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A recently discovered green comet will soon zip by Earth for the first time in 50,000 years. It was last visible in the night sky during the Stone Age.
Discovered on March 2, 2022, by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility’s wide-field survey camera at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, the comet made its closest approach to the sun on January 12, according to NASA.
Named C/2022 E3 (ZTF), the comet has an orbit around the sun that passes through the outer reaches of the solar system, which is why it’s taken such a long route — and long time — to swing by Earth again, according to The Planetary Society.
The icy celestial object will make its closest pass by Earth between February 1 and February 2, around 26 million miles to 27 million miles (42 million kilometers to 44 million kilometers) away, according to EarthSky.
Even during its closest approach, the comet will still be more than 100 times the moon’s distance away from Earth, according to EarthSky.
As the comet nears Earth, observers will be able to spot it as a faint green smudge near the bright star Polaris, also called the North Star. Comets reflect different colors of light due to their current positions in orbit and chemical compositions.
Early morning skies, once the moon has set after midnight for those in the Northern Hemisphere, are optimal for viewing the comet. The space object will be more difficult to see for those in the Southern Hemisphere.
Depending on its brightness, C/2022 E3 (ZTF) may even be visible to the unaided eye in dark skies, but binoculars or a telescope will make the comet easier to see.
The comet can be distinguished from stars by its streaking tails of dust and energized particles, as well as the glowing green coma surrounding it.
The coma is an envelope that forms around a comet as it passes close to the sun, causing its ice to sublimate, or turn directly to gas. This causes the comet to look fuzzy when observed through telescopes.
After passing by Earth, the comet will make its closest approach of Mars on February 10, according to EarthSky.
If clouds or inclement weather get in the way of skywatching, The Virtual Telescope Project will share a livestream of the comet in the skies above Rome. And don’t miss the other celestial events to see in 2023.
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CNN
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As a NASA orbiter turned its camera to the Martian surface, the face of a bear seemed to be looking back.
A camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, called the High Resolution Imaging Experiment, or HiRISE, captured an image of the unusual geological feature in December.
A circular fracture pattern on the Martian surface shapes the head, while two craters resemble eyes. A V-shaped collapsestructure creates the illusion of the nose of a bear.
The circular fracture might be due to the settling of a deposit on top of a buried impact crater that had been filled in with lava or mud. The noselike feature is possibly a volcanic vent or a mud vent.
The University of Arizona, which developed the camera with Ball Aerospace, shared the image on January 25.
The photo is reminiscent of another celestial “face” glimpsed by a NASA space observatory in October 2022, when the sun appeared to smile due to dark spots called coronal holes.
And last March, the Curiosity rover spotted a rock formation that resembled a flower on Mars.
The HiRISE camera has been taking images of Mars since 2006, when the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter began circling the red planet. The powerful camera was designed to capture detailed images of the Martian surface, including features as small as 3 feet (1 meter).
The orbiter circles Mars every 112 minutes, flying from about 160 miles (255 kilometers) above the south pole to 200 miles (320 kilometers) over the north pole.
The spacecraft and its suite of instruments help NASA scientists study the Martian atmosphere, weather and climate, and how they change over time. The orbiter searches for evidence of water, ice and complex terrain and scouts future landing sites for other missions.
Most recently, the orbiter returned stunning images of what winter looks like on Mars.
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CNN
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The rotation of Earth’s inner core may have paused and it could even go into reverse, new research suggests.
The Earth is formed of the crust, the mantle and the inner and outer cores. The solidinner core is situated about 3,200 miles below the Earth’s crust and is separated from the semi-solid mantle by the liquid outer core, which allows the inner core to rotate at a different speed from the rotation of the Earth itself.
With a radius of almost 2,200 miles, Earth’s core is about the size of Mars.It consists mostly of iron and nickel, and contains about about one-third of Earth’s mass.
In research published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Monday, Yi Yang, associate research scientist at Peking University, and Xiaodong Song, Peking University chair professor, studied seismic waves from earthquakes that have passed through the Earth’s inner core along similar paths since the 1960s to infer how fast the inner core is spinning.
What they found was unexpected, they said. Since 2009, seismic records, which previouslychanged over time,showed little difference. This, they said, suggested that the inner core rotation had paused.
“We show surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back,” they wrote in the study.
“When you look at the decade between 1980 and 1990 you see clear change but when you see 2010 to 2020 you don’t see much change,” added Song.
The spin of the inner core is driven by the magnetic field generated in the outer core and balanced by the gravitational effects of the mantle. Knowing how the inner core rotates could shed light on how these layers interact and other processes deep in the Earth.
However, the speed of this rotation, and whether it varies, is debated, said Hrvoje Tkalcic, a geophysicist at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the study,
“The inner core doesn’t come to a full stop,” he said. The study’s finding, he said, “means that the inner core is now more in sync with the rest of the planet than a decade ago when it was spinning a bit faster.”
“Nothing cataclysmic is happening,” he added.
