrin with a Bible, asking him to swear to the moon landings authenticity. More recently, Fear Factor host Joe Rogan has gone to bat for the Moon Hoax Theory, debating Plait on Penn Jillette’s radio show. But as for hard evidence? The stories haven’t changed much since 1974.

“In ten years I think this conspiracy theory will be gone,” says Plait, who points out that in 2009 NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will give us clear photos of the moon landing sites, and says the U.S. goal of returning to the moon by 2020 will refocus us on the triumph of the Apollo mission. “These guys are not professional journalists, they have no credentials, and their arguments are tissue thin. They have a track record of 100 percent errors.”

Though the hoaxers claims usually disappear when held up to the light, there is one question that sticks in one’s craw: what happened to the official videotapes of the Apollo 11 landing? To save space in the broadcast spectrum so they could transmit telemetry and other data, cameras on the lunar lander transmitted images in a special slow-scan format. That data was received by stations in Australia and the Mojave, formatted for television broadcast and sent to Houston. The images seen on television were fuzzy and indistinct. The actual slow-scan footage before conversion was crisp and full of detail.

But those priceless historical images weren’t put in a vault at the Smithsonian like they should have been. According to NASA records, the official video images of the moon landing were stored in 2,612 boxes at a government warehouse. Between 1975 and 1979, the Goddard Space Center requested all but two boxes of tapes and never returned them to the National Archives. Now, the 13,000 reels of data are nowhere to be found. In 2006, NASA began a dedicated agency-wide hunt, but to date, the images haven’t shown up. “Despite the challenges of the search,” a NASA release states, “NASA does not consider the tapes to be lost.” But the hoaxers and moon doubters do. And it’s unlikely their questions will be put to rest till we put another footprint on the moon.

View the scant remnants here.

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Workings

Have You Seen?

Tape It

Knowledge is Power

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Sunny day floods—which occur when high tides spill into roads and towns—are already a massive problem in the US. Hundreds of them occur every year up and down the Atlantic and Gulf coasts in low-lying areas. But starting in the 2030s, high-tide flooding is going to reach new heights, literally, as a roughly 18 year cyclical wobble in the moon’s orbit coincides with rising sea levels.

The moon causes the tides to change each day, but it also has a slight wobble in its orbit. As a result, the moon isn’t always a constant distance away from the Earth—and doesn’t have the exact same impact on sea level. For half of the 18.6 year-long cycle, high tides are higher and low tides are lower, and vice versa for the other half. The long term change in the tides isn’t all that dramatic compared to the daily difference in the tides, especially since it happens over such a long period of time. 

But climate change is worsening that. 

A study published in Nature Climate Change in June shows how much of a change some cities are in for. By 2033, La Jolla, California, can expect to see just one more day per year of high-tide flooding. In another decade, the community of nearly 50,000 people could see  an additional 49 days. In the same time frames, St. Petersburg, Florida, will gain six and 67 days, respectively. Under a slightly more extreme set of climate circumstances, Boston could gain more than 50 extra flooding days by 2051. 

[Related: High-tide floods are becoming more common, and it’s costing businesses]

Though sunny day floods are often minor in the grand scheme of things compared to riskier storm surges, they’re no less problematic. Hurricanes wreak havoc, but then leave and give towns time to recover. “But if it floods 10 or 15 times a month, a business can’t keep operating with its parking lot under water,” said Phil Thompson, the lead author on the study, in a statement. “People lose their jobs because they can’t get to work. Seeping cesspools become a public health issue.”

Thompson and his colleagues note in the study that there’s a major reason they’re trying to warn people about this now: to give governments and people time to prepare. The 2030s are not that far away, and it won’t be easy to solve this problem. Almost 40 percent of the US population lives along the coast, and our infrastructure is already struggling to stay together. Urban planners will need to grapple with the reality of more high-tide flooding as well—but at least now they have some warning.

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The first full moon of the summer season is set to grace the skies this Thursday. Read on to find out why some call this moon a supermoon, where its name came from and how to see the Strawberry Moon for yourself.

What’s a supermoon, anyways?

The path of the moon as it circulates the Earth is not a perfect circle, so the moon isn’t always the same distance away from us. We call the furthest point the apogee and the closest point the perigee. “Supermoon” refers to the slightly enlarged appearance of the moon whenever it’s closer to the Earth than average. Supermoons can also be up to 30 percent brighter than typical full moons, according to NASA, which is why they seem so imposing.

Although widely used, the term “supermoon” was actually the creation of the astrologer Richard Nolle in 1979, not astronomers, so its definition varies. As a result, there isn’t a consensus on how much closer the moon has to be in order to be considered a true supermoon. The guidelines proposed by EarthSky suggest any full moon or new moon that’s 224,791 miles or closer is a supermoon. 

[Related: A pink supermoon will rise on April 26]

“For 2021, some publications consider the four full Moons from March to June, some the three full Moons from April to June, and some only the two full Moons in April and May as supermoons,” NASA’s Gordon Johnston reported. Either way, the Strawberry Moon will be closer to us than the average full moon and will appear slightly larger.

This is the final time a full moon will coincide with supermoon timing this year, but it’s not the closest the moon will get. In fact, the moon will hit its closest distance to us in December—we just won’t be able to see it. December’s perigee will coincide with the point in the lunar cycle where the moon is between the Earth and the Sun, with its illuminated face facing away from us.

Why does this moon have a special name?

Whether or not this week’s Strawberry Moon is a true supermoon, it still gets a special name. This is because its name is actually due to its seasonal timing in the lunar cycle. The strawberry moon is the full moon closest in timing to the summer solstice, which coincides with the strawberry-growing season in what’s now the northeastern United States and parts of northern Canada. The full moon that marks this season was originally named by the indigenous Algonquin, Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota peoples, among others, that lived on these lands to honor the harvest of the sweet fruit, according to the Farmer’s Almanac. 

Alternative names reflect the early summer abundance of this time of year. The Haida term is Berries Ripen Moon; Blooming Moon (Anishinaabe) evokes the flowering season; Green Corn Moon (Cherokee) and Hoer Moon (Western Abenaki) indicate it’s time to care for young crops; Birth Moon (Tlingit) refers to the new animal life abundant in the Pacific Northwest; Egg Laying Moon and Hatching Moon (Cree) suggest a similar theme of animal babies. 

[Related: How to photograph the moon like a pro]

Unfortunately, the Strawberry Moon’s color won’t match its name. Instead, it will appear a warm golden color, as Jackie Fahey, an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History, told NPR. “It can have a tiny bit of a red tinge to it depending on what’s in the atmosphere, but mostly it will look like a nice yellow,” she says.

How and when to see the Strawberry Moon

The Strawberry Moon will be completely full for just a moment on Thursday, at 2:40 p.m. ET (1840 GMT). However, it will appear full to the casual observer roughly from Wednesday to Saturday. 

To observe and photograph the final full-moon supermoon of 2021, you can find your exact local moonrise and moonset times using timeanddate.com. If inclement weather disrupts your view, astrophysicist Gianluca Masi, founder and director of The Virtual Telescope Project, is hosting a virtual livestream of the Strawberry Moon rising over Rome at 3 p.m. ET (1900 GMT) on Thursday.

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Forty-eight years ago, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first footprints on the Moon, and it was epic. Popular Science covered this enormous achievement with an article by Wernher von Braun—a German-born engineer, now known as “The Father of Rocket Science,” who built the Saturn V launch vehicle that brought Apollo to the Moon. In our July 1969 issue, he described the plans for Armstrong and Aldrin’s two-hour rendevous with the Moon. (You can read the story in its original format here, although for mysterious reasons, two pages are missing.)

From The Archives.

First Men On The Moon

By Dr. Wernher von Braun

In the two-man cabin of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module, slowly riding down its vertical rocket jet, blue signal lights flash on. Probes dangling 60 inches below the disk-shaped footpads have touched the moon. The pilot cuts the engine. A moment later, a mild jar tells the crew they have landed on the moon’s surface.

That is to happen early in the afternoon of Sunday, July 20, 1969, in the western part of the moon’s Sea of Tranquility, according to NASA’s plans at this writing. Chosen to attempt the first manned lunar touchdown are Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin (“Buzz”) Aldrin. Circling above the landing site in their moon-orbiting mother spaceship, in the Command and Service Module, will be Command Module Pilot Michael Collins.

Success in Apollo 11’s great adventure would realize our aim of putting men on the moon within this decade. Millions of Americans will share the suspense and thrills of the fantastic mission as they watch it unfold on their TV screens. Here is an advance look at what the Apollo 11 astronauts mean to do, and a guide to key events on which success will hang:

The dash to the summit.

Man’s first touchdown on the moon can be compared to the final spurt to a lofty mountain’s summit by a few select climbers, starting from the highest of a string of base camps set up by others of their expedition.

Apollo 7 proved out the Comand and Service Module (CSM). Apollo 8’s moon voyage took men in and out of lunar orbit. Separating and docking the Lunar Module (LM) was rehearsed in earth orbit by Apollo9, and over the moon by Apollo 10. Now all is ready for the assault on the summit–the moon landing itself.

Apollo 11, up to a point, will retrace the moon-voyaging route of Apollo 8 and 10: the Saturn V launch into earth orbit, scheduled for July 16; re-ignition of the Saturn V’s top stage, to propel the craft into a coast to the moon; and rocket braking to put Apollo 11 in a lunar orbit, 70 statute miles above the surface. (The “go” for each major maneuver will mean that crew and spacecraft are in perfect shape so far; should trouble strike, anywhere along ‘the way, the mission would be aborted and the crew brought back.

Then the Lunar Module with its crew of two is to separate and make a rocket braking burn that, in an hour, brings it down to 50,000 feet above the moon. This maneuver has been performed before only by the Apollo 10 astronauts.

From here on, Apollo 11’s Lunar Module will blaze a new trail.

Coming in to Iand.

The all-clear for what has never been done before will be the radioed word from Mission Control at Houston: “You are go for PDI.” That stands for Powered Descent Initiation, the start of rocket braking so forceful that it commits the Lunar Module to a lunar landing attempt within minutes.

Feet first, the Lunar Module is skimming the moon at about 4,500 m.p.h., when its crew fires its descent engine straight forward. The retro-burn lasts six minutes at full 10,000-pound thrust–and two minutes more, with the LM now lightened by propellant consumption, at 6,000-pound thrust. That “braking phase” kills almost all forward velocity. It leaves the Lunar Module nearing the landing site at airplane-like speed of only a few hundred miles an hour.

As the craft turns upright, the moon’s surface, out of sight of the crew before, creeps into view from the bottom of their windows.

A landing radar has begun reporting altitude and velocity-data so vital that the landing attempt would have to be abandoned if the radar beams failed to “lock on” to the moon’s surface. At a point called the High Gate, less than five miles from touchdown, the falling craft is down to 7,000-foot altitude–and enters the Final Approach Phase. It begins tilting toward vertical and using its descent engine to check its fall.

As it turns upright, the moon’s surface, out of sight of the crew before, creeps into view from the bottoms of their windows. What they see is a flat and comparatively crater-free lunar plain–almost on the moon’s equator, at 23 degrees east, lunar longitude.

Look at the moon from earth and this landing site will be a little short of midway from the moon’s center to its righthand edge. At the time of the landing, when the moon will be nearing “first quarter,” it is barely within the sunlit zone. Purposely the touchdown is timed for early in the lunar morning, so that long shadows will vividly show up the relief of the terrain.

Selecting a landing spot free of obstacles, the crew tilts the whole craft until this target is at the zero point of a windowpane scale, whose fluorescent markings glow green and orange in the dark. Then they trigger a “mark” button to pin it down. This sets their inertial-guidance system to lead their descent path to it automatically.

At a point less than 1,000 feet up, called the Low Gate, the Final Approach Phase ends and the Landing Phase begins. The crew can choose an “auto” mode that does it all automatically; a semiautomatic mode, in which the LM Pilot controls the rate of descent; or a completely manual mode for a helicopter-style landing by eye. A likely choice is the semiautomatic mode.

The hovering Lunar Module descends toward a touchdown at three feet a second. Any remaining horizontal velocity will be even less. Keeping it to a minimum, and avoiding sloping ground and obstacles, are important to avert a disastrous tip-over. The LM is pretty forgiving about a less-than-perfect landing–but, even so, it will be a tense moment when the spidery legs’ footpads settle into lunar soil.

After the dramatic news that the crew are safely down on the moon, a little time elapses before further events, for the astronauts do not emerge at once. It takes them awhile to check their craft, and then struggle into “moon suits” with life-support backpacks, even if they should forego a rest period before their strenuous activities outside.

Footsteps on the moon!

Finally comes the high spot of the mission–an action-packed program of two hours and 40 minutes of “moonwalking.” Descending a ladder from the forward hatch, Commander Armstrong is to be first to set foot on the moon. Almost his first act is to scoop up a bagful of loose lunar soil, and hand it up to Aldrin to stow away. That “grabbag” sample guards against returning empty-handed, if anything should compel a premature takeoff. (You may be sure planners are thinking of nothing so fanciful as a hostile reception by little green men–but of such imaginable contingencies as a leak in the ascent propulsion system, or trouble with life-support equipment.) Then, after Armstrong has tested walking on the moon, and inspected the craft’s exterior to make sure it has suffered no damage in landing, Aldrin joins him outside.

Earth viewers will share by TV the eerie lunar scene confronting them–a stark gray desert, airless and lifeless, unrelieved by colors, harshly painted by the sun with glaring highlights and inky shadows. High in the black sky hangs the remote earth. The only nearer human being is Collins in the CSM, which they see sail overhead every two hours. Their mothership looks to them like a star, except that it is moving rapidly across the heavens, as it orbits the moon.

