The next Artemis 1 launch attempt might take place as soon as next week, seeing as NASA has met all the objectives it set out to do to consider its rocket's fuel test a success. NASA had to test adding super-cooled fuel to the Space Launch System's tanks to confirm the repairs it made after it scrubbed the mission's second launch attempt in late August. The ground team at Kennedy Space Center spotted a persistent hydrogen leak affecting one of the fuel lines on the SLS at the time and tried to fix it the day of three times. In the end, the team was unsuccessful and decided to postpone the mission.
The team determined a few days later that the leak was triggered when the SLS rocket's core booster tank went through a brief overpressurization. To prevent the same incident from happening, the team adjusted procedures for filling the rocket's tank with propellants, and it involves transitioning temperatures and pressures more slowly to prevent rapid changes that could cause leakage. The team's engineers also replaced the rocket's liquid hydrogen seals after discovering a small indentation in one of them that may have contributed to the leak.
While the engineers encountered another hydrogen leak during the fuel test, their troubleshooting efforts worked this time around and got the leak to "within allowable rates." That allowed them to conduct the pre-pressurization test, which brought up the liquid hydrogen tank's pressure level to match what it would experience just before an actual launch.
Artemis 1 launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said the test went "really well" and that the team was able to accomplish all the objectives it set out to do. NASA will now evaluate data from the test before deciding if it can schedule another launch for the mission on its target date of September 27th.
The James Webb Space Telescope's tour of the Solar System just shed light on the most distant planet in our cosmic neighborhood. Researchers have shared the observatory's first image of Neptune, and it offers the best view of the icy world's rings in over 30 years. The picture is not only clear, but offers the first-ever look at the dust-based rings in the near-infrared spectrum. At these wavelengths, the planet doesn't look blue — it absorbs so much infrared and visible red light that it takes on a dark, ghostly appearance.
The image also shows seven of Neptune's 14 confirmed moons, including Triton (the 'star' at top) as well as Galatea, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Proteus and Larissa. The bright spots and streaks on the planet represent methane-ice clouds, including a swirl surrounding a vortex at the south pole. Triton's attention-grabbing look is the product of both the James Webb telescope's telltale diffraction spikes as well as a condensed nitrogen surface that typically reflects 70 percent of sunlight.
A closer view of Neptune and six of its moons (Galatea, Naiad, Thalassa, Despina, Proteus and Larissa).
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Neptune is a particularly important target for scientists. At roughly 2.8 billion miles from the Sun, it's far enough to deal with conditions that aren't present for nearer planets, such as very low temperatures and a very long (164-year) orbit. Triton's odd retrograde orbit even suggests might be a Kuiper Belt object that succumbed to Neptune's gravitational pull.
This is just the start of studies using the James Webb telescope, and researchers expect to collect more observations of both Neptune and Triton within the next year. As with the recent looks at Mars and Jupiter, astronomers are only collecting preliminary data at this stage. You may have to wait a while before there are further insights that could improve our understandings of Neptune and space at large.
The James Webb Space Telescope is still snapping its first pictures of Solar System planets, and the latest batch could be particularly useful. NASA and the ESA have shared early images of Mars, taken on September 5th, that promise new insights into the planet's atmosphere. Data from the near-infrared camera (NIRCam) is already offering a few surprises. For starters, the giant Hellas Basin is oddly darker than nearby areas at the hottest time of the day, NASA's Giuliano Liuzzi and Space.comnoted — higher air pressure at the basin's lower altitude has suppressed thermal emissions.
The JWST imagery also gave space agencies an opportunity to share Mars' near-infrared atmospheric composition using the telescope's onboard spectrograph array. The spectroscopic 'map' (pictured at middle) shows the planet absorbing carbon dioxide at several different wavelengths, and also shows the presences of carbon monoxide and water. A future research paper will provide more detail about the Martian air's chemistry.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Mars JWST/GTO team
It was particularly tricky to record the images. Mars is one of the brightest objects the James Webb telescope can see — a problem for an observatory designed to study the most distant objects in the universe. Researchers countered this by capturing very short exposures and using special techniques to analyze the findings.
This is only the initial wave of pictures and data. It will take more observations to reveal more about Mars. However, the spectral info already hints at more information about the planet's materials. Liuzzi also thinks JWST studies could settle disputes over the presence of methane on Mars, potentially signalling that the Red Planet harbored life in its distant past.