Song and Yang argue that, based on their calculations, a small imbalance in the electromagnetic and gravitational forces could slow and even reverse the inner core’s rotation. They believe this is part of a seven-decade cycle, and that the turning point prior to the one they detected in their data around 2009/2010 occurred in the early 1970s.
Tkalcic, who is the author of “The Earth’s Inner Core: Revealed by Observational Seismology,” said the study’s “data analysis is sound.” However, the study’s findings “should be taken cautiously” as “more data and innovative methods are needed to shed light on this interesting problem.”
Song and Yang agreed that more research was needed.
Tkalcic, who dedicates an entire chapter of his book to the inner core rotation, suggested the inner core’s cycle is every 20 to 30 years, rather than the 70 proposed in the latest study. He explained why such variations occur and why it was so difficult to understand what happens in the innermost reaches of the planet.
“The objects of our studies are buried thousands of kilometers beneath our feet,” he said.
“We use geophysical inference methods to infer the Earth’s internal properties, and caution must be exercised until multi-disciplinary findings confirm our hypotheses and conceptual frameworks,” he explained
“You can think of seismologists like medical doctors who study the internal organs of patients’ bodies using imperfect or limited equipment. So, despite progress, our image of the inner Earth is still blurry, and we are still in the discovery stage.”
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CNN
—
The rotation of Earth’s inner core may have paused and it could even go into reverse, new research suggests.
The Earth is formed of the crust, the mantle and the inner and outer cores. The solidinner core is situated about 3,200 miles below the Earth’s crust and is separated from the semi-solid mantle by the liquid outer core, which allows the inner core to rotate at a different speed from the rotation of the Earth itself.
With a radius of almost 2,200 miles, Earth’s core is about the size of Mars.It consists mostly of iron and nickel, and contains about about one-third of Earth’s mass.
In research published in the journal Nature Geoscience on Monday, Yi Yang, associate research scientist at Peking University, and Xiaodong Song, Peking University chair professor, studied seismic waves from earthquakes that have passed through the Earth’s inner core along similar paths since the 1960s to infer how fast the inner core is spinning.
What they found was unexpected, they said. Since 2009, seismic records, which previouslychanged over time,showed little difference. This, they said, suggested that the inner core rotation had paused.
“We show surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back,” they wrote in the study.
“When you look at the decade between 1980 and 1990 you see clear change but when you see 2010 to 2020 you don’t see much change,” added Song.
The spin of the inner core is driven by the magnetic field generated in the outer core and balanced by the gravitational effects of the mantle. Knowing how the inner core rotates could shed light on how these layers interact and other processes deep in the Earth.
However, the speed of this rotation, and whether it varies, is debated, said Hrvoje Tkalcic, a geophysicist at the Australian National University, who was not involved in the study,
“The inner core doesn’t come to a full stop,” he said. The study’s finding, he said, “means that the inner core is now more in sync with the rest of the planet than a decade ago when it was spinning a bit faster.”
“Nothing cataclysmic is happening,” he added.
Song and Yang argue that, based on their calculations, a small imbalance in the electromagnetic and gravitational forces could slow and even reverse the inner core’s rotation. They believe this is part of a seven-decade cycle, and that the turning point prior to the one they detected in their data around 2009/2010 occurred in the early 1970s.
Tkalcic, who is the author of “The Earth’s Inner Core: Revealed by Observational Seismology,” said the study’s “data analysis is sound.” However, the study’s findings “should be taken cautiously” as “more data and innovative methods are needed to shed light on this interesting problem.”
Song and Yang agreed that more research was needed.
Tkalcic, who dedicates an entire chapter of his book to the inner core rotation, suggested the inner core’s cycle is every 20 to 30 years, rather than the 70 proposed in the latest study. He explained why such variations occur and why it was so difficult to understand what happens in the innermost reaches of the planet.
“The objects of our studies are buried thousands of kilometers beneath our feet,” he said.
“We use geophysical inference methods to infer the Earth’s internal properties, and caution must be exercised until multi-disciplinary findings confirm our hypotheses and conceptual frameworks,” he explained
“You can think of seismologists like medical doctors who study the internal organs of patients’ bodies using imperfect or limited equipment. So, despite progress, our image of the inner Earth is still blurry, and we are still in the discovery stage.”
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CNN
—
The James Webb Space Telescope peered inside a wispy molecular cloud located 630 light-years away and spied ices made of different elements.
Molecular clouds are interstellar groupings of gas and dust where hydrogen and carbon monoxide molecules can form. Dense clumps within these clouds can collapse to form young stars called protostars.
The Webb telescope focused on the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud, which appears blue in the new image. A young protostar, called Ced 110 IRS 4, glows in orange to the left. The journal Nature Astronomy published a study including the image on Monday.
More orange dots represent light from stars in the background, piercing through the cloud. The starlight helped astronomers determine the diverse range of frozen molecules within the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud, which is forming dozens of young stars.
The Webb telescope views the universe through infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. Infrared light can reveal previously hidden aspects of the cosmos and pierce dense clusters of gas and dust that would otherwise obscure the view.