Dark gold-coated visors of the moon-explorers’ red helmets shield their eyes from the sun’s glare. They wear heavily insulated “lunar overshoes”; underfoot, the moon’s soil is still frigid after the extreme cold of the 14-day-long lunar night, although it will become hotter than boiling water during the equally long lunar day.

Their TV views and their voices, via their walkie-talkies, are beamed to earth by a radio antenna shaped like an upside-down umbrella, which they have erected on the lunar soil. Eager shutterbugs, they snap away with film cameras, too.

Using long-handled scoops, tongs, and shovels for rock collecting, since they cannot bend over in their suits, they finish filling two “rock boxes” with carefully selected lunar specimens, individually sealed in plastic bags.

Science package for the moon.

Setting up three scientific experiments, of which two are left on the moon, completes the lunar explorers’ busy program.

A “moonquake detector,” powered by solar panels, is expected to report any seismic activity to the earth by radio for a year. It is so sensitive that it may transmit the sound of the astronauts’ footsteps as they walk away.

An array of 100 disk-shaped quartz reflectors, inclined to face the earth, will bounce back laser beams shot at it from earth stations. Through its use, scientists hope to measure earth-moon distance with unprecedented accuracy–and also to gauge the precise distance between laser stations on earth, for such purposes as testing theories of continental drift.

A sheet of plain aluminum foil, which the LM crewmen spread on the ground when they leave the craft and pick up again when they return, is a take-home experiment. Later it will reveal the composition of “solar wind” when it is tested for entrapped helium, neon, and other rare gases.

Together the three experiments–called EASEP, for Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Payload–weigh 171 earth pounds, or less than 30 pounds on the moon. Deploying them should take as little as 10 minutes. To avoid overtaxing the first moon men, NASA decided that bringing a more elaborate science outfit (called ALSEP, for Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package) would await subsequent moon-landing expeditions.

In the limited time of their sortie on the lunar surface, the explorers range no farther than 50 to 100 feet from their spacecraft. Returning to it, they spend the remainder of their 22 hours on the moon in resting from their demanding tasks, and in an elaborate prelaunch checkout of the equipment to be used in rejoining the orbiting CSM.

Earth viewers will share by TV the eerie lunar scene confronting them–a stark gray desert, airless and lifeless, unrelieved by colors, harshly painted by the sun with glaring highlights and inky shadows. High in the black sky hangs the remote earth.

“Fire in the hole.”

The first manned takeoff from the moon will be due about noon on Monday, July 21. Safety of the astronauts and their precious specimens will depend oh the success of the “FITH” launch of their spacecraft’s ascent stage. FITH stands for Fire in the Hole, and means that there is no separation of the stage prior to ignition of its ascent engine, nor is there a jet deflector of any sort. Having served its purpose, the now-expendable descent stage serves as a launch platform for the ascent stage, and damage to it from the ascent engine’s fiery jet will not matter.

For the first eight seconds the ascent stage climbs vertically, under its engine’s 3,500-pound thrust. Then it rather abruptly pitches downward about 50 degrees. Safely above lunar mountains and with no atmosphere to limit speed, it builds up horizontal velocity as fast as possible.

Seven minutes and 16 seconds after takeoff, the Lunar Module is speeding nearly horizontally at almost 3,400 m.p.h., 60,000 feet above the lunar surface. It is safely inserted in an elliptical orbit with a high point of 52 statute miles. If anything should go wrong with it now, the Command and Service Module can come to the LM crew’s rescue.

An hour later, the LM ascent stage circularizes its orbit at the high point, by adding a little speed with its small reaction control thrusters. Then a smaller nudge with them adjusts the altitude to put the craft just 17 and 1/4 miles below the CSM, and corrects any minor difference in their orbital planes. Now, from behind and below, the ascent stage makes its rendezvous-and-docking with the CSM.

The rest–the start for earth, the long coast through space, the high-speed re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific–will be a repeat of Apollo 8 and 10, up to the recovery of the astronauts and the Command Module.

Into quarantine.

Then comes the mission’s strange conclusion–quarantining the moon heroes and their lunar samples for at least three weeks, in the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston [PS, Oct. ’68]. It is a precaution against the chance they might have brought back living organisms–probably unknown on earth and possibly harmful to humans, animals, or plant crops here–although scientists consider it far more likely that the moon lacks any life whatever. Within on ly a few weeks we may have the first hard evidence, pro or con.

Apollo 11’s flight is only a beginning, a scouting expedition. Nine more Apollo landings at different sites on the moon are planned by NASA; the next one, Apollo 12, is scheduled for this November. But the first manned landing on the moon will be an epic achievement–the conquest of the greatest engineering challenge we have ever faced.

This article originally appeared in the July 1969 issue of Popular Science.

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In ancient mythology, the Roman god Jupiter uses a veil of clouds to conceal his mischief from his wife Juno. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has spent three years looking beneath the clouds of our similarly secretive and distant planetary neighbor, Jupiter. But recently, Juno got up close and personal with a different celestial body.

Juno’s original mission was to learn about Jupiter’s formation, magnetic field, and composition under its surface clouds. But in its extended mission, it’s going far beyond that. On Monday, June 7, the spacecraft shot past Jupiter’s Ganymede—the largest moon in the solar system—snapping a few quick but iconic images and taking readings of the moon’s magnetic field from just over 600 miles away.

The team of scientists running Juno is just starting to analyze the data, says Scott Bolton, the head of the mission and a space scientist at the Southwestern Research Institute. But they’ve already posted two close-up pictures which show the icy moon’s cratered and craggy surface in detail.

The flyby was the closest look we’ve had at Ganymede since the Galileo mission 20 years prior. One image was taken by JunoCam, the craft’s signature camera, but the other was taken by a navigational camera which, through clever use, was also able to measure radiation levels near the Jupiter moon. As the camera took pictures, charged particles would hit its sensor, leaving little dots, squiggles, or streaks in the image that scientists could use to approximate radiation levels.

The use of a navigational camera for this measurement “is one of the aspects that does surprise me,” says Xianzhe Jia, a space physicist at the University of Michigan who has studied Jupiter’s moons and planetary magnetic fields but was not involved in the Juno mission. As the saying goes, one instrument’s noise is another’s instrument’s signal, he says.

[Related: Researchers just measured Jupiter’s stratospheric winds for the first time—and they’re a doozy]

It’s part of the Juno team’s philosophy to squeeze every possible bit of science from the craft, Bolton says. “We look at every engineering sensor and think, ‘What can we do with it scientifically?’ It’s giving us some kind of data.” For example, when a camera unintentionally caught the impacts of dust particles on Juno’s solar panels, that “serendipitous” data helped scientists gain new insights about zodiacal light and the inner solar system’s dust cloud.  

The Juno team also used a method called radio occultation. But fear not—it has nothing to do with satanic rituals. Instead, it measures the moon’s ionosphere, a section of its thin atmosphere where radiation knocks the electrons off gas molecules. To do this, Juno sends a signal to Earth while positioned behind the moon’s atmosphere, so that it passes through Ganymede’s ionosphere and on to a receiver on Earth in Canberra, Australia. 

The charged particles in the ionosphere nudge the frequencies of the signal such that the team can, through a kind of reverse engineering, learn about the magnetic field causing the interference. The technique is common, Jia says, “but it highly depends on the geometry of the flyby.” To work, the objects need to line up perfectly, with a straight path between the craft, the magnetosphere, and Earth.

The magnetic environment around Ganymede is particularly interesting, Jia says, because it’s a small magnetosphere within a large one—that of Ganymede bubbled inside that of Jupiter. That makes it a natural laboratory to study plasma physics, he says.

[Related: Texas-sized plasma ‘cannonballs’ could help solve one of the sun’s biggest mysteries]

Other mysteries abound when it comes to Ganymede. For one thing, images show lines that scratch across the ice on its surface—and we aren’t sure what caused them. Tectonic faults could have caused these features, Bolton says, or some other process. For all we know, they could still be forming, he adds.

Bolton is most excited about the microwave measurements Juno captured during the flyby, which will make a map of Ganymede’s surface using six different wavelengths. “That’ll be really the first detailed map of the ice,” Bolton says.

The microwave readings could tell us about “the composition of the ice, the temperature of the ice, possibly the thickness of the ice,” Bolton says. The team will compare readings across the light and dark regions of the moon’s surface, and across craters and those mysterious tectonic lines. 

Soon, the team will share more images from the flyby, Bolton says, and the curious among us can download and toy with JunoCam’s raw images themselves. He’s excited to see what the community does with them.

Juno’s flyby also serves as a run-up for two other missions that will explore the Jovian moons. NASA’s Clipper mission will target Europa, and the European Space Agency’s JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) will study Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. Juno’s data will help both teams plan their missions, and because the sensors carried by each mission differ, Bolton says, “We complement them as well.”

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In the wee hours of the morning this Thursday, the moon will slide in front of our star to make the rising sun appear as a thin, fiery crescent. While only a lucky few in the icy North will get a full view of this event—known officially as an annular solar eclipse and lovingly as the ring of fire—stargazers in much of Europe and northern and eastern North America can still get a glimpse, if only partially.

The stars must literally align for this rare event to take place. The moon needs to be in its first lunar phase, also known as a new moon. It also has to be at its farthest point from Earth, making it appear smaller in the sky. These circumstances are what allows the edge of the sun to peek out around the moon and form the iconic ring of fire, appearing as a dark disk surrounded by bursts of light. In places where only a partial eclipse is visible, that darker disk will only appear to cover a section of the sun. 

To see it, look east along the horizon before, during, and just after sunrise to experience the ring of fire. Make sure you have an unobstructed view of the horizon, ideally on a body of water. This way you may even be able to see the so-called “devil’s horns” of the sun, the two points of crescent-appearing sun peeking above the horizon. 

People in remote parts of Canada, Greenland, and northern Russia will be the only ones able to see the full ring of fire. Check out this guide from the National Science Foundation to figure out if you’ll be able to see the event.

This event is different from a total solar eclipse, where the sun is completely obscured by our lunar neighbor. You might remember the last total solar eclipse from summer 2017, when the phenomenon captured America’s attention. 

Through all this celestial excitement, it’s crucial to remember that you should never look directly at the sun, even just for a partial eclipse. If you don’t have eclipse-safe glasses (not just regular sunglasses!) ready to go for the big day, check out our guides to making your own eclipse projector instead.

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Enceladus was supposed to be a frozen world, a dead chunk of solid ice locked in endless orbit around Saturn. But when the Cassini spacecraft visited the system from 2004 to 2017, it discovered an active moon literally bursting at the seams with water, hydrogen, and methane: three substances that, in Earthly oceans, would go hand in hand with life.  

But Enceladus is not Earth, and planetary scientists couldn’t be certain how to interpret the peculiar cocktail of molecules the Saturnian moon spits out into space. Were they the result of alien chemistry, or alien biology? Researchers still aren’t sure. Enceladus may or may not be home to alien “methanogens”—microbes that gobble up hydrogen and carbon dioxide and belch out methane. But a new analysis by a team of biologists, published yesterday in Nature Astronomy, shows that it’s almost impossible for so much methane to result from the most obvious chemical reaction alone. 

“Methanogens are able to explain the amount of methane,” says Antonin Affholder, a doctoral ecology student at ENS Paris and lead author of the new research.

A world under the ice

The first solid proof that Enceladus’s icy crust was hiding an ocean came in 2006, when Cassini spotted water geysers gushing into space.

A decade later, while looping around Enceladus, the spacecraft plunged directly through one of the watery plumes — skimming just 30 miles from the moon’s surface. During this daring dive the probe sampled the molecules spilling out into space, essentially sniffing the ocean spray.

It got a nose full of water, with notes of hydrogen and methane. The hydrogen, researchers determined, was a sign not of life but of the potential for life. It was likely coming from deep sea vents. Such vents on Earth throng with microbial life, which feed on the hydrogen. These sites are even considered candidates for the original cradle of terrestrial life.

[Related: Saturn now has 82 known moons—so why did we only get one?]

And then there was that methane. Many of the ancient life forms that make deep sea vents their home devour hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO2) and generate methane (CH4), earning them the name methanogens. With the discovery of just a few molecules, Cassini proved that Enceladus had just about everything necessary to keep simple organisms comfy—water, heat, and chow.

But the evidence was entirely circumstantial. Methane on Earth comes from various chemical reactions besides microbial digestion. Researchers puzzled over the abundance of hydrogen Cassini found too: a habitable Enceladus was overflowing with potential food, but nothing seemed to be eating it.

Mysterious methane

Affholder and his biologically minded colleagues decided to bring their understanding of populations and ecosystems to the problem, and set out to recreate all possible environments that could exist where Enceladus’s ocean meets its rocky core.

They started with the most obvious non-biological source of the methane. In places where hot water sloshes against certain minerals (such as in a deep-sea vent), a process known as “serpentinization” results in hydrogen. Then other chemical reactions can combine hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane, just like methanogens can. Using data from recent experiments nailing down serpentinization rates, the group calculated a range of plausible amounts of hydrogen and methane Enceladus can plausibly make on its own.

The team then considered how that range of hydrogen and methane would change if Enceladus had help from methanogens. The researchers did their modeling with real organisms from Earth to keep their speculations about Enceladus life reasonable. “We cannot just imagine whatever we want to imagine,” Affholder says. “We have to ground assumptions in what we know.”

