Migration can be a good thing for the environment. Here's how

by Sonja Fransen, Neil Adger, Ricardo Safra de Campos and William C. Clark, The Conversation

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Amsterdammers are proud of their city. But it turns out that people who have moved there from other parts of the world are just as concerned about keeping the place green and pleasant. We surveyed Amsterdam residents and found, among other things, that recent migrants were just as likely to recycle as those born and raised in the city.

Similarly, research has shown that internal and international migrants living in Accra, Ghana were more likely to take part in activities that enriched the local environment, like creating community gardens to grow food, than people who were born there.

Can the movement of people (including those displaced by climate change) aid sustainable solutions to environmental problems? Our research suggests that it can. Migration is good for society in circumstances when it reduces inequality, enhances overall well-being, and does not place greater environmental burdens on the regions where people move to or from.

Migrant flows and their consequences

Sustainable development means enhancing well-being in ways that fairly meet the needs of present and future generations. A new set of studies has shown that new policies are needed to manage migration in a way that ensures such sustainability, while also minimizing involuntary displacement due to conflict or disasters.

Poorly managed migration can deepen inequality and increase environmental damage. One study looked at Florida in the US, where sea-level rise is expected to lead to outward migration—with younger, economically active adults moving first. Such migration would put pressure on housing and water and contribute to congestion and pollution in the destination cities, while leaving the coastal areas with aging populations and a lower tax base.

In Niue, Papua New Guinea and the Marshall Islands, a recent study showed that people's sense of belonging and their capacity to maintain a sense of unity, even when many of them are emigrating, affected the long-term stability of remaining populations. Current patterns of emigration by working-age adults from these areas reduce pressure on natural resources in the origin islands, while the emigrant populations in Australia and New Zealand still support and promote their communities in the island nations.

In this way, population levels in the islands are kept stable and people there are less directly dependent on fishing and farming, as their income and ability to invest locally is increased through remittances. According to Sergio Jarillo and Jon Barnett from the University of Melbourne, it is this sense of belonging that "binds the people who live in and migrate from these places into a collective commitment to the continuity" of these island communities, which are threatened by climate change.

It is crucial to consider the impact of migration in the places people leave behind, as well as their new homes. At a global level, migrants remain rare (most people live close to where they were born) and international migrants even rarer, with those displaced by conflict or disaster rarer still. Most media attention on environmental migration to date has concerned people fleeing conflict or disasters, and so-called climate refugees.

Most migrants fleeing conflict or disaster end up concentrated in a few places relatively near to where they have fled from, creating significant new demands on water, food and waste services. As such, it is the clustering of people in one place, not migration itself, that poses the greatest challenges for sustainability.

The world's largest refugee camps, home to those displaced because of conflict and disaster, are regularly in places that are vulnerable to climate change. The Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, for example, have regularly been made uninhabitable by flooding in recent years.

Addressing migration and the environment together

Sustainability and migration are often managed separately. Yet we need new policies that manage migration in the interests of people and the planet, now and into the future. This includes focusing on the largest reason people move, known as "regular" migration: to find new economic and life opportunities.

For regular migration flows, planning is needed in destination areas to meet the increased demand for housing, employment and services. When new populations are integrated into communities with urban planning, the cities tend to work better for them and they feel more invested in their new homes. Such measures have been shown to create a positive environment for growth and reduce social tensions.

City planners in Chattogram in Bangladesh, for example, listened to migrants through forums and discussion groups, and have begun to amend their infrastructure plans to improve the city's informal settlements and provide clean water.

Governments also need to minimize the displacement of people as a result of environmental degradation and climate change in the first place, which amounts to a fundamental breach of their rights to a secure life.

Ultimately, we need to reset how migration is discussed in society—away from simple tropes that paint it as a threat, towards using evidence of its consequences for economies, environments and social cohesion.

Realizing the potential of migration to enhance sustainability requires seeing the benefits and costs to society in the round—not putting migration and sustainability in separate boxes working against each other.

Provided by The Conversation 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Migrants can be 'transformative force' for sustainable development, research suggests

\

Earth's water might have come from ancient space rocks, meteorite discovery suggests

By Rahul Rao 

SPACE.COM

Water might've existed in the building blocks of our world.

An artist's depiction of planets forming from a disk of material surrounding a star. 

(Image credit: NASA)

Earth and the rest of our solar system's inner, rocky planets are the products of a myriad of tiny planetesimals — glorified pebbles of primordial cosmic dust — assembling themselves together more than 4 billion years ago. Now, a new analysis suggests that those planetesimals already contained water.

Researchers tested samples from meteorites that they say are just as ancient as those planetesimals. In doing so, they found the fingerprints of chemical reactions known to occur in the presence of water.

There is no water to be found in these samples today, but scientists can still trace water that they once held. Over time, if water is in the presence of other elements, the water molecules' oxygen atoms will separate and join up with those very elements. Water and iron, for instance, will beget iron oxide. That's the substance that colors Mars’ surface rust-red.

However, even that iron oxide is now long gone in the meteorites — but when it faded, it would have taken a little bit of the meteorites' iron content away with it. So, scientists can test for ancient water by measuring a meteorite's iron level in comparison to the space rock's other elements.

Related: How giant impacts shaped the formation of the solar system's planets

Researchers expected to find about as much iron as nickel and cobalt. But instead, they found quite a lot of missing iron in comparison — implying the presence of oxygen and, by extension, water. In short, they concluded that the primordial material that formed the inner solar system likely included water.

"The difference between what we measured in the inner solar system meteorites and what we expected implies an oxygen activity about 10,000 times higher," said Paul Asimow, a geologist and geochemist at the California Institute of Technology, in a statement.

If water's hydrogen and oxygen were present in these primordial planetary building blocks, then it is a good sign that other elements — carbon and nitrogen, critical to creating life — may have been there at the start, too.

The researchers' work is outlined in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Jan. 9.

SPACE INC.

Blue Origin and SpaceX start work on cargo versions of crewed lunar landers

Jeff Foust

January 21, 2024

Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander will carry astronauts on the Artemis 5 mission, one year after an uncrewed test mission. Credit: Blue Origin

WASHINGTON — The two companies with NASA contracts to develop crewed lunar landers are also beginning work on cargo versions of their spacecraft.

