BioShock creative lead Ken Levine is reportedly facing trouble. According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Levine’s studio Ghost Story Games and its long-awaited debut project have been plagued by shifting design goals and an overambitious vision. It’s not a new criticism of Levine, but it suggests that the game’s nearly eight-year waiting period might not end any time soon and hints at some details about what Ghost Story is actually doing.
Schreier’s story indicates that Ghost Story, a division of Take-Two Interactive staffed with former members of Levine’s old studio Irrational, was originally supposed to release a small game in 2017. The project was a sci-fi shooter set on a “mysterious space station” where three factions would respond to the player’s actions. (While Bloomberg compares it to BioShock, the setting sounds similar to Levine’s earlier space horror game System Shock 2.) But the project’s scope was seemingly bigger than the 30-person team could handle, including a “complicated dialogue system that would morph based on player choices.” As of 2022, the project has apparently been rebooted multiple times and still has no name or release date.
According to Bloomberg, part of the delay stems from Levine’s mercurial management style and perfectionism. Like previous reports from his time at Irrational, it describes a place where projects would get suddenly overhauled or scrapped after months of work. One anecdote describes studio members joking about convincing Levine to adopt their ideas via “Kenception,” a reference to the artificially planted thoughts in Christopher Nolan’s Inception. An open-ended release timeline has apparently been a double-edged sword, with Levine reportedly saying that the studio’s ongoing budget is a “rounding error” in Take-Two’s operation, which could give its game an indefinitely long development process.
But Ghost Story’s core mission also contains some built-in tension. The studio grew alongside Levine’s fascination with “narrative Legos,” his term for the kind of procedurally generated drama produced by Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis system or some recent indie games. (The Bloomberg report also mentions the procedurally generated games Dead Cells and Void Bastards as potential influences.) At the same time, it’s apparently been pursuing the feel of a heavily scripted and polished big-budget 3D experience, something that’s difficult to produce with a highly variable story.
The BioShock franchise, meanwhile, has proceeded without Levine — although a new installment has also been in development for some time with no release in sight. An unrelated System Shock sequel has followed an even more tortured development roadmap.
System Shock 2 helped define the immersive sim, a genre that gave players a feeling of free choice through versatile but often painstakingly handcrafted systems. It’s a style that feels ripe for an experiment with infinitely generated conflict, especially paired with Levine’s love of lofty, clashing philosophical movements. But for now, those clashes are apparently happening inside the studio as well.
The Oura Ring isn’t the only smart ring on the block anymore. For CES 2022, health tech company Movano is announcing the Movano Ring, a wearable that aims to help people affordably monitor chronic illnesses and better understand their data.
The Movano Ring will measure all the basic metrics, including heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), sleep, respiration, temperature, blood oxygen levels, steps, and calories burned. However, instead of a raw data dump, Movano says it’ll distill how your metrics relate to each other “take a more proactive approach to mitigating the risks of chronic disease.” For example, the Movano app might tell you how your exercise habits impact your sleeping patterns or HRV over time.
This isn’t surprising — more wearable makers are shifting away from steps and calories in favor of simplified scores and insights. The Oura Ring, Whoop, and Fitbit all use scores to contextualize sleep and recovery data but mostly focus on telling you whether to push yourself or take it easy on a given day. They’re also accompanied by graphs and lengthy descriptions that can, at times, be overwhelming. Movano says it wants its insights to be more actionable. So far, the app screenshots that Movano showed The Verge don’t show anything groundbreaking, but the way the data is presented is more digestible than many trackers out there.
Plenty of wearables offer similar data, but the way it’s presented here is much easier to digestImage: Movano
There are a few other things that help the Movano Ring stand out. For starters, the device itself isn’t hideous and is impressively slim. The emphasis on a sleeker design was a deliberate choice, says Movano CEO Dr. John Mastrototaro, as the device was specifically designed for women of all ages. That’s notable in two ways. First, wearable tech has historically favored traditionally masculine styles and sizes. Smart rings like the Oura Ring and the now-defunct Motiv Ring have also tended to be on the chunkier side. That’s mainly because it’s hard to miniaturize sensors with current technology, but a side-effect is that they’re less suitable for petite hands. A truly slim and sleek smart ring would be a first. Second, only a handful of wearables companies take a women-first approach. Some have tried addressing the issue, but there’s still a huge gender gap in medical data. (Fun fact: it wasn’t until 1993 that Congress mandated women and minorities be included in clinical trials.)
