Major Niger uranium mine back in public control: govt

Niamey (Niger) (AFP) – Niger on Monday confirmed one of the world's biggest uranium mines had returned to public control after revoking the operating licence of French nuclear fuel producer Orano.


Issued on: 25/06/2024

Niger's military rulers have have broken ties with France, the former colonial power and traditional partner 

The company last week said it had been excluded from the Imouraren mine in northern Niger, in a move that highlighted tensions between France and the West African country's military rulers.

The government had not reacted before releasing a statement on Monday saying the Imouraren mine had returned "to the public domain of the state".

It justified revoking the licence by saying Orano "never honoured its commitments" despite two "formal notices" handed to it by the mines ministry in February 2022 and March this year.

Orano on Thursday said it had "taken note" of the withdrawal of the licence from its subsidiary Imouraren SA.

The move came despite its recent resumption of "activities" at the site, which had been fulfilled in line with the government's wishes, according to Orano.

The company added that it was "prepared to keep open all channels of communication" with the authorities while reserving the right to contest the decision in national or international courts.

The Imouraren mine sits on an estimated 200,000 tonnes of uranium, used for nuclear power and weapons.

But development was frozen after the collapse in world uranium prices following the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.

Niger's military rulers have vowed to review mining concessions in the country since taking power in a July 2023 coup, as part of its focus on national sovereignty.

They have also broken ties with France, the former colonial power and traditional partner, and turned towards Russia which is seeking to extend its influence in the region.

Niger in 2022 accounted for about a quarter of the natural uranium supplied to European nuclear power plants, according to data from the atomic organisation Euratom.

© 2024 AFP

 NATURAL DISASTERS

Cascadia Subduction Zone, One of Earth’s Top Hazards, Comes Into Sharper Focus

Kevin Krajick

June 8, 2024

Off the coasts of southern British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and northern California lies a 600 mile-long strip where the Pacific Ocean floor is slowly diving eastward under North America. This area, called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, hosts a megathrust fault, a place where tectonic plates move against each other in a highly dangerous way. The plates can periodically lock up and build stress over wide areas―eventually to be released when they finally lurch against each other. The result: the world’s greatest earthquakes, shaking both seabed and land, and generating tsunamis 100 feet high or more. Such a fault off Japan caused the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Similar zones exist off Alaska, Chile and New Zealand, among other places. At Cascadia, big quakes are believed to come roughly every 500 years, give or take a couple hundred. The last occurred in 1700.

Scientists have long been working to understand the Cascadia Subduction Zone’s subterranean structures and mechanics, in order to delineate places most susceptible to quakes, how big they might be and what warning signs they might produce. There is no such thing as predicting an earthquake; rather, scientists try to forecast probabilities of multiple scenarios, hoping to help authorities design building codes and warning systems to minimize the damage when something happens.

A newly published study promises to greatly advance this effort. A research vessel towing an array of the latest geophysical instruments along almost the entire zone has produced the first comprehensive survey of the many complex structures beneath the seafloor. These include the geometry of the down-going ocean plate and overlying sediments, and the makeup of the overriding North American plate. The study was just published in the journal Science Advances.

A schematic cross section of the Cascadia Subduction Zone shows the ocean floor plate (light grey) moving under the North American continental plate, along with other features. (Courtesy USGS)

“The models currently in use by public agencies were based on a limited set of old, low-quality 1980s-era data,” said Suzanne Carbotte, a marine geophysicist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which is part of the Columbia Climate School. “The megathrust has a much more complex geometry than previously assumed. The study provides a new framework for earthquake and tsunami hazard assessment.”

With funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the data was gathered during a 41-day cruise in 2021 by Lamont’s research vessel, the Marcus G. Langseth. Researchers aboard the ship penetrated the seafloor with powerful sound pulses and read the echoes, which were then converted into images, somewhat similar to how physicians create interior scans of the human body.

One key finding: the megathrust fault zone is not just one continuous structure, but is divided into at least four segments, each potentially somewhat insulated against movements of the others. Scientists have long debated whether past events, including the 1700 quake, ruptured the entire zone or just part of it—a key question, because the longer the rupture, the bigger the quake.

Sub-seafloor map of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, showing depth of the fault between the eastward-moving Juan de Fuca place and the North American plate. Yellow/orange indicates shallow depths; green, deeper; blues/purples deepest. Diagonal black lines approximate divisions between different segments of the zone. Wavy red line to right indicates the seaward edge of rigid continental rocks that apparently cause the zone to break into these segments. (Modified from Carbotte et al., Science Advances, 2024)

The data show that the segments are divided by buried features including big faults, where opposing sides slide against each other perpendicular to the shore. This might help buffer against movement on one segment translating to the next. “We can’t say that this definitely means only single segments will rupture, or that definitely the whole thing will go at once,” said Harold Tobin, a geophysicist at the University of Washington and coauthor of the study. “But this does upgrade evidence that there are segmented ruptures.”

The imagery also suggests the causes of the segmentation: the rigid edge of the overriding North American continental plate is composed of many different kinds of rocks, formed at different times over many tens of millions of years, with some being denser than others. This variety in the continental rocks causes the incoming, more pliable oceanic plate to bend and twist to accommodate differences in overlying pressure. In some places, segments go down at relatively steep angles, in others at shallow ones.

The researchers zeroed in on one segment in particular, which runs from southern Vancouver Island alongside Washington state, more or less ending at the Oregon border. The subterranean topography of other segments is relatively rough, with oceanic features like faults and subducted seamounts rubbing up against the upper plate—features that might erode the upper plate and limit how far any quake may propagate within the segment, thus limiting the quake’s size. In contrast, the Vancouver-Washington segment is quite smooth. This means that it may be more likely to rupture along its entire length at once, making it potentially the most dangerous section.

Also in this segment, the seafloor is subducting under the continental crust at a shallow angle relative to the other segments. In the other segments, most of the earthquake-prone interface between the plates lies offshore, but here the study found the shallow subduction angle means it probably extends directly under Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. This might magnify any shaking on land. “It requires a lot more study, but for places like Tacoma and Seattle, it could mean the difference between alarming and catastrophic,” said Tobin.

With funding from the U.S. Geological Survey, a consortium of state and federal agencies and academic institutions has already been poring over the data since it became available to sort through the implications.

As for tsunami hazard, that is “still a work in progress,” said Kelin Wang, a research scientist at the Geological Survey of Canada who was not involved in the study. Wang’s group is using the data to model features of the seafloor off Vancouver Island that might generate tsunamis. (In general, a tsunami occurs when the deep seafloor moves up or down during a quake, sending a wave to the surface that concentrates its energy and gathers height as it reaches shallower coastal waters.) Wang said his results will go to another group that models tsunamis themselves, and after that to another group that analyzes the hazards on land.

Practical assessments that could affect building codes or other aspects of preparedness may be published as early as next year, say the researchers. “There’s a whole lot more complexity here than was previously inferred,” said Carbotte.

Russia’s radioactive submarines remain a toxic Arctic threat

OpEd: There are many casualties of the invasion of Ukraine that will haunt Russia for generations to come. Far from the battlefields, in the country’s northwest loom radioactive threats that remain only half cleaned up and largely ignored.


Reactor compartments from decommissioned submarines were floating at piers in Saida Bay, Kola Peninsula. Photo: Thomas Nilsen

By Charles Digges
Editor and Jounralist at Bellona     

This OpEd was originally published in The Moscow Times.
June 02, 2024

The Russian Arctic stands to remain one of the most contaminated places on the planet. From old Soviet nuclear submarine bases and maintenance yards on shore to discarded reactors, radioactive waste, and — in some cases — entire nuclear submarines that were intentionally scuttled at sea.

Sadly, it didn’t have to be this way. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, a consortium of Western governments pitched in to help decontaminate the remains of the once-feared Soviet nuclear submarine fleet. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, a total of 198 rusted-out and derelict subs still loaded with spent uranium fuel were safely dismantled through bilateral funding agreements and scientific exchanges with European countries.