NASA has exercised options in Human Landing System (HLS) awards made to Blue Origin and SpaceX to begin initial design and development work of versions of their landers that can carry large amounts of cargo to the lunar surface.

NASA made a passing reference to the work in a Jan. 9 announcement about the delays to the Artemis 2 and 3 missions. “NASA also shared that it has asked both Artemis human landing system providers – SpaceX and Blue Origin – to begin applying knowledge gained in developing their systems as part of their existing contracts toward future variations to potentially deliver large cargo on later missions,” the agency said in a press release.

“In the last few months, we’ve asked both of our Human Landing System providers, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to being applying the work they’re doing on the human-rated versions of the landing vehicles to develop a cargo variant that can land large cargo on the surface,” said Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator for the Moon to Mars Program in NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Development, in a Jan. 9 media call. However, NASA provided no other details about that work at the time, with the briefing focused on the delays to the upcoming Artemis missions.

In a Jan. 19 statement to SpaceNews, NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton said that the work is being done under options to Blue Origin’s HLS contract, awarded in May 2023, and the “Option B” award to SpaceX in November 2022, which modified the original HLS contract SpaceX won in April 2021. The options, which cover work through a preliminary design review, do not require additional funding beyond the $3.4 billion to Blue Origin and $1.15 billion for SpaceX’s Option B.

“NASA expects these large cargo landers to have high commonality with the human landing systems already in work with adjustments to the payload interfaces and deployment mechanisms,” NASA stated. “The preliminary design requirements include delivering 12 to 15 metric tons to the lunar surface.”

NASA added that no payloads have been identified yet for those landers. The earliest the cargo landers would be used is Artemis 7, a mission projected for no earlier than the early 2030s.

Neither company has publicly discussed work on cargo versions of their HLS landers. Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, did mention the ability of his company’s Starship vehicle to land large payloads on the moon in a presentation posted by SpaceX Jan. 12. “We want to far exceed what NASA’s asked us to do,” he said. “We want to go far beyond the NASA requirements and actually be able to put enough payload on the moon with enough frequency that you could actually have a permanently occupied moon base.”

Blue Origin and SpaceX are not the only ones working on large cargo lander. The European Space Agency is in the early phases of development of Argonaut, a cargo lander that ESA is proposing to offer for future Artemis missions. Argonaut, as currently designed, would carry about two metric tons of cargo, far less than what NASA is proposing with the cargo HLS variants.

The cargo lander options that NASA has exercised are not the first NASA contracts to the companies regarding delivering cargo to the moon. NASA selected the two companies, along with three others, in the second round of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program in November 2019. SpaceX offered Starship, which the company said at the time could deliver up to 100 metric tons to the lunar surface, while Blue Origin offered its original cargo version of its Blue Moon lander, capable of taking several metric tons to the moon.

Neither Blue Origin nor SpaceX have won any CLPS task orders, and it is unclear if either company bid on any of the missions NASA has awarded through the program.

Opinion
NASA study: clean, space-based solar power beaming is possible

David Steitz

January 19, 2024

A diagram of space-based solar power technology from NASA's new report. 

Credit: NASA

A newly released NASA study examines the feasibility and potential impact space-based solar power could have on the world’s sustainable clean energy needs. The Biden administration and Congress now need to step up their clean energy game and mature this technology in order to assure American leadership in this critical, new high frontier of clean energy technology.

Space-based power beaming essentially works like our space-based telecommunications systems except for the fact that it beams usable energy instead of data. The idea is to use huge solar arrays parked in space to collect and beam solar energy down to remote ground stations on Earth via focused microwaves. Space solar power stations could beam collected energy to anywhere they can see; the transmitted energy can pass through clouds. The stations could be placed in orbits that provide power to literally anywhere on Earth’s surface, day or night. The resulting energy can then be easily converted into electricity on Earth, as zero-emissions clean energy.

Once demonstrated, space-based power beaming could become the energy source that moves us past fossil fuels in a way that is equitable, evolvable, scalable and distributable. Space-based solar power beaming could deliver energy that is cheaper, cleaner and more accessible than many alternatives.

The new NASA report, withheld for more than a year for technical and political review, shows that there appear to be no clear technical showstoppers for an in-space solar power demonstration mission. It also showed that tapping into technologies under development today by NASA’s global partners could make space solar power beaming feasible soon — within two decades. And because pieces of this promising technology are currently or soon to be available, development requires no miracles — just commitment.

While development of a space solar power beaming system will require a lot of work to get from today’s concepts to tomorrow’s demonstration mission, the technology holds tremendous returns for domestic industrial advancement, space sector expansion and abundant clean energy that can help us meet America’s net-zero goals.

If the clean energy provided by a space-based solar power system accounted for just five percent of our national energy consumption, it would significantly reduce our carbon footprint.

Details on possible space-based solar power satellites from NASA’s new report. 

Credit: NASA

Securing American leadership in space-based power

Experts in the field point out the many potential benefits of space-based solar power for meeting immediate energy and societal needs. It demonstrates how our growing space technology and industry can return sustainable and significant value back to Earth, how net-zero can be achieved, and how America can ambitiously lead in troubled times. Plans by the Europeans, Japanese, the United Kingdom and the Chinese show an appetite to move forward on this technology. Sadly, the U.S. remains largely on the sidelines. Make no mistake: whichever nation develops this technology first will hold the high ground in future energy supply systems.

To move the needle forward on space-based solar power, the White House should establish a small interagency Space Energy Working Group, led by the president’s Science Advisor, to explore a whole-of-government effort to field a space solar power beaming demonstration system for domestic energy, with a clear path to transitioning the capability to an industry-managed test deployment within a decade.

Such a working group could establish mechanisms that facilitate an innovative industrial engagement strategy. This working group should assign roles and establish policy recommendations to address any transmission issues necessary to ensure space-based solar power beaming can be integrated into the national grids.

At the same time, Congress should allocate an independent appropriations line within the lead agency that permits transfer of resources to support a demonstration project. Given that this is both a space and energy project that has obvious national security implications, a $50 million start-up cost to an expeditious agency like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) would help buy down risk.