Finally, they used a statistical framework known as Bayesian analysis to compare the odds of the two sets of theoretical Enceladuses. To make as much methane as Cassini picked up during its geyser dive, they found, the chain of chemical reactions beginning with serpentinization is not enough.

“The first hypothesis is completely disqualified,” Affholder says, with a “score of zero.”

The researchers also found that the plentiful hydrogen is exactly what one might expect an inhabited Enceladus to spew out. The molecules cluster near the vents in a zone far too hot for known methanogens to survive. Any organisms would most likely nibble on molecules at a safe distance from the vents, where they would have little impact on the overall quantity of hydrogen.

Unknown unknowns

Affholder emphasizes that his team’s result does not imply that Enceladus is swarming with methane-belching microbes. But it does mean that some unidentified source seems to be churning out the molecule.

The methane could, for example, be bubbling up from the core. If the moon formed mostly from colliding comets, it should be stuffed with rubbery, carbon-rich materials that break down into methane when heated. Or some completely unforeseen process could be at work. Researchers are drowning in their ignorance of what lies beneath the moon’s icy crust.  

“We don’t know the origin of Enceladus. We don’t know the age of Enceladus. We don’t know the precise nature of the methane,” Affholder says.

Alien hunting with indirect inferences

No lander will be drilling through miles of extraterrestrial ice in the foreseeable future, so researchers hoping to figure out what’s happening on Enceladus will have to make do with measurements at a distance.

[Related: Mars may have had recent volcanic eruptions—which is great news for finding life]

One strategy would be to examine the type of methane expelled. If its carbon atoms originally came from comets, by way of billions of years buried in the moon’s core, they may have different weights than the carbon atoms consumed and expelled by microbes. A Cassini sequel with updated instruments might be able to distinguish between the two.

“To know more, we might need a mission to examine methane,” Affholder says.

But with no new probes to the Saturn system on the horizon, researchers are turning their attention toward another icy moon—Jupiter’s Europa. After it launches later this year, the James Webb Space Telescope might be able to make out the contents of geysers there. An orbiter capable of directly sampling the plumes, just like Cassini did, is in the works too. Europa itself may be habitable, and if it isn’t, answering some basic questions about its history could inform the backstory of its icy cousin.

Affholder and his collaborators are also working on developing similar analyses to calculate the odds of extraterrestrial life on exoplanets, where atmospheric blends of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other gases will be even more complicated to interpret than Enceladus’s molecules. Their work foreshadows an era of astrobiology where any discoveries of alien life will come not with the bang of a smoking gun, but with the mounting whimpers of successive statistical analyses.

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This story was originally published in 2018 and has been updated.

The moon is a photographic tease. It hangs up there in the sky, all big and bright. Then you try to take a picture of it and you get a pathetic white blob floating in a sea of digital noise and darkness. It’s frustrating, especially when you’re experiencing a super moon, or a blood moon, or a harvest moon, or any of those other moon phenomena that don’t really mean anything, but are extremely good at helping websites rack up page views and Instagram users gather likes.

But, while the earth’s little lunar buddy can be a pain to photograph, the results can be rewarding. Here are some on how to photograph the moon, no matter what kind of camera you have, or what kind of media hype that particularly moon brings with it.

How to photograph the moon: Plan your shot

Let’s start with the bad news: Stumbling across a beautiful moon and expecting to capture it with your smartphone is extremely unlikely to happen. In fact, you’ll probably end up with something like this mess.

Bad moon photo

Gross, right? That’s because your smartphone—at least on its own—isn’t designed to snag a shot this kind of shot. The lens is too wide, the sensor generates too much digital noise, and the lens is often smudged with goop from your pocket that streaks the frame. It’s not pretty. So, it’s worth it to visualize the shot you want, and that will help determine the gear and technique you’ll want to use.

Sites like In-the-sky.org are a good reference for planning lunar events, or just tracking regular moon activities.

Using a dedicated camera

Your best bet learning how to photograph the moon is an advanced camera with exposure controls and a long, telephoto lens. For the shot below, I used a full-frame Canon 5D Mark III DSLR with a Tamron 150-600mm zoom lens and an extender attached. If you don’t know anything about the numbers associated with zoom lenses, 600mm is extremely long. In fact, it’s longer than most of the big, white lenses you’ll find on the sidelines of pro sporting events.

Luckily, you don’t need $10,000 worth of gear to make a solid shot happen. Any modern interchangeable lens camera with access to a zoom lens will do the trick. Even a compact camera with a long zoom lens built in can work, although if it does make things a little trickier.

Pick your longest telephoto lens. If you’re not sure which is which, you’ll want to check the focal length of the lens, which is typically noted as a range, like 18-55mm or 70-200mm. The higher the number, the more zoomed in your view will be.

When using a camera with a built-in zoom lens, it gets a little more complex. As you zoom toward the telephoto end of the camera’s range, it can’t let in as much light (because the aperture gets smaller). As a result, it needs to crank up the sensor’s light sensitivity, which increases digital noise. You might have to do a little experimenting to find the perfect balance of zoom and noise for your specific camera, especially if it’s something with a monstrous 50x zoom. Many cameras also offer “digital zoom,” which you should ignore because it’s just cropping in on the image, which you can do better in post.

In recent years, smartphones have gotten more adept at shooting moon photos. Specifically, Hauwei and Samsung both have specific shooting modes to enable moon captures with their zoom-lens equipped devices. Those devices have a way to go before they can compete with a DSLR or mirrorless camera, but they’re getting closer.

Super moon

Setting up

You’ll want a tripod for this shot, not because it’s dark, but because telephoto lenses are a lot harder to keep steady and free of motion blur without a sturdy base.

Pick a spot with a clear view of the moon—going out the night before to track the rough path across the sky can help you get an idea of when everything will fall into place.

If you want a shot of just the moon, location doesn’t matter as much, but adding some foreground can help give the moon some context that helps it feel as big as it looks, or even bigger.

Sometimes the time you shoot will be determined by a specific event, like an eclipse, but otherwise, you can pick the time that works best for your composition. Shooting a moon as it comes up over the horizon, for instance, will make it look huge, especially in a “super moon” situation.

Set the camera

If you’re not familiar with camera exposure modes and terms, you’ll want to switch your camera to program mode, which is typically represented by a “P” on the mode dial. This is an automatic mode, but it allows you to adjust exposure using something called “exposure compensation” because your camera doesn’t innately know how to photograph the moon. You’ll have to look up the exact method for using exposure compensation on your specific camera, but chances are, you’ll have to reduce the overall exposure by -2 or even more.

Moon shots often trick camera light meters because it tries to average out the bright celestial body with the dark sky. You can usually tell when you’re getting it right because you’ll start to see some actual detail in the moon.

If you do know about camera settings, start with a low ISO setting—even 100 will work to start. Choose a small aperture like f/8 or f/11 to get the sharpest performance out of your lens and start with a shutter speed around 1/125. This might be too dark, depending on your location, but you can adjust as you see fit.

Super Moon

How to photograph the moon: Shoot the photo

Focusing on the moon should be pretty easy if your lens is long enough. If your camera lets you zoom in when using the back screen to compose a shot, that’s a great way to carefully check that everything is sharp. You can use the camera’s autofocus system, but if you find that it’s constantly zipping back and forth, looking for its subject (photographers call this “hunting”) then manual focus might be a better bet.

Once you’re ready to take the picture, use your camera’s self-timer mode to actually fire the shutter. Many cameras have a mode that will wait two seconds after you push the button to take the picture and that comes in handy here. Pushing the shutter button with your finger can introduce small amounts of camera shake and give you a blurry photo, even if you’re on a tripod.

Don’t take just one. Lots can go wrong with a photo like this, so shoot as much as you can while you have the chance.

If you can’t get close enough to get a really tight shot of the moon, don’t sweat it too much. You only need a picture that’s roughly 2000 x 2000 pixels to look great on Instagram, so there’s plenty of room to crop into files from most cameras.

View this post on Instagram

Space station supermoon. This composite image made from six frames shows the International Space Station (@iss), with a crew of six onboard, as it transits the Moon at roughly five miles per second on Dec. 2. The microgravity laboratory orbits our planet at 17,500 mph and is home to important science and research that will not only benefit life here on Earth, but will help us venture deeper into the solar system than ever before. This Moon also happens to be a supermoon, which is when a full Moon is also at or near its closest point in its orbit around Earth. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky #nasa #space #spacestation #internationalspacestation #moon #planets #solarsystem #transit #microgravity #science

A post shared by NASA (@nasa) on Dec 3, 2017 at 3:08pm PST

How to photograph the moon with your phone

The biggest challenge of a decent smartphone moon-shot is the lens. The simplest solution is to find a buddy with a telescope and borrow it. They make special adapters for attaching smartphone cameras directly to telescope eyepieces, but you can get a similar effect by just hand-holding it.

You want to make sure that you use your hand—or even some tape—to block light from coming in between the telescope and the smartphone camera. That can cause lens flare and haze that will ruin your otherwise fancy photo.

It will likely take a little monkeying around with it to get the exact distance from the phone to the viewfinder in order to get everything in focus, but luckily phones have storage for lots of photos and you can delete the stinkers later.

If you have a phone with a dedicated zoom mode, like the Galaxy S21 Ultra, you can use that zoom to your advantage, but don’t be surprised if it takes some tries to get something that looks good.

Editing the photos

No matter how you shoot the image, editing should be pretty straight forward. You can typically use the “daylight” setting for color balance, even if there’s an eclipse happening, which will give it a red cast. After all, that is reflected sunlight that you’re capturing.

If you know how to shoot in raw—something that both smartphones and dedicated cameras now do regularly—enabling it will keep all the image data you capture without compressing it to make a JPEG file. That gives you extra leeway when it comes to editing a finished image.

And if you see weird purple or green fringing around the moon, that’s an effect called chromatic aberration and it often happens at high-contrast edges, especially with cheaper lenses and optics. It’s simply the lens’s inability to correct for different colors of light refracting at different angles. You can fix it in post using something like Lightroom or Photoshop. Or, just switch it to the best hider of imperfections ever: black-and-white.

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“Global warming is the greatest challenge our species will face in the next 100 years,” says Justin Lewis-Weber.

Currently a high school senior in California, Lewis-Weber has just published a paper in the journal New Space with what he thinks could be the solution to the upcoming energy crisis: putting self-replicating solar panels in space. These solar panels would to build copies of themselves, autonomously, on the surface of the moon. Then they would enter Earth’s orbit, collect the sun’s energy, and wirelessly beam it to the ground. Lewis-Weber’s paper builds on the work of John C. Mankins from Artemis Innovation Management Solutions.

Self-replicating solar panels on the moon may sound like a crazy idea, but the notion of space-based solar power actually dates back several decades, gaining some steam during the 1970s oil crisis. It was set aside after oil prices went back down, but since then, two things have happened: One, the world has become a lot more desperate to solve climate change; and two, technological innovations have brought this crazy idea out of the realm of science fiction. The idea is gaining attention, and with some big investments, it’s possible that space-based solar power could become a reality within a few decades.

Why Put Solar Panels In Space?

Of all the energy sources available to us Earthlings, the sun is pretty much as good as it gets, says Lewis-Weber. “As Elon Musk has stated, we have a fusion reactor in our sky.”

The problem with regular solar power is that the sun isn’t always up. We have nights, and cloudy days. The panels also take up a lot of land.

“To power entire world with solar power, we would need to cover an area that’s 92 percent the size of Nevada in solar panels, and that’s not even counting the batteries,” says Lewis-Weber. “To me, that’s just not feasible.”

But if you were to put those same solar panels in space, high above the atmosphere, there would be no weather to contend with, and the panels would experience nearly constant sunlight. Plus, the light that reaches them would be 27 percent brighter, since it wouldn’t need to filter through the atmosphere.

There’s no such thing as a cloudy day in orbit.

These solar panels would use microwaves to beam power back to receivers on Earth. And in case you’re worried, those microwaves wouldn’t fry us.

“The system would be designed not to exceed safe power densities,” Paul Jaffe, who works on space-based solar panels at the U.S. Naval Research Lab, told us. (Jaffe has proposed a plan to launch solar panels into space from Earth–but they wouldn’t be self-replicating.) “It’s sort of like how you don’t have to worry about breaking the land speed record by riding your bike. The system couldn’t be weaponized.”

Nor would the large array cast a shadow over the Earth. Sunlight would diffuse around the structure, like it does for other satellites in orbit. Even when the moon eclipses the sun, it only casts a shadow over a small part of the world for a short period of time. The shadow from an array the size of Nevada would be “not even a millionth of that,” says Jaffe.

There’s another advantage to space-based solar power. These arrays could beam power down across vast portions of the globe, wherever the receivers are set up. That opens up the possibility of sending electricity to villages in developing countries, or to disaster-stricken areas. The receiving equipment, Jaffe says, could fit into a couple of shipping containers.

Plus, since the sunlight would be essentially continuous, space-based solar power doesn’t require the development of large batteries to store the power–something that holds back ground-based solar power.

There’s Just One Big Problem

It’s going to take a LOT of solar panels to power the world, and launching all of those up into space will not be cheap.

Just one SpaceX launch costs about $60 million–and that’s much cheaper than the competition. In the paper, Lewis-Weber calculates that it could cost tens of trillions of dollars to send up a meaningful number of solar power satellites.

“Definitely the launch cost is one of the most influential factors in determining the cost of space solar,” Jaffe agrees. “Without that cost coming down, or using some alternate means to put the spacecraft in place, it’s not going to compete [with fossil fuels] on price.”

A Possible Solution?

