NASA has reestablished connection with Voyager 2 after a tense two weeks of not hearing anything from the probe. On July 21st, the agency lost contact with Voyager 2 following a series of planned commands that mistakenly pointed it two degrees away from our planet. While it is scheduled to automatically reset its orientation on October 15th, it's not surprising that NASA scientists didn't just wait for that date to know whether the spacecraft is still running. Voyager 2 was launched way back in 1977, and it's one of the only two probes sending us back valuable data on interstellar space. 

For a few days after July 21st, NASA wasn't even sure what the spacecraft's condition was. It wasn't until August 1st that multiple ground antennas from the Deep Space Network (DSN) were able to detect a carrier signal from the probe. A carrier signal is what a spacecraft uses to beam data back to the ground, but NASA said the one DSN detected was too weak to be able to transmit any information. Still, it was enough to confirm that Voyager 2 was still working and that it hadn't deviated from its trajectory. 

Instead of simply waiting for October, Voyager's ground team decided to take action. They concocted a plan to "shout" a command to the spacecraft across over 12.3 billion miles of space using the DSN, telling it to turn its antenna back to Earth. The whole process illustrated just how vast outer space truly is: It took 18.5 hours for that message to reach the probe, and another 18.5 hours for NASA to start receiving science and telemetry data again, indicating that Voyager 2 had received the command. 

This isn't the first time NASA has had issues with the spacecraft. In 2020, it had to provide tech assistance from billions of miles away after it tripped a system that shut off its scientific gear to conserve electricity. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space — that means it exited the plasma bubble created by our sun — back in 2018, becoming the second human-made object to do so after Voyager 1. Although NASA believes that both Voyager 1 and 2 could remain in contact with the DSN until 2036, it also says that "science data won't likely be collected after 2025." The spacecraft could only be providing us information on interstellar space for less than two years, so it stands to reason that scientists don't want to waste a single day it can send data back to Earth. 

Boeing has rediscovered just how hard space can be in recent months, as its ambitious Starliner program has been repeatedly sidelined by lingering technical issues. However, the company announced at a press conference Monday that it is confident that it will have those issues ironed out by next March and will be ready to test its reusable crew capsule with live NASA astronauts aboard.

“Based on the current plans, we’re anticipating that we’re going to be ready with the spacecraft in early March. That does not mean we have a launch date in early March,” Boeing VP and Starliner manager Mark Nappi stressed during the event, per CNBC. “We’re now working with NASA – Commercial Crew program and [International Space Station] – and ULA on potential launch dates based on our readiness ... we’ll work throughout the next several weeks and see where we can get fit in and then then we’ll set a launch date.”

The Starliner has been in development for nearly fifteen years now, first being unveiled in 2010. It's Boeing's entry into the reusable crew capsule race, which is currently being dominated by SpaceX with its Dragon 2. 

The two companies were actually awarded grants at the same time in 2014 to develop systems capable of transporting astronauts to the ISS with a contract deadline of 2017. By 2016, Boeing's first scheduled launch had already been pushed from 2017 to late 2018. By April 2018, NASA was tempering its launch expectations to between 2019 and 2020.

The first uncrewed orbital test flight in late 2019 failed to reach orbit, which further delayed the project. NASA, however, did agree to pay for a second uncrewed test in August of 2021. That test never made it off the launch pad due to a "valve issue." Fixing that problem took until the following May when the follow-up test flight completed successfully.

The two subsequent preparatory attempts for a crewed flight, did not. The scheduled July 21 flight was scrubbed after faults were discovered in both the parachute system and wiring harnesses. Which brings us to March, which is when Boeing is confident its Starliner will successfully shuttle a pair of NASA astronauts to the ISS for a weeklong stay. To date, Boeing is estimated to have incurred around $1.5 billion in project cost overruns.   