But ever since Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in February 2022, that cooperation has ground to a halt.

The Kremlin insisted at the time that it could continue the nuclear cleanup on its own. But as shown in our new report at Bellona, Moscow’s wartime leadership has little interest — or funding — to finish the job.

The situation at Andreyeva Bay, a former submarine maintenance yard Northwest of Murmansk near the Norwegian border, is especially worrying Throughout its career as a refueling point, the site amassed some 22,000 spent nuclear fuel assemblies from more than 100 submarines, much of which was stored in rusty containers in the open air. These shoddy conditions came horrifyingly to light in 1982, when 600,000 metric tons of radioactive water leaked from the site into the Barents Sea.

After decades of lobbying from Bellona, cleanup at Andreyeva Bay finally began in 2017. It required international cooperation, funded by Norway and using a ship supplied by Italy.

However, numerous damaged fuel rods still remain at the site, stored in irradiated buildings that also need to be dismantled and disposed of. Originally, this project — on which Norway alone has spent some 30 million euros ($32.6 million) — was on track to be completed by 2028. However, since the war began, Moscow has pushed that deadline back to a vague point in the 2030s, while providing little public evidence of progress.

Other threats lurk beneath the ocean. Moscow’s most recent Arctic development plan outlined efforts to lift a host of nuclear garbage scuttled by the Soviets in the Barents and Kara Seas — including the K-27 and K-159 nuclear submarines — by 2035. These submarines pose the greatest challenge for clean-up efforts. Between them, they contain 1 million curies of radiation, or about a quarter of that released in the first month of the Fukushima disaster.

Launched in 1962, the K-27 suffered a radiation leak in one of its experimental liquid-metal-cooled reactors after just three days at sea. Over the next several years, the Soviet Navy attempted to repair or replace the reactors. But in 1979, they gave up and decommissioned the vessel instead.

Too radioactive to be dismantled conventionally, the K-27 was towed to the Arctic Novaya Zemlya nuclear testing range in 1982 and scuttled in one of the archipelago’s fjords. Sinking it to a measly 33 meters took some effort. The sub was weighed down by asphalt to seal its fuel-filled reactors and a hole was punched in its aft ballast tank.

But this solution will not last forever. The sealant around the reactor was only meant to stave off radiation leaks until 2032. More troubling still is that the K-27’s highly enriched fuel could, in the right circumstances, generate an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction leading to a significant local release of radiation.

The other submarine, the K-159, was added to the toxic subsea catalog in 2003. But its position north of Murmansk, astride some of the Barents Sea’s most fertile fishing grounds and busiest shipping lanes, made it a source of special anxiety. Already a 305-foot-long rust bucket suffering from years of neglect, the K-159 sank to 240 meters while being towed to a Murmansk shipyard for dismantlement, killing nine sailors who were on board to bail out water in transit.

Unlike the K-27, however, no safeguards were put in place to secure the K-159’s two reactors before it sank, meaning it went down still loaded with 800 kilograms of spent uranium fuel. A radioactive release from this wreck would be devastating not only to Norway’s fishing industry, but Russia’s as well.

The project to lift the subs — estimated to cost north of 300 million euros ($326 million) — had been under consideration by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which along with Norway and other European nations had been in the process of developing a feasibility study for the massive, technologically demanding retrieval. But since the war began — and the EBRD shelved such considerations—there has been scant progress from Moscow’s side.

As recently as September 2022, a cross-section of Russian officials, engineers and nuclear scientists met to hash out a way to rescue the salvage operation, but the meetings stalled on one insurmountable problem — Russia simply doesn’t have the technology to undertake the operation. It was a Dutch salvage vessel that brought the Kursk to the surface in 2001. With the war continuing to rage in Ukraine, the Netherlands is unlikely to lend its services again.

This leaves the environment in the Russian Arctic in a state that is, at best, unpredictable. Should Moscow continue to prioritize war over the environment, it would only prolong a radiation threat that is — as two decades of progress and international goodwill have shown — solvable. What is clear, however, is that Russia cannot do it alone.

Charles Digges is an environmental journalist and editor of the Norway headed Bellona foundation’s website.

SPACE

Interstellar Space Clouds Triggered the Ice Ages, Research Suggests

Isaac Schultz
Mon, June 10, 2024 

A cold molecular cloud, as seen by the Webb Space Telescope. 

- Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, and M. Zamani (ESA)

The Pleistocene Epoch—with its glaciers, woolly mammoths, and Neanderthals—still looms large in Earth’s rearview mirror, having ended a mere 12,000 years ago. Now, a team of researchers posit that those hundreds of thousands of years of our planet’s history may have been chilly due to a cloud in space that briefly removed Earth from the safety of the Sun’s warm glow.

The researchers propose that, about two million years ago, an interstellar cloud interfered with the solar system in such a way that Earth and other planets were briefly outside of the Sun’s heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles from our host star that today forms an amorphous envelope around the system. Their research was published today in Nature Astronomy.

“This paper is the first to quantitatively show there was an encounter between the sun and something outside of the solar system that would have affected Earth’s climate,” said Merav Opher, an astrophysicist at Boston University and lead author of the study, in an email to Gizmodo. Opher added that the team is “still trying to quantify it with modern climate models” but with an increase of hydrogen and dust “Earth would have entered in an Ice Age.”

The team’s model showing the heliosophere 44 years into the simulation, shrunk to just .22 au. - Graphic: Opher et al., Nature Astronomy 2024

Opher’s team modeled data from the HI4PI survey and found that our solar system may have passed through the Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds in the constellation Lynx between 2 million and 3 million years ago. The Pleistocene began about 2.6 million years ago. It’s not possible to say for certain whether such cold clouds could’ve catalyzed an ice age, the release noted, but more evidence of clouds tampering with the heliosphere may clarify the kind of impacts it would have on Earth.

The team’s model revealed that, in such a passage, the heliosphere that ensconces Earth and its neighboring planets would shrink to about 0.22 astronomical units, or less than a quarter the size of the Earth’s distance to the Sun. To put that in perspective, ESA estimates that the closest boundary of the heliosphere today is about 100 AU out from the Sun, about twice as far as the Kuiper Belt.

Outside of the heliosphere, the Earth would’ve been exposed to iron and plutonium in the interstellar medium, the team posited. Their timeline aligns with an uptick in the amount of plutonium-244 and iron-60, two isotopes of the respective elements which are known to occur from events in space, in Antarctic snow, deep-sea sediments, and samples from the Moon. And as Opher added, samples from Mars, if tested in the same way as the lunar and terrestrial samples, could reveal a similar spike in the iron isotope around 2 to 3 million years ago.

The heliosphere could’ve been blocked out for anywhere from just a couple hundred years to one million years, Opher said in a Boston University release. The moment Earth and the other planets moved away from the cloud, the heliosphere returned.

To vet their results, the team is now trying to figure out the position of the Sun some seven million years ago, where there is evidence for another peak in the ratios of plutonium-244 and iron-60 in earthly ice and sediments. They are trying to create a digital twin—basically, a high-tech model—of the heliosphere to better model the sorts of conditions our solar system may have been subject to. Lastly, additional data from ESA’s Gaia mission could further help the team place the Sun’s exact position at that moment in the ancient past.

According to the Utah Geological Survey, at least five major ice ages have occurred on Earth. The first occurred over 2 billion years ago and the most recent began around 3 million years ago. According to NASA, ice ages can kick off due to a combination of factors, including changes in Earth’s orbit, low amounts of energy from the Sun, the composition of the atmosphere, changes in ocean currents, and even volcanoes, which were responsible for the year without a summer. In other words, we’re not wanting for theories explaining Earth’s various cold moments, and the jury is out on exactly how Earth being outside the heliosphere may have catalyzed such a frigid period

James Webb telescope reveals 'cataclysmic' asteroid collision in nearby star system

Ben Turner
Tue, June 11, 2024 

Illustration of a protoplanetary disk.