But the big thing is that while most wearable companies sidestep questions about FDA approval, Movano is frank about its medical ambitions. According to Mastrototaro, while the first Movano Ring won’t have FDA clearances, the goal is to eventually get Class II designation and add medical features like non-invasive glucose monitoring and cuffless blood pressure in a “step-by-step” manner over time. To do that, the company is conducting clinical trials for its radio frequency-enabled tech and algorithms, as well as accuracy studies to gain FDA clearance for heart rate, SpO2, and respiratory rate monitoring. Non-invasive glucose monitoring and cuffless blood pressure are holy grails for wearable tech — and big names, including Apple and Fitbit, have been rumored to be working on these features for smartwatches. Bringing them to a smart ring would be an impressive achievement.
It’s miraculously not chunky — a big win for smart rings if this ever gets to market.Image: Movano
That said, consumer wearables promising medical features often end up in regulatory limbo. The Withings ScanWatch made its debut at CES in January 2020, but it wasn’t until November 2021 that it obtained the FDA clearance necessary to hit the US market. Its Move ECG smartwatch was announced even earlier but still has yet to receive clearance. Omron’s HeartGuide blood pressure smartwatch also took several years to clear. It often means companies end up choosing between making consumer wellness devices that lack medical credibility or niche medical devices that are inaccessible to the average person. However, Mastrototaro says Movano’s got a secret trump card: decades of regulatory experience.
“We’re taking the regulatory side of things very seriously,” Mastrototaro told The Verge. He also pointed to his long history in developing medical devices, including the first continuous glucose monitor, as well as that of his staff. That experience, Mastrototaro says, gives Movano an edge in navigating the FDA’s notoriously opaque clearance process.
The Movano Ring won’t be available until the second half of 2022, and even then, it’ll be a beta version. We also don’t have any concrete details for pricing, though Mastrototaro says the company aims for it to be “one of the most affordable” on the market.
“We’re aiming for both a medical and consumer focus — the intersection of these two fields as opposed to one or the other. We want to have the look, feel, and affordability of a consumer device with the accuracy and reliability of a medical device,” says Mastrototaro. What Mastrototaro is describing is the holy grail of wearable tech. We’ll have to see if the Movano Ring ends up being another CES pipedream, but it’s certainly one of the more ambitious takes on smart rings that we’ve seen in a long time.
Plans for an accelerated pipeline to develop drug cocktails to treat COVID-19 were announced on Tuesday by researchers from several prestigious universities and institutes around the world. The pipeline could speed new and better treatments that patients could take at home to prevent serious illness, with a stated goal of making effective treatments available in “weeks, not months,” according to researchers.
An international team of scientists from the University of Virginia, University of Washington, and the University of Maryland collaborated with research company MRIGlobal and collaborators in Estonia, Finland and Norway to issue the joint plan, which argued that a response based on drug cocktails – a combination of existing treatments and medicines – is a “proactive drug development strategy” and could offer the first line of defense against future pandemics.
The researchers, who published their findings in the peer-reviewed scientific journal mBio, believe that focusing on the drug cocktail strategy would reduce the burden on healthcare systems and help prevent disease spread by limiting a virus’ ability to adapt to its hosts, adding that this approach is already the norm for treating viruses such as HIV.
“We need to proactively develop drug cocktails against virus families as a whole – for example, all coronaviruses – to be ready on day one if a new virus or variant emerges. The cocktail should be low cost, easy to transport and distribute, and easy to self-administer – therefore available to people across the globe,” said study co-author and researcher Dr. Judith M. White from the University of Virginia School of Medicine. “We hope that this concept of ‘smart drug cocktails’… will be the basis for a robust, coordinated effort against coronaviruses and other pathogenic viruses, such as Zika and Lassa fever,” Dr. White added.