What if, instead of sending thousands of solar panels into orbit, we could just send up one that’s programmed to make copies of itself? And then each machine it makes would make copies of itself, and so on. Like multiplying rabbits, the population of solar panel satellites would grow exponentially, covering the size of Nevada in a few months or years.

Earth orbit doesn’t have a whole lot of resources for building all those robots, so instead we could send the self-replicating machine to the moon, Lewis-Weber suggests. There, it could mine the soft lunar regolith for aluminum, iron, and silicon, to turn into parts for its solar satellite babies.

Building self-replicating robots won’t be easy, but Lewis-Weber has a plan. The first step would be to simplify the solar panels’ design as much as possible. “Instead of having 1,000 different types of screws,” he says, “let’s have five. Instead of having different molds for different parts, let’s have a 3D printer.”

Like multiplying rabbits, the population of solar panel satellites would grow exponentially.

With about 18 different “species” of factory machine, each one performing a simple task, such as producing screws or solar cells, it is theoretically possible to turn the moon into a self-sufficient solar cell factory.

Once the solar panels are ready, they could launch back to Earth–a process that’s a lot easer than launching from Earth, since the moon’s gravity is only about a sixth as strong as our planet’s–and take up residence in orbit.

The process requires a lot of new technology, but none of it is particularly distant. There’s no need for warp drives or matter transporters (though the latter would certainly be useful). Lewis-Weber thinks he could make it happen for about $10 billion. Most of that would be spent on research and development. After the technology is developed and launched, each solar panel it makes is essentially free.

For that same $10 billion, building and launching the solar panels from Earth would provide an array that’s large enough to power 150,000 homes. Not bad, but not as great as being able to power the entire world with the same amount of money.

Space-based solar power

Even if Lewis-Weber’s R&D ends up costing $100 billion, the cost of the electricity it generates ($0.00042 per kilowatt-hour) would be several orders of magnitude lower than that of fossil fuels. Not only would that allow solar power to outcompete coal, oil, and natural gas, it means companies that invest in this technology could stand to earn a lot of money.

But It’s Not Possible Yet

Complex, self-replicating robots don’t exist yet, and “it’ll be a tough engineering challenge,” Lewis-Weber admits. But it seems possible. Scientists are making progress on building simple machines that can “reproduce”, and one 3D printer comes close to self-replicating; it can print 73 percent of a working copy of itself.

In terms of digging up lunar dust and refining it into usable parts, that might be a job for Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources, companies that are developing technologies to mine asteroids.

Other research teams are also trying to make space-based solar power a reality. Jaffe and his colleagues, for example, are trying to develop technologies that would help the individual satellites move into an organized array in orbit. “Whether you build these from pieces you launch from Earth or from the moon, it’s likely that there’s going to be some assembly required.”

It’ll be a tough engineering challenge.

Meanwhile, researchers in Japan have successfully demonstrated the kind of wireless power transmission you’d need to get the energy from the solar panels in orbit down to the ground. They were able to beam 10 kilowatts of power to a receiver 1,640 (500 meters) away.

How Do We Get There?

The idea of space-based solar power seems to be gaining momentum. Out of 500 teams, Jaffe’s won 4 of the 7 awards at a recent Department of Defense competition.

“With climate change, there’s definitely a renewed interest in this,” he says.

In his presentation for the Department of Defense, Jaffe outlined a plan for getting space-based solar power off the ground. His strategy would use solar panels launched from Earth rather than the moon, but the step-by-step testing would likely be similar for both strategies.

An international team would test the technology on the ground, before bringing it to the International Space Station. After that, they’d launch a “pathfinder mission”–a small-scale version of the array–into low Earth orbit. This mission would be able to beam power to anywhere in the world.

“These steps can be accomplished by 2021 if we start now, and for about $350 million dollars,” he says in the presentation. That’s “about the same amount of money that Americans spend annually on Halloween costumes for their pets.”

We could get started for about the same amount of money that Americans spend on Halloween costumes for their pets every year.

Lewis-Weber, too, will be working on securing funding as he heads to one of the nation’s top universities this fall. He has one person in particular in mind, who he’d like to partner with: “I’d be extraordinarily pleased to work with Elon Musk.”

The electric car-making, rocket-launching billionaire would no doubt be a great fit for the project, if somewhat hard to get on the phone. But if you’re already taking moon shots, why not aim high?

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They’re not called “hardy tardis” for no reason. For the last few decades, scientists have been studying tardigrades, rather remarkable tiny microorganisms that seem to withstand all sorts of catastrophic threats. These little creatures have been able to weather everything from extreme temperatures to vacuums to high radiation. Usually found in freshwater, these water bears are only about 100 to 1000 microns in length—one micron is a one-thousandth of a millimeter—making them exceptionally small. 

So what could possibly stop these sturdy little creatures? Turns out it’s being shot out of a two-stage light gas gun toward sand targets in a nylon bullet, according to a new study published in Astrobiology. 

But there’s a reason for shooting microscopic organisms at high speeds: understanding the limits of extraterrestrial life.

Researchers like Alejandra Traspas, a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London who led the experiment, and her supervisor Mark Burchell, a professor of space science at the University of Kent in England, must systematically work through the obstacles that any living organism would have to overcome to survive. In the hypothetical case of a whizzing rock, such as a meteorite, crashing towards a planet or a moon, the organism would need to be able to survive being placed in a vacuum, getting exposed to radiation, and being frozen. Sound familiar? 

While there has been research published proving that tardigrades could weather those conditions, the next step was to see how they would respond to the force of impact.

“If they’re on a rock and hit the new moon, would they survive that shock? And if the shockwave passes through, would it kill them? That’s what we were testing,” Burchell says. “It’s not that there’s an actual colony of tardigrades out there. They’re used as a model organism. If they could do it and they’re the hardest thing we know, right? Maybe other things can, but if they can’t do it, and they’re the hardest thing we know, then maybe nothing else can either.”

[Related: Tardigrades that crash-landed on the moon may still be alive, but they’re not having fun]

To test this, they placed the tardigrades into the tun state—the tardigrade version of hibernation—by freezing them for 48 hours. In this state, they expel most of their water which allows them to freeze and then revive and their metabolic activity practically flatlines. This is their survival state.

Traspas then loaded the gun with the tardigrades and fired them towards targets made primarily out of silica to simulate a sandy surface like our moon or Mars. The chamber where this occurred was also a vacuum to further simulate the conditions of space. The tardigrades were shot out at speeds of 500 meters per second (1,118 miles per hour) to begin with, and worked their way up all the way to one kilometer per second (2237 miles per hour). 

“It usually takes them between 16 to 72 hours to recover after the different speeds, if they survive,” says Traspas. “If they don’t survive, of course, they are dead.”

The researchers found that at speeds of 500, 600, and 700 meters per second, the tardigrades had survival rates of 100%. After finding and recovering the tardigrades, Traspas reported that they were absolutely fine, moving around and eating normally. Then at 825 meters per second, the survival rate dropped to 65 percent, as one of the three tardigrades could not be revived.

“Then at 900 meters per second, we got fragments. So no survivors,” says Traspas. “So there’s this range between 700 and 900, where it goes from 100 percent survival to zero.”

Though this goes beyond the scope of this study, Traspas thinks there is room to explore what changes internally within the tardigrade to cause this. She found that after experiencing this level of shock, the tardigrades were able to move around and eat, but not reproduce. In the summer she hopes to conduct genetic analysis to understand whether there is internal damage or whether this is an evolutionary protective mechanism.

Achieving these results meant staring at the tardigrades for hours through a microscope. “For the first couple of hours after the impact, you barely see anything because they were in the tun state. They become very, very small,” says Traspas. “Then as the hours go by, you can start seeing them. It’s like a butterfly coming out of their little [cocoon].” The hardy little water bears slowly start recovering to their full size before they start moving around and signalling that they have survived yet another extreme test. 

So what does all of this mean? The researchers believe that these findings hint at how similar life could have started on Earth. Or it could indicate that there are similarly complex organisms in other places, like the moons of Europa and Enceldaus, since their icy surfaces suggest there may be liquid water beneath.

The study also gives momentum to the theory of panspermia, a theory that suggests that life originated in outer space and journeyed between various worlds transported by meteorites that occur after an asteroid hits a planet or the moon.

“As NASA used to say: follow the water. If you could find liquid water, you would find life, was the hope,” says Burchell. Liquid water suggests life, which is why icy moons have been of particular interest in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Europa and Enceladus are affected by tidal waves that cause water to shoot through the icy surface of the moon. If water can support life here on Earth, then perhaps we have cautious reason to believe that there is life to be found in those plumes too. Tardigrades are just another piece in the puzzle to help us understand how life can survive in even the most unlikely of situations.

Correction: An earlier version of this story wrote Alejandra Traspas’ name as Trapas after the first mention.

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Just shy of a full year encircling the moon, NASA’s twin lunar probes are bidding farewell on Monday, crashing in a controlled fashion into a small mountain-like formation at the moon’s north pole. The GRAIL twins, nicknamed Ebb and Flow, are almost out of fuel and their lives would come to an end anyway–but rather than let them fall out of the lunar sky, as it were, NASA is performing a kind of spacecraft euthanasia.

“It’s kind of sad for me,” said David Lehman, GRAIL’s project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, in a phone call with journalists. “I’m hoping tonight a gas station will pull up next to our spacecraft, refuel it, and we can continue another 6 months. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Ebb and Flow, which were named by schoolchildren and are about the size of washing machines, will receive commands Friday morning to fly from south to north on their final trajectory. Ebb, which reached the moon on New Year’s Eve, will be the first to go down, impacting at 2:28:40 p.m. Pacific time on Monday. Flow will hit about 20 seconds later.

The two will probably break into countless pieces as they strike a small massif in a dark area of the moon. It’s not technically a mountain, because the moon doesn’t have big mountain-forming orogenies. It’s actually a rim near a crater called Goldschmidt. The GRAIL probes’ final resting place doesn’t even have a name, although Maria Zuber, the mission’s principal investigator and director of research at MIT, said the team is working on that.

Ebb and Flow are crashing on purpose in part so NASA could avoid damaging any lunar heritage sites, including soft landers sent by Russia and the U.S. and some Apollo sites. The two spacecraft are too small to create a scientifically interesting splat, like the one created by the LCROSS probe a few years ago that helped prove the prevalence of water. “They would be more skid marks than craters,” Zuber said of their impact.

GRAIL Trajectory

Still, scientists figured they could get some interesting information about moon structures if the probes crashed into something tall. The way they impact the unnamed massif will tell scientists something about its composition. The probes will be flying around 1.7 kilometers per second, or 3,760 mph. Just to be sure, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will check out the area a few days later. If LRO does pick up any volatile compounds–water or something else–that will be really interesting, although it’s pretty unlikely.

The mission’s main goal, which it achieved with great success, was producing the most accurate map ever of the moon’s gravity field. The first crop of scientific papers describing that gravity field were published last week in Science. The map revealed plenty of moon features that have never been seen before, like a very porous crust, and unusual lava-filled formations indicating a tumultuous past. Scientists were also able to figure out how much aluminum is in the moon, which bolsters the already-strong theory that the moon was sheared off of Earth when a Mars-sized object smacked into our planet a few billion years ago.

Along with characterizing the moon better than ever, GRAIL will help future lunar explorers be as efficient as possible–at least when traveling there. Its gravity map also produced extremely precise parameters for navigation, Zuber said.

“If there was a particular boulder you wanted to target, you could land at it now. This actually decreases the cost of future missions to the moon,” she said. “Although this is not why we did the mission, it’s an additional benefit.”

GRAIL stands for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, and the two probes found all of this out by flying in a very precise formation and transmitting radio signals to each other. As they flew over the moon, small perturbations in the moon’s gravity changed their positions relative to each other, which changed the radio signals’ transmission times.

The mission also carried along some cameras, which were operated by school kids around the U.S. The MoonKam project collected some 115,000 images of the moon, Zuber said, which are being hosted in an online archive for future educational use. The pictures represent striking detail of the moon’s surface, down to 300 meters on the lunar surface. For comparison, when the first Viking orbiters photographed Mars, they reached about 200 meters resolution. And this is a science experiment solely for the purpose of educating kids.

The MoonKam on Ebb will take some final shots on Friday, Lehman said. Then all the instruments will go quiet for good until the spacecraft crash on Monday.

GRAIL Crash Sites

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Scientists have known for almost five years now that the moon is watery–or at least that lots of water molecules are trapped in its crust and its permanently dark, frozen craters. The prevailing theory is that this water comes from molecules in the solar system. But maybe the moon has had water all along, according to a new study of Apollo moon rocks.

Hejiu Hui of Notre Dame, Youxue Zhang of the University of Michigan and their colleagues studied several rocks from the lunar highlands, recovered during the late Apollo missions. One rock was nicknamed the “genesis rock” after Apollo 15 astronauts recovered it on a crater rim. The rock was thought to have come from the moon’s primordial crust.

The researchers used infrared spectroscopy to peer inside the rocks without disturbing them, and were able to analyze the rocks’ water content. It’s not really water, per se, but the related chemical known as hydroxyl, which contains one atom each of oxygen and hydrogen.

Recent missions have found a whole lot of this on the moon. In the fall of 2009, the Lunar Crater Observating and Sensing Satellite, LCROSS, slammed into a permanently dark crater and found rich deposits of water ice. Around the same time, instruments on India’s Chandrayaan-1 probe found evidence of water molecules in the moon’s soil. And since then, follow-up observations have yielded plenty of other water evidence.