The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found evidence of two giant asteroids slamming into each other in a nearby star system. The colossal collision ejected 100,000 times more dust than the impact that killed the dinosaurs.

The violent impact occurred recently in Beta Pictoris, a star system located 63 light-years away in the constellation Pictoris.

Beta Pictoris is a baby compared to our own solar system — having existed for only 20 million years compared with our system's venerable 4.5 billion years. It was first detected in 1983 by NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) spacecraft and is thought to have formed from the shockwave of a nearby supernova.


While the young star system currently contains at least two gas giant planets it has no known rocky worlds like our own. But rocky inner planets may be in the process of forming, thanks to large dust-producing collisions like the one spotted by JWST, the researchers behind the new findings said in a June 10 presentation at the 244th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin.

Because it is still very young, the star system's circumstellar debris disk — the vast ring of gas and dust surrounding the star — is a significantly more violent place than our own, making it the perfect place for astronomers to study the tumultuous early years of planet-forming systems. The team added that their findings could offer a rare insight into the history of our own solar system.

"Beta Pictoris is at an age when planet formation in the terrestrial planet zone is still ongoing through giant asteroid collisions, so what we could be seeing here is basically how rocky planets and other bodies are forming in real time," lead study author Christine Chen, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement.

Related: James Webb telescope spots wind blowing faster than a bullet on '2-faced planet' with eternal night

snapshots 20 years apart of the same area around the star called Beta Pictoris

To capture a snapshot of the distant asteroid crash, the astronomers trained JWST's powerful eye on the system and found that giant masses of clumped silicate dust spotted by the Spitzer Space Telescope between 2004 and 2005 had completely disappeared.

This means that, sometime 20 years ago, a gigantic collision between two asteroids likely occurred, pounding the bodies into vast quantities of dust with particles smaller than pollen or powdered sugar, Chen said.

"With Webb's new data, the best explanation we have is that, in fact, we witnessed the aftermath of an infrequent, cataclysmic event between large asteroid-size bodies, marking a complete change in our understanding of this star system," Chen said.

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The researchers suggest their findings will help astronomers to better understand how the architecture of star systems is constructed, and how often habitable systems like our own come into being.

"The question we are trying to contextualize is whether this whole process of terrestrial and giant planet formation is common or rare, and the even more basic question: Are planetary systems like the solar system that rare?" study co-author Kadin Worthen, a doctoral student in astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University, said in the statement. "We're basically trying to understand how weird or average we are."
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'Supernova discovery machine' James Webb Space Telescope finds most distant star explosion on record

Robert Lea
Tue, June 11, 2024 

Red and yellow dots against a black ground with some circled with blue rings.


When it comes to hunting for the explosive deaths of massive stars in the early universe, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is quite the cosmic detective. This celestial Sherlock Holmes has found evidence of 80 new early supernovas in a patch of sky as wide as a grain of rice held at arm's length.

Not only is this 10 times more supernovas than have been uncovered before in such early cosmic history, but the sample also includes the earliest and furthest supernova ever seen. It's one that exploded when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just 1.8 billion years old.

Data from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program helped a team of scientists find this unprecedented clutch of supernovas, which further includes Type Ia blasts that astronomers call "standard candles" and can use to measure cosmic distances.

Prior to the JWST commencing operations in the summer of 2022, only a handful of supernovas had been found dating back to when the universe was only 3.3 billion years old, equal to around 25% its current age. The JADES sample, however, contains many supernovas that exploded even further back in the past. In fact, some erupted when the universe was less than 2 billion years old.

Related: Peer inside remnants of an 800-year-old supernova and see a 'zombie' star

"The JWST is a supernova discovery machine," team member Christa DeCoursey, a third-year graduate student at the Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in a statement. "The sheer number of detections plus the great distances to these supernovas are the two most exciting outcomes from our survey."

The unparalleled infrared sensitivity of the JWST means it is discovering supernovas almost everywhere it looks in the cosmos.
The supernova detective

When light wavelengths travel through the cosmos, the expansion of the very fabric of space stretches out those wavelengths. This causes the light to move further down the electromagnetic spectrum in terms of classification, inching from the bluer end towards the redder end. This phenomenon is known as "redshift."

The longer that light has been traveling through space, the more extreme the degree of redshift it undergoes. Thus, light from bodies located around 12 billion light-years away, like these supernovas, has experienced extreme wavelength lengthening, or "cosmological redshift."

That shifts this supernova light down into the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, a region the JWST is adept at viewing the universe in.

a double ended arrow with types of light indicated above a colored arrow and a wavelength that decreases in frequency

The Hubble Space Telescope had previously allowed astronomers to view supernovas so distant they existed when the universe was in its "young adult" phase. With JADES and the JWST, however, astronomers can observe supernovas when the cosmos is in its "teens" or even "pre-teens."

In the future, scientists hope to look back to the "toddler" phase of the universe — or even back to its cosmic infancy, ideally stumbling upon the deaths of the first generation of massive stars.

To obtain this new cavalcade of supernova observations, the JADES team took multiple images of the same patch of the sky at year-long intervals. Then, they compared the images. Because supernovas are "transients," meaning they brighten and fade over time, observing changes in the images allowed the scientists to distinguish which points of light were indeed exploding stars and which were probably some other phenomena.

"This is really our first sample of what the high-redshift universe looks like for transient science," JADES team member Justin Pierel, a NASA Einstein Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, said in the statement. "We are trying to identify whether distant supernovas are fundamentally different from or very much like what we see in the nearby universe."

A white orb illustration surrounded by a trail of orange gas leading to a glowing star toward the top right of the scene.

Not all of the supernovas seen by the JADES team were "core collapse" supernovas, triggered when massive stars run out of the fuel supply needed for nuclear fusion in their cores and collapse under their own gravity, birthing a black hole or a neutron star.

As mentioned, some were Type Ia supernovas triggered when stellar corpses called "white dwarfs" cannibalistically feed on material stripped from a companion, or donor, star. This material piles on the white dwarf's surface until it triggers a runaway thermonuclear explosion that completely obliterates the white dwarf.

The light outputs of these events are uniform with the same intrinsic brightness, seemingly regardless of distance. This means they can be used as cosmic rulers to measure distance and also serve as markers to gauge the rate at which the fabric of space is expanding. However, should the intrinsic brightness of Type Ia supernovas change at high redshifts, their utility at measuring large cosmic distances would be limited.

The team's observations of a Type Ia that erupted around 11 billion years ago indicated that its brightness had not varied despite its light undergoing cosmological redshift.

Related stories:

— Aftermath of 2 star explosions captured in breathtaking new NASA image

— Astronomers catch rare glimpse of oldest known supernova, which dates back to Year 185

— These supernovas are whipping up a storm, contributing to cosmic life and death

The "pre-teen" universe was a vastly different place than we see today, with far more extreme environments. Additionally, because the universe was mostly hydrogen and helium at these times, astronomers expect to see ancient supernovas triggered by the deaths of stars that contain far fewer heavy chemical elements, or "metals," than the current generation of "metal-rich" stars like the sun.

Thus, comparing these ancient supernovas with massive stars exploding in the local universe could help scientists better understand how stars are enriched during their formation by metals forged by early stars and spread through the cosmos as they died.

"We're essentially opening a new window on the transient universe," Matthew Siebert, leader of the spectroscopic analysis of the JADES supernovas. "Historically, whenever we've done that, we've found extremely exciting things — things that we didn't expect."

The team's findings were presented at a press conference at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin, on Monday (June 10).

Watch SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy booster splash down in this epic video

Mike Wall
Tue, June 11, 2024 


A silver-gray rocket is seen in a gray sky.