Astronomers have usedthe space observatory to discover a diverse range of some of the coldest ices in the darkest regions of a molecular cloud to date. During a survey of the cloud, the international research team identified water ice, as well as frozen forms of ammonia, methanol, methane and carbonyl sulfide.
These icy molecules could contribute to the formation of stars and planets — and even the building blocks of life.
Ices can supply planets with carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur, which could lead to the formation of a habitable planet like Earth, where they are used in planetary atmospheres as well as amino acids, sugars and alcohols.
“Our results provide insights into the initial, dark chemistry stage of the formation of ice on the interstellar dust grains that will grow into the centimeter-sized pebbles from which planets form in disks,” said lead study author Melissa McClure, an astronomer and assistant professorat Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, in a statement. McClure is the principal investigator of the observing program.
“These observations open a new window on the formation pathways for the simple and complex molecules that are needed to make the building blocks of life.”
In addition to simple molecules, the researchers saw evidence of more complex molecules.
“Our identification of complex organic molecules, like methanol and potentially ethanol, also suggests that the many star and planetary systems developing in this particular cloud will inherit molecules in a fairly advanced chemical state,” said study coauthor Will Rocha, an astronomer and postdoctoral fellowat Leiden Observatory, in a statement.
“This could mean that the presence of precursors to prebiotic molecules in planetary systems is a common result of star formation, rather than a unique feature of our own solar system.”
Astronomers used starlight filtering through the cloud to search for chemical fingerprints and identify the elements.
“We simply couldn’t have observed these ices without Webb,” said study coauthor Klaus Pontoppidan, Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, in a statement.
“The ices show up as dips against a continuum of background starlight. In regions that are this cold and dense, much of the light from the background star is blocked, and Webb’s exquisite sensitivity was necessary to detect the starlight and therefore identify the ices in the molecular cloud.”
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CNN
—
In its violent early years, Earth was a molten hellscape that ejected the moon after a fiery collision with another protoplanet, scientists now suspect. Later, it morphed from a watery expanse to a giant snowball that nearly snuffed out all existing life.
Then hyper-hurricanes with waves as high as 300 feet pummeled the newly thawed ocean. But that’s nothing compared with the celestial turmoil and fireworks in the 9 billion years before the birth of our planet.
Science and history documentarian Dan Levitt’s upcoming book, “What’s Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body’s Atoms, From the Big Bang Through Last Night’s Dinner,” evokes a series of striking and often forceful images in tracing how our cells, elements, atoms and subatomic particles all found their way to our brains and bones and bodies. The book comes out on January 24.
“Now we know that the origin of the universe, the making of elements in stars, the creation of the solar system and Earth and the early history of our planet was incredibly tumultuous,” Levitt told CNN.
The nearly incomprehensible explosions, collisions and temperatures, though, were essential for life.
A disturbance in Jupiter’s orbit, for example, may have sent a hail of asteroids to Earth, seeding the planet with water in the process. And the molten iron forming Earth’s core has created a magnetic field that protects us from cosmic rays.
“So many things happened that could’ve gone another way,” Levitt said, “in which case we wouldn’t be here.”
Reconstructing the epic step-by-step journey of our atoms across billions of years, he said, has filled him with awe and gratitude.
“Sometimes when I look at people, I think, ‘Wow, you are such incredible organisms and our atoms all share the same deep history that goes back to the big bang,’ ” he said. He hopes that readers will recognize “that even the simplest cell is incredibly complex and worthy of great respect. And all people are, too.”
Our bodies contain 60 or so elements, including the torrent of hydrogen unleashed after the big bang and the calcium forged by dying stars known as red giants. As Levitt assembled the evidence for how they and more complex organic molecules made their way to us, he weaved in the tumultuous history of the scientific process itself.
He didn’t initially set out to parallel the turbulence in the universe with upheavals in the scientific world, but it definitely came with the territory. “So many scientific certainties have been overthrown since our great-grandparents were alive,” he said. “That’s part of the fun of the book.”
After Levitt finished his first draft, he realized to his surprise that part of the scientific turmoil was due to various kinds of recurring bias. “I wanted to get into the heads of scientists who made great discoveries — to see their advances as they did and understand how they were received at the time,” he said. “I was surprised that almost every time, the initial reaction to groundbreaking theories was skepticism and dismissal.”
Throughout the book, he pointed out six recurring mental traps that have blinded even brilliant minds, such as the view that it’s “too weird to be true” or that “if our current tools haven’t detected it, it doesn’t exist.”
Albert Einstein initially hated the strange idea of an expanding universe, for example, and had to be persuaded over time by Georges Lemaître, a little known but persistent Belgian priest and cosmologist. Stanley Miller, the “father of prebiotic chemistry” who ingeniously simulated early-Earth conditions in glass flasks, was a notoriously fierce opponent of the hypothesis that life could have evolved in the deep ocean, fueled by mineral-rich enzymes and super-heated vents. And so on.
“The history of science is littered with elder statesmen’s grand pronouncements of certainties that would soon be overturned,” Levitt writes in his book. Thankfully for us, the history of science is also full of radicals and freethinkers who delighted in poking holes in those pronouncements.