Scientists at a federally funded research center in the US have successfully conducted a second nuclear fusion reaction experiment that resulted in a net energy gain. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) said scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) generated a higher energy yield than in their December breakthrough, as Reuters reports.

The nuclear fusion approach is very similar to the process that results in stars being able to emit light and heat. The scientists used a laser aimed at fuel to combine two light atoms into a denser one. This releases a great deal of energy. The process is said to have a lot of potential as a source of sustainable, low-carbon energy that could help combat climate change.

In the initial experiment in December, the laser delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target. The scientists achieved fusion ignition by generating 3.15 megajoules of energy output. That's a net yield of around 1.1 megajoules, which is equivalent to 0.31kWh — enough energy to power a 50-watt LED TV for six hours.

It's not yet clear exactly how much of a net energy yield was obtained from the latest successful experiment, which was carried out on July 30th. An LLNL spokesperson told Reuters that researchers are still analyzing the final results.

There's quite some way to go until fusion ignition becomes a viable option for mainstream energy production with the capability of powering homes. For one thing, scientists will have to scale up the system substantially. In any case, showing that it was possible to repeat the experiment and surpass the previous results is a positive step forward for clean energy.

NASA estimates that its Earth science missions will generate around a quarter million terabytes of data in 2024 alone. In order for climate scientists and the research community efficiently dig through these reams of raw satellite data, IBM, HuggingFace and NASA have collaborated to build an open-source geospatial foundation model that will serve as the basis for a new class of climate and Earth science AIs that can track deforestation, predict crop yields and rack greenhouse gas emissions.

For this project, IBM leveraged its recently-released Watsonx.ai to serve as the foundational model using a year’s worth of NASA’s Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 satellite data (HLS). That data is collected by the ESA’s pair of Sentinel-2 satellites, which are built to acquire high resolution optical imagery over land and coastal regions in 13 spectral bands.

For it’s part, HuggingFace is hosting the model on its open-source AI platform. According to IBM, by fine-tuning the model on “labeled data for flood and burn scar mapping,” the team was able to improve the model's performance 15 percent over the current state of the art using half as much data.

"The essential role of open-source technologies to accelerate critical areas of discovery such as climate change has never been clearer,” Sriram Raghavan, VP of IBM Research AI, said in a press release. “By combining IBM’s foundation model efforts aimed at creating flexible, reusable AI systems with NASA’s repository of Earth-satellite data, and making it available on the leading open-source AI platform, Hugging Face, we can leverage the power of collaboration to implement faster and more impactful solutions that will improve our planet.”

NASA is launching its very own streaming platform called NASA+ sometime this summer. While the space agency already livestreams launches and other events on its website, NASA+ will feature not just live broadcasts, but also collections of original video series. A handful of the first shows on the platform will even be new titles launching with the service, and what's even better is that it will be free and will not be interrupting shows with ads. In other words, it's where you should go if you want to binge watch NASA and space content. 

The streaming service will be available through the agency's iOS and Android apps on mobile devices. You'll also be able to access it on desktop and mobile browsers, as well as stream shows on demand through media players, such as Roku, Apple TV and Fire TV. 

Marc Etkind from NASA's Office of Communications said:

"We’re putting space on demand and at your fingertips with NASA’s new streaming platform. Transforming our digital presence will help us better tell the stories of how NASA explores the unknown in air and space, inspires through discovery, and innovates for the benefit of humanity."

In addition to introducing its own streaming service, NASA is also giving its whole digital presence an overhaul. It's currently working on a new web (and app) experience that can better consolidate information about its missions, research projects and updates about the Artemis program, among other things. NASA has numerous websites for different programs and divisions, but the new experience will include content from several of them. It will also feature integrated navigation and search function for easier access to information across NASA websites. You can visit the beta version of the upgraded web experience right now, but take note that the agency plans to connect more libraries and websites to it even after it's been fully launched. 

