Late in 2021, the astronomy community released its decadal survey, a road map of scientific priorities for the next 10 years, which describes the hardware we need to build in order to achieve them. That survey was focused on distant objects and recommended projects like large, broad-spectrum space telescopes.
This week sees the release of a second decadal survey, this one focused on the needs of astronomers and planetary scientists who focus on the objects in our Solar System. This survey’s big-ticket recommendations are orbiters for Uranus and Enceladus, while smaller missions include preparations for sample returns from Mars, the Moon, and Ceres. As always, what we get done will depend on whether the planetary science budgets do better than keeping pace with inflation.
Big priorities
The survey lays out the overall scientific themes behind the priorities, but they’re broad enough that they pretty much cover everything. As listed, they include a look at the materials present in small bodies within the Solar System to infer the details of planet formation from the protoplanetary disk, and observations of the planets to track their evolution since then. Also a priority: moon formation; studying the interiors and atmospheres of the planets; and the role of impacts in shaping planet evolution. Finally, there’s the possibility of life existing at present or in the past on a body other than Earth.
That seems to cover just about everything in the Solar System, which means these research priorities could justify just about any mission. So what hardware has the scientific community chosen to pursue?
The big-ticket item is the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, or UOP, which will undoubtedly get a better name prior to launch. Much like earlier Galileo and Cassini missions, UOP will consist of an orbiter that stays in place to study the system, and an atmospheric probe that will make a one-way trip into the planet (or, in Cassini’s case, the atmosphere of the moon Titan). Ideally, UOP will be constructed within the next decade in order to use a gravity assist from Jupiter that will be available if it’s launched within a window that ends in 2032.
Why Uranus? We’ve already done extensive study of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, but the two ice giants of the outer Solar System, Neptune and Uranus, have only been visited by Voyager 2 decades ago. Exoplanet surveys have revealed that Neptune-size planets are quite common elsewhere in our galaxy, so their study will be generally informative. Uranus in particular is interesting because it seems to have been struck violently early in its history, causing its axis of rotation to shift by nearly 90 degrees. It also has moons that seem to have been geologically active and may harbor oceans. Aside from all that, it happens to be considerably closer than Neptune.
Should budget increases outpace inflation, the survey recommends a second flagship mission, this one to Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. Enceladus appears to have a sub-ice ocean and geysers that release some of its contents to space. The “Enceladus Orbilander” will fly through the plumes of these geysers to analyze their content and then land for two years of operation on the moon’s surface. The goal would be to have it launched in time to reach the moon by the 2050s, when orbital variations will provide more sunlight on the southern hemisphere of Enceladus, where the geysers are located.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a unique group of merging galaxies that provides a glimpse into processes in the early universe.
The five galaxies, known as the Hickson Compact Group (HCG) 40, are in the process of merging into a single entity, a process that will be complete roughly a billion years from now, Hubble officials said in a statement. The officials released the image in anticipation of the venerable telescope’s 32nd anniversary, which occurs on Sunday (April 24).
The image is part of the Hubble Space Telescope’s longstanding work in studying galactic evolution.
“Studying nearby groups like HCG 40 helps astronomers learn about how galaxies formed,” the Hubble team said. “Tight groups like this,” Hubble officials added of HGC 40, “may have been more common in the early universe when their superheated, infalling material may have fueled very energetic black holes called quasars.”
Related: The best Hubble Space Telescope images of all time!
The Hickson Compact Group 40 is a group of five merging galaxies, as shown here in a Hubble Space Telescope image. (Image credit: SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, STScI IMAGE PROCESSING: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))
The group, located some 300 million light-years away from Earth, is very tightly packed into a region of space less than twice the diameter of the stellar disk of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
Although scientists have found more than 100 compact galaxy groups, according to the Hubble team, the configuration of HGC is rather unique as the galaxies are not part of a larger galaxy cluster, making them an interesting target for astronomers to study. How this configuration came into being is still a matter of debate.
“One possible explanation is that there’s a lot of dark matter — an unknown and invisible form of matter — associated with these galaxies,” Hubble officials wrote. “If they come close together, then the dark matter can form a big cloud within which the galaxies are orbiting. As the galaxies plow through the dark matter, they feel a resistive force due to its gravitational effects. This slows their motion and makes the galaxies lose energy, so they fall together.”