Watching Starship come back to Earth last week was perhaps even more exciting than seeing it rise off the pad.

SpaceX launched its Starship megarocket for the fourth time ever on June 6, sending the giant vehicle into space from its Starbase site in South Texas.

The flight plan called for both of Starship's stages — the Super Heavy first-stage booster and the 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper stage, called Starship, or just Ship — to steer themselves back to Earth for ocean splashdowns. Super Heavy was supposed to come down in the Gulf of Mexico, and Ship targeted the Indian Ocean. Both stages managed to stick their landings, and we got great looks at Super Heavy's homecoming.



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a silver-gray rocket is seen in a gray sky

On Saturday (June 8), SpaceX posted on X a 25-second video of the final stages of Super Heavy's descent through Earth's atmosphere. The video, which combines footage from a boat or drone with that captured by Super Heavy's onboard cameras, captures the roar of the booster's Raptor engines as they fire in a landing burn just above the waves.

Super Heavy looked to be more or less intact, which you couldn't quite say for Ship. The upper stage went much higher, faster and farther than Super Heavy, so its reentry was more fiery and dramatic. It lost many heat-shield tiles, for example, and one of its flaps nearly burned through from frictional heating, but Ship managed to hold together until it hit the water.

Related: SpaceX's Starship 4th flight test looks epic in these stunning photos

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Starship's performance has improved on each of its four test flights, all of which have occurred in the past 14 months. On Flight 1, for instance, Starship's two stages failed to separate as planned, and SpaceX detonated the tumbling vehicle about four minutes after launch.

Stage separation occurred on Flight 2, but it too was relatively short, ending just eight minutes in. Flight 3 lasted nearly 50 minutes, but neither Super Heavy nor Ship made it to their planned splashdown zones; both vehicles broke apart while coming back to Earth.

SpaceX is gearing up for the fifth launch of Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. But we may have already seen the last Super Heavy ocean splashdown; shortly after the June 6 launch, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk suggested that the company might try to catch the returning booster with the "chopstick" arms of the giant launch tower at Starbase.

Scientists probe a space mystery: Why do people age faster during space travel?

Karen Weintraub, USA TODAY
Updated Tue, June 11, 2024

Humanity's future may involve getting to a planet other than Earth ‒ but first people will have to survive the journey. That's why in a new series of papers scientists explore the impact of space travel on the human body from skin to kidneys to immune cells to genes.

Four civilian astronauts allowed themselves to be researched from top to bottom as they circled in low-Earth orbit for three days aboard the 2021 SpaceX Inspiration4 mission and then returned to their normal lives.

One of the most important observations was that although their bodies were stressed and showed dramatic signs of aging during the journey, 95% of the indicators studied returned to normal within a few months.

Radiation exposure apparently causes the acceleration of disease and damages cells "even in three to five days," Susan Bailey, a co-author on many of the studies and a radiation cancer biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, said in a Monday video call with reporters.

Space news: Starship splashes down for first time in 4th test

Bailey and other scientists have studied astronauts before, most famously, identical twins Scott and Mark Kelly, during and after most of the 520 days Scott spent in space. (Mark is now a senator from Arizona, choosing to run for political office after his wife, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, now a gun control advocate, was shot in the head by a constituent.)

But this collection of studies, published Tuesday in Nature and related journals, shows the impact of space travel both on more people and also on a more diverse group, not just the exclusive people who can pass NASA's rigorous selection process.

Hayley Arceneaux, for instance, a physician's assistant who served as the mission's medical director, was treated for cancer at age 10 and was one of the rare women in space. At 29, Arceneaux was also the youngest-ever space traveler.

Each of the four members of Inspiration4 represented a different decade of life, and began to provide the kind of diversity that will be crucial to understanding how space travel may impact people of different ages and health status and with different lived experiences, the researchers said.

"It really provides the foundation as we think ahead and more futuristically," Bailey said. The papers, she said, encouraged her and her peers to "think a little bit more about what it's really going to take for people to live in space for long periods of time, to thrive, to reproduce. How is all of that really going to happen?"

Bailey spent months studying the biology of the space travelers. But Monday's video conference was the first time she'd seen them face-to-face. "I'm familiar with your DNA," she told Arceneaux and fellow space traveler Chris Sembroski. "But it's nice to meet you."

Civilians (from left) Hayley Arceneaux, Chris Sembroski, Jared Isaacman and Sian Proctor enjoyed three days of weightlessness on the Inspiration4 mission as they orbited the Earth in 2021.

Better understanding the damage that accumulates and how the body adapts to space travel will also lead researchers to treatments and fixes, said Bailey and the two other co-authors on the call, Christopher Mason, professor of genomics, physiology, and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, and Afshin Beheshti, an expert in bioinformatics at Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle.

In addition to age-related diseases, the papers revealed other problems space travelers can develop, like kidney stones. "Here we can treat that, but a kidney stone halfway to Mars, how are you going to treat that?" Beheshti wondered aloud. "That wasn't on the radar before" these papers.

"As we start to unravel some of this," Bailey added, "we'll improve not only our ability to deal with radiation exposure but also be addressing some of these age-related pathologies like cardiovascular disease that certainly could influence astronauts' performance en route to Mars."

Another insight: Women seem to recover faster from space damage than men, though Mason cautioned that more women need to be studied to better understand the effect and that faster recovery could come at the expense of higher long-term risk of breast and lung cancer from extended radiation exposure.

Inspiration4 space travelers (from left) Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux orbited the Earth for three days in fall 2021.

The lessons learned from space travelers could help folks on Earth, too, the researchers said.

Learning how to keep cells safe from radiation, for instance, might be transferable to help minimize damage to cancer patients undergoing radiation treatments, Mason said.

New protection measures could also be useful for people exposed to radiation at work or in case of a nuclear reactor disaster like the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan after the 2011 earthquake there.

Because space travel speeds up aging, learning how to reverse or slow that process could help "extend health-span for us mere earthlings as well," Bailey said. The new skin study, for example, suggests approaches that might be used to help people keep their skin looking younger longer.

"There's all kinds of things that could potentially benefit people on Earth," she said.

The Inspiration4 mission, which raised $250 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, also relied on some experimental technologies for recording medical information, including a handheld ultrasound imaging device, smartwatch wearables, a measurement device to check for eye alignment and new methods for profiling the immune system as well as other cells and molecules.

Civilian space travelers Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux subject themselves to scientific research aboard the 2021 Inspiration4 mission.

These devices and approaches could be useful for Earth-bound settings that are far from major urban medical centers, Mason said.

Relying on civilians rather than NASA astronauts also made it easier to study the space travelers, who signed waivers and aren't subject to government regulations, he said. Their data will be made available to other researchers.

Both Arceneaux and Sembroski, a data engineer who works for the space technologies company Blue Origin, said they loved their spaceflight and would do it again in a second if given the chance. But they also hope many others are given the same opportunity.

"We're not going to see the civilization in space that we want without people being willing to share that experience," Sembroski said about sharing his data for research. "It was fun to be part of this."

"Our mission had, not only a lot of heart behind it," Arceneaux added, "but we really wanted to make a scientific impact."

Arceneaux said she doesn't mind the mark left by the biopsy used to study how her skin reacted to space travel. "I love my space scar!" she said.

"Better than a tattoo," Bailey responded.

The best news from the research on both Kelly and the Inspiration4 travelers, Mason said, is that there's "no show-stopper. There's no reason we shouldn't be able to get to Mars and back."

Radiation exposure probably means people shouldn't be taking multiple trips to and from the red planet, he said. But "so far, from all we've observed, the body is successfully adapting to the space environment."

Karen Weintraub can be reached at kweintraub@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New research studies why traveling in space ages astronauts so much


New research explores how a short trip to space affects the human body

ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN
Updated Tue, June 11, 2024 






 Jared Isaacman, left, and Hayley Arceneaux prepare to head to launchpad 39A for a launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Wednesday Sept. 15, 2021. New research presents the largest set of information yet regarding how the human body reacts to spaceflight. 