Researchers proposed a five-point plan to best adopt their proposed strategy, saying healthcare systems must:
Prioritize drugs that people could take at home either by mouth or inhalation,
Focus on drug combinations rather than individual drugs
Prioritize drugs that are already approved or in advanced clinical trials
Focus on drugs that can be safely given to patients without them suffering from toxic side effects
Use advanced computer models to identify useful drug combinations and speed development.
“Models that incorporate both the properties of the drugs and the biology of the virus spreading against an immune response can be used to identify the best way to dose promising treatments,” said Dr. Joshua T. Schiffer of the University of Washington. “These models suggest strategically combining drugs may add substantial benefit.”
“Having easily deployable, easily administered, inexpensive drug cocktails on the shelf when a new virus outbreak occurs would buy time from virus discovery to development and roll-out of sequence-dependent countermeasures like vaccines and designer drugs, and could therefore blunt the initial stages of an epidemic,” concluded Dr. White.
Folded like a $9.7 billion piece of metal origami and nestled into the nose of an Ariane 5 rocket, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will, in late December, be sent nearly one million miles from the surface of the Earth. Once it reaches its destination — a region of space with open views, where the sun and Earth’s gravity counterbalance each other — the Hubble telescope’s bigger, grander successor will spend the next decade answering questions that are as scientific as they are existential.
“How did we get here? What is the universe? And how did it come into being?” said David Hunter, a project manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute. “With something like the JWST, you actually have a tangible way of finding answers.”
Over two decades of work — totaling 100 million hours of labor from more than 1,000 scientists, engineers, and technicians — went into the development of this next-generation space telescope. For their efforts, Webb will be able to peer into distant corners of the universe, using infrared detection to penetrate clouds of dust, survey the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets, and look backward in time over 13 billion years, picking up faint light emitted by galaxies formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang.
Yet this sci-fi-seeming agenda wasn’t possible when JWST was first imagined.
“At the beginning, [NASA] identified the technologies that would be needed,” explained Hunter. “They went through a development program, looking at all of the parts of the observatory that needed to be built. They figured out which ones we couldn’t do yet, and how to advance the engineering capability to do that.”
The telescope’s signature feature — 18 gold-plated hexagonal mirrors, reaching over 21 feet in diameter, resembling a giant honeycomb — also posed one of its greatest engineering challenges. The mirrors had to be lightweight, yet sturdy enough to hold firmly in place, and capable of folding down to fit into the nose of the carrier rocket. Beneath the mirrors sits the sunshield, another marvel, composed of 5 micro-thin layers of a resilient film called Kapton which will unfurl to the size of a tennis court, protecting the observatory from solar heat. In outer space, deploying the telescope will take a total of 29 days, an intensely nerve-racking window in which hundreds of discrete release mechanisms need to fire in perfect succession.
Transporting the telescope to the verdant European Spaceport in French New Guinea was an ordeal in itself. It arrived on October 12th, following a late-night police escort through the streets of Los Angeles and a 16-day, 5,800-mile sea voyage through the Panama Canal on a custom carrier ship. During transit, controversy over the telescope’s name boiled over from the pages of academic journals into the public sphere. Articles in The Washington Post and NPR detailed a posthumous investigation into the career of James Webb, a former leader at NASA and the telescope’s namesake, who stood accused of discriminating against LGBTQ government employees in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. But a NASA investigation concluded that the name will stay.
“NASA’s History Office conducted an exhaustive search through currently accessible archives on James Webb and his career,” NASA spokeswoman Karen Fox told the Washington Post in a statement. “They also talked to experts who previously researched the topic extensively… NASA found no evidence at this point that warrants changing the name of the James Webb Space Telescope.”
The JWST has already been a source of news, controversy, and anticipation, but the real headlines, said Hunter, will come once it settles into its stable orbit a million miles from Earth.
“The big stories are going to emerge once we get into regular operations,” he said. “It’s what we’ve all been building it for — for the discoveries it will make, which will tell us things we didn’t know about the universe.”
Apple Inc’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) car project has gone full-throttle, according to tech journalist Mark Gurman.