Voyager and Lockheed Martin have found a partner to design astronaut facilities for their space station. Hilton will develop suites and sleeping quarters for Starlab, CNBC reports. Under the partnership, Hilton and Voyager will also look at marketing opportunities related to Starlab and trips to what may be one of the first space hotels.
NASA has granted contracts to four private companies who are building private space stations ahead of the agency's planned decommissioning of the International Space Station at the end of the decade. Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman are also working on space stations. Voyager's operating company Nanoracks received the largest contract, which was valued at $160 million.
Voyager and Lockheed Martin hope to have the first Starlab up and running by 2027. I wonder how many Hilton Honors points it will cost for a trip there.
Blue Origin’s recent NS-23 flight didn’t go according to plan. On Monday morning, the private space firm was forced to abort the uncrewed mission after one of its New Shepard rockets suffered an unspecified “booster failure.” The problem came up about a minute after the flight took off from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site at 10:26AM ET. You can see the entire incident unfold in the video the company shared on Twitter.
Booster failure on today’s uncrewed flight. Escape system performed as designed. pic.twitter.com/xFDsUMONTh
“It appears we have experienced an anomaly with today’s flight,” a commentator said during the NS-23 livestream. “This was unplanned and we don't have any details yet. But our crew capsule was able to escape successfully, we’ll follow its progress through landing. As you can see, the drogues have deployed, and the mains are going to be pulled out next.”
The capsule was carrying NASA-funded research equipment. “It’s useless to speculate about what happened at this point. Not even the company knows the cause,” tweeted Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, adding in a separate post that had the spacecraft been manned, the crew “would have felt a serious jolt, but would have been safe.”
Blue Shepard won’t be able to fly again until Blue Origin investigates the incident and the Federal Aviation Administration signs off on the company’s findings.
NASA has completed a critical repair of its next-generation Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. On Friday, engineers replaced the leaky seal that forced the agency to scrub its most recent attempt to launch Artemis 1. On September 3rd, a fitting on one of the fuel lines to the SLS began leaking hydrogen. Ground crew at Kennedy Space Center tried to troubleshoot the problem three times, only for the leak to persist and force NASA to call off the launch attempt. On Friday, engineers also replaced the seal on a 4-inch hydrogen “bleed line” that was responsible for a smaller leak during an earlier August 29th launch attempt.
Engineers have replaced the seals associated with the hydrogen leak detected during the #Artemis I launch attempt on Sept. 3. The teams will inspect the new seals over the weekend and assess opportunities to launch: https://t.co/dT8A4UEkvdpic.twitter.com/xXzwbYOxMp
With the new gaskets in place, NASA plans to conduct a fueling test to verify they’re working as intended. The dry run will see engineers attempt to load the SLS with all 736,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen it would need during a regular flight. NASA hopes to successfully complete that test as early as September 17th. “This demonstration will allow engineers to check the new seals under cryogenic, or supercold, conditions as expected on launch day and before proceeding to the next launch attempt,” the agency said.
On Thursday, NASA announced it was targeting September 23rd for another go at putting Artemis 1 into space, with September 27th as a backup. Whether it can make those dates will depend on next week’s fueling test and a decision from the US Space Force. Flight regulations require that NASA test the battery of Artemis 1’s flight termination system every 20 days. That’s something it can only do within the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building. The Space Force previously granted the agency an extension on the 20-day deadline. NASA has now asked for another waiver.
It's difficult to describe the state of the universe's affairs back when the whole of everything was compressed to a size slightly smaller than the period at the end of this sentence — on account that the concepts of time and space literally didn't yet apply. But that challenge hasn't stopped pioneering theoretical astrophysicist, Dr. Laura Mersini-Houghton, from seeking knowledge at the edge of the known universe and beyond. In her new book, Before the Big Bang, Mersini-Houghton recounts her early life in communist Albania, her career as she rose to prominence in the male-dominated field of astrophysics and discusses her research into the multiverse which could fundamentally rewrite our understanding of reality.
Scientific investigations of problems like the creation of the universe, which we can neither observe nor reproduce and test in a lab, are similar to detective work in that they rely on intuition as well as evidence. Like a detective, as pieces of the puzzle start falling into place, researchers can intuitively sense the answer is close. This was the feeling I had as Rich and I tried to figure out how we could test our theory about the multiverse. Rationally, it seemed like a long shot, but intuitively, it seemed achievable.