DARPA researchers and engineers could then make progress toward power beaming, deployable lightweight structures, control systems for large structures, high power electronics, in space assembly, and new flight dynamics algorithms.
A call for a demonstration mission

Policy makers should direct DARPA to stand up a space power technology program to develop the architecture, technology development and model development of a 5-kW demonstration mission by 2028, with a goal of a 1-MW system by 2035.

Following a first demonstration mission, a reasonable path toward development of space solar power beaming could fuse a large public investment with major industrial players (think the aerospace prime contractors), to build and demonstrate a megawatt-scale system. Once a demonstration mission is up, smaller companies may spin out from the government-led project to develop and build subsystems and emerge as new players.

The White House and Congress should not turn their backs on the chance for America to lead on a new clean energy technology that has tremendous potential. Space-based solar power connects the ambition and inspiration of space exploration with tangible benefits to Earth by addressing the persistent and growing need for more clean energy.

It takes very little imagination to see how space-based solar power beaming technology is not only becoming feasible, but also a clean energy solution that’s exactly what America needs. The path to net zero will not be found by drilling down, but by building up above.

David Steitz is a communications and space technology consultant. He served as NASA’s deputy associate administrator for technology, policy and strategy and as the agency’s deputy chief technologist until retiring from NASA in 2022, concluding a 32-year career at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NASA report offers pessimistic take on space-based solar power

Jeff Foust

January 19, 2024

Caltech tested some space-based solar power technologies in low Earth orbit last year, but a NASA study concluded that approach to providing electricity was not cost effective compared to terrestrial alternatives. 

Credit: Caltech

WASHINGTON — Advocates of space-based solar power are criticizing a NASA report that offered a skeptical assessment of that technology’s ability to provide low-cost green energy.

The report, released Jan. 10 by NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy (OTPS), examined two previously published architectures for generating electrical power in space and transmitting it to Earth by microwaves, known as space-based solar power (SBSP). The report calculated the lifecycle costs of those architectures as well as the greenhouse emissions their development would produce.

The report concluded that one architecture would produce electricity at a cost of $0.61 per kilowatt-hour, and the other at $1.59 per kilowatt-hour. By contrast, terrestrial renewable systems, such as wind, hydropower and terrestrial solar plants, produce energy at $0.02 to $0.05 per kilowatt-hour.

The report also found that the greenhouse gas “emission intensity” of the SBSP systems, or the amount of greenhouse gases produced from building and launching the systems, was much less than the average of the U.S. electric grid today, but similar to terrestrial renewable systems.

“We found that these space-based solar power designs are expensive. They are 12 to 80 times more expensive than if you were going to have renewable energy on the ground,” said Erica Rodgers, science and technology partnership forum lead in NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist, in a presentation at the AIAA SciTech Forum conference where the agency released the report.

However, advocates of SBSP have criticized NASA’s cost assessment, in particular the assumptions used for it. “The things that I thought were most admirable were the general methodology, the modeling and the economic emphasis,” said John Mankins, a former NASA official who led an earlier agency study of SBSP in the late 1990s, of the new report in an interview. “They looked at lots of different cases and tried to model a wide variety of different parameters.”

What he took issue with in the report are the assumptions and the data inputs for that modeling. “It seems to be driven entirely by a wide variety of assumptions that are, in combination, the worst possible of the worst possible cases from years ago.”

One example is launch, which accounts for more than 70% of the overall costs of each of the two architectures studied by NASA. The study assumed launch costs of $1,000 per kilogram, plus a 15% “block buy” discount. That struck Mankins as pessimistic, citing SpaceX’s development of Starship and work by other companies, particularly since the NASA study assumed the SBSP system would be launched in the 2040s.

“If it was really true that everybody believed that there was never going to be any improvement in launch beyond the Falcon 9 reusable, I don’t think Blue Origin would be wasting their time working on New Glenn,” he said.

Launch costs could be further reduced, he noted, if electric propulsion is used to transport elements of the system from low Earth orbit to geostationary orbit, rather than the NASA study’s approach of refueling Starship in LEO — similar to the approach it is using for the Starship lunar lander — to carry payloads to GEO.

The NASA study did address the baseline model’s sensitivity to factors such as lower launch costs, use of electric propulsion and assuming a longer lifetime for components in GEO than the 10 years included in the baseline. Incorporating all of those factors reduces the electricity costs of the SBSP systems to levels similar to terrestrial renewable alternatives.

“That’s just weird,” Mankins said of that approach. A typical such study, he said, would pick a “middle of the road” scenario as the baseline and see how factors can either increase or decrease costs. He also criticized the report for not incorporating much of recent research on SBSP technologies.

Other organizations that have promoted SBSP, like the National Space Society (NSS), also critiqued the report. In a Jan. 17 statement, it argued that the report “stopped short of a thorough examination of the real costs and promise” of SBSP, citing launch costs and other factors.

“NSS welcomes the recognition of the importance of space solar power in the OTPS report and looks forward to providing input to NASA to clarify and enhance the conclusions,” said Dale Skran, chief operating officer of the NSS.

Another advocacy group, the Space Frontier Foundation, said the report is evidence that the U.S. government as well as companies should take the technology seriously despite the conclusions of the baseline model. “This report retires the concerns that space-based solar power is science fiction, and shows that NASA and the U.S. government are recognizing the climate-friendly economic benefits of global leadership of this new energy system,” said Sean Mahoney, executive director of the organization.

The report, which NASA announced plans to produce in 2022, comes as other countries and organizations pursue SBSP studies. The European Space Agency is funding a project called Solaris to examine the feasibility of SBSP. China, Japan and the United Kingdom have performed their own analysis of the technology.

That interest in SBSP was one factor in NASA’s decision to conduct this study, Rodgers said. “We were motivated because space-based solar power research is picking up globally. It’s been accelerating over the past five years,” she said at the AIAA conference. “We wanted to better understand why there’s this acceleration.”

Mankins said he was concerned that the pessimistic NASA report might dampen some of that global interest. “That will have a significant chilling influence, particularly in Europe, the U.K. and the U.S.,” he said, “Any document that comes out with the [NASA] meatball on it is regarded almost as gospel.”