What Happened: Gurman pointed to the Apple Watch software chief Kevin Lynch leading the company’s car efforts in recent weeks and his push to accelerate the development of the electric vehicle.
“Now he’s pushing the team behind the project to accelerate its development, with an eye on debuting a car as early [as] 2025,” wrote Gurman in his weekly newsletter.
The Apple-focused journalist noted that Lynch wants the first version of the vehicle to be fully autonomous and have no steering wheel or pedal controls.
“It’s an ambitious and aggressive plan and certainly fascinating to follow,” wrote Gurman.
See Also: How To Buy Apple (AAPL) Shares
Why It Matters: Resurfaced rumors surrounding the so-called Apple car propelled the shares of the Tim Cook-led company into record territory last week.
Loup Ventures analyst Gene Munster put the chances of Apple eventually releasing a car at 50% and said it is likely more than five years away.
Although Apple has given itself a timeline of four years to release a car with the more advanced fully autonomous technology, should the iPhone maker not be able to meet its set deadline it could either delay the launch or release a vehicle with less advanced technology, as per a Bloomberg report.
This month, it was reported that Apple Car’s concept resembles Tesla Inc’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Cybertruck.
Price Action: On Friday, Apple shares rose 1.7% to $160.55 in the regular session and gained 0.27% in the after-hours session.
Read Next: Here’s What Morgan Stanley Sees From Apple Car
House Republicans railed against the legislation as government overreach that would exacerbate inflation and rising costs. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, suggested that fears about backlash over the bill had prompted the latest round of Democratic retirements.
“They know this reconciliation bill will be the end of their Democrat majority, and for many, their congressional careers,” Mr. McCarthy said.
If the bill clears the House, it faces a difficult road in the Senate, where Republicans will have a clear shot to offer politically difficult amendments, any one of which could unravel the delicate Democratic coalition behind it. Two Democratic centrists, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, have not committed to supporting it, and a single defection would bring the measure down in the evenly divided chamber.
Some significant provisions remain in play, including a measure to grant work permits and legal protection to many undocumented immigrants; funding for four weeks of paid family and medical leave; and a generous increase in the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes paid, from $10,000 a year to $80,000.
Liberals like Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is the chairman of the Budget Committee, and at least one centrist Democrat, Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, have raised strong objections to that tax measure, which would amount to a major tax cut for wealthy homeowners who itemize their deductions. Mr. Sanders and other senators are discussing limiting who can benefit from the increased deduction based on income.
Having capped the deduction in their 2017 tax law, Republicans have also singled out the provision in their attacks on the legislation. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, scoffed, “I’m almost impressed our colleagues have found a way to be this out of touch.”
But Democrats from high-tax states like New Jersey and New York have demanded the provision as the price for their vote.
NASA will launch its Artemis missions using the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System, seen together in this illustration.
NASA
The moon is sitting there in the night sky, silently beckoning humanity to return for another visit. It’s been decades, but NASA is determined to return. First, however, the space agency needs to launch a successful Artemis I moon mission, and we now have a new target for that: February 2022.
There had been some hope of launching Artemis I, an uncrewed test flight around the moon, in the fall of 2021, but it’s no surprise the launch has been pushed into next year.
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NASA just crossed a major milestone by connecting the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “With stacking complete, a series of integrated tests now sit between the mega moon rocket and targeted liftoff for deep space in February 2022,” NASA said in a statement on Friday.
The space agency laid out the many tests that will need to be completed before launch, including status checks of systems, interfaces and communications. SLS and Orion will also go through a simulated launch and a “wet dress rehearsal” that involves loading propellent into the rocket. A more exact launch date will be announced after a successful rehearsal.
Cosmic dead ringers: 27 super strange-looking space objects
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“The first in a series of increasingly complex missions, Artemis I will provide a foundation for human deep-space exploration and demonstrate our commitment and capability to extend human existence to the moon and beyond prior to the first flight with crew on Artemis II,” NASA said.