Finally, a potential solution hit me. I realized that the key to testing and validating this theory was hidden in quantum entanglement — because decoherence and entanglement were two sides of the same coin! I could rewind the creation story all the way back to its quantum-landscape roots, when our wave-universe was entangled with others.
I already knew that the separation — the decoherence — of the branches of the wave function of the universe (which then become individual universes) was triggered by their entanglement with the environmental bath of fluctuations. Now I wondered if we could calculate and find any traces of this early entanglement imprinted on our sky today.
This might sound like a contradiction. How could our universe possibly still be entangled with all the other universes all these eons after the Big Bang? Our universe must have separated from them in its quantum infancy. But as I wrestled with these issues, I realized that it was possible to have a universe that had long since decohered but that also retained its infantile “dents” — minor changes in shape caused by the interaction with other surviving universes that had been entangled with ours during the earliest moments — as identifiable birthmarks. The scars of its initial entanglement should still be observable in our universe today.
The key was in the timing. Our wave-universe was decohering around the same time as the next stage, the particle universe, was going through its own cosmic inflation and coming into existence. Everything we observe in our sky today was seeded from the primordial fluctuations produced in those first moments, which take place at the smallest of units of measurable time, far less than a second. In principle, during those moments, as entanglement was being wiped out, its signatures could have been stamped on the inflaton and its fluctuations. There was a chance that the sort of scars that I was imagining had formed during this brief period. And if they had, they should be visible in the skies.
Understanding how scars formed from entanglement is less complicated than you might imagine. I started by trying to create a mental picture of the entanglement’s scarring of our sky. I visualized all the surviving universes from the branches of the wave function of the universe, including ours, as a bunch of particles spread around the quantum multiverse. Because they all contain mass and energy, they interact with (pull on) one another gravitationally, just as Newton’s apple had its path of motion curved by interacting with the Earth’s mass, thus guiding it to the ground. However, the apple was also being pulled on by the moon, the sun, all the other planets in our solar system, and all the stars in the universe. The Earth’s mass has the strongest force, but that does not mean these other forces do not exist. The net effect that entanglement left on our sky is captured by the combined pulling on our universe by other infant universes. Similar to the weak pulling from stars on the famous apple, at present, the signs of entanglement in our universe are incredibly small relative to the signs from cosmic inflation. But they are still there!
I will admit it... I was excited by the mere thought that I potentially had a way to glimpse beyond our horizon and before the Big Bang! Through my proposal of calculating and tracking entanglement in our sky, I may very well have pinned down, for the very first time, a way of testing the multiverse. What thrilled me most about this idea was its potential for making possible what for centuries we thought was impossible — an observational window to glimpse in space and in time beyond our universe into the multiverse. Our expanding universe provides the best cosmic laboratory for hunting down information about its infancy because everything we observe at large scales in our universe today was also present at its beginning. The basic elements of our universe do not vanish over time; they simply rescale their size with the expansion of the universe.
And here is why I thought of using quantum entanglement as the litmus test for our theory: Quantum theory contains a near-sacred principle known as “unitarity,” which states that no information about a system can ever be lost. Unitarity is a law of information conservation. It means that signs of the earlier quantum entanglement of our universe with the other surviving universes must still exist today. Thus, despite decoherence, entanglement can never be wiped from our universe’s memory; it is stored in its original DNA. Moreover, these signs have been encoded in our sky since its infancy, since the time the universe started as a wave on the landscape. Traces of this earlier entanglement would simply stretch out with the expansion of the universe as the universe became a much larger version of its infant self.
I was concerned that these signatures, which have been stretched by inflation and the expansion of the universe, would be quite weak. But on the basis of unitarity, I believed that however weak they were, they were preserved somewhere in our sky in the form of local violations or deviations from uniformity and homogeneity predicted by cosmic inflation.
Rich and I decided to calculate the effect of quantum entanglement on our universe to find out if any traces were left behind, then fast-forward them from infancy to the present and derive predictions for what kind of scars we should be looking for in our sky. If we could identify where we needed to look for them, we could test them by comparing them with actual observations.