NASA and DARPA have chosen aerospace and defense company Lockheed Martin to develop a spacecraft with a nuclear thermal rocket engine. Announced in January, the initiative — in which BWX Technologies will provide the reactor and fuel — is dubbed the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO). The agencies aim to showcase the tech no later than 2027 with an eye toward future Mars missions.

Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) has several advantages over chemically propelled rockets. First, it’s two to five times more efficient, allowing ships to travel faster and farther with greater agility. In addition, its reduced propellant needs leave more room on the spaceship for storing scientific equipment and other essentials. It also provides more options for abort scenarios, as the nuclear engines make it easier to alter the ship’s trajectory for a quicker-than-expected return trip. These factors combine to make NTP (perhaps) the ideal Mars travel method.

“These more powerful and efficient nuclear thermal propulsion systems can provide faster transit times between destinations,” said Kirk Shireman, VP of Lunar Exploration Campaigns for Lockheed Martin. “Reducing transit time is vital for human missions to Mars to limit a crew’s exposure to radiation.”

NASA / DARPA

The NTP system will use a nuclear reactor to heat hydrogen propellant rapidly to extremely high temperatures. That gas is funneled through the engine’s nozzle, creating the ship’s thrust. “This nuclear thermal propulsion system is designed to be extremely safe and reliable, using High Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) fuel to rapidly heat a super-cold gas, such as liquid hydrogen,” BWX said today. “As the gas is heated, it expands quickly and creates thrust to move the spacecraft more efficiently than typical chemical combustion engines.”

To help quell concerns about radioactive leaks in the Earth’s atmosphere, NASA and DARPA plan not to power up the reactor until the ship has reached a “nuclear safe orbit,” where any tragedies would occur outside the zone where it would affect Earth. The agencies aim for a nuclear spacecraft demonstration by 2027, launched from a conventional rocket until it reaches “an appropriate location above low earth orbit.”

Nuclear reactors will also likely play a key role in powering future Martian habitats, with NASA testing small and portable versions of the tech as far back as 2018.

Before NTP propels the first humans to Mars, it could find use on much shorter flights, as nuclear-powered spacecraft could also make transporting material to the Moon more efficient. “A safe, reusable nuclear tug spacecraft would revolutionize cislunar operations,” said Shireman. “With more speed, agility and maneuverability, nuclear thermal propulsion also has many national security applications for cislunar space.”

Last month, theoretical physicist Avi Loeb made headlines with the sensational claim that tiny spherules recovered from the bottom of the ocean were probably of alien origin. “It’s most likely a technological gadget with artificial intelligence,” he said to The New York Times, which published a story today about the Harvard professor’s contentious claims. Although the biggest scientific breakthroughs often start with a bold hypothesis, Loeb’s peers believe the decorated astrophysicist’s assertions can be called many things — but “good science” isn’t one of them.

Loeb’s proclamations stem from an object that US government sensors logged on January 8th, 2014: a fireball from space that blazed into the western Pacific Ocean off the northeastern coast of Papua New Guinea. Highlighting its logged speed and direction as an anomaly, Loeb and undergraduate assistant Amir Siraj targeted the otherwise inconsequential planetary entry as an object worthy of further investigation.

Fast-forward to last month, when Loeb led a voyage — funded by a crypto entrepreneur — to recover evidence from the fireball’s calculated crash path. Dragging a magnetic sled attached to the expedition boat across the ocean floor, the team recovered a series of tiny spherical objects which Loeb says “appear under a microscope as beautiful metallic marbles.” Preliminary analysis indicated that the sub-millimeter orbs were 84 percent iron, with silicon, magnesium and trace elements comprising the rest. Loeb believes that “as a result of being exposed to the fireball’s heat, the surface of the object likely disintegrated into tiny spherules, similar in number per unit area to those recovered by the expedition.”