The Artemis I launch is full of excitement and promise, a kickoff to a new era of lunar exploration. It will also be a crucial test of what NASA says is the most powerful rocket it’s ever built. It will let NASA know if Orion is safe for astronauts as we inch closer to the main event: humans on the moon once again.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s newest asteroid probe, named Lucy, blasted off from Kennedy Space Center here in Florida to embark on a 12-year mission to study two different clusters of asteroids around Jupiter known as Trojans.
These swarms represent the final unexplored regions of asteroids in the solar system. Lucy, acting as a robotic archaeologist, will help to answer questions about how the giant planets formed.
Perched atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket, the refrigerator-sized spacecraft lit up the predawn skies above Cape Canaveral as it leapt off its launch pad right on time at 5:34 a.m. EDT (0934 GMT) Saturday morning (Oct. 16). Just under two hours after launch, NASA confirmed Lucy’s solar arrays had deployed and it had successfully phoned home.
Related: Meet the 8 asteroids NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will visit
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An Atlas V rocket carrying NASA’s Lucy spacecraft launches in a 2.5-minute exposure captured on Oct. 16, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)
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A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying NASA’s Lucy asteroid-exploring spacecraft lifts off from Space Launch Complex-41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida before dawn on Oct. 16, 2021. (Image credit: United Launch Alliance)
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A United Launch Alliance Atlas V carrying NASA’s Lucy spacecraft bound for Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids launches from a pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Oct. 16, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)
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A United Launch Alliance Atlas V carrying NASA’s Lucy spacecraft bound for Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids launched on Oct. 16, 2021. (Image credit: NASA TV)
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Engineers rotate the Lucy spacecraft during late-stage launch preparations on Sept. 1, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/Glenn Benson)
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NASA’s new asteroid explorer Lucy being readied for launch. (Image credit: NASA)
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NASA’s Lucy spacecraft was encapsulated into its rocket fairing on Sept. 30, 2021, in preparation for launch. (Image credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky)
Lucy will spend the next six years cruising through the solar system, looping around the Earth twice in order to build up enough momentum to reach Jupiter. The spacecraft will fly by a total of eight different asteroids (seven Trojans, which are located in two separate swarms, ahead of and behind the massive planet in its orbit, and one main belt) in order to help scientists better understand how the solar system evolved. Researchers believe that the Trojans are perfectly preserved cosmic time capsules and hope that studying them could shed more light on the origin of the solar system and how the giant planets formed.
“The reason why [the Trojans] are important scientifically is that they were essentially leftovers,” Hal Levison, Lucy’s principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute, told Space.com.
Believed to be fragments of the early solar system, the Trojans are gravitationally locked in stable orbits at the same distance from the sun as Jupiter. With the help of a suite of scientific instruments, Lucy will study the geology, composition, density and structure of each of its Trojan targets.
Artist’s depictions of the eight asteroids that NASA’s Lucy mission will visit. (Image credit: NASA Goddard/YouTube)
To date, space agencies around the world have explored a variety of small bodies from the asteroid belt to near-Earth asteroids (using projects like Japan’s Hayabusa mission and NASA’s OSIRIS-REx) to the icy expanse of the Kuiper belt.
But one area remains unexplored: the Trojan swarms around Jupiter. Approximately 10,000 objects have been discovered in these two regions ranging from a few kilometers across to hundreds of kilometers in diameter. First spotted more than a century ago, astronomers at the time were naming the objects after heroes in Homer’s Iliad, earning the region’s inhabitants the name “Trojans.”
Lucy in the sky
The mission is named “Lucy” as a nod to the 3.2 million-year-old hominin skeleton discovered in 1974 by a paleoanthropologist named Donald Johanson. At the time, the skeleton was the oldest and most complete hominin discovered and it revealed some secrets of human evolution. NASA named its newest spacecraft Lucy because it hopes that the robotic probe can help unlock some secrets of solar system evolution.
“I will never look at Jupiter the same,” Johanson said after watching the Lucy mission launch from Florida. “To be out here this morning was absolutely mind-expanding, and it was such a positive experience.”
Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson saw the Lucy spacecraft, named for his discovery of a 3-million-year-old hominin, in July 2021, when the spacecraft was nearly complete. (Image credit: Donald Johanson)
“You know, the world is going through some tribulations, something as positive as this people should look at and see what the creativity of the human mind can do,” Johanson continued in a live NASA interview. “And there it is, she’s on her way and she will tell us so much. I just had goosebumps.”
The Lucy fossil got its name from the Beatles’ famous tune, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which was playing at the campsite at the time of the fossil’s discovery. As such, the spacecraft is carrying a plaque with some of the song lyrics, along with lyrics from other songs by the Beatles and by other artists.
In 2025, Lucy will reach its first target: a small asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter named for Johanson (Asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson). The spacecraft will test its sensors on the small asteroid as a practice run before its main mission: flying by seven different Trojan asteroids, ranging in size from a tiny moon to a large binary asteroid.
Planetary conundrum
Early theories as to how the solar system formed envisioned a star in the center of a rotating disk of protoplanetary material. Gradually, the material would condense and collect in clumps to form the planets.
But when planetary scientist Hal Levison tried to simulate this, he kept running into a problem: the orbits of Uranus and Neptune did not match up. It was impossible to build these two giant planets in their current orbits. So, Levison tweaked his simulation and developed a new model called the Nice model of solar system evolution, which suggests that the giant planets formed much closer to the sun.
Thanks to the increasingly eccentric orbits of young Jupiter and Saturn, the solar system was rearranged and Neptune and Uranus were kicked out of place and flung into the outer solar system. As they migrated outward, they scattered the small bodies of the solar system. Comets and asteroids were flung to the deep outer solar system, and some were even ejected out of the solar system and into the Milky Way.
As this was happening, a small set of the scattered asteroids were trapped by Jupiter’s gravitational tractor beam and locked in an orbital dance at two of Jupiter’s permanent Lagrange points, which are regions of space where the gravitational and orbital influences of the planet and the sun are balanced.
A diagram of Lucy’s itinerary among the Trojan asteroids that trail and lead Jupiter. (Image credit: Southwest Research Institute)
These regions, known as Trojan swarms, both lead and trail Jupiter in its orbit. The asteroids that are trapped in these two different swarms are believed to be the bits and pieces of the giant planets leftover after their formation.
“Surprisingly, the Trojans are all physically very different from one another but together, occupy a really small region of space,” Levison said. “That diverse population in such a small region is telling us something important about the early evolution of the solar system.”
Levison said the team just needs to unlock those secrets. Lucy was chosen to do just that. It was selected to fly in 2014 as part of NASA’s Discovery program, which allows scientists to compete for smaller mission proposals.
Lucy is equipped with multiple cameras that will image each of its targets in multiple wavelengths in order to analyze geophysical properties. For instance, by counting and measuring the number of craters on the surface of these asteroids, scientists can determine how old an asteroid is. (The older an asteroid’s surface is, the more craters will be present.)
Scientists will also analyze the color of the asteroids’ surfaces, which can provide some insight into what the rocks are made of. Together with thermal measurements and infrared spectra, scientists are hoping to pinpoint the composition of each asteroid. NASA is especially interested in the notion of finding primordial organic material on asteroids because billions of years ago, this material may have seeded Earth with the chemical ingredients necessary for life thanks to asteroid impacts.
Each asteroid encounter will be at an altitude of 600 miles (970 km) or less from the Trojan’s surface. And after the final flyby, if the spacecraft is in good health, NASA could green light an extended mission and target future asteroids or other celestial objects for further analysis.
Solar-powered spacecraft
Lucy’s solar panels unfurled during spacecraft work before launch. Lucy will become the solar-powered spacecraft to venture the farthest from the sun. (Image credit: Lockheed Martin)
During its 12-year mission, Lucy will rely on two giant solar arrays, which will expand outward like folding fans shortly after launch. Its unique looping trajectory will carry it farther from the sun than any solar-powered spacecraft has ever flown before.
The design is based on the same design that currently powers the InSight Mars lander, only much larger. The solar panels will provide about 500 watts of power while the spacecraft is flying past the Trojan asteroids, Katie Oakman, Lucy structures and mechanisms lead at Lockheed Martin Space, which built the spacecraft, said during a news conference held on Thursday (Oct. 14).