Rich and I started on this investigation with help from a physicist in Tokyo, Tomo Takahashi. I first got to know Tomo at UNC Chapel Hill in 2004 when we overlapped by one year. He was a postdoc about to take a faculty position in Japan, and I had just arrived at UNC. We enjoyed interacting, and I saw the high standards Tomo maintained for his work and his incredible attention to detail. I knew he was familiar with the computer simulation program that we needed in order to compare the predictions based on our theory with actual data about matter and radiation signatures in the universe. In 2005, I called Tomo, and he agreed to collaborate with us.
Rich, Tomo, and I decided that the best place to begin our search was in the CMB — cosmic microwave background, the afterglow from the Big Bang. CMB is the oldest light in the universe, a universal “ether” permeating the entire cosmos throughout its history. As such, it contains a sort of exclusive record of the first millisecond in the life of the universe. And this silent witness of creation is still all around us today, making it an invaluable cosmic lab.
The energy of the CMB photons in our present universe is quite low; their frequencies peak around the microwave range (160 gigahertz), much like the photons in your kitchen microwave when you warm your food. Three major international scientific experiments — the COBE, WMAP, and Planck satellites (with a fourth one on the way), dating from the 1990s to the present — have measured the CMB and its much weaker fluctuations to exquisite precision. We even encounter CMB photons here on Earth. Indeed, seeing and hearing CMB used to be an everyday experience in the era of old TV sets: when changing channels, the viewer would experience the CMB signal in the form of static — the blurry, buzzing gray and white specks that appeared on the TV screen.
But if our universe started purely from energy, what can we see in the CMB photons that gives us a nascent image of the universe? Here, quantum theory, specifically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, provides the answer. According to the uncertainly principle, quantum uncertainty, displayed as fluctuations in the initial energy of inflation, is unavoidable. When the universe stops inflating, it is suddenly filled with waves of quantum fluctuations of the inflaton energy. The whole range of fluctuations, some with mass and some without, are known as density perturbations. The shorter waves in this spectrum, those that fit inside the universe, become photons or particles, depending on their mass (reflecting the phenomenon of wave-particle duality).
The tiny tremors in the fabric of the universe that induce weak ripples or vibrations in the gravitational field, what are known as primordial gravitational waves, hold information on what particular model of inflation took place. They are incredibly small, at one part in about ten billion of the strength of the CMB spectrum, and therefore are much harder to observe. But they are preserved in the CMB.
The Federal Communications Commission wants to do something about space junk in low Earth orbit. On Thursday, the agency published a proposal (via Ars Technica) that, if adopted, would put a deadline on how long non-geostationary satellites can stay in space.
As things stand, voluntary NASA guidelines published in the 1990s recommend that dead satellites should be deorbited within 25 years. The FCC wants to adopt a five-year rule that would require domestic satellite operators and companies that want access to the US market to dispose of their non-functioning satellites as soon as they can. “We believe it is no longer sustainable to leave satellites in LEO [low Earth orbit] to deorbit over decades,” the FCC states in its proposal.
Our space economy is moving fast. For it to continue to grow, we need to do more to clean up after ourselves so space innovation can continue to expand. That is why I am proposing to shorten the 25-year guideline to no more than 5 years. https://t.co/u8uImI25hQ
Satellites already in space would be exempt from the FCC’s guidelines. The Commission is also proposing there be a two-year grandfathering period that start on September 29th, the day it plans to vote on the regulation. That carveout would give organizations that previously obtained approval for a future satellite launch time to develop a disposal plan for their spacecraft. The FCC said it would also grant waivers case-by-case after NASA expressed concern that the five-year limit would impact its CubeSat missions.
The proposal comes as the number of satellites in low Earth orbit is expected to increase over the next few years dramatically. With contributions from companies like SpaceX, Amazon and OneWeb, as many as 18,000 new satellites could be floating above the planet by 2025. Those satellites will not only make it more challenging to observe the night sky, but the probability of a potential crash will increase too.
I think beneath Tim Cook’s deeply reserved, professional aura lies someone who loves a bit of sass. Naturally, as the CEO of Apple, Cook needs to present a professional image at all times, but he did let his sense of humor out at the 2022 Code Conference. During a Q&A, a journalist asked about the iPhone’s lack of compatibility with RCS, which meant they couldn’t share video clips with their Android-using mom. Cook said it wasn’t a priority for the company, then joked that the person should “buy your mom an iPhone.”