There is a small amount of SBSP research in the United States taking place outside of NASA. The California Institute of Technology announced Jan. 16 that it had completed its first in-space test of SBSP technologies, called Space Solar Power Demonstrator 1. That featured three experiments to test deployable structures, photovoltaic cells and wireless power beaming that were flown as a hosted payload on the Vigoride-5 tug by Momentus last January.

Those tests were largely successful, Caltech professors involved in the project described in a presentation last October. However, they said they did not immediately plan to fly a second set of experiments, electing to first perform additional work in the lab for the privately funded project.

“Solar power beamed from space at commercial rates, lighting the globe, is still a future prospect,” Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum said in a statement about the end of the experiment. “But this critical mission demonstrated that it should be an achievable future.”

Space investors banking on funding uptick in 2024
Jason Rainbow

January 18, 2024

The poor stock performance of space ventures that went public by merging with a blank check company has left a bad taste in the mouths of investors, said Matt O’Connell, an operating partner at venture capital firm DCVC. 

Credit: Nasdaq

TAMPA, Fla. — Space investments should start picking up in 2024 after plummeting last year, executives discussing the industry’s outlook said Jan. 17, but will likely remain far short of record highs.

According to recently released research from early-stage investor Space Capital, around $17.9 billion was invested in the global space economy in 2023, 25% less than in 2022 and a decade low against tough economic conditions.

This level of investment was a far cry from a $47 billion peak Space Capital recorded for 2021 as banking giants such as Morgan Stanley forecast a trillion-dollar space economy by 2040.

“A lot of it is just driven by macroeconomic factors like higher interest rates, which tend to reduce the risk appetite,” Hoyt Davidson, managing partner of investment banking and financial advisory firm Near Earth, said during a webinar hosted by the Space and Satellite Professionals International (SSPI) trade organization.

Historically, most space investments come from the United States, where Davidson said investors were buckling down for a recession that never came.

“I think people believe in general that inflation is getting tamed and interest rates are going to flatten or come down,” he added, “and so the appetite for risk investment should improve this year.”

However, investors are still reeling from a recent wave of special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) mergers that rushed a bunch of early-stage space firms to the stock exchange, only for many of them to miss revenue targets and significantly underperform on the public market.

“We had kind of a boom and bust cycle with the SPACs,” said Matt O’Connell, an operating partner at venture capital firm DCVC.

“I think that there were some companies that should not have gotten funded and that left a bad hangover,” O’Connell said, “and we’re still working through that.”

The market is in a “holding period right now,” he said, but “will come around because there’s a lot of demand out there.”

O’Connell said he knows of three space companies planning to list shares on the public market in 2025 through a traditional IPO process.

The space industry is also benefiting from unprecedented familiarity among investors, he said, thanks partly to an increase in public companies and the efforts of high-profile entrepreneurs.

“There’s no question that the three amigos — Musk, Bezos, and Branson — helped raise the visibility of the industry a lot,” O’Connell said, “and people started thinking, oh, space is not just for aliens … you can actually make money in space.”

The panel also agreed that widespread government demand for space-based capabilities continues to be a major boon for the industry, and helped prop up the sector amid a challenging macroeconomy.

Space companies able to demonstrate commercial success will only increase government support for the industry, noted Carie Mullins, director of analytics at space research firm BryceTech.

Tianzhou-7 reaches Tiangong in China’s first space station mission of 2024

Andrew Jones

January 18, 2024

A view of the Tianzhou-7 cargo spacecraft from the Tianhe core module of the Tiangong space station. Credit: CMSEO


HELSINKI — The Tianzhou-7 cargo spacecraft docked at China’s Tiangong space station Wednesday to resupply the orbital outpost.

A Long March 7 rocket lifted off from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan island at 9:27 a.m. Eastern (1427 UTC) Jan. 17. Tianzhou-7 separated from the launcher and entered its predetermined orbit 10 minutes later, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) announced.

Tianzhou-7 docked at Tiangong just over three hours later, at 12:46 (1746 UTC), according to CMSEO. The Shenzhou-17 crew aboard the space station will later enter the Tianzhou 7 cargo spacecraft and carry out cargo transfer and other related work.

The launch was the first to Tiangong in 2024. China completed the space station in late 2022 and has been sending regular, three person crews to Tiangong for roughly six-month-long missions. Each mission includes a handover, during which time there are briefly six astronauts aboard.

China plans to launch three further missions to Tiangong in 2024. These will be the Shenzhou 18 and 19 crewed missions and the Tianzhou-8 mission. The latter will fly roughly eight months from now.

Tianzhou-7 carries 260 items of cargo, with a total mass of around 5.6 tons. Of this around 2.4 tons are supplies for the astronauts, including fresh fruit and vegetable and gift packages related to the incoming Year of the Dragon.

60 science units include an experiment focused on human bone cells and another carrying anaerobic archaea which will look at viability and methane production of early terrestrial life in a simulated cosmic environment.

CMSEO plans to send a Tianzhou spacecraft to Tiangong once every eight months. This is up from the original plan of once every six months, thanks to improvements in the capacity of the Tianzhou spacecraft.

The automated docking was not as fast as the two-hour launch-to-docking performed by Tianzhou-5 in 2022, but the three-hour Tianzhou-7 docking was fuel and technology intensive.

CMSEO is also fostering low-cost cargo alternatives to supply Tiangong. The agency issued a call for proposals in May 2023 and selected four proposals in September to advance to a detailed design study phase.

While all selected cargo spacecraft proposals came from state-owned entities, it is understood that commercial launch vehicles are involved in plans to launch these spacecraft, rather than relying solely on Long March rockets.

The Kinetica-2 launcher being developed by CAS Space is understood to be the launcher for a proposal from the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites (IAMCAS) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). CAS Space is a CAS spinoff.

Additionally, the Gravity-1 solid rocket launched by Orienspace from the Yellow Sea last week included a self-developed low-cost cargo spacecraft, according to the company. This was partly as a mass simulator to verify the rocket’s performance.