Levitt described how many of the leaps forward came about by researchers who never received due credit for their contributions. “I’m drawn to unsung heroes with dramatic stories that people haven’t heard before,” he said. “So, I was pleased that many of the most gripping stories in the book turned out to be about people who I hadn’t known about.”
They are scientists such as Austrian researcher Marietta Blau, who helped physicists see some of the first signs of subatomic particles; Dutch physician and philosopher Jan Ingenhousz, who discovered that sunlit leaves can create oxygen via photosynthesis; and chemist Rosalind Franklin, who was instrumental in working out the three-dimensional structure of DNA.
Wonders of the universe
The lightning spark of new ideas often struck independently around the world. To his surprise, Levitt found that multiple scientists worked out plausible scenarios for how life’s building blocks could have begun assembling.
“Our universe is awash in organic molecules — many of them are precursors to the molecules that we’re made of,” he said. “So I alternate between thinking that it’s just so improbable that creatures like us exist, and thinking that life must exist in many places in the universe.”
Nothing about our own journey from the big bang has been straightforward, though.
“If you try to envision how life evolved from the first organic molecules, it had to have been a herky-jerky process, full of twisted pathways and failures,” Levitt said. “Most of them must have gone nowhere. But evolution has a way of creating winners from countless experiments over long periods of time.”
Nature also has a way of recycling the building blocks to create new life. A nuclear physicist named Paul Aebersold found that “we swap out half of our carbon atoms every one to two months, and we replace a full 98 percent of all our atoms every year,” Levitt writes.
Like a house constantly under renovation, we are ever-changing and replacing old parts with new ones: our water, proteins and even cells, most of which we apparently replace every decade.
Eventually, our own cells will grow quiet, but their parts will reassemble into other forms of life. “Although we may die, our atoms don’t,” Levitt writes. “They revolve through life, soil, oceans, and sky in a chemical merry-go-round.”
Just like the death of stars, in other words, our own destruction opens up another remarkable world of possibility.
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CNN
—
In its violent early years, Earth was a molten hellscape that ejected the moon after a fiery collision with another protoplanet, scientists now suspect. Later, it morphed from a watery expanse to a giant snowball that nearly snuffed out all existing life.
Then hyper-hurricanes with waves as high as 300 feet pummeled the newly thawed ocean. But that’s nothing compared with the celestial turmoil and fireworks in the 9 billion years before the birth of our planet.
Science and history documentarian Dan Levitt’s upcoming book, “What’s Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body’s Atoms, From the Big Bang Through Last Night’s Dinner,” evokes a series of striking and often forceful images in tracing how our cells, elements, atoms and subatomic particles all found their way to our brains and bones and bodies. The book comes out on January 24.
“Now we know that the origin of the universe, the making of elements in stars, the creation of the solar system and Earth and the early history of our planet was incredibly tumultuous,” Levitt told CNN.
The nearly incomprehensible explosions, collisions and temperatures, though, were essential for life.
A disturbance in Jupiter’s orbit, for example, may have sent a hail of asteroids to Earth, seeding the planet with water in the process. And the molten iron forming Earth’s core has created a magnetic field that protects us from cosmic rays.
“So many things happened that could’ve gone another way,” Levitt said, “in which case we wouldn’t be here.”
Reconstructing the epic step-by-step journey of our atoms across billions of years, he said, has filled him with awe and gratitude.
“Sometimes when I look at people, I think, ‘Wow, you are such incredible organisms and our atoms all share the same deep history that goes back to the big bang,’ ” he said. He hopes that readers will recognize “that even the simplest cell is incredibly complex and worthy of great respect. And all people are, too.”
Our bodies contain 60 or so elements, including the torrent of hydrogen unleashed after the big bang and the calcium forged by dying stars known as red giants. As Levitt assembled the evidence for how they and more complex organic molecules made their way to us, he weaved in the tumultuous history of the scientific process itself.
He didn’t initially set out to parallel the turbulence in the universe with upheavals in the scientific world, but it definitely came with the territory. “So many scientific certainties have been overthrown since our great-grandparents were alive,” he said. “That’s part of the fun of the book.”
After Levitt finished his first draft, he realized to his surprise that part of the scientific turmoil was due to various kinds of recurring bias. “I wanted to get into the heads of scientists who made great discoveries — to see their advances as they did and understand how they were received at the time,” he said. “I was surprised that almost every time, the initial reaction to groundbreaking theories was skepticism and dismissal.”
Throughout the book, he pointed out six recurring mental traps that have blinded even brilliant minds, such as the view that it’s “too weird to be true” or that “if our current tools haven’t detected it, it doesn’t exist.”
Albert Einstein initially hated the strange idea of an expanding universe, for example, and had to be persuaded over time by Georges Lemaître, a little known but persistent Belgian priest and cosmologist. Stanley Miller, the “father of prebiotic chemistry” who ingeniously simulated early-Earth conditions in glass flasks, was a notoriously fierce opponent of the hypothesis that life could have evolved in the deep ocean, fueled by mineral-rich enzymes and super-heated vents. And so on.