(AP Photo/John Raoux, File)

DALLAS (AP) — Space tourists experience some of the same body changes as astronauts who spend months in orbit, according to new studies published Tuesday.

Those shifts mostly returned to normal once the amateurs returned to Earth, researchers reported.

Research on four space tourists is included in a series of studies on the health effects of space travel, down to the molecular level. The findings paint a clearer picture of how people — who don't undergo years of astronaut training — adapt to weightlessness and space radiation, the researchers said.

“This will allow us to be better prepared when we’re sending humans into space for whatever reason,” said Allen Liu, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Michigan who was not involved with the research.

NASA and others have long studied the toll of space travel on astronauts, including yearlong residents of the International Space Station, but there's been less attention on space tourists. The first tourist visit to the space station was in 2001, and opportunities for private space travel have expanded in recent years.

A three-day chartered flight in 2021 gave researchers the chance to examine how quickly the body reacts and adapts to spaceflight, said Susan Bailey, a radiation expert at Colorado State University who took part in the research.

While in space, the four passengers on the SpaceX flight, dubbed Inspiration4, collected samples of blood, saliva, skin and more. Researchers analyzed the samples and found wide-ranging shifts in cells and changes to the immune system. Most of these shifts stabilized in the months after the four returned home, and the researchers found that the short-term spaceflight didn’t pose significant health risks.

“This is the first time we've had a cell-by-cell examination of a crew when they go to space,” said researcher and co-author Chris Mason with Weill Cornell Medicine.

The papers, which were published Tuesday in Nature journals and are now part of a database, include the impact of spaceflight on the skin, kidneys and immune system. The results could help researchers find ways to counteract the negative effects of space travel, said Afshin Beheshti, a researcher with the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science who took part in the work.

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AP videojournalist Mary Conlon contributed from New York.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.


Data from all-civilian crew details health effects of space travel

Tue, June 11, 2024 




By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - When pediatric cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux and a trio of crewmates spent three days in space in 2021 as part of SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission, they made history not only as the first all-civilian team to orbit Earth. They also provided the most in-depth data on record regarding the effects of space travel on the human body.

New research based on this data details changes in the brain, heart, muscles, kidneys and skin, immune regulation and stress levels and a breakdown in the activity of subcellular structures called mitochondria amid the microgravity environment, increased radiation and other factors in space.

More than 95% of the biomarkers tracked in the research returned to preflight levels in the months after the crew returned to Earth, though some abnormalities including in the mitochondria persisted, the researchers said. But the data indicated that spaceflights - at least short-duration ones - do not pose significant health risks, they concluded.

"We did not see anything that was worrisome, thankfully," said Chris Mason, a professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York who helped lead the research, with studies published on Tuesday in Nature and other journals. "This bodes well for other groups of civilians planning to live and work in space."

"We did see some evidence of brain-associated proteins in the blood after the mission, which we had also seen once before in the Twins Study (a 2019 study based on retired NASA astronauts and twins Scott and Mark Kelly), and we think is evidence of brain stress during the mission," Mason added.

Mason said this might be explained by findings in experimental mice flown to space that experienced disruptions in the blood-brain barrier, a layer of cells protecting the brain. Cognitive function in the Inspiration4 crew, as measured by the University of Pennsylvania's Mathias Basner, was not affected, Mason noted.

Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis and the mission's medical officer, and her crewmates - aerospace data engineer Chris Sembroski, geoscientist Sian Proctor and billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman - were monitored before, during and after the flight. They underwent extensive testing and provided blood, saliva and other samples - including skin biopsies that left a lasting mark.

"I love my space scar," said Arceneaux, who was 29 at the time and became the youngest American to orbit Earth, adding that the crew "really wanted to make a scientific impact."

The research encompassed data from the two women and two men from Inspiration4 as well as information from 64 astronauts who participated in longer stints aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and other missions. Inspiration4 flew at roughly 370 miles (590 km) above Earth, higher than the ISS, meaning the crew faced higher radiation levels.

"So far, females seem to return to baseline (preflight status) faster than males, but our numbers are too small for this to be definitive," Mason said.

The onset of a "second Space Age" characterized by commercial missions has heightened the urgency to understand health risks, according to bioinformatician Afshin Beheshti of the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, another leader of the research.

The amount of time spent in space is considered a key factor in the health effects, with greater concern over long-duration missions.

"The longer the duration in space, the greater the increase in health risks observed," Beheshti said.

Beheshti said data from Inspiration4 and Japan's space agency, along with Earth-based experiments, detailed the significant impact of spaceflight on mitochondrial function and immune regulation.

"Previous publications have touched on these issues, but the new findings indicate that microgravity and space radiation systematically affect the body, leading to dysfunction at the cellular level that impacts multiple organs, including muscles, kidneys, heart, skin, and CNS-related (central nervous system) tissues," Beheshti said.

"The systemic response observed in spaceflight has been shown to contribute to increased frailty in humans. Space is known to accelerate aging and many human diseases, and the research underscores this by identifying key health risks that can be targeted for countermeasures," Beheshti added.

The research pointed to potential paths to mitigate damage caused by space radiation. It found that certain molecules involved in regulating gene activity were inhibited in space.

"This research demonstrates that targeting these key factors can rescue the immune and inflammatory pathways dysregulated in space," Beheshti said.

The researchers are taking a forward-looking approach.

"If humans are going to be living and working in space, or living on the moon and Mars, we need to set a baseline data of metrics for how the body responds to space," Mason said.

(Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)

Human missions to Mars in doubt after astronaut kidney shrinkage revealed

Anthony Cuthbertson

THE INDEPENDENT UK
Wed, June 12, 2024

Samples from 40 space missions revealed astronauts’ kidneys shrunk the longer they were exposed to the extreme conditions (Nasa)

Human missions to Mars could be at risk after new research revealed that long-duration space travel can impact the structure of astronauts’ kidneys.

Samples from more than 40 space missions involving humans and mice revealed that kidneys are remodelled by the conditions in space, with certain parts showing signs of shrinkage after less than a month in space.

The findings could jeopardise plans by SpaceX and Nasa to send crewed missions to Mars in the coming decades, with SpaceX boss Elon Musk recently claiming that it could be possible within the next “10 to 20 years”.

SpaceX created a five minute animation demonstrating what a crewed trip to Mars aboard a Starship rocket might look like (SpaceX)


Scientists at University College London (UCL), who carried out the study, said that microgravity and galactic radiation from space flight caused serious health risks to emerge the longer a person is exposed to it.

Future missions to Mars were not ruled out, though the scientists said that measures to protect the kidneys would need to be developed to avoid serious harm to astronauts. Methods of recovery could also be introduced onboard spacecraft, such as dialysis machines.

“We know what has happened to astronauts on the relatively short space missions conducted so far, in terms of an increase in health issues such as kidney stones,” said Dr Keith Siew, first author of the study from the London Tubular Centre, based at the UCL Department of Renal Medicine.

“What we don’t know is why these issues occur, nor what is going to happen to astronauts on longer flights such as the proposed mission to Mars. If we don’t develop new ways to protect the kidneys, I’d say that while an astronaut could make it to Mars they might need dialysis on the way back.

“We know that the kidneys are late to show signs of radiation damage; by the time this becomes apparent it’s probably too late to prevent failure, which would be catastrophic for the mission’s chances of success.”

An artist's impression of a Mars colony (iStock/ Getty Images)

Professor Stephen Walsh, senior author of the study from the London Tubular Centre, UCL Department of Renal Medicine, said: “Our study highlights the fact that if you’re planning a space mission, kidneys really matter.

“You can’t protect them from galactic radiation using shielding, but as we learn more about renal biology it may be possible to develop technological or pharmaceutical measures to facilitate extended space travel.”