China aims to operate Tiangong for at least a decade. A co-orbiting space telescope with a roughly two-meter-diameter aperture is set to launch in 2025. “Xuntian” will be able to dock with Tiangong for maintenance, repairs and possibly upgrades.

The country is also planning to expand Tiangong with a multipurpose module. This will allow further full-sized modules to dock with the orbital outpost. The lifespan could also be extended, keeping it in orbit long after the International Space Station is expected to be deorbited.

 

The Solar System used to have nine planets. Maybe it still does? Here’s your catch-up on space today

THE CONVERSATION
Published: January 21, 2024 

Some of us remember August 24 2006 like it was yesterday. It was the day Pluto got booted from the exclusive “planets club”.

I (Sara) was 11 years old, and my entire class began lunch break by passionately chanting “Pluto is a planet” in protest of the information we’d just received. It was a touching display. At the time, 11-year-old me was outraged – even somewhat inconsolable. Now, a much older me wholeheartedly accepts: Pluto is not a planet.

Similar to Sara, I (Rebecca) vividly remember Pluto’s re-designation to dwarf status. For me, it wasn’t so much that the celestial body had been reclassified. That is science, after all, and things change with new knowledge. Rather, what got to me was how the astronomy community handled the PR.

Even popular astronomers known for their public persona stumbled through mostly unapologetic explanations. It was a missed opportunity. What was poorly communicated as a demotion was actually the discovery of new exciting members of our Solar System, of which Pluto was the first.

We can help you make informed decisions with our independent journalism.Get newsletter

The good news is astronomers have better media support now, and there’s a lot of amazing science to catch up on. Let’s go over what you might have missed.
Pluto didn’t meet the criteria of a fully fledged planet. But there may still be a 9th planet in our Solar System waiting to be found. Shutterstock

A throwback to a shocking demotion

Pluto’s fate was almost certainly sealed the day Eris was discovered in 2005. Like Pluto, Eris orbits in the outskirts of our Solar System. Although it has a smaller radius than Pluto, it has more mass.

Astronomers concluded that discovering objects such as Pluto and Eris would only become more common as our telescopes became more powerful. They were right. Today there are five known dwarf planets in the Solar System.

The conditions for what classifies a “planet” as opposed to a “dwarf planet” were set by the International Astronomical Union. To cut a long story short, Pluto wasn’t being targeted back in 2006. It just didn’t meet all three criteria for a fully fledged planet:it must orbit a star (in our Solar System this would be the Sun)
it must be big enough that gravity has forced it into a spherical shape
it must be big enough that its own gravity has cleared away any other objects of a similar size near its orbit.

The third criterion was Pluto’s downfall. It hasn’t cleared its neighbouring region of other objects.

So is our Solar System fated to have just eight planets? Not necessarily. There may be another one waiting to be found.

Read more: I've always wondered: why are the stars, planets and moons round, when comets and asteroids aren't?
Is there a Planet Nine out there?

With the discovery of new and distant dwarf planets, astronomers eventually realised the dwarf planets’ motions around the Sun didn’t quite add up.

We can use complicated simulations in supercomputers to model how gravitational interactions would play out in a complex environment such as our Solar System.

In 2016, California Institute of Technology astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown concluded – after modelling the dwarf planets and their observed paths – that mathematically there ought be a ninth planet out there.

Their modelling determined this planet would have to be about ten times the mass of Earth, and located some 90 billion kilometres away from the Sun (about 15 times farther then Pluto). It’s a pretty bold claim, and some remain sceptical.

One might assume it’s easy to determine whether such a planet exists. Just point a telescope towards where you think it is and look, right? If we can see galaxies billions of light years away, shouldn’t we be able to spot a ninth planet in our own Solar System?

Well, the issue lies in how (not) bright this theoretical planet would be. Best estimates suggest it sits at the depth limit of Earth’s largest telescopes. In other words, it could be 600 times fainter than Pluto.

The other issue is we don’t know exactly where to look. Our Solar System is really big, and it would take a significant amount of time to cover the entire sky region in which Planet Nine might be hiding. To further complicate things, there’s only a small window each year during which conditions are just right for this search.

That isn’t stopping us from looking, though. In 2021, a team using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (a millimetre-wave radio telescope) published the results from their search for a ninth planet’s movement in the outskirts of the Solar System.

While they weren’t able to confirm its existence, they provided ten candidates for further follow-up. We may only be a few years from knowing what lurks in the outskirts of our planetary neighbourhood.

The ACT sits at an altitude of 5,190 meters in Chile’s Atacama desert. Here, the lack of atmospheric water vapour helps to increase its accuracy. NIST/ACT Collaboration
Finding exoplanets

Even though we have telescopes that can reveal galaxies from the universe’s earliest years, we still can’t easily directly image planets outside of our Solar System, also called exoplanets.

The reason can be found in fundamental physics. Planets emit very dim red wavelengths of light, so we can only see them clearly when they’re reflecting the light of their star. The farther away a planet is from its star, the harder it is to see.

Astronomers knew they’d have to find other ways to look for planets in foreign star systems. Before Pluto was reclassified they had already detected the first exoplanet, 51 Pegasi B, using a radial velocity method.

This gas giant world is large enough, and close enough to its star, that the gravitational tug of war between the two can be detected all the way from Earth. However, this method of discovery is tedious and challenging from Earth’s surface.

So astronomers came up with another way to find exoplanets: the transit method. When Mercury or Venus pass in front of the Sun, they block a small amount of the Sun’s light. With powerful telescopes, we can look for this phenomenon in distant star systems as well

.
In August, the TESS telescope took this snapshot of the Large Magellanic Cloud (right) and the bright star R Doradus (left). NASA/MIT/TESS

We do this via the Kepler space telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Both have observed tens of thousands of stars and discovered thousands of new planets – dozens of which are about the same size as Earth.

But these observatories can only tell us a planet’s size and distance from its star. They can’t tell us if a planet might be hosting life. For that we’d need the James Webb Space Telescope.
Looking for life

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just wrapped up its first year and a half of science. Among its many achievements is the detection of molecules in the atmospheres of exoplanets, a feat made possible by the transit method.

