Scientists know that a dying star will become a giant that swallows all the planets within a certain radius, but they've never seen it happen... before now, that is. Astronomers at Caltech, Harvard, MIT and other schools have detected a star consuming one of its orbiting planets as it turns into a red giant. A star about 12,000 light-years away, close to the Aquila constellation, became 100 times brighter for over 10 days in an outburst that researchers say represented a hot jovian world falling into its host star's atmosphere and, ultimately, its core.

The group first observed the burst in May 2020, but took roughly a year to determine what happened. Thanks to the NEOWISE infrared telescope, the team ruled out merging stars. The energy from the outburst was only a thousandth of what it should have been for a star-on-star collision, and there was a stream of cold dust rather than hot plasma. MIT's Kishalay De, who led the paper, also notes that Jupiter's mass is about a thousandth that of the Sun, providing a handy reference point.

This phenomenon is believed to be common in the universe, and it's believed that the Earth and other inner Solar System planets will face a similar demise when the Sun dies roughly 5 billion years from now. In that regard, the astronomers confirmed their existing models. Past studies caught stars just before and after they swallowed planets, but never in mid-digestion.

There are still unknowns surrounding planet-munching stars. This finding helps complete the picture, though, and De tellsScienceNews that the next wave of infrared-capable observatories will increase the chances of finding similar events. That, in turn, could illustrate how these apocalyptic processes vary across the cosmos.

Russia has formally agreed to remain aboard the International Space Station (ISS) until 2028, NASA has announced. Yuri Borisov, the Director General of Roscosmos, previously said that the country was pulling out of the ISS after 2024 so it can focus on building its own space station. "After 2024" is pretty vague, though, and even Roscosmos official Sergei Krikalev said it could mean 2025, 2028 or 2030. Now, we have a more solid idea of until when Russia intends to remain a partner. To note, the United States, Japan, Canada and the participating countries of the ESA (European Space Agency) have previously agreed to keep the ISS running until 2030. 

After the United States and other countries imposed sanctions on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, former Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin spoke up and threatened to stop working with his agency's western counterparts. "I believe that the restoration of normal relations between the partners at the International Space Station and other projects is possible only with full and unconditional removal of illegal sanctions," Rogozin said at the time. 

While Roscosmos has now agreed to continue cooperating with its fellow ISS partners, the increasing tension between Russia and the US even before the invasion of Ukraine began prompted NASA to prepare for the possibility of the former leaving the space station. NASA and the White House reportedly drew plans to pull astronauts out of the station if Russia leaves abruptly, as well as to keep the ISS running without the Russian thrusters keeping the flying lab in orbit. 

Private space companies had reportedly been called in to help out, and a previous report said Boeing already formed a team of engineers to figure out how to control the ISS without Russia's thrusters. It's unclear if the remaining ISS partners will use any of those contingencies after 2028 and if a private space corp will step in to keep the space station running. It's worth noting, however, that NASA and other space agencies are already preparing to leave Low Earth Orbit to explore the moon. 

After a string of delays and a scrubbed launch attempt, SpaceX finally conducted the first test flight of its Starship spacecraft earlier this month. While the vehicle got off the ground, it seems federal agencies will be dealing with the explosive fallout of the mission for quite some time.

Federal agencies say the launch led to a 3.5-acre fire on state park land. The blaze was extinguished. Debris from the rocket, which SpaceX said it had to blow up in the sky for safety reasons after a separation failure, was found across hundreds of acres of land. “Although no debris was documented on refuge fee-owned lands, staff documented approximately 385 acres of debris on SpaceX’s facility and at Boca Chica State Park,” the Texas arm of the US Fish and Wildlife Service told Bloomberg.

The agency noted it hasn’t found evidence of dead wildlife as a result of the incident. Still, it’s working with the Federal Aviation Administration on a site assessment and post-launch recommendations, while ensuring compliance with the Endangered Species Act.

Soon after the launch and Starship’s explosion, the FAA said it was carrying out a mishap investigation. Starship is grounded for now and its return to flight depends on the agency “determining that any system, process or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety.”