Studying the details of galaxies in nearby groups like this helps astronomers sort out when and where galaxies assembled themselves, and what they are assembled from, Hubble officials added.
The famed telescope launched on space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990 on a quest to better understand the early universe. Astronauts serviced the observatory five times, the last in 2009.
While Hubble is aging, including overcoming some serious “safe mode” incidents in 2021, the telescope remains healthy. NASA plans to pair Hubble’s work with the just-launched successor James Webb Space Telescope. Webb is in a months-long commissioning period set to finish around June.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
One of the oldest recorded meteor showers is set to peak this week, and it could send hundreds of meteors streaking across the sky in Colorado.
The 2022 Lyrid Meteor Shower is expected to peak on Thursday night through Friday morning, with up to 18 meteors per hour expected. Stray meteors will likely be spotted in the days leading up to and following the peak.
The Lyrid Meteor Shower is caused by debris from comet Thatcher, which has a 415-year orbit around the sun. Historical Chinese literature claims that the shower was first spotted more than 2,500 years ago, with the actual comet not being again visible from Earth until 2276.
This year’s Lyrid shower is extra special, because it marks the end of a meteor shower drought that began in January 2022, according to AccuWeather.com.
The best time to view the shower will be between 12 AM and 2 AM, just before moon rise. If the night is clear, the shower will be visible without special equipment. Keep in mind that light pollution can block out meteors, so metropolitan viewers may have a harder time seeing them. If you’re willing to take a road trip for stargazing, check out this OTC list of extraordinary places to stargaze in Colorado.
STAY INFORMED: Sign-up for the daily OutThere Colorado newsletter here
One of the oldest recorded meteor showers is set to peak this week, and it could send hundreds of meteors streaking across the sky in Colorado.
The 2022 Lyrid Meteor Shower is expected to peak on Thursday night through Friday morning, with up to 18 meteors per hour expected. Stray meteors will likely be spotted in the days leading up to and following the peak.
The Lyrid Meteor Shower is caused by debris from comet Thatcher, which has a 415-year orbit around the sun. Historical Chinese literature claims that the shower was first spotted more than 2,500 years ago, with the actual comet not being again visible from Earth until 2276.
This year’s Lyrid shower is extra special, because it marks the end of a meteor shower drought that began in January 2022, according to AccuWeather.com.
The best time to view the shower will be between 12 AM and 2 AM, just before moon rise. If the night is clear, the shower will be visible without special equipment. Keep in mind that light pollution can block out meteors, so metropolitan viewers may have a harder time seeing them. If you’re willing to take a road trip for stargazing, check out this OTC list of extraordinary places to stargaze in Colorado.
STAY INFORMED: Sign-up for the daily OutThere Colorado newsletter here
On Sunday, a camera livestreaming the night sky captured the astonishing video below of a shimmering spiral floating overhead. Turns out the strange object was the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket delivering a classified spy satellite into orbit on behalf of the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The streaming camera is part of a public outreach effort from the Subaru Telescope on top of the Mauna Kea dormant volcano. From Space.com:
The video “shows the characteristic spiral caused by the post-deorbit-burn fuel vent of the Falcon 9 upper stage, which was deorbited over the Pacific [Ocean] just after the end of the 1st revolution,” Netherlands-based satellite tracker Marco Langbroek told SpaceWeather.com[…]
The first stage of the Falcon 9 booster is reusable, and it landed successfully atop a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean, according to SpaceX footage. The upper stage of Falcon 9 is not reusable, and after sending the spacecraft out to its assigned orbit, that stage fell back naturally in the atmosphere to burn up.
Subterranean pools of salty water may be commonplace on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, according to researchers who believe the sites could be promising spots to search for signs of life beyond Earth.
Evidence for the shallow pools, not far beneath the frozen surface of the Jovian moon, emerged when scientists noticed that giant parallel ridges stretching for hundreds of miles on Europa were strikingly similar to surface features discovered on the Greenland ice sheet.
If the extensive ice ridges that crisscross Europa formed in a similar way to those in Greenland, then pockets of subsurface water may be ubiquitous on the body and help circulate chemicals necessary for life from the icy shell down to the salty ocean that lurks far beneath.