The research was detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

Can the bodies of astronauts survive Mars missions?

Nina Massey, PA Science Correspondent
Tue, June 11, 2024 



Travelling into space changes the structure of kidneys, with galactic radiation causing damage that could potentially put human missions to Mars at risk, new research suggests.

Spaceflight is known to cause a number of changes in astronauts’ bodies, and as more people venture into space, understanding the health risks associated with space exploration is key for the preparation of long-duration, lunar, and potentially Martian missions, experts say.

Despite the findings in relation to kidneys, researchers suggest that short-duration space flights pose no significant health risks to private astronauts.

Other findings indicated that women may be better able to physiologically tolerate space flight than men, but further research is needed.

The new research analysed samples collected from the first all-civilian crew from the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission which launched on September 15 2021 and returned three days later.

As well as the harm caused to kidneys, the research suggests that the effects of short term spaceflight mirror those of longer missions.

This includes elevated levels of a protein (cytokines) that could lead to excess inflammation, and lengthening of sections of DNA found at the ends of each of our chromosomes (telomeres) – which could result in mutations.

The research found that although more than 95% of changes returned to normal in the months after the mission, some proteins, genes, and cytokines appeared to be still activated in the recovery period after spaceflight and persisted after flight for at least three months.

Christopher Mason, of Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, USA, one of the authors of the papers published in the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA) package, said: “It’s really mostly good news in the sense that there are many, many changes across all those layers of biology and modalities of biochemistry, but the vast majority of them return to baseline quickly.

“So I think it bodes well for people who think: ‘Maybe I’ll go to space in six months’ because anyone can really quickly get ready to go, and not only go and safely go and return, but also get trained and get just skills and tools to do experiments in space very quickly.”

Researchers at UCL looked at the effect of space flight on the kidneys.

They found that both human and animal kidneys are remodelled by the conditions in space, with specific parts of the organs showing signs of shrinkage after less than a month in space.

Researchers suggest the likely cause of this is microgravity rather than galactic cosmic radiation (GCR), though further research is required to determine if the interaction of microgravity and GCR can accelerate or worsen these structural changes.

The main reason that kidney stones develop during space missions had previously been assumed to be solely due to microgravity-induced bone loss that leads to a build-up of calcium in the urine.

However, the new findings, published in Nature Communications, indicated that the way the kidneys process salts is fundamentally altered by space flight and likely a primary contributor to kidney stone formation.

The scientists suggest the most alarming finding is that the kidneys of mice exposed to radiation simulating GCR for 2.5 years experienced permanent damage and loss of function.

They say it will be necessary to develop measures to protect the kidneys from harm if missions to Mars are to be successful.

Dr Keith Siew, first author of the study from the London Tubular Centre, based at the UCL Department of Renal Medicine, said: “We know what has happened to astronauts on the relatively short space missions conducted so far, in terms of an increase in health issues such as kidney stones.

“What we don’t know is why these issues occur, nor what is going to happen to astronauts on longer flights such as the proposed mission to Mars.

“If we don’t develop new ways to protect the kidneys, I’d say that while an astronaut could make it to Mars they might need dialysis on the way back.

“We know that the kidneys are late to show signs of radiation damage; by the time this becomes apparent it’s probably too late to prevent failure, which would be catastrophic for the mission’s chances of success.”

Professor Stephen B Walsh, senior author of the study from the London Tubular Centre, UCL Department of Renal Medicine, said: “Our study highlights the fact that if you’re planning a space mission, kidneys really matter.

“You can’t protect them from galactic radiation using shielding, but as we learn more about renal biology it may be possible to develop technological or pharmaceutical measures to facilitate extended space travel.

“Any drugs developed for astronauts may also be beneficial here on Earth, for example by enabling cancer patients’ kidneys to tolerate higher doses of radiotherapy, the kidneys being one of the limiting factors in this regard.”

In the Wellcome, St Peters Trust and Kidney Research UK (KRUK) funded study, the UCL-led team of researchers from more 40 institutions across the world looked at data and samples from more than 40 Low Earth orbit space missions involving humans and mice, as well as 11 space simulations involving mice and rats.

The SOMA package, published in Nature, includes data from a range of missions, including the SpaceX Inspiration4, Polaris Dawn, Axiom, Nasa Twins and Jaxa missions, and researchers across the world.

In a flagship paper Eliah Overbey, Cem Meydan, Susan Bailey, Afshin Beheshti, Christopher Mason and colleagues offer a detailed guide to the data.

Speaking about the findings into the differences between men and women, Prof Mason said: “There are a couple of things we know that women seem to be less affected by.

“One is spaceflight associated neuro-ocular syndrome – or the damage that can happen to their eyes – I think that’s been established already, and I think in this case, the genetic and epigenetic resilience is something we observed here seems to be a new finding.

“It may be just by the fact that women have to give childbirth, so maybe being able to tolerate large changes in physiology and fluid dynamics may be great for being able to manage pregnancy but also manage the stress of spaceflight at a physiological level.

“We don’t have the full answer yet as to why women seem to be, so far, a little bit more tolerant of the stressors of spaceflight, but we’re looking into it.”

A mysterious hole on Mars could be a jackpot of scientific discoveries, from extraterrestrial life to where astronauts could live

Ellyn Lapointe,Jessica Orwig
Tue, June 11, 2024 

Scroll back up to restore default view.


Scientists have known about Mars holes for years but an old image has reignited interest.


These holes could contain evidence of alien life on Mars and be a shelter for future astronauts.


But there are still many questions about how deep these holes are and where they lead.

In case you hadn't heard, there's a hole on Mars — multiple holes, actually. These holes, or pits, aren't news. Here's a photo of one from 2007:

This hole on Mars is located on the side of the ancient volcano Arsia Mons.NASA, JPL, U. Arizona

However, an image taken by the HiRISE camera in 2022 recently resurfaced on the University of Arizona HiRISE's Picture of the Day, reigniting the conversation around these fascinating features.

Any excuse to talk about these holes is a good one because they remain largely mysterious and full of promise for future scientific missions.
What are those mysterious holes on Mars?

These pits on Mars can be around 10 feet across, according to Space.com, but it's anyone's guess on how deep they go or where they lead.NASA, JPL, U. Arizona

The holes, aka pits, are located on the flanks of ancient volcanoes in Mars's Tharsis region, the largest volcanic region on the red planet and home to some of the biggest volcanoes in our solar system.

As far as scientists can tell, Mars is no longer volcanically active. So there's no risk of these giant volcanoes erupting. But there is a possibility that residual underground lava tubes may still exist.

Scientists think these holes are "skylights," or places where the ground above the lava tubes has caved in and created a gaping hole in the surface, Brandon Johnson, a geophysicist at Purdue University who studies impact craters throughout the solar system, told Business Insider.

The largest volcano in our solar system, Olympus Mons, is on Mars and is about three times higher than Mount Everest.HUM Images/Getty Images

If these lava tubes are anything like Earth's, they could be the perfect place for astronauts to hunker down during their stay on Mars.

"There's more than one of these [pits] on Mars that we've seen," Johnson said. "But they're really interesting because they're places where astronauts might be able to go and be safe from radiation."

That said, it's unclear how deep these holes go or where they lead. We can only speculate from what we see on other planets, like our own.

A giant underground lava tube on Earth located in Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii, is large enough to fit tens to hundreds of humans.George Rose/Getty Images

"On the Earth, these lava tubes can be large enough to walk around in, but they can also be small or the voids can be discrete or discontinuous," Ross Beyer, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute, told Business Insider over email. "So these pits we see could open into larger caves, or they could just be isolated pits."

Beyer added, "There's no way to know what's in them until we explore them in more detail."

Besides hypothetical human missions that may, or may not, happen anytime soon, there's a far more important reason to explore these holes further.
Is there life on Mars?