Lucy will soar through Jovian Lagrange points and swinging back around Earth multiple times. In fact, team members say that Lucy could thrive in this loop-to-loop trajectory for as long as its onboard fuel reserves last. As such, the agency has equipped Lucy with a “time capsule” of poetry, quotes and song lyrics, in the hope that one day far in the future, space-faring humans might recover the spacecraft and discover Lucy’s treasure trove of information on what life was like in the 21st century.
Levison says that when Lucy has visited all of its targets and sent back all the data, he hopes that the team is able to determine where the Trojans formed. If data suggests that they formed in different places at different distances from the sun and were then swept into their current orbits, it would line up with his theory of solar system formation.
But that might not be what happens. If the team discovers something unexpected, Levison said that would be a very good thing. “My hope will be to look at the current models of solar system formation — including my own work — and discover that it wasn’t as simple as we thought and that we have to start over from scratch,” he said.
Ride to space
(Image credit: ULA)
Lucy’s liftoff marked the 100th launch from ULA’s facilities at Space Launch 41 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It’s also the 89th launch of an Atlas V, and the 146th overall launch for ULA since its formation in 2006.
The rocket used in Saturday’s flight is the most basic version of an Atlas V, called a 401 configuration. For this vehicle, the rocket features a 4-meter payload fairing, a single-engine Centaur upper stage and no solid rocket boosters.
It was originally slated to carry a different payload: Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule. That spacecraft was slated to blast off in August, but was forced to stand down after a series of valves in the craft’s propulsion system were stuck shut. Starliner was ferried back to Boeing’s factory for engineers to troubleshoot the anomaly, while its rocket was stripped of its dual-engine Centaur upper stage in favor of the single engine version needed to launch Lucy.
Starliner will not be able to launch now until sometime in 2022 due to traffic at the International Space Station and other payloads, namely Lucy, that needed to go ahead and launch. Plus the teams still need to figure out what’s going on with those pesky propulsion valves.
Up next for ULA is the launch of a rideshare mission called STP-3. It will blast off sometime in November, carrying payloads for the U.S. Space Force.
Follow Amy Thompson on Twitter @astrogingersnap. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the planet’s surface for future missions to retrieve, as seen in this illustration. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The drill hole from Perseverance’s second sample-collection attempt can be seen, in this composite of two images taken on September 1, 2021, by one of the Perseverance rover’s navigation cameras. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Returning a sample from
The first cored sample of Mars rock is visible (at center) inside a titanium sample collection tube in these images from the Sampling and Caching System Camera (known as CacheCam) of NASA’s Perseverance rover. These images were taken on September 6, 2021 (the 194th sol, or Martian day, of the mission), prior to the system attaching and sealing a metal cap onto the tube. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Mars Sample Return would involve several firsts aimed at settling an open question: Has life taken root anywhere in the solar system besides Earth? “I’ve been working my whole career for the opportunity to answer this question,” said Daniel Glavin, an astrobiologist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Glavin is helping design systems to protect the Martian samples from contamination throughout their journey from Mars to Earth.
Collecting samples from Mars and bringing them back to Earth will be a historic undertaking that started with the launch of NASA’s Perseverance rover on July 30, 2020. Perseverance collected its first rock core samples in September 2021. Credit: NASA/ESA/
This illustration shows a concept for a set of future robots working together to ferry back samples from the surface of Mars collected by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover. Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech
The rocket would deliver the sample capsule to Martian orbit, where an ESA orbiter would be waiting to receive it. Inside the orbiter, the capsule would be prepared for delivery to Earth by a payload being developed by a team led by NASA Goddard. This preparation would include sealing the sample capsule inside a clean container to trap any Martian material inside, sterilizing the seal, and using a robotic arm being developed at Goddard to place the sealed container into an Earth-entry capsule before the return trip to Earth.
One of the primary tasks for NASA engineers is figuring out how to seal and sterilize the sample container without obliterating important chemical signatures in the rock cores inside. Among the techniques the team is currently testing is brazing, which involves melting a metal
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NASA’s next asteroid-bound mission to explore the earliest days of our solar system is nearly ready to launch.