“Liquid water near to the surface of the ice shell is a really provocative and promising place to imagine life having a shot,” said Dustin Schroeder, an associate professor of geophysics at Stanford University. “The idea that we could find a signature that would suggest a promising pocket of water like this might exist, I think, is very exciting.”
At 2,000 miles wide, Europa is slightly smaller than Earth’s moon. It became a leading contender in the search for life elsewhere when observations from ground-based telescopes and passing space probes found evidence of a deep ocean 10 to 15 miles beneath its icy surface.
Europa’s ocean is estimated at 40 to 100 miles deep, so even though it is one-quarter the width of Earth, it may hold twice as much water as all of Earth’s oceans combined.
For all that is known about Europa, images of the frigid body have thrown up longstanding mysteries. One is the presence of vast double ridges that cover the surface like scars. The ridges can reach up to 300 metres (1,000ft) high and are separated by valleys half a mile wide.
The Stanford team’s insight was sparked by an academic presentation about Europa that mentioned the curious double ridges. Pictures of the features reminded the scientists of a much smaller double ridge they had noticed in north-west Greenland. Armed with radar and other observations of the Greenland ridges, they set about understanding how they formed.
“On the Greenland ice sheet there is this little double ridge feature that looks almost exactly like the ones we see on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa,” said Riley Culberg, a PhD candidate and geophysicist at Stanford. “And the reason it’s exciting to have this analogue feature in Greenland is that we’ve been trying to figure out what makes double ridges on Europa for about 20 years.”
Writing in Nature Communications, the researchers describe how Greenland’s double ice ridges, which are about 50 times smaller than those on Europa, formed when shallow pools of subsurface water froze and fractured the surface time and time again, steadily driving up the twin ridges. “It’s like when you put a can of soda in the freezer and it explodes. It’s that kind of pressure that pushes up the ridges on the surface,” said Culberg.
In Greenland, water drains into the underground pockets from surface lakes, but on Europa the scientists suspect liquid water is forced up towards the surface from the underlying ocean through fractures in the ice shell.
This movement of water could help circulate chemicals necessary for life down into Europa’s ocean, they add.
Michael Manga, a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the research, said it was “plausible” for Europa’s ridges to form by water being squeezed upwards.
But questions remain. “I do wonder why the features are so much smaller on Earth,” he said. While Earth’s stronger gravity could explain why the ridges are lower here than on Europa, it is unclear why the valleys between them are narrower too.
Nasa’s Europa Clipper mission, due to launch in 2024, is expected to shed light on how the double ridges formed when it performs detailed reconnaissance of Jupiter’s moon and investigates whether it harbours conditions suitable for life.
The space science community thinks the time is ripe to study Uranus in depth — and they’re being serious. A new report compiled by planetary scientists from across the United States says that sending an interplanetary probe to study the ice giant planet should be considered the top priority for planetary exploration over the next decade.
Specifically, scientists are calling on NASA to create the Uranus Orbiter and Probe, or UOP. The mission concept would send a spacecraft into orbit around Uranus, along with a probe that would plunge into the planet’s atmosphere. Scientists envision such a mission launching sometime in the early 2030s as long as engineers get started on it as soon as next year.
If it works, the UOP mission could provide the most intricate details yet about this mostly unexplored world. The only spacecraft to ever visit Uranus was NASA’s Voyager 2 mission, which flew by the planet in 1986, coming within 50,700 miles of the planet’s cloud tops. Voyager 2 unlocked some intriguing secrets about Uranus, discovering new moons and rings around the planet. But Voyager 2 didn’t stay for long; it zoomed by during its exploration of the outer Solar System and kept going, eventually heading off into interstellar space.
An orbiter and a probe could provide a wealth of additional knowledge. Most of all, they could tell us exactly what Uranus is made of. Scientists believe the planet mainly consists of some combination of rock, ices, and hydrogen and helium, but that hasn’t really been confirmed. “Our understanding of the interior structure of the planet is so poor that we really have very little idea what the ratio of those three things are to each other,” Jonathan Fortney, a professor at UC Santa Cruz who authored a report about possible missions to Uranus and Neptune, tells The Verge. “And so there’s been a long assumption that it’s mostly these ices but that’s that’s literally an assumption. We don’t really know that.”