One of these exoplanets, WASP-17, is also known as a “hot Jupiter”. It seems to have been plucked from a page in a sci-fi novel, with evidence for quartz nanocrystals in its clouds.

Read more: 10 times this year the Webb telescope blew us away with new images of our stunning universe

Meanwhile, the super-Earth K2-18b (a Kepler find) shows signs of methane and carbon dioxide. But while such discoveries are amazing, the magic ingredient necessary for life still eludes us: water vapour.

The field of planetary studies is evolving and 2024 looks promising. Maybe JWST will finally produce signs of water vapour in an exoplanet atmosphere. Who knows, we might even have a ninth planet surprise us all, filling the void left by Pluto.

Stay tuned for exciting science to come.

Small bodies on the very fringes of our Solar System are essentially invisible to us – but advanced new techniques and technologies are changing this. NASA/Jasmin Moghbeli

Authors

Sara Webb
Lecturer, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology

Rebecca Allen
Coordinator Swinburne Astronomy Online | Program Lead of Microgravity Experimentation, Space Technology and Industry Institute, Swinburne University of Technology

Colombian mission to Antarctica analyzes climate change footprints


A cruise ship sails at the Gerlache Strait, which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula.


January 21, 2024 

Colombia’s 10th Antarctic Expedition is making its way to the far reaches of the continent, exploring remote and almost untouched places inhabited by penguins, whales and the occasional seal. The Colombian Navy’s ARC Simon Bolivar is taking aquatic samples in Antarctica and advancing scientific research on climate change amid huge blocks of ice and frost.

“Antarctica is the world’s refrigerator,” Pablo Araujo, a researcher at the Central University of Ecuador, told AFP on board the ship, which is home to 39 researchers, 11 Colombian projects and nine international cooperation projects with four countries. “What we want to see is how climate change is affecting the world’s refrigerator and how that affects the whole quantity of nutrients (in the sea),” says the white-coated scientist.

On board the ship, the Ecuadoran researcher is carrying out a project to model Antarctic ecosystems using machine learning techniques, a branch of artificial intelligence focused on the study of statistical algorithms. With the application of these models and the use of satellite images, researchers are studying the dynamics of greenhouse gas fluxes in Antarctic ecosystems.
.

View of an iceberg at the Gerlache Strait, which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula.

View of the tail of a Humpback whale at the Gerlache Strait, which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, in Antarctica.--AFP photos

View of the Colombian research vessel "ARC Simon Bolivar" at the Gerlache Strait, which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula, in Antarctica.

View of a seal at the Gerlache Strait, which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula.

Crew members of the Colombian research vessel "ARC Simon Bolivar" ride a boat at the Gerlache Strait, which separates the Palmer Archipelago from the Antarctic Peninsula


One Colombian team is launching a battery of Niskin bottles, used to take water samples, into the ocean. “Once (they) come to the surface, we proceed to take these samples for later analysis,” said Alexis Grattz, a researcher from the Directorate General of Maritime Affairs, wearing a thick red mackintosh, gloves and a hat.

At the Ecuadoran scientific station, located at Punta Fort Williams on Greenwich Island, the maritime authority installed a portable weather station to record atmospheric pressure oscillations in the area. These measurements are taken to “determine and help us understand more about these variations in sea level, understanding it as... an important indicator in the evolution of climate change,” said Maritza Moreno, another researcher at the Directorate General of Maritime Affairs.

A Turkish mission, meanwhile, is studying the levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) -- which result from burning fossil fuels, wood, trash and tobacco—in Antarctic soil. Burak Karacik, a professor at Istanbul Technical University, said he is collecting sediment samples. “I will analyze these sediment samples for persistent organic pollutants, and we will look at the effects of humans, here, in this environment,” he added.

 — AFP

INSECT GENITALIA DOWN UNDER

Digitising decades of insect discoveries for future research

We’re digitising the microscope slides at the Australian National Insect Collection to make them available for research all over the world.

BY ANDREA WILD

21 JANUARY 2024

Key points

There are more than 300,000 microscope slides in our collection, from tiny flies to moth genitalia.

We’re photographing our microscope slides and extracting the information recorded on them to increase their accessibility.

Later this year, we’ll be moving our microscope slides, and 12 million other specimens, to our new collections building in Canberra.

Our microscope slides preserve tiny insects and other tiny creatures like mites and nematodes (roundworms) for research under the microscope.

We’re now digitising the entire collection to make it available to the world.

What’s on our microscope slides of insects?

Our Australian National Insect Collection has 12 million specimens. They are mainly pinned insects. However, the collection also has more than 300,000 microscope slides that preserve around:80,000 aphids, coccids, whiteflies and thrips
70,000 tiny flies
75,000 mites and their relatives
50,000 nematodes
the genitalia of 36,000 moths… more on this later!

Nicole Fisher coordinates digitisation activities across our collections. She said the goal of digitising the microscope slides is to enable research.

"We want to help build a picture of things like species distributions and the ecology of insects that can spread diseases,” she said.


A tray of specimens preserved on microscope slides. Credit: Nicole Fisher


Take a picture!

The first step in digitising the microscope slides is to capture their metadata.

“We photograph each microscope slide and use optical character recognition to extract the handwritten or typed information, which includes when and where the specimen was collected,” Nicole said.

“There are many challenges because the writing on some is faded. Others are discoloured, some are etched and some have writing on the underside too.

“We need to give each microscope slide a unique number and repair damaged slides as we go. When the whole collection is digitised, we’ll have a searchable, digital database. We’ll know exactly how many microscope slides we have, what species they are and what information is recorded on them.”


Ryan Main imaging microscope slides at our Australia National Insect Collection. Credit: Nicole Fisher


Photographing our microscope slides of insects

Ryan Main is a photographer who previously worked with the team digitising the Australian National Herbarium.

“It only takes me a second to take a photo. But these microscope slides represent decades of work by the collectors,” Ryan said.

“When this project is finished, people all over the world will be able to see this collection.”

With so many microscope slides in the collection, Ryan sometimes photographs whole trays. The individual slides are then digitally separated. Despite this, it took Ryan and other staff more than six months just to work through the microscope slides of flies.