“The history of science is littered with elder statesmen’s grand pronouncements of certainties that would soon be overturned,” Levitt writes in his book. Thankfully for us, the history of science is also full of radicals and freethinkers who delighted in poking holes in those pronouncements.
Levitt described how many of the leaps forward came about by researchers who never received due credit for their contributions. “I’m drawn to unsung heroes with dramatic stories that people haven’t heard before,” he said. “So, I was pleased that many of the most gripping stories in the book turned out to be about people who I hadn’t known about.”
They are scientists such as Austrian researcher Marietta Blau, who helped physicists see some of the first signs of subatomic particles; Dutch physician and philosopher Jan Ingenhousz, who discovered that sunlit leaves can create oxygen via photosynthesis; and chemist Rosalind Franklin, who was instrumental in working out the three-dimensional structure of DNA.
Wonders of the universe
The lightning spark of new ideas often struck independently around the world. To his surprise, Levitt found that multiple scientists worked out plausible scenarios for how life’s building blocks could have begun assembling.
“Our universe is awash in organic molecules — many of them are precursors to the molecules that we’re made of,” he said. “So I alternate between thinking that it’s just so improbable that creatures like us exist, and thinking that life must exist in many places in the universe.”
Nothing about our own journey from the big bang has been straightforward, though.
“If you try to envision how life evolved from the first organic molecules, it had to have been a herky-jerky process, full of twisted pathways and failures,” Levitt said. “Most of them must have gone nowhere. But evolution has a way of creating winners from countless experiments over long periods of time.”
Nature also has a way of recycling the building blocks to create new life. A nuclear physicist named Paul Aebersold found that “we swap out half of our carbon atoms every one to two months, and we replace a full 98 percent of all our atoms every year,” Levitt writes.
Like a house constantly under renovation, we are ever-changing and replacing old parts with new ones: our water, proteins and even cells, most of which we apparently replace every decade.
Eventually, our own cells will grow quiet, but their parts will reassemble into other forms of life. “Although we may die, our atoms don’t,” Levitt writes. “They revolve through life, soil, oceans, and sky in a chemical merry-go-round.”
Just like the death of stars, in other words, our own destruction opens up another remarkable world of possibility.
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CNN
—
South Korea’s first lunar probe has returned some striking images of Earth and the moon.
The Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter began orbiting the moon in December after the Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s spacecraft hadlaunched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August.
The probe, also known as “Danuri” thanks to a public naming contest in the country that combined the Korean words for moon and enjoy, will orbit the moon for 11 months.
The stunning images captured by the probe showcasing Earth and the moon in black and white look like something photographer Ansel Adams might have taken had he ever enjoyed such an opportunity. The orbiter is flying at an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the lunar surface.
Data collected by the orbiter will be used to inform future lunar exploration, including the Artemis program, which eventually aims to land humans at the lunar south pole in late 2024.
The probe’s imagery could help with selecting landing sites for future Artemis missions, as well as mapping resources like water.
South Korea signed the Artemis Accords in 2021 and collaborates with NASA on lunar exploration.
The probe carries six instruments, including the NASA-funded ShadowCam, developed by Arizona State University.
Universities and research institutes in South Korea developed the probe’s high-resolution camera to scout future landing sites, a polarized camera to analyze surface particles, an instrument to measure the lunar magnetic field and a gamma-ray spectrometer to identify elements in the lunar surface.
ShadowCam’s main objective is to take images of the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles that will help researcherssearching for ice, mapping terrain and watching for seasonal changes.
ShadowCam is several hundred times more sensitive than the cameras on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, enabling it to take detailed images in incredibly low-light conditions.
The probe recently used ShadowCam to peer inside Shackleton crater, one of the permanently shadowed regions on the lunar surface.
Previous images taken of this crater by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter were able to spot its illuminated rim, but ShadowCam could actually see the interior, including the crater floor and boulder tracks that rocks left behind after tumbling inside.
Officials atthe Korea Aerospace Research Institute, or KARI, seesthe Danuri orbiter as a “first step for ensuring and verifying its capability of space exploration,” according to the organization.
The US, Russia, Japan, China, European Union and India have all sent missions to the moon, and South Korea wants to dive into space exploration and develop its own missions.
“Korea is planning to successfully land onto the surface of the Moon or asteroids and make safe return,” according to the institute. “Korea is expecting to achieve strategic space technologies.”
In addition to the orbiter, KARI aims to make an initial lunar landing on the moon by 2030.
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New York CNN Business
—
In the fervor-filled days leading up to the November 16 launch of the long-awaited Artemis I mission, an uncrewed trip around the moon, some industry insiders admitted to having conflicting emotions about the event.
On one hand, there was the thrill of watching NASA take its first steps toward eventually getting humans back to the lunar surface; on the other, a shadow cast by the long and costly process it took to get there.