Additionally, when scientists look at planets outside our Solar System, ice giants like Uranus and Neptune seem to dominate the Universe. And yet, they are the only main planets in our Solar System that we’ve never orbited. “Ice giant-like planets are some of the most common ones out there,” Bethany Ehlmann, a professor at Caltech and one of the steering committee members on the Decadal, tells The Verge. “We have two in our cosmic neighborhood in our Solar System, and it’s high time we check them out.”
The Uranus mission is at the top of a long wishlist detailed today in what is known as the Planetary Science Decadal Survey. Published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, it’s a massive document written every 10 years or so by groups of planetary scientists detailing the space missions they’d most like to see happen a decade into the future. The Decadal Survey is done so infrequently because of the extensive amount of time it takes to plan and build a flagship interplanetary spacecraft, often requiring roughly a decade of work to execute.
Because it takes so long to pull off a space mission, scientists have to be strategic about their asks, ranking the missions they want to happen in order of highest to lowest priority. The Uranus mission was actually first recommended in 2011 during the last Decadal Survey, but the spacecraft was listed as the third-highest priority behind a Mars rover designed to look for signs of life on the Red Planet and a spacecraft to study Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, thought to harbor a liquid water ocean underneath its surface.
Both of those priorities have manifested into actual missions. The Mars rover became NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February 2021 and continues to drill up samples of Martian soil. The mission to Europa became NASA’s Europa Clipper, a spacecraft designed to periodically zoom by Jupiter’s moon to potentially taste its atmosphere and perhaps pass through plumes of water that might erupt from its surface. As of now, Europa Clipper is slated to launch in October of 2024, with its arrival at Europa scheduled for 2030.
Saturn’s moon Enceladus, as seen from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Since those programs have been funded and planned, the lower priority missions from a decade ago have now moved to the top. Now, the second-highest priority on the list, after the Uranus mission, is a spacecraft to visit Saturn’s enticing moon Enceladus, also thought to harbor a liquid water ocean underneath its crust. Specifically, the Decadal calls for building an Enceladus Orbilander — a spacecraft that would function as both an orbiter and a lander. First the spacecraft would insert itself into orbit around Enceladus, possibly flying through plumes that are thought to erupt from the moon’s surface. Eventually, it would look for a spot to land on Enceladus, where it would stay for a two-year mission. Its main objective would be to search for signs of life.
It’s going to be a while before the Enceladus mission takes flight, though. The Decadal calls for the mission to begin formulation in fiscal year 2029 at the earliest, with an arrival at Enceladus in the 2050s. And that’s if the budget manifests in full for both the Uranus mission and the Enceladus mission at NASA, which will likely cost billions of dollars. Understanding that funding is always precarious, the authors of the Decadal also made a second set of recommendations in case the money doesn’t materialize; they suggested that the Uranus mission could start development in 2028. But that would likely mean the Enceladus mission wouldn’t get underway until the 2030s at the earliest.
While the Uranus and the Enceladus missions are the top new missions for the Decadal authors, they’ve also included a list of recommendations for space missions already taking place that they want to see continue. For instance, they strongly recommend that NASA continue to work toward bringing back samples from Mars. The Perseverance rover was just one major step in a long-term plan to dig up samples and then eventually transport them to Earth, where they can be studied in a lab. NASA is slowly moving forward with the next part of that plan, which entails creating a suite of vehicles that would land on Mars, collect the samples Perseverance cached, launch them off Mars, and then travel back to Earth. It’s going to be a very complicated process, and again, the Decadal recognizes budget can be a concern. While the report recommends finishing this sample return as quickly as possible, it also cautions not to let the budget balloon too much that it impacts all of the other planetary missions NASA is juggling.
There are also plenty of smaller planetary missions that are recommended that wouldn’t cost nearly as much money as the Uranus and Enceladus flagship missions. These would include probes to Saturn and its moon Titan, a new Venus mission, another mission to fly by Enceladus, missions to the Moon, and more. The Decadal isn’t done with Mars, either; it wants to create another mission called the Mars Life Explorer to look for signs that life may currently live on the Red Planet while assessing the world’s habitability. Additionally, the authors want NASA to continue the search for hazardous asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth by completing a planned spacecraft called the NEO Surveyor, which is scheduled to launch in 2026.