These vast quantities of water have mostly been explained by micrometeoroid bombardment, or even free molecules deposited by the solar wind. But Hui and Zhang say otherwise. The hydroxyl content of the rocks they examined suggests the lunar interior contained a whole lot of water when the moon was still young and molten, before the crust solidified.

That poses a bit of a problem, however. Most moon-formation theories hold that a Mars-sized object whacked the Earth and sheared off a giant hunk of rock that became our moon. Recent computer simulations show how this could have happened. But if it really did, all the water on that chunk would have instantly vaporized as the rock superheated. So why is it still there?

“Because these are some of the oldest rocks from the moon, the water is inferred to have been in the moon when it formed,” Zhang said in a statement. So maybe the moon didn’t form that way after all, or maybe this inference is incorrect somehow. More work now needs to be done to figure this out. The paper appears in Nature Geoscience.

Moon Formation In The Late Hadean Period

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A team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon have built a robot that will send video from the moon to the Earth. And the robot will be controlled by the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, with the 3-D camera on the robot turning to match the head movements of the user.

“The vision was simple — let anyone on Earth experience the Moon live through the eyes of a robot,” team leader Daniel Shafrir told BBC News. “We weren’t just going to go to the Moon. We are going to bring the Moon back.”

This telepresence robot is named Andy, after Andrew Carnegie, the famed industrialist who founded the college. Currently, only the operator controlling this moon rover will be able to see through its “eyes” thousands of miles away.

The project is being worked on in partnership with Astrobotic, a company that was spun off from Carnegie Mellon. The company builds a variety of space robots for various purposes such as transportation, exploration, and mining. Astrobotic has a deal with SpaceX, the private space exploration company, to include Andy on a mission to the moon scheduled for 2016.

“Imagine the feeling of looking out and seeing rocks and craters billions of years old. Turn your head to the right and you see the dark expanse of space. Turn your head to the left and you see home, Earth,” said Mr Shafrir.

Andy

Ever wanted to be an astronaut exploring the moon? You may one day be able to live that experience through telepresence and virtual reality.

The project is competing with 17 others for the Google Lunar XPrize, a $30 million reward for the first team that can land a robot on the Moon, have it travel there for 500 meters, and beam video of the moon surface back to Earth.

While concrete plans on how Carnegie Mellon and Astrobotic will share this live VR experience with others has not been created, the creators want to make it a reality. The team behind Andy wants to have “hundreds of the robots on the Moon”, said Mr Shafrir. “With an Oculus headset in every classroom, allowing kids to experience what, to this date, has only been experienced by 12 human beings.”

The Oculus Rift headset currently only exists as prototype development kits for software developers to make virtual reality programs. The final VR headsets are expected to be released in 2015.

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It’s been over 40 years since humans last set foot on the lunar surface. But that doesn’t mean we’re done exploring the Moon. In fact, there have been over 50 successful robotic missions to the Moon, including six current missions operated by three different space agencies.

So we’ve been the Moon. Now what? Many say we shouldn’t go back–instead let’s go to Mars. But, what if the only feasible way to get humankind to Mars is by way of the Moon?

That’s what the Lunar Polar Hydrogen Mapper, or “Luna-H Map”, is trying to figure out. The SpaceTrex lab at Arizona State University has partnered with NASA to create a tiny satellite with one important goal: to measure and locate the exact amount of water on the Moon.

Why do we care about water on the moon? Because water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, and when you mix those two ingredients back together, you get combustion. Or in other words, the Moon’s water could be made into rocket fuel.

Jekan Thanga, the head engineer on LunaH-Map dreams of a lunar gas station for astronauts. “Just think, we could have a refueling station at the L2 point,” he says, referring to a point beyond the Moon where gravitation alignments would allow supplies in space to remain stationary. “Our astronauts could stop there to refuel and stock up on supplies before heading out to Mars, or Europa.”

The Moon’s water could be made into rocket fuel.

There seems to be a decent amount of H₂O on the Moon, but scientists aren’t sure exactly how much is there, or where it’s concentrated. Craig Hardgrove, the principle investigator for LunaH-Map says, “We’re trying to prove that there’s water at the lunar poles.”

NASA has been hoping to answer these questions for years, but it hasn’t had the funding or the support to send people or landers back to the Moon. That’s where CubeSat technology comes in. CubeSats are very small satellites, about the size of an oversized Rubik’s Cube. Advanced scientific instruments can be packed inside these tiny spacecraft to obtain information the same way a larger craft would, but for 1 percent of the price. The 4-inch cubes can also be stacked together to add more room for instruments. (LunaH-Map is about the size of a cereal box.)

Because of their small size, CubeSats can hitch rides on rockets with larger payloads and get released on their own trajectories to conduct their own science, opening up possibilities to explore the solar system in missions that otherwise wouldn’t have been funded.

CubeSats measure about four inches on each side

Many scientists compete for these coveted spots on mission payloads. To date there is one particular space ride that CubeSat scientists are vying for, and it happens to be on the most powerful rocket ever built. The first official launch of NASA’s Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft will take place in 2018, and onboard it will carry 11 separate CubeSat missions into deep space (including BioSentinel, which will measure the effects of space radiation on yeast DNA). It will also be swinging around the Moon and dropping off LunaH-Map along with potentially two other lunar CubeSats, to answer the water question once and for all.

But CubeSats won’t stop at the Moon. Next year, two will travel to Mars with NASA’s Insight Lander, becoming the first CubeSats to leave Earth’s orbit.

The Mars Cube One, or MarCO, CubeSats have a temporary but critical objective: they will serve as real time communications liaisons between the InSight lander and the scientists at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This task of relaying real-time information has traditionally been the job of the Mars orbiter Odyssey. However, the alignment of Odyssey doesn’t sync up with InSight’s landing coordinates. Instead, MarCo A and B will relay data during the lander’s descent and landing. After that, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will take over communications with Earth, and the CubeSats’ mission will be complete.

Lunar Flashlight is another CubeSat mission that will look for water on the moon

MarCo A and B will be the first CubeSats to participate in an interplanetary mission, but they definitely won’t be the last. There’s talk of building a CubeSat to accompany NASA’s future mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa.

Europa contains an ocean with more water than Earth, so the mission to Europa carries with it high hopes for finding life. With a minimum six-year journey to Jupiter’s moon, mission scientists have one shot at obtaining data during the flyby. Adding a CubeSat has the potential to increase the amount and the kind of data scientists could get from the mission.

Since 2000, more than 300 CubeSat missions have been tested and deployed in Earth orbit, including the Planetary Society’s LightSail this year. Bill Nye, CEO of the Planetary Society, has said of CubeSat technology: “When you go exploring, two things happen. First, you make discoveries. The other thing is you’ll have an adventure, and I think we all want to be a part of space exploration.”

As scientists and engineers continue to develop more efficient technology, CubeSats and small science instruments like these will continue to open the doors to universities and organizations wanting to participate in space exploration. As long as there’s more science to do and mysteries to uncover, it’s safe to say the era of CubeSats will continue to advance, and maybe even help humans get deeper into space.

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This post has been updated on August 10, because you still care about the moons.

Blue moons, black moons, pink moons, strawberry moons, micromoons, supermoons. For some reason, your news aggregation algorithm of choice thinks you really really really want to know all about these moons. “Catch This Weekend’s AMAZING SUPERMOON,” one headline (or, perhaps, 500 of them) will announce. “The Supermoon Isn’t Actually A Big Deal And You’re All Ruining Astronomy,” another will grouse.

The latest example is the full moon that will rise on August 11 around 9:36 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time: the so-called Sturgeon Moon, named after the big American fish historically caught in late summer. It’s the last supermoon of the year. It will also coincide with—and reduce the visibility of—the Perseid meteor shower’s peak. Should you ignore tomorrow’s moon in solidarity with outshined fireballs? Absolutely not. Here’s everything you need to know about this moon’s headline-grabbing moon, the next one, and all the rest.

What is a full moon?

Look, it’s okay if you don’t know. There are probably loads of folks who walk around pretending they totally know why that thing in the sky seems to get bigger and smaller at regular intervals who totally do not.

The moon orbits Earth, and it’s tidally locked—that means it always shows us the same face, instead of twirling around like our planet does. That’s why you can always see the man on the moon (or the moon rabbit, depending on your cultural preferences) even as the satellite spins around us. But while the moon is big and bright in the sky when it’s full, that’s only because it’s reflecting light from the sun. The moon is also always moving, so it’s getting hit with sunlight at different angles. It’s invisible to us during the “new moon,” because the celestial body is parked right between us and the sun; the so-called dark side of the moon is lit up like Las Vegas, but the side we can see is in shadow. A full moon happens when Earth is right between the sun and the moon, so sunlight hits the part we can see. All the other phases are just the transition from one of those extremes to the other.

[Related: How to take a picture of the moon that doesn’t look like a tiny, white blob]

What is a super moon?

Depending on who you ask, there will have been anywhere from two to four supermoons in 2022. Confused? Don’t feel bad. It’s confusing.

A moon’s supermoon status is often the subject of fierce debate. This is because, as EarthSky explains, a supermoon may sound more scientific than a Blood Moon or Worm Moon, but it’s still not a term with a scientific definition. In fact, it was coined not by an astronomer, but by an astrologer named Richard Nolle in 1979. Basically, whether or not a particular moon is a supermoon boils down to how different stargazers (amateur and otherwise) calculate just how relatively close a full moon has to be to be considered super.

The moon isn’t always exactly the same distance from Earth, because its orbit isn’t perfectly circular. We call the closest point perigee (when it averages a distance of about 225,803 miles), and the most distant point apogee (when it averages a distance of about 251,968 miles). These shifts are not insignificant, but they’re also far from earth-shattering.

The reason you care about this middling change in distance is that it turns a moon super. When a full moon happens close to perigee, it’s going to look a smidge bigger than if it happened at apogee. Maybe. If you’re lucky. Honestly, the difference is not that profound, but if you’re in a position to photograph the supermoon next to something that showcases the slight increase in scale, it can look pretty cool. Our 2022 supermoons—the ones where perigee for the months lines up with the full moon—occurred in May, June, July, and August. Supermoon season is nearly over!

And just to really remind you that words are meaningless and the moon is always just the moon no matter what we decide to call it: The moon sometimes makes its closest monthly (or even annual) approach to Earth on a night we can’t see it. Just because you can’t snap a pic for your Instagram doesn’t mean the new moon isn’t super. We had such super moons in January and February of 2022, and will get another one in December.

What’s a sturgeon moon?

There won’t be anything fishy about the moon’s appearance. Instead, as NASA notes, this refers to what some Algonquin tribes called the moon during August; at this time of year, Native Americans fished for sturgeon in the Great Lakes. There are other names for it, too, like the Green Corn Moon.

Sometimes you’ll see a headline that promises a moon with so many qualifiers it makes your head spin. A superblueblood wolf moon, mayhaps? Lots of websites will tell you that “wolf moon” is the traditional name of the first full moon of the year in “Native American” cultures, which is kind of a weird thing to claim given that there are 573 registered Tribal Nations in the US alone today, not to mention historically. The idea that hungry, howling wolves were such a universal constant in January that all of North America, with its disparate cultures, geographies, and languages, spontaneously came up with the same nickname is—well, it’s silly. It’s a silly idea.

The Farmer’s Almanac now lists a handful of alternatives for historical August moon names: the Black Cherries Moon (Assiniboine), Ricing Moon (Anishinaabe), and Harvest Moon (Dakota), to name just a few.

Many cultures have traditional names for the full moon in a given month or season, so there’s quite a list to draw from if you’re trying to really plump up a story on a perfectly pedestrian full moon. But these are all based on human calendars and activities and folklore; you will not go outside and see a fish-scale moon in August or a fuchsia moon in April (or a moon full of beavers in November, for that matter), though I wish it were so.

What is a new moon?

Every 29.531 days, the relative positions of the sun, moon, and Earth conspire to leave our satellite—which doesn’t produce its own light, but shines thanks to the reflected light of our host star—in the dark. The sun’s rays are still striking the moon’s surface, but they’re hitting the (obviously inappropriately named) dark side that faces away from us. The moon appears to grow and shrink in the sky throughout the month thanks to shifts in its position relative to Earth and the sun. Fun fact: while basically everyone knows what a crescent moon is and why it’s so-called, you might not know that the bulbous shape of a moon somewhere between a straight split down its face and a full circle is called “gibbous,” from the Latin for hunched or humped.

What is a micro moon?

It’s the opposite of the super one. Size isn’t everything. In a previous version of this article, I wrote that while we had such a moon coming up in September 2019, we probably wouldn’t see tons of news outlets crowing over the Micro Full Corn Moon. I was only half right: There were plenty of headlines crowing, though they decided to dub it the Harvest Micromoon instead.

As is the case with supermoons, you shouldn’t expect to see a noticeable difference in a micromoon’s size.

Super moon

What is a blue moon?

A blue moon is a nickname for when two full moons fall in the same calendar month. Astronomer David Chapman explained for EarthSky that this is merely a quirk of our calendar; once we stopped doing things based on the moon and started trying to follow the sun and the seasons, we stopped having one reliable full moon per month. The moon cycle is 29.53 days long on average, so on most months we still end up with a single new moon and a single full one. But every once in awhile, things sync up so that one month steals a full moon from another.

In March of 2018, we had our second “blue moon” of that year, to much acclaim. And while that’s not necessarily special in an oh-gosh-get-out-and-look-at-it kinda way, it’s certainly special: We hadn’t previously had two in one year since 1999. In 2018 (and in 1999) both January and March stacked full moons on the first and last nights of the month, leaving February in the dark. The next time this will happen is 2037.