“I have mixed feelings, though I hope that we have a successful mission,” former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao said in an opinion roundtable interview with The New York Times. “It is always exciting to see a new vehicle fly. For perspective, we went from creating NASA to landing humans on the moon in just under 11 years. This program has, in one version or another, been ongoing since 2004.”
There have been numerous delays with the development of the rocket at the center of the Artemis I mission: NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket ever flown — and one of the most controversial. The towering launch vehicle was originally expected to take flight in 2016. And the decade-plus that the rocket was in development sparked years of blistering criticism targeted toward the space agency and Boeing, which holds the primary contract for the SLS rocket’s core.
NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) repeatedly called out what it referred to as Boeing’s “poor performance,” as a contributing factor in the billions of dollars in cost overruns and schedule delays that plagued SLS.
“Cost increases and schedule delays of Core Stage development can be traced largely to management, technical, and infrastructure issues driven by Boeing’s poor performance,” one 2018 report from NASA’s OIG, the first in a series of audits the OIG completed surrounding NASA’s management of the SLS program, read. And a report in 2020 laid out similar grievances.
For its part, Boeing has pushed back on the criticism, pointing to rigorous testing requirements and the overall success of the program. The OIG report also included correspondence from NASA, which noted in 2018 that it “had already recognized the opportunity to improve contract performance management” and agreed with the report’s recommendations.
In various op-eds, the rocket has also been deemed “the result of unfortunate compromises and unholy politics,” a “colossal waste of money” and an “irredeemable mistake.”
Despite all the heated debate that has followed SLS, by all accounts, the rocket is here to stay. And officials at NASA and Boeing said its first launch two months ago was practically flawless.
“I worked over 50 Space Shuttle launches,” Boeing SLS program manager John Shannon told CNN by phone. “And I don’t ever remember a launch that was as clean as that one was, which for a first-time rocket — especially one that had been through as much as this one through all the testing — really put an exclamation point on how reliable and robust this vehicle really is.”
The Artemis program manager at NASA, Mike Sarafin, also said during a post-launch news conference that the rocket “performed spot-on.”
But with its complicated history and its hefty price tag, SLS could still face detractors in the years to come.
Many have questioned why SLS needs to exist at all. With the estimated cost per launch standing at more than $4 billion for the first four Artemis missions, it’s possible commercial rockets, like the massive Mars rocket SpaceX is building, could get the job done more efficiently, as the chief of space policy at the nonprofit exploration advocacy group Planetary Society, Casey Dreier, recently observed in an article laying out both sides of the SLS argument.
(NASA Administrator Bill Nelson noted that the $4 billion per-launch cost estimate includes development costs that the space agency hopes will be amortized over the course of 10 or more missions.)
Boeing was selected in 2012 to build SLS’s “core stage,” which is the hulking orange fuselage that houses most of the massive engines that give the rocket its first burst of power at liftoff.
Though more than 1,000 companies were involved with designing and building SLS, Boeing’s work involved the largest and most expensive portion of the rocket.
That process began over a decade ago, and when the Artemis program was established in 2019, it gave the rocket its purpose: return humans to the moon, establish a permanent lunar outpost, and, eventually, pave the path toward getting humans to Mars.
But the SLS is no longer the only rocket involved in the program. NASA gave SpaceX a significant role in 2021, giving the company a fixed-price contract for use of its Mars rocket as the vehicle that will ferry astronauts to the lunar surface after they leave Earth and travel to the moon’s orbit on SLS. SpaceX’s forthcoming rocket, called Starship, is also intended to be capable of completing a crewed mission to the moon or Mars on its own. (Starship, it should be noted, is still in the development phases and has not yet been tested in orbit.)
Boeing has repeatedly argued that SLS is essential and capable of performing tasks that other rockets cannot.
“The bottom line is there’s nothing else like the SLS because it was built from the ground up to be human rated,” Shannon said. “It is the only vehicle that can take the Orion spacecraft and the service module to the moon. And that’s the purpose-built design — to take large hardware and humans to cislunar space, and nothing else exists that can do that.”
Starship, meanwhile, is not tailored solely to NASA’s specific lunar goals. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has talked for more than a decade about his desire to get humans to Mars. More recently, he has said Starship could also be used to house giant space telescopes.
Yet, another reason critics remain skeptical of SLS is because of its origins. The rocket’s conception can be traced back to NASA’s Constellation program, which was a plan to return to the moon mapped out under former President George W. Bush that was later canceled.
But the SLS has survived. Many observers have suggested a big reason was the desire to maintain space industry jobs in certain Congressional districts and to beef up aerospace supply chains.
Much of the criticism levied against SLS, however, has focused on the actual process of getting the rocket built.
At one point in 2019, former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine considered sidelining the SLS rocket entirely, citing frustrations with the delays.
“At the end of the day, the contractors had an obligation to deliver what NASA had contracted for them to deliver,” Bridenstine told CNN by phone last month. “And I was frustrated like most of America.”
Still, Bridenstine said, when his office reviewed the matter, it found “there were no options that were going to cost less money or take less time than just finishing the SLS” — and the rocket was never ultimately sidelined. (Bridenstine noted he was also publicly critical of delayed projects led by SpaceX and others.)