The Lucy spacecraft is targeting a launch window that opens on Saturday (Oct. 16). After blastoff, the spacecraft will make a 12-year journey to the outer solar system, where it will visit half a dozen ancient “Trojan” asteroids that orbit in the same path as the planet Jupiter.
This ambitious mission will include a number of firsts — Lucy will be the first spacecraft to visit asteroids in this region and the first to make a flyby of Earth from the outer solar system. Moreover, the mission will add fresh data as scientists seek to learn more about our universe’s early history.
“No other space mission in history has been launched to as many different destinations in independent orbits around our sun,” NASA said in a mission description. “Lucy will show us, for the first time, the diversity of the primordial bodies that built the planets.”
Related: Lucy mission to explore 7 trojan asteroids explained by NASA
Lucy is named after a famous early australopithecine (humanoid) skeleton that is roughly 3.2 million years old, the discovery of which has long been hailed as a keystone in understanding human evolution. The skeleton itself was named after the Lucy in the 1967 Beatles tune, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” a song to which excavators danced during the 1974 expedition that uncovered the skeleton, NASA said in a 2017 press release about the Lucy mission.
NASA drew inspiration from the Lucy skeleton, which to the agency represents the beginning of humans, in naming a mission that aims to teach us more about the beginnings of our solar system.
“These asteroids really are like diamonds in the sky in terms of their scientific value for understanding how the giant planets formed and the solar system evolved,” Harold Levison, principal investigator of Lucy at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), said in a 2017 NASA statement. Levison was the one who suggested naming the mission after the skeleton.
Lucy’s dozen-year journey will take it to at least eight different asteroids, with three revisits to Earth (two before heading to the outer solar system, and one after) to pick up speed through gravity assists. One small world will be located in the “main belt” of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, while the other seven are Trojans. Notably, four of the seven Trojans are paired up, allowing Lucy to view two asteroids simultaneously with each of those particular visits.
The mission will target a range of different kinds of asteroid bodies: C-type (chondrite, common ancient asteroids made of clay and silicate), D-type (asteroids with low albedos or reflectivity, which may be rich in organic molecules) and P-type (more asteroids with low albedos that may also be rich in organics, although we have no samples yet on Earth to confirm this).
An artist’s depiction of NASA’s Lucy spacecraft swinging past a Trojan asteroid. (Image credit: Southwest Research Institute)
In order, Lucy’s planned asteroid targets are 52246 Donaldjohanson, 3547 Eurybates and its small satellite Queta, 15094 Polymele, 11351 Leucus, 21900 Orus and the binary 617 Patroclus/Menoetius. Lucy’s website has more details about each asteroid’s type, size and orbit.
“The dark-red P- and D-type Trojans resemble those found in the Kuiper Belt of icy bodies that extends beyond the orbit of Neptune,” NASA officials wrote in the mission description. “The C-types are found mostly in the outer parts of the main belt of asteroids, between Mars and Jupiter. All of the Trojans are thought to be abundant in dark carbon compounds. Below an insulating blanket of dust, they are probably rich in water and other volatile substances.”
Flying on Lucy will be several instruments: a color visible imager to determine composition; a long-range reconnaissance imager to pick up high-resolution images of each asteroid’s surface; a thermal emission spectrometer to examine how the Trojans retain heat; a terminal-tracking camera to obtain wide-field images of the asteroids to learn more about their shapes; and a high-gain antenna to determine the masses of each of these small worlds.
Asteroids and comets represent the leftover small objects from when our solar system formed, roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Studying the makeup, orbits and other dynamics of these little worlds tell cosmologists more about how our neighborhood came to be.
Lucy will also build on numerous recent missions concerning asteroids, including NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission that is currently headed for Earth with a sample from asteroid Bennu and Japan’s Hayabusa2 that returned to Earth in late 2020 with dust from asteroid Ryugu. Both of those objects are near-Earth asteroids, and comparing this category of space rock with Lucy’s observations of the Trojans may give scientists a new path to understanding the solar system.
Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