Getting two blue moons a year is rare, but we have individual blue moons every few years. Also, fun fact: not actually blue. A moon can indeed take on a moody blue hue, but this only happens when particles of just the right size disperse through the sky—and it has nothing to do with the moon’s status as “blue.” Big clouds of ash from volcanic eruptions or fires can do the trick, but it doesn’t happen often, and the stars would certainly have to align for two such rare instances to occur at once.

Is there another kind of blue moon?

Surprise! There’s another kind of moon that some farmer’s almanacs refer to as blue. Just as there’s typically one full moon a month, there are generally three full moons a season. And just as there are sometimes two full moons in a month due to our calendar almost-but-not-quite following the lunar cycle (ugh) there are sometimes four full moons in a season. April 2019’s full moon landed right as spring began, leaving enough time for another three (the last rose on June 17, less than a week before summer officially kicked off and long after we’d all started acting like spring was dead and buried). Some breathlessly referred to this as a rare occurrence, but it happens every couple of years.

Weirdly, the blue moon moniker is applied not to the fourth full moon in a season (which actually only happens once-in-a-you-know-what) but to the third. Why? Who knows. What’s the fourth full moon in a season called? A full moon. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Similarly, the term “black moon” most commonly refers to the second new moon in a calendar month, but can also refer to the third new moon in a season with four of them. The phrase has also historically been applied to months without full moons, as well as months without new moons. Each of these circumstances occur about once every 19 years, and only in February.

Sadly, 2022 will be completely blue-moon-less.

What is a black moon?

You may be familiar with the concept of a blue moon (see above), which rather dramatically refers to the second full moon in a month. A black moon is the same thing, but for the second new moon in a month. This happens about once every three years. What’s it look like? Well, it looks like a new moon. That means you can’t really see it. But by all means, get out there and do some stargazing.

In case you haven’t yet really grasped the fact that all of these moons are just the result of our arbitrary and often nonsensical calendar system, consider this: In some time zones, North America’s July 31, 2018 new moon actually rose on August 1. That means it wasn’t a black moon, because it was the first new moon of August instead of the second new moon of July. Those time zones got their own black moon at the end of August, when we Americans looked up to see our first new moon of the month (which was their second). This is all definitely very important and noteworthy.

What’s a pink moon?

While spring moons may be referred to as “Pink Moons,” they won’t actually look pink. Atmospheric conditions can conspire to change the hue of the moon as seen from the ground—NASA has a neat picture of a positively purple one, which is just gorgeous—but there’s no reason to think full moons in April look anything but the usual grayish color. The Full Pink Moon is so-named, according to the Farmer’s Almanac, because its April rise often coincides with the blossoming of a pink North American wildflower called Phlox subulata.

What is a blood moon?

Objectively the most metal moon (sorry, black moon), these only occur during total lunar eclipses (which can happen a few times a year in any given location). When the moon slips through our shadow, our planet gives it a reddish cast. The moon can also look orange whenever it’s rising or setting, or if it hangs low in the horizon all night—the light bouncing off of it has to travel through thicker atmosphere there, which scatters more blue light away. But you’ll probably only see that deep, sinister red during an eclipse.

A lot of headlines about moons are just silly (you do not need to be particularly excited about a blue moon, it just looks like a regular ol’ moon), but you should definitely roll out of bed to look at a blood moon if one is going to be visible in your region. But anyone who crams both “blood” and “eclipse” into their moniker for a moon is just trying to win the search engine optimization game; a blood moon is just a lunar eclipse that’s going through a goth phase. Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo makes the case that we should really just stop throwing the phrase “blood moon” around and call them lunar eclipses, which is tough but fair, because they’re lunar eclipses and not evidence of bloody battles between the sky gods.

Most of North America had a great view of a total lunar eclipse during May’s full moon, which fell on May 15. The eclipse itself occurred during the wee hours of the morning on May 16. A flower blood supermoon? We can get behind that.

The post Everything to know about the last supermoon of 2022 appeared first on Popular Science.

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When the Cassini spacecraft swung by Saturn’s moon Enceladus in 2005, its cameras glimpsed a particularly arresting feature of the alien world: tiger stripes. Where fractures in Europa’s icy shell race across the surface at random angles, Enceladus’s surface hosts five epic fissures running in parallel across its southern pole, each stretching roughly 80 miles in length.

Now a team of physicists suggests they’ve cracked the origin of these stripes: an unruly ocean burst into space and fell as snow that overloaded ice shelves enough to create the handful of rather uniform cracks, according to results published Monday in Nature Astronomy. The theory also has implications for how water escapes from the moon into orbit, where Cassini was able to taste it and determine that the liquid has most of the chemical ingredients needed to support life as we know it.

“Since it is thanks to these fissures that we have been able to sample and study Enceladus’s subsurface ocean, which is beloved by astrobiologists, we thought it was important to understand the forces that formed and sustained them,” said Douglas Hemingway, a physicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science and paper coauthor, in a press release.

It’s a tidy tale that builds upon previous work to explain why the stripes occurred at a pole, and why they run side by side, but some geologists wonder if it asks for too many miracles. “They need so many assumptions to line up,” says An Yin, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who was not involved with the study. “It’s like three or four perfect [scenarios] that have to come together.”

The story starts with an ocean that sloshes beneath an ice shell. As Enceladus cooled in the distant past, a layer of seawater froze and expanded. Locked underwater by the crust, this expansion pressurized the ocean until, like a glass bottle left too long in the freezer, something had to give.

Saturn’s gravity occasionally squeezes Enceladus as it orbits, a process that’s thinned the crust at the moon’s poles. As the pressure built, it was the south pole that happened to give way first, Hemingway and colleagues contend. The icy crust was ripped apart, exposing the ocean below, and a long crevasse now known as Baghdad ran straight through the world’s southernmost point.

Oceanic tides on the moon caused by Saturn’s gravitational tugs keeps the crack from freezing over, previous research has suggested, by repeatedly ripping it apart and forcing it back together. “You’re actually flushing water out and pumping it back in,” Hemingway says, which churns the water and keeps the crevice warm. Eternally exposed to the vacuum of space, significant quantities of water continuously leach into the sky, generating plumes like the one Cassini dove through.

Ice pellets from those plumes rained down on either side of the Baghdad fissure. They built up over time and weighed each ice sheet down until they cracked, creating Cairo and Damascus (the stripes take their names from places featured in One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern and Indian folk tales) at about 20 miles to either side. Yin likens the situation to putting a child on the tip of a thin diving board and then feeding them until the diving board buckles.

The process then played out, giving rise to the Alexandria fissure, and one more partial crack too shallow to reach the subsurface ocean, which goes by the unofficial nickname “E.” Hemingway and his colleagues estimated that it took between one hundred thousand and one million years for each fissure to spew enough seawater and rain down enough ice to produce each subsequent pair of cracks. No more crevasses should form, however, because as they stray farther from the pole the ice gets too thick.

Yet some geologists remain skeptical that the new theory really describes Enceladus’s history. “I personally think that the chances are very small,” Yin said. He views the assumption that the global ocean melted and froze uniformly as unrealistic, because picture-perfect craters in the moon’s northern hemisphere show little sign of past trauma from whole-world heating or cooling.

Instead, he suggests that a burst of heat from the moon’s interior liquified part of a half-mile high plateau, melting it like a block of cheese in a pan. As this ice slide cascaded sideways into the moon’s frozen shell, it pushed up wrinkles that remain visible. These rolls then would have frozen in place, and mounting horizontal pressure from the ice slide, he says, would have torn open all five tiger stripes at the same time. Yin and his colleagues detailed their theory, which he says explains more features with fewer assumptions, in a pair of publications in 2015 and 2016.

Yin welcomes the competition from the new ocean-bursting theory—which he agrees is not impossible—because it makes testable predictions. The plumes of evaporating water should have put down layer after layer of ice as they weighted down the ice shelves over hundreds of thousands of years, and the stripes should have exposed these layers. Hemingway’s chasms should also feature deep cuts with exposed seawater along the entire fault, where Yin’s fissures would have exposed seawater that shoots off plumes only at certain points. Current imaging technology can’t distinguish between the two cases, but future exploration of Enceladus will make the origin of the tiger stripes much clearer. Cassini alumni have proposed a follow up “Enceladus Life Finder” mission to trek back to the ice world, but it has not yet received funding.

“In the distant future if we have spacecraft in the orbit, or landers,” Hemingway says, “we can get a much more detailed understanding of the interior, which can put some ideas to the test.”

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Before astronauts can hike through Titan’s gentle hills or slide down its colossal dunes, they’ll have to know where they’re going.

Researchers have taken a major step toward the exploration of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, by producing the first global map of the world’s icy plains, twisted canyons, and crinkled shorelines. The pathfinding chart, published Monday in Nature Astronomy, will form the foundation of more detailed maps to come, maps that will help scientists decipher the moon’s past and plan for its future exploration.

“Geologic mapping,” says David Williams, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who helped produce the plot, “is basically another tool we use when we analyze planetary surfaces to try and understand their histories.”

The Cassini spacecraft, which arrived in the Saturn system in 2004, gave researchers their first glimpse through Titan’s thick yellow clouds (the moon’s atmosphere is thicker than the Earth’s but almost all nitrogen and methane). The probe’s penetrating radar swept over the moon again and again during the next 13 years as it performed more than 100 flybys, revealing lakes, rivers, and other unmistakable signs of surface liquid—a first for any world other than Earth.

Williams and his colleagues started with radar imagery, where Cassini sent radio waves through the clouds to bounce off Titan’s surface in order to generate a map. This method covered slightly less than half of Titan’s surface in swooping, crossing tracts, but featured fine resolution the team could use to identify the moon’s different types of terrains, such as plains or dunes. They then overlaid that radar data with data from other cameras imaging visible and infrared light that were fuzzier, but covered the whole world, to learn how each landform appeared to each of Cassini’s various eyes. Finally, they used that global data from the other instruments to infer what types of land lay between the swaths of radar. “This particular map was focused on showing the variety of surface materials on a global scale,” Williams says.

The map reveals a world shaped by liquid and wind, although at nearly 300 degrees F below zero, no water flows on Titan’s surface. Rather, liquid methane and ethane fill Titan’s rivers and lakes, before evaporating and raining down again in an alien analogy of Earth’s water cycle.

Although that’s not to say the moon doesn’t have H2O. On the contrary, Titan’s surface largely is H2O. “The overall crust, like what people would walk on, what would make up continents on Earth,” Williams says, “in the case of Titan would be water ice.”

The team identified six major types of terrain carved from the icy crust: craters, lakes, plains, dunes, hummocks (hills) and labyrinths (canyons).

Here and there a few craters speckle the surface. Near the north pole lie the methane lakes, dark spots thrown into relief by sharp coastlines. Moving south, an explorer would encounter Titan’s most common landform: Plains, flat stretches of icy crust with a dusting of methane- and ethane-based sand, cover nearly two thirds of the world. Equatorial winds pile said sand into dunes hundreds of feet tall that stretch for hundreds of miles, circling the moon’s midsection and covering about one fifth of its surface.

Interspersed with the planes and dunes, lie “hummocky” regions of hills perhaps a few hundred feet high. Webs of cracked canyons dug by streams of methane from a wetter era cover much of the south pole—a sign of the climate change Titan has experienced as its orbit around Saturn, and Saturn’s orbit around the sun, change slightly over time.

“Over the geologic history of titan,” Williams says, “we see a sequence where the liquid accumulates at the poles and then is more dominant at the equator and back and forth.”

Further study of the chart and others like it in the future may eventually let researchers work out the movement of liquid on a seasonal basis as well. “Ultimately, we hope such maps will help explain the methane cycle on Titan,” says Imke de Pater, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who was not involved with the research.

And better maps are well on their way. Although Cassini’s 2017 dive into Saturn’s atmosphere put an abrupt end to its steam of data, Williams says spotting and naming the major terrains was just the first step. He and his colleagues have already gone a step further, slicing the land into finer categories like bright plains and mountains, and produced a more detailed map. They plan to publish it through the US Geological Survey, where it will join other geological maps of extraterrestrial worlds including the moon, Mars, Ceres, and Vesta. (Maps of Pluto and Mercury are also in the works).

While it may be awhile before any human explorers will need these charts, a robotic scout may put them to good use before too long. NASA is developing a probe called Dragonfly that can navigate Titan by air, land on the surface, and take off again. The mission is scheduled to depart Earth in 2026 and arrive at the moon in 2034, where it will look for signs of alien habitability.

“This map will help inform that team of the nature of the geologic units around wherever it is that they’re planning on putting their drone to explore,” Williams says.

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In the 50 years since Apollo 11 took off from Launch Pad 39A in Cape Kennedy, Florida, only a dozen NASA astronauts have strolled along the moon’s surface. The original mission lasted 12 days, depositing the crew in the Pacific Ocean after a total flight distance of 952,000 miles. Several books, films, and series have eulogized that first successful lunar flight and walk, but none are as breathtaking as the Hasselbad camera stills that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong used to document their explorations of the moon’s surface. In addition to the famous flag and footsteps, they left behind a seismic detector and laser-reflector to continue capturing space data long after Apollo had departed.

To celebrate the anniversary of the July 1969 expedition, we picked out some of our favorite photos from the NASA archives to remind us that no matter how far we go in or past the solar system, it all started here, with the Earth’s most beloved and mysterious satellite.

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When the Apollo 15 mission first brought a lunar rover to the surface of the moon in 1971, it allowed astronauts to cover more than 17 miles of terrain. That’s more than four times what previous missions covered on foot. The next year, the Apollo 17 mission earned the distance record with more than 22 miles of travel under its belt thanks to the rover.