Avi Loeb / Medium

Not one to exercise much caution with public pronouncements, Loeb wrote in a Medium post, “Their discovery opens a new frontier in astronomy, where what lay outside the solar system is studied through a microscope rather than a telescope.” He summarized, in an equally dramatic manner, “The discovery of spherules felt like a miracle.” Soon after, CBS News picked up on his excitement and published an attention-grabbing article titled, “Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he’s found fragments of alien technology.” Loeb has sent the mysterious spheres to Harvard University, the University of California, Berkeley and the Bruker Corporation in Germany for more in-depth analysis.

“It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA,” CBS Newsreported Loeb as saying earlier this month. “We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization or some technological gadget.”

It all sounds fascinating, especially with the resurgent interest in UFOs and the quest to discover signs of alien life. But there’s one problem: The scientific community, by and large, believes Loeb is, if not entirely full of it, practicing something far outside what they’d call science.

Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at Western University in Ontario, said that “several percent” of detected events appear interstellar at first but almost always end up chalked up to a measurement error. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, argued at a recent conference that if the object were traveling as fast as the data suggests — one of the points Loeb uses to indicate its origin was from outside our solar system — it would have been wholly incinerated entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Brown and other scientists also highlight Loeb’s lack of engagement with peers who study similar unidentified fireballs.

Brown recently presented data (accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal) demonstrating that NASA’s recordings in cases like these often end up being proven untrustworthy. He believes the fireball likely impacted at a slower speed than the recorded data suggested. “If the speed was overestimated, then the object becomes, more or less, within the realm of what we see in terms of other bound solar system objects,” he said. (Loeb retorted by citing an unbendable trust in government data: “They are responsible for national security. I think they know what they are doing.”) The New York Times adds that the government is unlikely to declassify the data that would allow the scientific community to learn how precise (or not) it is.

Avi Loeb / Medium

Regardless of the spherules’ origins, researchers are alarmed by Loeb’s penchant for venturing outside science to make bold (and highly publicized) claims — with his scientific background boosting their perceived legitimacy. The gist of their alarm is that becoming a Harvard-employed astrophysicist doesn’t grant you the wizard-like ability to know the answers to questions the scientific method hasn’t yet confirmed. On the contrary, it’s supposed to mean your peers respect you for exercising restraint and doing quite the opposite. “[Loeb’s claims are] a real breakdown of the peer review process and the scientific method,” Desch said to The New York Times. “And it’s so demoralizing and tiring.”

Loeb’s views about his peers’ harsh response can be summarized in his cited quote from philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer from a recent blog post. “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident.” Notably, Loeb seemingly refers to his team’s preliminary findings — with plenty of question marks still intact — as “truth.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines confirmation bias as “the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.” Loeb’s words and excited tone suggest he knows the answer and that his peers’ criticism stems from their resistance to the new frontier he’s discovered. However, their criticism seems only partially about his specific conclusions; it’s paired with a larger concern about an esteemed cohort jumping to conclusions that fall far outside of the scientific method. “What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works,” remarked Desch. “And they shouldn’t go away thinking that.”

The Apollo 11 moon landing was a seminal event in American history, one etched deeply into our nation's collective psyche. The event ushered in an era of unbridled possibilities — the stars were finally coming into reach — and its effects were felt across the culture, from art and fashion to politics and culture. In After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, a multidisciplinary collection of historians, researchers and academics explore the myriad ways that putting a man on the moon impacted the American Experience.

University of Florida Press

Excerpted from “Scientists Without Borders: Immigrants in NASA and the Apollo Program” by Rosanna Perotti from After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, edited by J Bret Bennington and Rodney F. Hill. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2023. Reprinted with permission of the University of Florida Press.