Permanently shadowed regions in this pit on the moon remain at temperatures of about 63 °F.NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

These holes could be one of the best places to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life on Mars because they may offer a protective, warm sanctuary from the planet's unforgiving surface.

For example, lava tubes on the moon can be as warm as 63 °F. That's plenty warm enough for life to arise inside. It's unclear if lava tubes on Mars would also be this warm — it's not a stretch to imagine, just a challenge to confirm.

Right now, the only information scientists know about these holes is what they can see from orbiting cameras in space. When it launched onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft in 2005, the HiRISE camera was the most powerful telescope to ever leave Earth's orbit and has since transformed our understanding of the red planet, snapping over 80,000 images. But it's still limited.

"Unfortunately, there is a limit to the 'angle' that we can get from orbit to look 'into' these pits. So sometimes we can see 'walls' and sometimes we can't," Beyer told BI.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has the powerful HiRISE camera onboard that has transformed our understanding of Mars by snapping tens of thousands of images of the planet's surface in unprecedented detail.Getty Images

The best way to explore below the surface would be to physically go inside by dispatching a rover to investigate the pit, Johnson said.

"There are missions proposed to essentially have a robot go on a line and drop down into one of these skylights and be able to explore what's inside of them," he said.

But to be clear, just because there could be life in these pits, doesn't mean Mars definitely hosts extraterrestrials.

"This is a good place to look, but we don't know if there's life on Mars at all," Johnson said.

In the meantime, to understand these mysterious holes as much as we can, "HiRISE and other Mars-orbiting spacecraft will certainly continue to take images of volcanic areas from orbit to try and characterize them better," Beyer said.

Mysterious 'hole' on Mars could be future home for astronauts

Keith Cooper
Mon, June 10, 2024

Pit crater on Arsia Mons.


A mysterious pit on the flank of an ancient volcano on Mars has generated excitement recently because of what it could reveal beneath the surface of the Red Planet. Here's what that means.

First things first, the pit, which is only a few meters across, was actually imaged on Aug. 15, 2022 by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which was about 159 miles (256 kilometers) above the Martian surface at the time. This hole in the ground is also not alone. It's one of many seen on the flanks of a trio of large volcanoes in the Tharsis region of Mars. This particular pit is found on a lava flow on the extinct volcano Arsia Mons, and appears to be a vertical shaft. That raises a question: Is it just a narrow pit, or does it lead to a much larger and remarkable cavern? Or, could it perhaps be a really deep lava tube formed underground long ago when the volcano was still active?

Related: Will future colonists on the moon and Mars develop new accents?

There are several reasons why pits and caves on Mars are of interest. For one, they could provide shelter for astronauts in the future; because Mars has a thin atmosphere and lacks a global magnetic field, it cannot ward off radiation from space the way that Earth does. Consequently, radiation exposure on the Martian surface averages between 40 and 50 times greater than on Earth.

The other enticing aspect of these pits is they might not just provide shelter for human astronauts; they could hold astrobiological interest in the sense that they could have been sheltered abodes for Martian life in the past — perhaps even today, if microbial life indeed exists there.

The presence of these so-called holes on the flanks of volcanoes is a big clue that they are probably connected to volcanic activity on Mars. Channels of lava can flow away from a volcano underground; when the volcano grows extinct, the channel empties. That leaves behind a long, underground tube. We see such tubes not only on Mars, but also on the moon and on Earth.

Another pit crater on Arsia Mons

Sometimes, if the crust is thin enough, the ceiling of these tubes collapses. If a collapse happens along the tube's entire length, it forms a feature called a rille, which is a long trench commonly found on the moon and sometimes in other areas of Mars. If the tube's ceiling just collapses in small areas, however, we get pits like those imaged on Arsia Mons. Planetary scientists have also seen pit chains on the flanks of Martian volcanoes, which are linear stretches of multiple pits seemingly following the length of a lava tube.

Pit chains in a region of Mars called Tractus Catena

How deep these pits descend is a mystery, however, and it remains uncertain whether the pits open into a large cavern or whether they are contained to a small, cylindrical depression. Some Martian pits have been imaged when the sun is high enough in the sky to illuminate what appears to be the sides of the pit wall, which implies they are shafts that go straight down into the flank of the volcano. This would seem to suggest these pits are unlikely to open into larger caves or tubes. If so, this would make them similar to pit craters found on the volcanic mountains of Hawaii, which also don't open up to anything larger and which are produced by the collapse of material deeper underground, which causes material above to sink.

However, pits on the moon have been shown to have boulder-strewn floors that appear as though they could lead to a larger subterranean volume.


pit crater on the moon

Pits can also be formed through tectonic stresses that fracture a world's surface, and these may be less likely to lead to a larger cavern. And finally, one other — possibly less likely — explanation is that these pits open up into where underground rivers once flowed billions of years ago.

We can see a similar phenomenon on Earth, in the form of a geological feature called a karst, which forms when limestone bedrock dissolves and weakens, creating pits and sinkholes that open up into areas of groundwater. If that is the case on Mars, then, if the Red Planet ever once had life, those organisms may have sheltered in karsts. Indeed, running water down the flank of an active volcano would have been warm, providing the perfect protected environment for life to flourish and stay safe.

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Still, this is all speculation for now. We'll only have some concrete answers after future missions actually explore some of these pits. Though a rover that drives to the edge of a pit would be unable to descend, an airborne mission along the same lines as NASA's Ingenuity helicopter, which operated on Mars for three years before it became grounded in January 2024 after damaging one of its rotor blades, would have the ability to hover over and descend into a pit to see what is down there.

If these pits do open up into caves, they may become a preferred landing site for future crewed missions to Mars that will require astronauts to build a sheltered basecamp away from the world's unrelenting radiation.

Originally posted on Space.com.

‘Once-in-a-lifetime’ explosion will bring a new star to the night sky

Ashley Strickland, CNN
Tue, June 11, 2024 

Astronomers are expecting a “new star” to appear in the night sky anytime between now and September in a celestial event that has been years in the making, according to NASA.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event that will create a lot of new astronomers out there, giving young people a cosmic event they can observe for themselves, ask their own questions, and collect their own data,” said Dr. Rebekah Hounsell, an assistant research scientist specializing in nova events at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement. “It’ll fuel the next generation of scientists.”

The expected brightening event, known as a nova, will occur in the Milky Way’s Corona Borealis, or Northern Crown constellation, which is located between the Boötes and Hercules constellations.

While a supernova is the explosive death of a massive star, a nova refers to the sudden, brief explosion from a collapsed star known as a white dwarf. The dwarf star remains intact, releasing material in a repetitive cycle that can occur for thousands of years.

“There are a few recurrent novae with very short cycles, but typically, we don’t often see a repeated outburst in a human lifetime, and rarely one so relatively close to our own system,” Hounsell said. “It’s incredibly exciting to have this front-row seat.”

T Coronae Borealis, otherwise known as the “Blaze Star,” is a binary system in the Corona Borealis that includes a dead white dwarf star and an aging red giant star. Red giants form when stars have exhausted their supply of hydrogen for nuclear fusion and begin to die. In about 5 billion or 6 billion years, our sun will become a red giant, puffing up and expanding as it releases layers of material and likely evaporating the solar system’s inner planets, although Earth’s fate remains unclear, according to NASA.

Every 80 years or so, T Coronae Borealis experiences an explosive event.

The stars in the orbiting pair are close enough to each other that they interact violently. The red giant becomes increasingly unstable over time as it heats up, casting off its outer layers that land as matter on the white dwarf star.

The exchange of matter causes the atmosphere of the white dwarf to gradually heat until it experiences a “runaway thermonuclear reaction,” resulting in a nova as seen in the animation below, according to the space agency.
Keeping an eye on the changing sky

A nova was releasing from T Coronae Borealis in the fall of 1217 when a man named Burchard, abbot of Ursberg, Germany, noted his observance of “a faint star that for a time shone with great light,” according to NASA. It was the first recorded observation of the Blaze Star.