It’s an extremely detailed report, consisting of nearly 800 pages. And while the focus of the Decadal may be on studying the worlds and rocks in our Solar System, wrapped in this report is a key message that the authors want to emphasize: we also need to protect and support the people working on these missions. In an effort to create a more diverse community of scientists and engineers working on these programs, the report recommends engaging students from underrepresented communities to pursue planetary science. The authors also recommend that NASA’s planetary science division work to eliminate bias and create codes of conduct surrounding its missions and conferences.
“While scientific understanding is the primary motivation for what our community does, we must also work to boldly address issues concerning our community’s most important resource — the people who propel its planetary science and exploration missions,” Philip Christensen, a professor at Arizona State University and co-chair of the Decadal’s steering committee, said in a statement.
The mission, called AX-1, was brokered by the Houston, Texas-based startup Axiom Space, which books rocket rides, provides all the necessary training, and coordinates flights to the ISS for anyone who can afford it. The mission has set off yet another round of debate about whether people who pay their way to space should be referred to as “astronauts,” though it should be noted a trip to the ISS requires a far larger investment of both time and money than taking a brief suborbital ride on a rocket built by companies like Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic.
The four crew members — Michael Lopez-Alegría, a former NASA astronaut turned Axiom employee who is commanding the mission; Israeli businessman Eytan Stibbe; Canadian investor Mark Pathy; and Ohio-based real estate magnate Larry Connor — are slated to leave the space station aboard their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on Tuesday around 10:00 pm ET.
They’ll spend the rest of the day aboard the 13-foot-wide capsule as it maneuvers back toward the edge of the Earth’s thick atmosphere. They’re slated to parachute to a splashdown landing aboard their spacecraft Wednesday afternoon, according to NASA, if weather conditions allow.
The three paying customers completed about 15 weeks of training before the flight. Though they do not have to worry about piloting their spacecraft, as the Crew Dragon is fully autonomous, they went through extensive studying of the capsule’s design, prepared for all sorts of emergency scenarios, and completed zero-gravity test flights to prepare them for space, much as professional astronauts do.
The crew arrived at the ISS about a week ago, where they were greeted by the professional astronauts already on board, including three NASA astronauts, a German astronaut and three Russian cosmonauts.
During their stay on the space station, the group stuck to a regimented schedule, which included about 14 hours per day of activities, including scientific research that wasdesigned by various research hospitals, universities, tech companies and more. They also spent a fair amount of time doing outreach events by video conferencing with children and students.
It’s not the first time paying customers or otherwise non-astronauts have visited the ISS, as Russia has sold seats on its Soyuz spacecraft tovarious wealthy thrill seekersin years past. Last year, for example, a Russian actress and film crew visited the ISS to film part of a movie in an historic first.
But AX-1 is the first mission witha crew entirely comprised of private citizens with no active members of a government astronaut corps onboard during the trip to and from the ISS. It’s also the first time private citizens have traveled to the ISS on a US-made spacecraft.
It’s not clear how much this mission cost. Axiom previously disclosed a price of $55 million per seat for a 10-day trip to the ISS, but the company declined to comment on the financial terms for this specific mission beyond saying in a press conference last year that the price is in the “tens of millions.”
The mission is made possible by very close coordination among Axiom, SpaceX and NASA, since the ISS is government-funded and operated.
The space agency has revealed some details on how much it’ll charge for use of its 20-year-old orbiting laboratory.
Food alone costs $2,000 per day, per person, in space. Getting provisions to and from the space station for a commercial crew is another $88,000 to $164,000 per person, per day. For each mission, bringing on the necessary support from NASA astronauts will cost commercial customers another $5.2 million, and all the mission support and planning that NASA lends is another $4.8 million.
The SpaceX Dragon Endeavour carrying four Axiom Mission 1 astronauts approaches the International Space Station on April 9, 2022, less than a day after launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Pictured above Earth’s horizon is the first quarter Moon. Credit: NASA
The SpaceX Dragon Endeavour crew ship carrying the private Axiom Ax-1 astronauts approaches the ISS. Both spacecraft were orbiting 257 miles above the Atlantic Ocean northwest of the island country of The Republic of Cabo Verde, which is off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, in Africa. Credit: NASA
Weather permitting, the four-member private astronaut crew now is targeted to undock at about 10 p.m. Tuesday, April 19, to begin the journey home with splashdown off the coast of Florida no earlier than approximately 3:24 p.m. EDT Wednesday, April 20.