Space Travel and the Immigrant Experience

From NASA’s very beginnings, immigrant engineers, scientists, and technicians lent their talent, labor, and technical skills to the space program. But space travel itself always represented more than a scientific endeavor. Human spaceflight was one of the “great dreams” of the 1960s, as space historian Valerie Neal reminds us, and as a “big idea,” spaceflight relied heavily on American cultural narratives. The Apollo program (1963–1972) conjured the image of pioneering the frontier in the 1960s—exploration and discovery were indispensable to America’s history and continuing redefinition, and Americans welcomed the frontier as a metaphor for space exploration (Neal 15). The shuttle program (1972–2011) echoed the narrative of Americans “going to work.” As the Apollo missions were replaced by the space shuttle, NASA supporters and commentators depicted the shuttle crews with imagery associated with blue-collar labor: “astronaut repairmen made service calls in a vehicle often called a space truck."

Both of these narratives — “pioneering the frontier” and “getting the job done” — are closely associated with a third narrative that was becoming deeply ingrained in American national identity in the 1960s: the myth of the United States as a nation of immigrants and of the immigrant as the backbone of America’s egalitarian democracy. This American immigrant myth was not born in the nineteenth or even in the early twentieth century, when immigration was peaking and Congress struggled to impose limitations and quotas. The myth reached wide acceptance only in the early 1960s. It is no coincidence that John F. Kennedy presented the immigrant myth most succinctly in his pamphlet, A Nation of Immigrants, in 1963, as Kennedy was preparing to ask Congress to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. At the same time, his administration was pressing furiously to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, a central goal of the New Frontier. Interestingly, Kennedy’s space proposals were a far more important policy priority for the administration than immigration reform (the latter was not accomplished until 1965, as we shall see later). But his articulation of the “nation of immigrants” narrative provided powerful imagery in support of the space program he championed from the start of his administration.

Kennedy’s articulation of the complex immigration myth featured not just a welcoming America, but an idealized immigrant, united with others by little other than a common love of freedom. Ours was “a nation of people with the fresh memory of old traditions who dared to explore new frontiers, people eager to build lives for themselves in a spacious society that did not restrict their freedom of choice and action." Citing Tocqueville, Kennedy noted that immigrants’ very poverty made them more inclined toward egalitarian democracy. No arena of American life was untouched by the influence of immigrants, and immigrants themselves were paragons of self-reliance, ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and pioneer spirit. “It was the future and not the past to which he was compelled to address himself,” Kennedy wrote, describing the motivations of the nineteenth-century immigrant.

Except for the Negro slave, he could go anywhere and do anything his talents permitted. A sprawling continent lay before him, and he had only to weld it together by canals, by railroads and by roads . . . This has been the foundation of American inventiveness and ingenuity, of the multiplicity of new enterprises, and of the success in achieving the highest standard of living anywhere in the world.

The space program was the next frontier in the natural progression toward excellence. It evoked not only the immigrant’s capacity for adventure and discovery but also his practicality and capacity to work hard and tame his surroundings. From the time of the English settlers, who “fought a rugged land” in the words of Kennedy, immigrants had to overcome adversity to earn their fortunes and shape their environment. They had worked as artisans, provided cheap labor for American farms, factories, mills, and mines, and climbed the economic ladder to provide succeeding generations with educational opportunities. They had moved forward to get the job done. Launched under the motto “Going to Work in Space,” the space shuttle was a vehicle that could deliver satellites and repair them in orbit, carry commercial payloads, and support a research laboratory. Astronauts would carry out their work all but rolling up their sleeves as builders and repair technicians, wielding robotic arms and power hand tools. Businesses could use the shuttle as a workhorse to launch satellites or develop manufacturing capabilities. All of this economic productivity in space could be expected to resonate with a nation whose increasingly diverse immigrant workforce was transitioning to a new economy. American society was reflected not only symbolically but practically in NASA’s missions. They produced results that appeared almost impossibly ambitious. NASA represented excellence: the best work in the world. Space travel also mirrored some of the risks and hardships of the immigrant experience. As the American public began questioning the nation’s investment in space travel through the 1980s, advocates harked back to this part of the immigrant narrative. In the aftermath of the 1986 Challenger tragedy, the Report of the Advisory Committee on the Future of the US Space Program (1990) reminded Americans that acceptance and resilience in the face of failure were a part of America’s pioneer and immigrant legacies:

In a very real sense, the space program is analogous to the exploration and settlement of the new world. In this view, risk and sacrifice are seen to be constant features of the American experience. There is a national heritage of risk-taking handed down from early explorers, immigrants, settlers, and adventurers. It is this element of our national character that is the wellspring of the U.S. space program.