A group inside Meta that analyzed potential harms to society caused by Facebook’s products has been shut down. The team consisted of engineers, ethicists and civil rights experts who advised the company’s broader team on potential risks. Meta didn’t explain why the group has closed but said it remained committed to the team’s goals. Of course, given Facebook’s reputation for building products without much consideration of the consequences, this seems like an unwise step. Maybe there should be a team of in-house experts to point out this sort of thing ahead of… ohhhh.
Microsoft promised a deal for three years, Sony wasn’t happy.
As part of the $68.7 billion deal to acquire Activision Blizzard, Microsoft has had to make several commitments to ward off antitrust regulators and angry gamers. One of the biggest was to not pull major franchises, like Call of Duty, away from the PlayStation to force people to buy Xboxes. Despite public promises made by Xbox head Phil Spencer, PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan isn’t happy. Ryan revealed Microsoft has only promised to keep Call of Duty on the rival platform for a further three years, after which things get a little more uncertain.
NVIDIA’s GPU technology conference happens later this month, and the big news is CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote. The company says that at 11 AM ET on September 20th, we’re going to see “the latest breakthroughs in gaming, creating and graphics technology.”
That’s set many tongues wagging. Are we going to see the next generation of Ampere Next-based GPUs in the form of the RTX-40 series? Given the majority of RTX-30 cards are only now entering the market after the crypto bubble burst, it’ll be interesting to see how many of these actually go on sale in the near future.
NASA has picked Axiom Space to supply the space suits worn when humanity returns to the moon. These new suits will work for a wider range of crew members and offer increased flexibility and more specialized tools for exploration. The lack of appropriate gear was one of the reasons a planned all-woman spacewalk was canceled back in 2019. With a contract in place to provide the suits necessary to walk on the moon, the planned return to our nearest neighbor feels a lot more real. Now NASA just has to get the wagon that’ll take everyone there up and running.
‘Star Trek: Khan – Ceti Alpha V’ will be written and directed by Nicholas Meyer.
A prestige streaming series covering the life of Trek arch-villain Khan Noonien Singh while in exile on Ceti Alpha V has been rescued from development hell and will be turned into a podcast. Star Trek: Khan – Ceti Alpha V will fill in the gap from the end of classic series episode ‘Space Seed’ until the beginning of The Wrath of Khan. More importantly, however, the series will be written and directed by Trek superstar Nicholas Meyer. I’ll be honest, I never expected to get more Trek written by Meyer in my lifetime, and I’m here for it.
The Artemis III mission will take humanity back to the Moon and will have two astronauts conducting up to four spacewalks on its surface. Now, NASA has picked the company that will be building the spacesuits Artemis astronauts will wear when they leave their spacecraft and explore the lunar landscape. The agency has announced that Axiom Space will develop the mission's moonwalking system and has been awarded an order with a value of at least $228.5 million.
Axiom is one of the two companies that NASA named as its official Artemis spacesuit partners back in June, with the other one being Collins Aerospace. For this particular order, the agency said it reviewed proposals from the two vendors and had decided on Axiom to design, develop, certify and ultimately produce Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) spacesuits and equipment for Artemis III.
Axiom's xEVAS will build off on NASA's Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU) spacesuits that the agency designed for Artemis missions. They will accommodate a wide range of crew members, the company said in its announcement, and will be built with increased flexibility and specialized tools for exploration.
That Axiom is building the spacesuit to accommodate a wider range of bodies is of particular importance as we prepare to explore the Moon and other deep space locations. If you'll recall, a planned all-female spacewalk back in 2019 was cancelled due to the lack of properly fitting gear, and it put a spotlight on spacesuit design and the availability of various sizes. Artemis III is intended to put the first woman on the lunar surface, and Axiom has confirmed in its announcement that it will be making an xEVAS spacesuit for that female astronaut.
Michael Suffredini, Axiom Space President & CEO, said in a statement:
"Our modernized, evolvable spacesuits will enable rapid upgrades to implement better, safer technologies over time, ensuring our astronauts are always equipped with high performing, robust equipment. We look forward to providing our space pioneers with advanced tools needed to further humanity's permanent expansion off the planet."
This particular order is for the Artemis III landing only. The vendors are expected to compete for future task orders that include spacesuits for recurring lunar landings, as well as the development of spacesuits for use outside the ISS in low-Earth orbit.