NASA continued to stand by Boeing and the SLS rocket even as it became a political hot potato, with some in Congress both criticizing its costs and refusing to abandon the program.
The SLS rocket ended up flying its first launch more than six years later than originally intended. NASA had allocated $6.2 billion to the SLS program as of 2018, but that price tag more than tripled to $23 billion as of 2022, according to an analysis by the Planetary Society.
Those escalating costs can be traced back to the type of contracts that NASA signed with Boeing and its other major suppliers for SLS. It’s called cost-plus, which puts the financial burden on NASA when projects face cost overruns while still offering contractors extra payments, or award fees.
In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Science last year, current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticized the cost-plus contracting method, calling it a “plague.”
More in vogue are “fixed-price” contracts, which have a firm price cap, like the kind NASA gave to Boeing and SpaceX for its Commercial Crew Program.
In an interview with CNN in December, however, Nelson stood by cost-plus contracting for SLS and Orion, the vehicle that is designed to carry astronauts and rides atop the rocket to space. He said that without that type of contract, in his view, NASA’s private-sector contractors simply wouldn’t be willing to take on a rocket designed for such a specific purpose and exploring deep space. Building a rocket as specific and technically complex as SLS isn’t a risk many private-sector companies are anxious to take on, he noted.
“You really have difficulty in the development of a new and very exquisite spacecraft … on a fixed-price contract,” he said.
“That industry is just not willing to accept that kind of thing, with the exception of the landers,” he added, referring to two other branches of the Artemis program: robotic landers that will deliver cargo to the moon’s surface and SpaceX’s $2.9 billion lunar lander contract. Both of those will use fixed-price — often referred to as “commercial” — contracts.
“And even there, they’re getting a considerable investment by the federal government,” Nelson said.
Still, government watchdogs have not pulled punches when assessing these cost-plus contracts and Boeing’s role.
“We did notice very poor contractor performance on Boeing’s part. There’s poor planning and poor execution,” NASA Inspector General Paul Martin said during testimony before the House’s Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics last year. “We saw that the cost-plus contracts that NASA had been using…worked to the contractor’s — rather than NASA’s — advantage.”
Shannon, the Boeing executive, acknowledged in an interview that Boeing and SLS have faced loud detractors, but he said that the value of the drawn out development and testing program would become evident as SLS flies.
“I am extremely proud that NASA — even though there were significant schedule pressures — they could set up a test program that was incredibly comprehensive,” he said. “The Boeing team worked through that test process and hit every mark on it. And you see the results. You see a vehicle that is not just visually spectacular, but its performance was spectacular. And it really put us on the road to be able to do lunar exploration again, which is something that’s very important in this country.”
But the rocket is still facing criticism. During a Congressional hearing with the House’s Science, Space, and Technology Committee in March 2022, NASA’s Inspector General said that current cost estimates for SLS were “unsustainable,” gauging that the space agency will have spent $93 billion on the Artemis program from 2012 through September 2025.
Martin, the NASA inspector general, specifically pointed to Boeing as one of the contractors that would need to find “efficiencies” to bring down those costs as the Artemis program moves forward.
In a December 7 statement to CNN, Boeing once again defended SLS and its price point.
“Boeing is and has been committed to improving our processes — both while the program was in its developmental stage and now as it transitions to an operational phase,” the statement read, noting the company already implemented “lessons learned” from building the first rocket to “drive efficiencies from a cost and schedule perspective” for future SLS rockets.
“When adjusted for inflation, NASA has developed SLS for a quarter of the cost of the Saturn V and half the cost of the Space Shuttle,” the statement noted. “These programs have also been essential to investing in the NASA centers, workforce and test facilities that are used by a broad range of civil and commercial partners across NASA and industry.”
The successful launch of SLS was a welcome winning moment for Boeing. Over the past few years, the company has been mired in controversy, including ongoing delays and myriad issues with Starliner, a spacecraft built for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, and scandal after scandal plaguing its airplane division.
Now that the Artemis I mission has returned safely home, NASA and Boeing can turn to preparing more of the gargantuan SLS rockets to launch even loftier missions.
SLS is slated to launch the Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts on a journey around the moon, in 2024. From there, SLS will be the backbone of the Artemis III mission that will return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in five decades and a series of increasingly complex missions as NASA works to create its permanent lunar outpost.
Shannon, the Boeing SLS program manager, told CNN that construction of the next two SLS rocket cores is well underway, with the booster for Artemis II on track to be finished in April — more than a year before the mission is scheduled to take off. All of the “major components” for a third SLS rocket are also completed, Shannon added.
For the third SLS core and beyond, Boeing is also moving final assembly to new facilities Florida, freeing up space at its manufacturing facilities to increase production, which may help drive down costs.
Shannon declined to share a specific price point for the new rockets or share any internal pricing goals, though NASA is expected to sign new contracts for the rockets that will launch the Artemis V mission and beyond, which could significantly change the price per launch.