“The flies went on forever, just like the grasses seemed to when we digitised the plant specimens in the herbarium,” Ryan said.

Ryan needs to pause to clean dirty slides and repair broken slides, which requires considerable technical skill. Broken pieces need to be glued onto a new microscope slide with a glue that takes 24 hours to set.

Many of the microscope slides in the collection were prepared in the 1960s and 1970s. Some are up to 100 years old!

A big move for our collections

This year, the Australia National Insect Collection and the Australian National Wildlife Collection will be moving to a new facility at CSIRO in Canberra.

“As well as being digitised, the slide collection is going through an overhaul as it moves from old cabinets to new cabinets,” Nicole said.

“Early next year we’ll open both our new building and a fully digitised microscope slide collection. It’s a valuable resource that will be more readily available to researchers. The glass will be cleaner on the other side.”


We are cleaning and repairing older microscope slides before we digitise them. 

Credit: Nicole Fisher


Not so secret bug’s business

If you’re wondering why we collect insect genitalia, we’re glad you asked!

For many species of insects, from moths to butterflies to weevils, genitalia are important way of telling species apart. This helps us describe species that are new to science.

This includes the Sapphire Azure Butterfly, a newly-described species endemic to Queensland that is threatened by land clearing.

The caterpillars of this butterfly feed on mistletoe and are cared for by the tree dwelling ant species Anonychomyrma inclinata. They depend on the ants for their survival.

The new National Collections Building is jointly funded by CSIRO and the Department of Education through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy.

Get the buzz on our digital collections

Scientists found mummified skin that is older than the dinosaurs

By Joshua Hawkins
Published Jan 21st, 2024 

Image: focussy / Adobe


If you buy through a BGR link, we may earn an affiliate commission, helping support our expert product labs.


Scientists have discovered mummified skin that is older than the dinosaurs. The skin, which they say likely belonged to a reptile, is estimated to come from the Paleozoic era, between 541 million to 252 million years ago. It dates back at least 290 million years.

The skin was discovered by paleontologists in Oklahoma, and it appears to have a pebble-like, non-overlapping scales design, which is very akin to ancient reptile species, the researchers explain in their study. They say it mostly resembles the extinct Cretaceous dinosaur Edmontosaurus and crocodile skin.

However, the age of the mummified skin means it is older than the dinosaurs, so it can’t have belonged to the Edmontosaurus or another dinosaur like it. The researchers write that it also has hinged regions between the epidermal scales that resemble the skin structure of modern snakes and worm lizards.

Diagram showcasing the mummified skin. 

Current Biology, Mooney et al

The study on the mummified skin was published in Current Biology. According to study co-author Ethan Mooney, the piece is “technically the oldest piece of a proper mummified skin.” (via LiveScience)

Understanding the origins of the mummified skin can help us better understand some of the creatures that lived in the ages older than the dinosaurs. Most other proper mummified and older skin pieces come from dinosaurs. This piece, however, is dated 130 million years older than any of those.

The researchers also say that the structure of the skin could have been vital to the species’ transition and survival from being an aquatic animal to living fully in terrestrial environments, as the skin would have protected the creature’s organs from the elements.

Ultimately, the piece of mummified skin that was found is roughly the size of a tiny fingernail, and it was preserved in clay sediments found in the Richards Spur limestone cave system in Oklahoma, along with some other specimens. The fact that the mummified skin was preserved so well allowed the researchers to properly age it as being older than the dinosaurs.

Controversial study claims megalodon didn't look like a 50-foot giant great white shark

By Melissa Hobson

 

Scientists say they have discovered a discrepancy in previous research and suggest megalodons may have been longer and more slender than previously believed — but not everyone is convinced.

Megalodon size and shape has been revised by researchers in a new study, but the findings have been met with criticism. (Image credit: Sayouna/Shutterstock)

Megalodon, the biggest shark to have ever lived, may not have looked like an uber great white shark as is generally assumed — but instead may have been longer and thinner, scientists have revealed. 

By reanalyzing the incomplete spine of a fossilized megalodon (Otodus megalodon) held at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (IRSNB) in Brussels, the team found discrepancies in previous reconstructions, which suggested these supersized shark had a body length of around 52 feet (16 meters) and a shape resembling great white sharks.

"The previously published reconstruction of Megalodon skeleton and body shape looked very awkward," co-author Kenshu Shimada, a paleobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago, told Live Science in an email. 

The team of 26 shark experts revealed their findings in a new study, published Jan. 21 in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.

Great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are often used as a model to inform estimates about megalodon's size and what it might have looked like. This is because shark skeletons are made largely of cartilage — which is less likely to be preserved as fossils than bone — so scientists have only found fossilized teeth and vertebrae from megalodon. As a close relative and apex predator with similar diet and traits, great whites are thought to be an appropriate model.

Related: What did 'the meg' look like? We have no idea

In the new study, the researchers examined CT scans of a juvenile great white’s vertebral skeleton and then compared it to the vertebra of the megalodon specimen. Their findings showed differences in the growth of the centrum — the solid, central part of the vertebrae. In living Lamniform sharks (the order that megalodon and great whites belong to), centrum growth relates to girth, the team wrote. The megalodon's vertebral column was found to be much thinner than the great white's, which they interpret as meaning the meg was far more slender than a great white.

The previous analysis suggested a vertebrae length of 36.4 feet (11.1 m), but the new findings indicate this would have been the minimum length. The researchers say megalodon was likely longer and slimmer, so it might not look like the great white shark model after all. "We still don't know the exact shape of its head, fins, or tail," Shimada said.

Instead, megalodon might have resembled something closer to a mako shark (Isurus oxyrinchus), co-lead author Phillip Sternes, a biologist at University of California Riverside, said in a statement. 

So, how big could megalodon have been? The researchers don't want to give a definitive length without solid evidence, but this new information suggests it could have "easily" reached 50 feet (15 m) long and may even have reached 66 feet (20 m) "or possibly slightly more," Shimada said.

"The reality is that we need the discovery of at least one complete Megalodon skeleton to be more confident about its true size as well as its body form," Shimada said. 