The SpaceX Dragon Endeavour crew ship carrying 4 Axiom Mission 1 astronauts approaches the International Space Station. Both spacecraft were orbiting 259 miles above the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Casablanca, Morocco, in northwest Africa. Credit: NASA
NASA coverage of the farewell ceremony will remain as previously scheduled, and the updated NASA Ax-1 return coverage is as follows (all times Eastern):
Tuesday, April 19
7 a.m. – Coverage begins for farewell ceremony
7:45 p.m. – Coverage begins for hatch closure at approximately 8 p.m.
9:45 p.m. – Coverage begins for undocking at about 10 p.m.
The SpaceX Dragon Endeavour crew ship carrying the private Axiom Mission 1 astronauts approaches the International Space Station. Pictured below Endeavour is the first quarter Moon as both spacecraft were orbiting 262 miles above central China. Credit: NASA
Teams will continue to monitor the weather at the splashdown sites prior to undocking to ensure conditions are acceptable for a safe recovery of the Dragon spacecraft and Ax-1 astronauts. If needed for any reason, there are additional opportunities for the crew’s departure from the space station on Wednesday, April 20.
There’s never been a house call quite like this. In a first for telepresence communication, a NASA flight surgeon was ‘holoported’ to the International Space Station (ISS), appearing and conversing as a virtual presence in real time, hundreds of miles above the surface of Earth.
If it sounds like Star Trek, you’re not too far off. (after all, Star Trek: Voyager did feature an artificial physician who was a holographic projection.)
But this isn’t science fiction. When NASA flight surgeon Josef Schmid was beamed up to the ISS in October of last year, the illusion was made possible thanks to Microsoft’s ‘holoportation’ technology, which lets users interact with 3D representations of remote participants in real time.
“This is [a] completely new manner of human communication across vast distances,” says Schmid. “It is a brand-new way of human exploration, where our human entity is able to travel off the planet.”
Schmid and other team members during the holoportation session. (ESA/Thomas Pesquet)
Unlike traditional holographic projections that appear to hover in the air for anybody to see, holoportation requires the use of an augmented reality headset, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens technology, for the wearer to be able to perceive (and interact with) the remotely captured individual(s), who are filmed with a multiple-camera setup in their actual location.
In this case, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who was on board the ISS and wearing such a headset, had a two-way conversation with Schmid and members of his medical team, along with Fernando De La Pena Llaca, the CEO of AEXA Aerospace, which develops custom holoportation software (the kind that made this ISS session possible).
While Microsoft’s holoportation technology has existed – in various stages of development – for several years, it’s never been used for something as ambitious as this before: connecting Earth-based medical researchers with astronauts on mission, orbiting the planet hundreds of miles up in the sky.
Yet it’s this exact kind of capability – bridging physical gaps to connect people over huge distances in space – that could be important for future space-exploration missions. This way, scientists could virtually interact with real-time 3D representations of remote participants on Earth, space stations, or other spacecraft, enabling collaborations that can be much more involving and immersive than standard 2D video calls.
“Our physical body is not there, but our human entity absolutely is there,” says Schmid.
“Imagine you can bring the best instructor or the actual designer of a particularly complex technology right beside you wherever you might be working on it.”
NASA flight surgeon Josef Schmid holoported onto the ISS. (ESA/Thomas Pesquet)
The next step in the technology’s evolution is to enable fully two-way holoportation interactions.
During this experiment, Pesquet was the only participant wearing an augmented reality headset that enabled him to perceive the other participants as digital 3D holograms, as Schmid and the other participants did not wear such devices themselves.
Once all participants are similarly equipped, however, the possibilities to jump into someone else’s reality could become even more instructive and transformative for off-world astronauts – whether you’re consulting Earth-bound doctors about a medical issue, or exchanging important ideas about mission objectives with NASA researchers.
“What it really plays into is opportunities for more longer duration spaceflight and more deep spaceflight,” Christian Maender, a research director at space infrastructure company Axiom Space, explained to the Verge in 2021.
“Where you are really talking about wanting to create a human connection between your crew – no matter where they’re traveling – and back to someone on the planet.”