But those are short distances compared to what might happen at this end of this decade. For its 2029 expedition, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) plans to plunk an enclosed, pressurized rover that will hold two to four astronauts on the moon’s surface that will ultimately travel more than 6,000 miles if everything goes according to plan.

Toyota is working with JAXA to build the majority of its rover, but Bridgestone has signed on to build the tires on which the astronauts, their gear, and the bulk of the rover will move. A much heavier craft, and the vastly increased travel distance, create some unique challenges that will take years of engineering to sort out, but Bridgestone already has a prototype model, which it showed off in-person at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

The original lunar rover wheels employed a zinc-coated, piano-wire mesh shell to support the weight of the craft. Then the engineers riveted titanium treads in an arrow pattern to increase traction on the moon’s loose terrain.

For the much larger JAXA craft, Bridgestone is testing an outer shell made of a steel wool-like material that’s formed into thick ropes to form the treads. Each tire has the appearance of two tires placed right next to each other with the opposing treads forming a chevron pattern. “It’s biomimicry,” says Bridgestone America’s chief technology officer, Nizar Trigui, noting that they were inspired by a camel’s hoof. “The pattern helps the tire carry the load without penetrating too deeply into the sand.”

Underneath the woven surface, Bridgestone isn’t relying on the honeycomb-style pattern it has shown off for some of its commercial airless tires for trucks and cars. Instead, it uses a network of metal slats that flex like springs as the wheel moves along. “You don’t need a honeycomb structure because of the moon’s low gravity,” Trigui says. “Keeping the weight down is already a unique challenge.”

While the metal structure and skin isn’t exactly light, the moon isn’t the place to roll around on rubber tires. In addition to the massive temperature swings, the surface itself is hostile toward gear. “The particles are fine, electrocharged, abrasive, and sharp,” says Trigui. “The materials need to be robust to all of that.”

To make sure the tires will stand up to the abuse once they actually arrive on the moon, Jaxa, Toyota, and Bridgestone will test them in simulated moon conditions. The partners haven’t divulged which moon simulation provider they will use for the tests, but companies like Off Planet Research employ materials such as basaltic cinder, crushed glass, and to replicate more authentic moon conditions than you’d get simply driving across the sands in the desert.

With years to go before the launch, and lots of work still left to do on the rover as a whole, the design may change considerably from this concept before blast off. One thing that won’t change, however, is the moon’s status as one of the worst places you could think of to get a flat.

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On July 20th Hasselblad celebrates its fiftieth anniversary as the maker of the camera that documented the historic moon landing. NASA and Hasselblad began working together in 1962 during the Mercury program, seven years before the moon mission, to ensure that the cameras would function properly in the intense cold temperatures and decreased gravity in space.

Project Mercury astronaut Walter Schirra actually owned a Hasselblad 500C and suggested that NASA and Hasselblad work together to document the missions to space. To prepare the cameras for the journey, Hasselblad had to remove a number of elements to reduce the overall weight of the camera, including the leather covering, auxiliary shutter, reflex mirror, and the viewfinder. The custom film magazine held enough film for 70 frames instead of the normal 12. The cameras were then painted matte black to minimize reflections from the window of the orbiter. The camera first accompanied astronauts into space on Mercury 8 in October 1962.

The cameras that captured the first frames from the moon in 1969 was a Hasselblad Data Camera (HDC) with a Zeiss Biogon 60mm f/5.6 lens and a 70mm film magazine, and a Hasselblad Electric Camera (HEC) with a Zeiss Planar 80mm f/2.8 lens. The HDC included a Réseau plate, which imprinted the fixed cross-marks on the negatives and allowed for photogrammetric measurements to be made from the images. It was painted silver to regulate its performance as it moved from the temperatures that ranged from -85° F to 248° F. Armstrong shot all of the photos from the moon landing with the HDC attached to the chest of his space suit.

After the film magazines were successfully removed from the cameras, the astronauts had to leave the cameras and lenses behind—the weight requirements to successfully return to Earth were very strict and so any ancillary objects had to be tossed. The “garbage heap” left behind was worth about 1 million dollars according to a 1969 press release about the successful mission. Cameras and lenses were discarded after all of the Apollo missions, meaning that there are still 12 Hasselblad bodies and lenses on the surface of the moon. The photos captured on this mission remain some of the most iconic. Check out some of the historic frames from the Apollo 11 mission in the photos, below.

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Many people who are old enough to have experienced the first moon landing will vividly remember what it was like watching Neil Armstrong utter his famous quote: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Half a century later, the event is still one of the top achievements of humankind. Despite the rapid technological advances since then, astronauts haven’t actually been back to the moon since 1972.

This seems surprising. After all, when we reflect on this historic event, it is often said that we now have more computing power in our pocket than the computer aboard Apollo 11 did. But is that true? And, if so, how much more powerful are our phones?

Onboard Apollo 11 was a computer called the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). It had 2048 words of memory which could be used to store “temporary results”—data that is lost when there is no power. This type of memory is referred to as RAM (Random Access Memory). Each word comprised 16 binary digits (bits), with a bit being a zero or a one. This means that the Apollo computer had 32,768 bits of RAM memory.

In addition, it had 72KB of Read Only Memory (ROM), which is equivalent to 589,824 bits. This memory is programmed and cannot be changed once it is finalized.

Read more: To the moon and beyond podcast series—trailer

A single alphabetical character—say an “a” or a “b”—typically requires eight bits to be stored. That means the Apollo 11 computer would not be able to store this article in its 32,768 bits of RAM. Compare that to your mobile phone or an MP3 player and you can appreciate that they are able to store much more, often containing thousands of emails, songs, and photographs.

Phone memory and processing

To put that into more concrete terms, the latest phones typically have 4GB of RAM. That is 34,359,738,368 bits. This is more than one million (1,048,576 to be exact) times more memory than the Apollo computer had in RAM. The iPhone also has up to 512GB of ROM memory. That is 4,398,046,511,104 bits, which is more seven million times more than that of the guidance computer.

But memory isn’t the only thing that matters. The Apollo 11 computer had a processor—an electronic circuit that performs operations on external data sources—which ran at 0.043 MHz. The latest iPhone’s processor is estimated to run at about 2490 MHz. Apple do not advertise the processing speed, but others have calculated it. This means that the iPhone in your pocket has over 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed humans on the moon 50 years ago.

The situation is even more stark when you consider that there will be other processing built into the iPhone which looks after particular tasks, such as the display.

What about a calculator?

It’s one thing comparing against a state-of-the-art phone, but how did the Apollo 11 computer compare against a classic calculator? Texas Instruments was one of the most famous manufacturers of calculators. In 1998, they released the TI-73, and in 2004, they released the TI-84.

The following tables show the specification of these two calculators.

If we compare the two calculators against the Apollo guidance computer we can note that the TI-73 has slightly less ROM, but eight times more RAM. By the time the TI-84 was released, amount of RAM had increased to 32 times more than the Apollo computer and the ROM was now more than 14,500 times more.

With regard to processing speed, the TI-73 was 140 times faster than the Apollo computer and the TI-84 was almost 350 times faster.

It’s mind-blowing to think about that a simple calculator, designed to help students decades ago pass their exams, was more powerful than the computer that landed humans on the moon.

What if Apollo 11 had had a modern computer?

The Apollo computer was state-of-the-art in its time, but what would have been different if the moon landing had the state-of-the-art computers that are available today?

I suspect that the software development time would have been a lot faster, due to the software development tools that are available today. It would have been a lot quicker to write, debug, and test the complex code required to deliver a man to the moon.

The user interface (called Display Keyboard (DSKY)) had a calculator-type interface where commands had to be input using numerical codes. Today’s interface would be a lot easier to use—which could matter in a stressful situation. It would almost certainly not have a keyboard, but would use swipe commands on a touch screen. If that were not possible, due to having to wear gloves, the interface might be through gestures, eye movement, or some other intuitive interface.

Surprisingly, one thing that wouldn’t be better today is the communication speed with Earth. The actual time it takes to communicate is the same today as it was in 1969—that is, the speed of light, which means that it takes 1.26 seconds for a message to get from the moon to Earth. But with the larger files we now send—and from greater and greater distances—to get an image from a spacecraft to Earth today will take relatively longer than it did in 1969. That said, it would look much prettier thanks to advances in camera technology.

Perhaps the biggest change we would see is the computer being a lot more artificially intelligent. I am sure that the flying and landing of the spacecraft would not be put solely into the hands of the computer, but it would have much more information and intelligence and would be able to make many more decisions than the Apollo 11 computer was able to do in 1969. This could be a huge relief for the astronauts. Armstrong did say that, on a worrying scale from one to ten, walking on the moon was about a one, whereas making the final descent to land was about a 13.

So let us end by acknowledging what it took to land people on the moon in 1969 with the limited computing power that was available at the time. It really was a remarkable achievement.

Graham Kendall is a Professor of Computer Science and Provost/CEO/PVC, University of Nottingham. This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

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NASA mathematician and trailblazer Katherine Johnson has died at 101 years old. Johnson was among the first black women to work at the space agency as well as at its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Among her many achievements, Johnson computed the flight path that Neil Armstrong and his fellow Apollo 11 crew members would take to make their historic trip to the moon and back.

Johnson was coincidentally born on Women’s Equality Day in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. She was “simply fascinated by numbers,” starting at an early age, according to NASA. Her local school system only provided education for black students until eighth grade, so Johnson’s family moved 120 miles away to enroll her in high school. She then skipped enough grades to graduate college at 18 years old.

After years as a teacher, in her mid-30s, she began working as a “human computer,” performing calculations for the Mercury, Apollo, and Shuttle programs. She was so respected by her peers that “John Glenn requested that she personally re-check the calculations made by the new electronic computers before his flight aboard Friendship 7—the mission on which he became the first American to orbit the Earth,” NASA wrote.

Johnson went on to spend 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division, the office that launched the American space program. There, she and colleagues wrote an entire textbook on space mission mathematics because no such reference work previously existed.

Over the decades, she worked with several hundred educated female mathematicians at NASA, the New York Times reports. Johnson was one of about three dozen black women working for the space agency and its precursor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).

For all her legendary achievements and obstacles she had to overcome, her identity remained obscure over the twentieth century, though Johnson has received her due recognition over the past decade. In November 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. Two years later, NASA named a new building after Johnson on the 55th anniversary of John Glenn’s trip into space—her calculations made the voyage possible. The national space agency named a bench after Johnson in 2016, which sits outside her former workplace at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

In 2016, the film Hidden Figures portrayed Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson) and her colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson (portrayed by Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, respectively). The movie won the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture.

Late in her life, Johnson regularly met with children to promote math and science careers.

“We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics. Everything is physics and math,” she said to students.

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The next few decades could bring a cascade of discoveries on extraterrestrial life. NASA announced on Thursday its decision to green-light Dragonfly, a octocopter drone designed to sniff out signs of life-giving chemistry on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Combined with the Europa Clipper mission, which should start orbiting Jupiter’s moon several years before Dragonfly touches down, the space agency is giving us our best shot by far at finding alien organisms.

If life exists in our solar system outside of Earth, it’s probably on a wet moon such as these two. But while Europa tempts us with a subsurface ocean—perhaps not so different from our deepest Antarctic reservoirs, which we know harbor microbial life—it’s an icy world with a habitat quite unlike our own. Titan, with the thickest atmosphere of any moon studied, is one of the most Earth-like bodies we know of.

“Titan has all the ingredients needed for life,” Lori Glaze, Director of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate’s Planetary Science Division, said during a press conference on Thursday. “We have the opportunity to examine the conditions that existed on early Earth when life formed” or even conditions, she said, “that harbor life today.”

The world isn’t a perfect analog for our own, but that makes it all the more exciting to study. What makes Titan both familiar and alien is its methane: at -290°F and under the pressure of an atmosphere thicker than Earth’s, what we experience as a gas exists as a flowing liquid. This liquid methane actually condenses in the atmosphere to form clouds, which make rain. It’s just like our planet’s water cycle, except without liquid water. The resulting storms have carved out lakes and rivers and valleys on the surface, creating a terrain that scientists believe will look very familiar.

Titan also has organic molecules, which are crucial to the evolution of life as we know it.

“There are chemical reactions going on [in the atmosphere] that actually cause very complex organic molecules to form, and they drift down,” Curt Niebur, NASA’s lead program scientist for New Frontiers, said in a press conference. “It’s almost like a light snow that’s always forming. And it’s that kind of complicated organic synthesis that really drives our interest.”

Dragonfly—which won’t look like a little backyard drone, but more like a flying Mars rover—will spend 2.7 years making a couple dozen short flights around Titan. Its ultimate goal is to make a total journey of around 108 miles, which is farther than all previous Mars rovers combined. It’s worth the trek: Dragonfly is gunning for the Selk impact crater, where scientists believe all three crucial ingredients for life may once have met. There’s evidence it once held liquid water, plus the organic molecules and energy (in the form of sunlight) found elsewhere on the surface.

Even if we don’t find signs of previously existing life there, the crater gives us a unique opportunity to peek at the chemical conditions of Earth back when biology got its start. “The great thing about Titan is that it’s very similar chemically to Earth before life evolved,” Niebur said. “We can’t go back in time on Earth and learn lessons about the chemistry that eventually led to life, but we can go to Titan and pursue those questions.”