Despite questioning the findings from the previous study, the research team still believe it was important and say it was significant in helping the team reach its new conclusions. It's "an excellent example of how science advances," Shimada said.

The authors of the previous study are not convinced by the new findings, however. Lead author Jack Cooper, a researcher at Swansea University in the U.K., along with his colleagues Catalina Pimiento, also at Swansea University, and John Hutchinson, at the Royal Veterinary College, say the new study is more of an alternative hypothesis that suffers from "circular logic" — where an argument assumes its conclusion is correct, and uses the conclusion to support the argument

RELATED STORIES

—Could the megalodon still exist today?

—Megalodon shark mamas had human-size cannibal babies

—Great white sharks may have driven megalodon to extinction 

"Moreover, they don't actually provide a new length estimation in their work," they told Live Science in an email. The new study, they added, ignores the fact that the previous analysis considered multiple living examples of sharks alive today, and that one of their models also showed an elongated body when based on great white sharks alone. 

"Importantly, the 'elongated body' interpretation is based on a single observation, a comparison with a single analogue, and lacks any statistical tests to support its hypothesis," they said. "More critically, several aspects of the study are impossible for future researchers to verify or replicate as the authors do not provide the raw data."

Was Megalodon Slimmer Than Previously Thought?

A new study has spurred scientists to debate the shape of prehistory’s biggest shark

Riley Black
Science Correspondent

SMITHSONIAN

January 21, 2024 

A museum curator gives a sense of scale to the reconstructed jaws of the fossil shark Otodus megalodon. 

Rick Meyer / Contributor via Getty Images


In the more than 400 million years that sharks have been swimming through Earth’s seas, none has been larger than Otodus megalodon. The great megatoothed shark reached more than 50 feet in length and prowled oceans the world over between 2.6 million and 23 million years ago. Despite the shark’s success and its fame as a massive apex predator worthy of multiple B-movies, paleontologists are still investigating what the giant shark actually looked like. And a new proposal suggests that O. megalodon was more slender than previously thought.

The latest study, published Sunday in Palaeontologia Electronica, draws from a portion of an O. megalodon backbone to suggest that the shark had a proportionally longer body than that of the modern great white shark. But some outside experts are doubtful about the new restoration.

Paleontologists have been investigating and revising the proportions of O. megalodon for decades. Experts principally work from teeth and vertebrae from the shark to estimate its size and proportions, which is common for prehistoric sharks, as their cartilaginous skeletons often decayed before fossilization. The shark’s spotty fossil record makes it challenging to get an exact idea of what the great fish looked like. “No complete skeleton of O. megalodon has been discovered yet, and that is why deciphering its body size and form have been so challenging,” says DePaul University paleontologist and study co-author Kenshu Shimada.

Just because a complete O. megalodon skeleton is unlikely to have been fossilized, however, doesn’t mean paleontologists are totally in the dark about what the shark looked like. O. megalodon belonged to a group of sharks called lamniformes, which includes species like the great white, salmon shark, porbeagle and others. The modern sharks share some key attributes with O. megalodon, such as body temperatures elevated above the surrounding seawater and preferences for fat-rich prey to help fuel their active lifestyles. O. megalodon probably resembled its modern relatives, but the details are still being discussed by experts.

The new study by Shimada and colleagues is the latest attempt to outline what O. megalodon might have looked like and is largely a response to a 2022 study from a different research team. Both studies are based on the same O. megalodon vertebrae, but they reached different conclusions.

In the latest study, the researchers scaled up a great white’s proportions so that its vertebrae would have the same diameter as the O. megalodon vertebrae. In this case, an O. megalodon with great white proportions would be about 30 feet long. However, the actual length of the partial backbone is about 36 feet—significantly longer than the great white model suggests. To resolve the discrepancy, the researchers propose that O. megalodon had a more elongated form than a great white of the same size would.

“Our new study suggests that we need to think outside the box when it comes to inferring the biology of O. megalodon,” Shimada says.

The new study suggests that the megatooth shark had an elongated body form compared to today’s great white. 

DePaul University / Kenshu Shimada


But the researchers behind the 2022 research are not convinced by the new hypothesis. “While alternative hypotheses should be and are welcomed in science, this particular proposal suffers from a circular logic,” says paleontologist Jack Cooper of Swansea University in Wales, who was not involved in the new study.

The new study says that the great white shark is an inappropriate analogue for O. megalodon, Cooper notes, but the new research also uses the great white shark for its comparisons of body form to the exclusion of other sharks. The 2022 study, by comparison, considered other lamniform sharks in addition to the great white and created a three-dimensional model. The 2022 study also produced an elongated O. megalodon model as one of its possible outcomes, as well, but researchers ruled it out based on data from a broader array of lamniform sharks.

Lacking a complete O. megalodon skeleton, such disagreements may seem difficult to resolve. “However,” Cooper says, “sharks have generally remained geometrically similar throughout their long evolutionary history, which means living sharks can be informative in reconstructing extinct ones.” Even when the shark’s record is mostly teeth and isolated vertebrae, scientists can still generate a rough idea of the megatooth’s shape based on physiology, what it likely fed on and other details gleaned from the fossil record.

University of California, Riverside, biologist and study co-author Phillip Sternes holds an O. megalodon tooth. 

Douglas Long / California Academy of Sciences

Working out the shark’s form is critical to understanding how the megatoothed shark lived during its long tenure in Earth’s seas. “The body plan of megalodon is a key part of understanding its wider ecology, such as how fast it swam and what it needed to eat,” Cooper says. A longer shark would swim differently, for example, or have organs like the liver and spiral intestine related to the shark’s feeding and digestion. O. megalodon thrived for about 20 million years before vanishing, even as its preferred prey survived. Understanding the shark’s form can help experts uncover the carnivore’s evolution and extinction.

For the moment, however, Cooper and colleagues are not swayed by the new reconstruction. All researchers are agreed that O. megalodon was not simply a supersized great white, but what kind of shape the enormous shark took as it slid through ancient waters is only just beginning to come into focus.



Riley Black | | READ MORE
Riley Black is a freelance science writer specializing in evolution, paleontology and natural history who blogs regularly for Scientific American.