Electric vehicle startup Canoo has delivered its first shipment to NASA. This week, a trio of the company’s Crew Transportation Vehicles (CTVs) arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Although they look like they’re made for exploring the surface of the Moon, the vans are designed to carry astronauts to the KSC’s launch pads, starting with NASA’s forthcoming Artemis 2 mission.

According to Canoo, the vans, based on the company’s existing lifestyle vehicle design, can carry fully-suited astronauts, as well as flight support crew and any equipment they may need. “The vehicles have an exclusive interior and exterior design that will provide astronaut and crew comfort and safety while on the nine-mile journey to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center,” the company said, adding it would share interior shots of the vehicles later this year.

Canoo

The Artemis 2 mission will see NASA launch its first crewed mission to the Moon since the end of the Apollo program in 1972. Four astronauts will travel around the satellite during the 10-day flight. During Artemis 2, NASA plans to conduct additional tests of its Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) super heavy-lift rocket to ensure both spacecraft are safe for future crewed missions to the lunar surface.

As for Canoo, this is a chance for the automaker to drum up interest for its EVs. In May 2022, the company warned investors it was running low on cash. Since then, it announced an agreement with Walmart to provide the retailer with 4,500 EVs. The company also delivered a test vehicle to the US Army. Still, even with those deals in place, it has a long way to go before achieving financial sustainability.

The Perseverance Rover has found evidence of organic compounds in the Jezero Crater on Mars. Don’t get too excited: These compounds could have also developed in nonbiological ways. But even if it’s not proof of organic life on Mars, the results hint at complex organic conditions for the “key building blocks for life.” Organic molecules like those observed in the Jezero Crater contain carbon and often hydrogen atoms. They’re the core components of life as we know it on Earth.

The rover found organic materials in all ten targets it observed on the crater floor. “Our results support observations by previous robotic missions to Mars that the Red Planet was once rich in organic material, compounds made primarily of carbon and hydrogen, and that some of that organic material can still be detected billions of years later,” co-author Joseph Razzell Hollis, a London-based astrobiologist, told Gizmodo. “Each detection, each observation, gives us a little bit more information that brings us closer to understanding the history of Mars and whether it could have supported life in the past.”

Hopefully, scientists can maintain this level of excitement. They’ll have to wait for the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, which isn’t expected to launch from Earth until at least the late 2020s.

– Mat Smith

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Engadget

Just a year ago, Apple announced the biggest software update the iPad has ever seen. iPadOS 16 ushered in Stage Manager, a completely revamped multitasking mode. There were several other new features, as usual, but Stage Manager, in particular, brought the iPad closer than ever to a Mac or Windows PC experience. iPadOS 17, on the other hand, is a subtler update. We preview the beta, which is out on public release now.

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Google's Bard AI chatbot has learned to talk

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'Roblox' is coming to Meta Quest VR headsets

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Roblox

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Elon Musk’s new AI company aims ‘to understand the true nature of the universe’

The team will be holding a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday.

Elon Musk has a new AI company. A website has appeared for xAI, which will embark on the self-described mission to “understand the true nature of the universe.” The announcement comes after filing documents revealed the existence of a company called X.AI Corp earlier this year. Musk also said in April he wanted to start a venture for “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” which “hopefully does more good than harm.”

Not much else is known yet about Musk’s latest venture. He tweeted yesterday: “Announcing formation of @xAI to understand reality.” The company webpage notes the team will host a Twitter Spaces chat on Friday, July 14th.

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