Niebur is especially excited for humankind to see images of Dragonfly’s flight. The European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, which touched down on Titan in 2005 after hitching a ride with Cassini, sent beautiful pictures home. In fact, Huygens and Cassini provided data that will guide Dragonfly’s mission plan, and the drone will make its first descent not far from the spot we’ve already seen. But Dragonfly will ultimately provide a much better view. “We will get the experience as if we were riding along with Dragonfly, staring down at this very alien yet familiar surface that has these rivers and mountains, and I think that’s going to be just a tremendous experience for the public,” Niebur said. “I think it’ll look a lot like when you’re flying above Earth in an airplane.”

There’s also hope that Titan’s suspected subsurface ocean might come up high enough to interact with its other life-giving ingredients, which would open up the possibility for some kind of life below the towering sand dunes and methane rivers.

“We’re absolutely thrilled,” said the mission’s Principal Investigator Elizabeth “Zibi” Turtle, who is based at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “The team has been working so hard over the past few years pulling together all the different aspects of this mission, and this has so much potential for science.”

Dragonfly is set to launch in 2024 and arrive at Titan in 2036, so our dreams of playing in an early-Earth sandbox will have to wait a while longer. But when we do get to Titan, whatever we learn is going to give us game changing insight on the origin of life as we know it.

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Having a moon launch anniversary party? A moon landing anniversary party? Just love to sit around thinking about that good ol’ moon of ours? The 50th anniversary of Apollo 11—the first moon landing—is on July 20, 2019. However it is you choose to celebrate the occasion, our playlist is the perfect fit: We’ve rounded up the music that topped the charts on that historic day and peppered it with bops both old and new that pay homage to our favorite satellite.

Some of the hits in the summer of ’69 (Note: we did not include “Summer of ’69”) give us a glimpse of the starry-eyed musings of artists at the time. “Space Oddity” is almost too on the nose (and was probably pretty depressing for the Apollo 11 crew to hear, yikes) and “In the Year 2525” looks ahead to a super-high-tech (and also super-super-terrible) future. So, when we say “starry-eyed musings,” we really mean “cynical dystopian hot-takes.” But hey, “Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In” is an optimistic tune that’s… technically space-related. We’ve also included a selection of other Billboard toppers released in the months before Apollo 11 to add to the mod mood of your moon shindig.

You’ll notice some more modern tunes that fit the moon landing vibe. Apollo 11 was only the beginning of our species’ dabble in lunar exploration, not the end—so it’s no surprise that space has continued to inspire hits. Take Old Town Road, for instance: When Lil Nas X says, “I been in the valley, you ain’t been up off that porch,” he’s referring to Schroter’s Valley, one of the proposed landing sites for the canceled Apollo 18 mission, as a nod to America’s hubris during the height of the space race.

We hope you enjoy these topical tunes, whether you listen to them while you and your friends drink Mai Tais and do The Jerk or just turn them up while you take in some quality Apollo anniversary content on from PopSci.

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Is Earth’s fresh air, endless biodiversity, and (relatively) stable average temperature getting you down? Ever wanted to drop everything and jet off to a place where life is simpler—or better yet, nonexistent? Then take a 238,900-mile jaunt to the solar system’s premiere deserted destination: The moon. Our closest astronomical neighbor offers 14.6 million square miles of peace, quiet, and more shades of gray than you can count—perfect for a rustic getaway without all the distractions of nature.

Sound heavenly? Unfortunately, it’ll take a lot more than a simple rocket trip to achieve lunar paradise. And the first folks to set up shop on the moon probably won’t be building resorts and vacation homes—as of now, NASA wants to create what’s basically a gas station for future trips to Mars. Astronauts would stop on the moon to refuel and stock up on supplies before embarking on an 8-month odyssey to the red planet.

Whether it becomes a 5-star hotel among the stars or the first 7-Eleven outside Earth’s atmosphere, the tiny rock orbiting our planet is so desolate that we’ll have to establish basic infrastructure to sustain life if humans are ever to settle down there. It won’t be easy, but it’s far from science fiction.

“Humans are fragile, and because we’re so fragile, we require so much,” says astrophysicist and planetary scientist Laura Forczyk, who owns the space consulting firm Astralytical.

For starters, there’s the moon’s lack of a genuine atmosphere. Forczyk says it does have somewhat of a “pseudo-atmosphere” called an exosphere: a magnetically suspended mix of gases and particles stirred up from the lunar surface by solar wind. But the elements that make up breathable air float around the moon at infinitesimal concentrations compared to Earth. Taking a deep breath would be just as deadly on the moon as it would be in the vacuum of space.

Don’t break out into a passionate rendition of Jordin Sparks’ “No Air” just yet—thankfully, breathing could be the least of future lunar residents’ worries. Forczyk says we’ve gotten really good at recycling air on the International Space Station through the Environmental Control and Life Support System. Along with a few lunar greenhouses to foster oxygen-emitting plants, a similar system could purify air and send it back through a network of sealed, controlled habitation modules in a lunar settlement, keeping us breathing easy for years. However, we’d have to send loads of those life-giving gases to the moon at least once to get the cycle going, which would be expensive: Shipping just a pound of material (even air, which would have to be pressurized in tanks) to the moon would cost more than $1.3 million.

The moon’s dinky exosphere poses other serious problems. Because there’s no air, there’s no wind, which means no erosion. That’s made the dust particles on the lunar surface—called regolith—especially troublesome. Unlike granules of sand on Earth, which appear round when observed under a microscope, regolith particles are sharp; meteorites and solar wind have hammered them, and there’s no fluid around to wear down those fractured edges. Getting sand out of your clothes at the beach would be a walk in the park compared to fielding these ultra-clingy particles, and they could cause problems for machines and humans working on the lunar surface.

No atmosphere also means no protection against meteorites, which hurtle toward the moon at breakneck speeds, threatening to puncture spacesuits and permanent structures. So if future humans on the moon see a shooting star, they’ll have to run for cover instead of making a wish.

While a lunar colony thankfully wouldn’t have to account for hurricanes or other extreme atmospheric weather events, it’d have to shore up against an invisible—but highly hazardous—threat: solar storms. Unlike the Earth, the moon has no magnetic field to protect against highly charged electromagnetic particles emitted by the sun. During particularly intense solar flares, which eject bursts of high-energy light waves from beneath the sun’s surface, even the Earth can’t fully shield our electricity infrastructure from going haywire. Without that crucial magnetic field, a solar storm engulfing a lunar settlement could be potentially disastrous for human health and infrastructure. Thus, we’d have to use substances like water or polyethylene, which contain concentrations of hydrogen high enough to absorb the impact of these rogue space particles, to protect buildings on the moon from solar radiation.

Scientists have recently uncovered another lunar nuisance to be aware of: moonquakes. Seismometers left by Apollo astronauts have told us that, despite having no apparent plate tectonic system or subduction zones, the moon’s ground can shake up to a magnitude of around 5 on the Richter Scale. That’s not as intense as some earthquakes recorded here at home, and Sam Courville, a research assistant at the Planetary Science Institute who has studied planetary seismology, says they likely wouldn’t pose a major risk for lunar structures.

But Courville says a possible mechanism behind these quakes could have implications for our future buildings. Some moonquakes are believed to be caused by temperature stress, when intense freezing and warming periods lead to contraction and expansion of materials and, in some cases, the formation of faults. The moon has some of the most variable temperatures in the solar system, ranging from a balmy 260˚F during the day to a bone-chilling -280˚F at night. And because a single lunar day lasts 27 Earth days, a colony’s structures would have to withstand these extreme temperatures for weeks at a time before feeling relief.

There’s also the issue of gravity: the moon’s is only about 1/6th that of Earth’s. Given what we know about the effects of long-term weightlessness on astronauts, lunar residents would have to take precautions to keep healthy. Exposure to microgravity on the ISS has been shown to accelerate bone and muscle loss and create cardiovascular issues, because having to work against gravity is part of what keeps our bodies fit. That’s why astronauts on the ISS spend hours a day exercising to make up for its absence. While the moon’s lack of gravity isn’t quite as extreme, Courville says living long-term in any environment with reduced gravity could be detrimental to human health.

Because we’d be setting up shop in a venerable desert, a lunar colony would need to secure some kind of water source. An ECLSS-like system could recycle any water we bring with us, but it’s not 100-percent efficient and would result in the loss of some water over time. Forczyk says one option is scavenging for traces of hydrogen and oxygen bonded to regolith particles and fusing them together to make trusty molecules of H₂O, but that process would require an immense amount of energy. Instead, we could establish a settlement near one of the lunar poles, which contain deposits of ice that never see the sun—and never melt. This would provide easier access to a water source to replenish the purification system.

Strangely enough, Courville and Forczyk say the biggest obstacle to living on the moon isn’t a solar death storm or evil sand—it’s the economic and political will to make it happen. As of now, NASA has no set plan to send humans back to the moon in any capacity, and other space programs don’t yet have the funding to carry out their own crewed missions.

“Technologically, NASA has the ability, motivation, and expertise to do this,” Forczyk says. “The question is: Are people here on Earth going to fund it so we can actually accomplish it?”

Fifty years ago, the Cold War space race was a big motivator for sending the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Today, it’s the possibility of using the moon as a jumping off point for Mars and other spots throughout the solar system. Courville says a permanent settlement on the moon could dramatically reduce the cost of launching rockets into deep space, mainly because the moon’s low gravity and lack of atmosphere make liftoff a lot easier.

Whether the moon becomes a crucial stop on the way to Mars, the most isolated research facility to date, or just an outlet mall, the challenges of setting up permanent shop there should make us grateful to live on a planet that gives us everything we need.

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For the last two and a half years, the Earth may have had two moons. There’s the obvious one that raises the tides and can often be seen during the day, and now researchers have identified a candidate for a second. The “mini-moon,” as some are calling it, is a couch-sized speck roughly 10 trillion times dimmer than its more famous counterpart. And astronomers found the satellite just in time, because soon it will be gone forever.

Kacper Wierzchos and Theodore Pruyne, astronomers with the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, first spotted the object. They estimate it measures between six and 12 feet long, and it streaked across the sky on February 15 while they scanned for asteroids. Now, after about ten days of observations by a handful of observatories, the Minor Planet Center has released the details of the satellite’s orbit—a looping, erratic path around Earth. By extrapolating that trajectory backward and forward, researchers estimate that the object, dubbed 2020 CD3, came under the Earth’s gravitational influence in October 2017, and will depart on March 7 of this year, according to Robert Jedicke, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii. Kacper announced the discovery Tuesday on Twitter.

Researchers have long anticipated studying more of these rare visitors for the lessons they could teach us about our nearest neighbors, but some sky-watchers caution that it’s too soon to know for sure what exactly they’re seeing. While the Earth has one confirmed natural satellite it also has more than 2,000 artificial ones, from communication satellites to spent rockets—and distinguishing space rocks from aluminum siding is tricky at such immense distances.

“I would be excited if this was indeed a natural temporary moon,” says Grigori Fedorets, an astronomer at the University of Helsinki in Finland, who is working with an international team to try to tell if the satellite is natural or artificial. “However, the data is still inconclusive.”

Rocks of all sizes fill Earth’s orbital zone, and sometimes their paths cross with ours. Giant, miles-wide asteroids can be easily seen through telescopes and tiny pebbles a few inches across appear as shooting stars burning up in the atmosphere. But between those two extremes sits a group of boulders in the dozens-of-feet range that researchers are still trying to get a handle on, according to Jedicke.

Simulations predict that from time to time one of these small asteroids should come close enough for Earth to capture it, at which point it becomes a mini-moon. It then follows what Jedicke calls a “crazy straw orbit” around Earth for an average of nine months before the tug of distant solar system objects pulls it away and slips it back into orbit around the sun. Astronomers found the first mini-moon orbiting us from the summer of 2006 to the summer of 2007, but nothing since. “This current object is a little overdue actually if you ask me,” Jedicke says.

Or the mini-moon may have a more mundane explanation. The Minor Planet Center couldn’t match its orbit to any known artificial satellite, but the object could still be an untracked piece of space debris, or even a long-discarded rocket engine that escaped into orbit around the sun and has since been re-captured by the Earth. Normally light reflects differently off rock and metal, but this object is too dim to identify directly.

To figure out what it might be, groups at the Arecibo Observatory and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Deep Space Network are gearing up to snipe the object with a radar pulse and see what bounces back, according to Jedicke, but the strategy’s chances are uncertain. “Detecting a meter-scale object at that distance is challenging in the best of times,” he says.

Meanwhile, others will carefully observe the object, seeking acceleration that can’t be explained by gravity—a sign that sunlight is ever-so-slightly prodding the object. Measuring this effect would reveal the object’s mass and density, which could help researchers make a more informed guess at whether it’s a rock, an empty fuel tank, or a pile of rubble.

Whatever this visitor’s origins, the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO)—which will scan huge swaths of the sky on successive nights—is likely to find more. Many more. After the facility comes fully online in 2022 it could discover between one and six mini-moons every year, according to a recent simulation done by Fedorets, Jedicke, and three collaborators.

In addition to what these currently invisible objects could reveal about the number of mid-sized asteroids and how they form, they could also serve as practical testbeds for developing asteroid mining and redirecting technologies. Rather than venturing deep into space to explore new asteroids, or trying to drag one back at great expense, Jedicke envisions a future where spacecraft hang out around our main moon, waiting for word from the VRO to jet off and stabilize the orbit of a newly discovered asteroid visitor so it doesn’t leave us before we have the chance to mine it for resources and knowledge.

“That wouldn’t take a lot of work and all of a sudden we’d have this sort of second moon we could go study in detail,” he says, which would provide unprecedented access to material left over from the solar system’s creation.

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