T Coronae Borealis last experienced an explosive outburst in 1946, and astronomers are keeping a watchful eye on the star system once more.

“Most novae happen unexpectedly, without warning,” said William J. Cooke, NASA Meteoroid Environments Office lead, in an email. “However, T Coronae Borealis is one of 10 recurring novae in the galaxy. We know from the last eruption back in 1946 that the star will get dimmer for just over a year before rapidly increasing in brightness. T Coronae Borealis began to dim in March of last year, so some researchers are expecting it to go nova between now and September. But the uncertainty as to when this will happen is several months — can’t do better than that with what we know now.”

The star system, located 3,000 light-years from Earth and typically too dim to be seen with the naked eye, is expected to reach a level of brightness similar to that of Polaris, or the North Star.

Once the nova peaks in brightness, it will be as if a new star has appeared — one that’s visible for a few days without any equipment and a little over a week with binoculars before it dims and disappears from sight for another 80 years or so.

The nova will appear in a small arc between the Boötes and Hercules constellations, and will be visible from the Northern Hemisphere.

The nova is expected to appear in the Corona Borealis constellation, also known as the Northern Crown. - NASA

“The Northern Crown is a horseshoe-shaped curve of stars west of the Hercules constellation, ideally spotted on clear nights,” according to a release shared by NASA. “It can be identified by locating the two brightest stars in the Northern Hemisphere — Arcturus and Vega — and tracking a straight line from one to the other, which will lead skywatchers to Hercules and the Corona Borealis.”

Observations around the world

The event promises to be an exciting one for amateur astronomers, said Dr. Elizabeth Hays, chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA Goddard.

“Citizen scientists and space enthusiasts are always looking for those strong, bright signals that identify nova events and other phenomena,” Hays said. “Using social media and email, they’ll send out instant alerts, and the flag goes up. We’re counting on that global community interaction again with T CrB.”

Astronomers will observe the nova using a range of ground- and space-based telescopes, and data from citizen scientists could help astronomers piece together what happens before the eruption as well, Hounsell said.

Typically, nova events are so distant and faint that it’s difficult to identify the full picture of the eruption, but “this one will be really close, with a lot of eyes on it,” Hays said.

“Studying recurring novae like T Coronae Borealis help us understand the mass transfer between the stars in these systems and provide insights into the thermonuclear runaway that occurs on the surface of the white dwarf when the star goes nova,” Cooke said.

Cooke recalled that the last nova he witnessed — Nova Cygni in 1975 — had a similar brightness to what is expected from T Coronae Borealis. Nova Cygni is not expected to experience another explosion again.

“I was a teenage astronomy geek about to start college and was outside on the night of August 29,” Cooke said. “Glancing at the sky, I noticed that the constellation of Cygnus was messed up; there was a star that shouldn’t be there. After enduring some comments from friends who thought I was crazy, I got them to look and we realized that we were looking at a nova! It was a very memorable experience and reinforced my choice of astronomy as a career. I used to joke that a star had to explode in order to get me to suffer through undergraduate physics.”

While it’s possible that T Coronae Borealis won’t explode by September, astronomers plan to monitor it just in case.

“Recurrent novae are unpredictable and contrarian,” said Dr. Koji Mukai, an astrophysics researcher at NASA Goddard, in a statement. “When you think there can’t possibly be a reason they follow a certain set pattern, they do — and as soon as you start to rely on them repeating the same pattern, they deviate from it completely. We’ll see how T CrB behaves.”

7 potential 'alien megastructures' spotted in our galaxy are not what they seem

Paul Sutter
Mon, June 10, 2024 


A NASA satellite image of the sky, with a hot, dusty galaxy circled in magenta.


A team of astronomers combed through a collection of odd stars that are candidates for Dyson spheres — artificial constructs designed by aliens to leech energy from stars. Instead, the scientists found, the weird stars are more likely to be "hot DOGs" — hot dust-obscured galaxies.

In early 2024, astronomers combed through more than 5 million stars from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, Gaia and 2MASS sky surveys, searching for stars that seemed to have excess infrared radiation. According to the researchers, this extra infrared signal could be interpreted as the signature of a Dyson sphere.

First proposed in the 1960s by physicist Freeman Dyson, these hypothetical constructs would essentially be enormous shells that wrap around stars, absorbing as much light energy as possible. In Dyson's theory, the material used to construct these spheres would come from disassembled planets in that star's system.

Alien civilizations could use Dyson spheres to acquire millions of times more solar energy than we have access to on Earth while also giving themselves a spiffy new structure to live on. But no energy collection or usage system is perfect. So, while the Dyson sphere collects radiation from the star on its inside, it also emits heat from its outside.

To us, that would make a Dyson sphere appear as a star with a lot more infrared radiation than normal. In the latest search, the astronomers identified seven stars within 1,000 light-years of Earth that emit an abnormally large amount of infrared radiation, making them Dyson sphere candidates.

Related: 32 strange places scientists are looking for aliens

But in a more recent study published to the preprint server arXiv in May, a new team of astronomers examined those seven candidates in greater detail. They found that three are very close to a peculiar kind of galaxy known as a hot dust-obscured galaxy, or "Hot DOG."

Hot DOGs are surrounded by enormous, thick clouds of dust, and warm dust is very good at emitting infrared radiation. Therefore, the astronomers propose that for these three candidates, the excess infrared radiation isn't due to the star itself but rather our view through the warm dust surrounding a Hot DOG.

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As for the other four stars? The researchers argue that because of the similarities in the various wavelengths of light emitted by all seven candidates, these stars are likely obscured by hot DOGs as well, even though we don't have detailed enough observations in those directions to conclusively find the culprits.

While this new research doesn't completely throw a wet blanket on the idea of advanced alien civilizations turning their planets inside out, it doesn't help the overall search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But it does show just how intricate astronomy can be and how simple chance alignments can lead to surprising results. Importantly, it demonstrates that if we do ever find more conclusive evidence for aliens, we're going to have to work hard to prove they're not just cosmic Hot DOGs.

Boeing Starliner's return delayed: Here's when the astronauts might come back to E

Natalie Neysa Alund, USA TODAY
Tue, June 11, 2024 

On the heels of a successful launch last week, the return of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft to Earth from the International Space Station has been delayed until at least next week.

On June 5, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore made history taking Boeing's Starliner on its maiden crewed mission.

The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in eastern Florida at 10:52 a.m. EDT.

Delayed by previous scrubs, Starliner − named Calypso in honor of explorer Jacques Cousteau's ship − landed on the space station on June 6.

More rocket launches: SpaceX Starship successful in fourth test launch
When is Starliner expected to return to earth?

Initially, NASA reported, Starliner was only slated to spend a week on the space station.

Now, the Starliner and its two astronauts are set to land in the New Mexico desert no earlier than Tuesday, June 18, NASA posted on X.

NASA and Boeing reported a parachute-assisted landing is planned. 

Why is Starliner's return to earth delayed?

According to the space agency, additional days at the ISS will allow for Williams, 58, and Wilmore, 61, to assist with a spacewalk on Thursday.

In addition, it will allow engineers more time to complete system checkouts of Starliner, working towards its NASA certification.

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore speak to NASA officials during a live streamed event on Monday, June 10.
What was Starliner designed for?

The Starliner was designed to accommodate passengers for missions to low-Earth orbit.

The capsule is intended to carry four astronauts along with a mix of cargo and other scientific instruments to and from the International Space Station for NASA.

It carries more than 750 pounds of cargo including food, clothing, exercise gear, medical supplies, media equipment, and vehicle supplies, NASA reported.

Contributing: Eric Lagatta and Mary Walrath-Holdridge.

Natalie Neysa Alund is a senior reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at nalund@usatoday.com and follow her on X @nataliealund.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Boeing Starliner return: Astronauts stay at ISS extended, NASA says