Nelson also told CNN in December that NASA “will be making improvements, and we will find cost savings where we can,” such as with the decision to use commercial contracts for other vehicles under the Artemis program umbrella.
How and whether those contracts bear out remain to be seen: SpaceX needs to get its Starship rocket flying, a massive space station called Gateway needs to come to fruition, and at least some of the robotic lunar landers designed to carry cargo to the moon will need to prove their effectiveness. It’s also not yet clear whether those contracts will result in enough cost savings for the critics of SLS, including NASA’s OIG, to consider the Artemis program sustainable.
As for SLS, Nelson also told reporters December 11, just after the conclusion of the Artemis I mission, that he had every reason to expect that lawmakers would continue to fund the rocket and NASA’s broader moon program.
“I’m not worried about the support from the Congress,” Nelson said.
And Bridenstine, Nelson’s predecessor who has been publicly critical SLS, said that he ultimately stands by SLS and points out that, controversies aside, it does have rare bipartisan support from its bankrollers.
“We are in a spot now where this is going to be successful,” Bridenstine said last month, recalling when he first realized the Artemis program had support from the right and left. “All of America is going to be proud of this program. And yes, there are going to be differences. People are gonna say well, you should go all commercial and drop SLS…but at the end of the day, what we have to do is we have to bring together all of the things that are the best programs that we can get for America and use them to go to the moon.”
A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
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There are more than 5,000 known worlds beyond our solar system.
Since the 1990s, astronomers have used ground and space-based telescopes to search for signs of planets beyond our tiny corner of the universe.
Exoplanets are notoriously difficult to directly image because they’re so far away from Earth.
But scientists know the signs, looking for wobbles of stars as orbiting planets use their gravitational pull, or dips in starlight as planets pass in front of their stellar hosts.
It’s highly likely that there are hundreds of billions more exoplanets just waiting to be discovered.
Part of the excitement around the James Webb Space Telescope is its ability to peer inside the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets and discover new worlds. This week, the space observatory certainly delivered.
The Webb telescope confirmed the existence of an exoplanet for the first time since the space observatory launched in December 2021.
The world, known as LHS 475 b, is almost exactly the same size as Earth and located 41 light-years away in the Octans constellation.
Scientists can’t yet determine if the planet has an atmosphere, but the telescope’s sensitive capabilities picked up on a range of molecules. Webb will get another crack this summer at observing the planet to build upon this data.
The exoplanet was just one of Webb’s cosmic discoveries announced this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. What’s more, NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, mission spied a second Earth-size exoplanet in an intriguing planetary system 100 light-years away — and the world just might be potentially habitable.
A year after the powerful eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano, scientists are still learning more surprising aftereffects of the event.
The explosion set off more than 25,500 lightning strikes in just five minutes, according to a new report. The event also triggered nearly 400,000 lightning strikes over six hours and accounted for half of all the lightning in the world during the eruption’s peak.
But even more surprising is that the January 2022 eruption was merely one factor in a year of extremes for lightning across the globe.
Blooming flowers are notoriously ephemeral, but a nearly 40 million-year-old specimen remains trapped in amber and frozen in time.
Researchers have taken another look at the extraordinary amber fossil, which was first documented in 1872. It’s the largest known flower to be fossilized in amber at 1.1 inches (28 millimeters) across.
Scientists were able to extract some of the flower’s pollen and discovered it’s related to a group of modern plants.
Meanwhile, archaeologists uncovered eight prehistoric ostrich eggs near an ancient fire pit in Israel.
Russian space agencyRoscosmos will launch an uncrewed replacement spacecraft to the International Space Station as a return vehicle for three crew members after their Soyuz capsule sustained damage in December.
Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio launched to the space station in September.
A commission determined that damage to the Soyuz radiator’s pipeline was caused by a micrometeoroid impact, which created a hole with a diameter less than 1 millimeter, according to Roscosmos.
Crew members remain in good health, but their return to Earth — which has not been determined — will be delayed by at least several months.
Meanwhile, Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket attempted to launch from the United Kingdom, and California-based start-up ABL Space Systems set out to launch its RS1 rocket from Alaska. Both rockets failed, and investigations are underway to determine what went wrong.
The contrails that stream out behind aircraft crisscrossing our skies every day may seem harmless, but these wispy ice clouds are actually bad for the environment.
The condensation trails, which form when ice crystals cluster around small particles emitted by jet engines, trap more heat than carbon dioxide emissions that result from burning fuel. The longevity of the contrails depends on atmospheric conditions.
Researchers believe that slightly shifting the paths of specific flights could help reduce the damage.
Catch up on these stories before you go:
— An unusually brightening star might have been dust-bombed by a mysterious stellar companion for years.
— Europe’s “bog bodies,” the incredibly well-preserved mummies and skeletons discovered mired in peat and wetlands, reveal some of the brutal realities of prehistoric life.
— Astronomers have spotted the closest pair of supermassive black holes ever observed across multiple wavelengths of light. The cosmic bodies were brought together by colliding galaxies.