Starship’s approved launch plan included an anomaly response process, which the FAA says was triggered after the spacecraft blew up. As such, SpaceX is required to remove debris from sensitive habitats, carry out a survey of wildlife and vegetation and send reports to several federal agencies. “The FAA will ensure SpaceX complies with all required mitigations,” the agency told Bloomberg.

Even if SpaceX can sate federal agencies' concerns swiftly, it may be quite some time until the next Starship launch. The super heavy-lift space launch vehicle destroyed its launch pad, sending chunks of debris into the air. Footage showed the shrapnel landing on a nearby beach and even hitting a van hundreds of yards from the launch site. Fortunately, no one was hurt, according to the FAA.

A Japanese company might be on the cusp of making history. Japan's ispace is attempting to land its Hakuto-R craft on the Moon at 12:40PM Eastern, and you can watch the livestream right now. If all goes well, ispace will claim both the first successful private Moon landing and the first Japanese lunar landing of any kind. To date, only China, the Soviet Union and the US have touched down. The vehicle includes payloads from NASA, Japan's JAXA and a small robotic rover (Rashid) from the United Arab Emirates. The rover is also historic as the UAE's first lunar craft.

Hakuto-R launched aboard a SpaceX rocket about 100 days ago. The landing is divided into six stages that include a de-orbit insertion, a largely unpowered "cruise" phase, a braking burn, a reorientation and two final phases where the machine slows down and (hopefully) reaches the surface intact. Israel's SpaceIL tried a private Moon landing in 2019, but it crashed following an engine failure.

A completed landing will help ispace's goals of sending two more landers to the Moon in 2024 and 2025. It could also spur Japan's broader spaceflight ambitions. Both JAXA and Japanese companies have struggled to get into space using domestically-made rockets. While ispace is relying on an American rocket to complete its mission, a landing would upstage SpaceX, Blue Origin and other private outfits racing to land on Earth's cosmic neighbor.

The gargantuan artificial construct enveloping your local star is going to be rather difficult to miss, even from a few light years away. And given the literally astronomical costs of resources needed to construct such a device — the still-theoretical-for-humans Dyson Sphere — having one in your solar system will also serve as a stark warning of your technological capacity to ETs that comes sniffing around. 

Or at least that's how 20th century astronomers like Nikolai Kardashev and Carl Sagan envisioned our potential Sol-spanning distant future going. Turns out, a whole lot of how we predict intelligences from outside our planet will behave is heavily influenced by humanity's own cultural and historical biases. In The Possibility of Life, science journalist Jaime Green examines humanity's intriguing history of looking to the stars and finding ourselves reflected in them.

Harper Collins Publishing

Excerpted from The Possibility of Life by Jaime Green, Copyright © 2023 by Jaime Green. Published by Hanover Square Press.

On a Scale of One to Three

The way we imagine human progress — technology, advancement — seems inextricable from human culture. Superiority is marked by fast ships, colonial spread, or the acquisition of knowledge that fuels mastery of the physical world. Even in Star Trek, the post-poverty, post-conflict Earth is rarely the setting. Instead we spend our time on a ship speeding faster than light, sometimes solving philosophical quandaries, but often enough defeating foes. The future is bigger, faster, stronger — and in space.

Astronomer Nikolai Kardashev led the USSR’s first SETI initiatives in the early 1960s, and he believed that the galaxy might be home to civilizations billions of years more advanced than ours. Imagining these civilizations was part of the project of searching for them. So in 1964, Kardashev came up with a system for classifying a civilization’s level of technological advancement.

The Kardashev scale, as it’s called, is pretty simple: a Type I civilization makes use of all the energy available on or from its planet. A Type II civilization uses all the energy from its star. A Type III civilization harnesses the energy of its entire galaxy.

What’s less simple is how a civilization gets to any of those milestones. These leaps, in case it’s not clear, are massive. On Earth we’re currently grappling with how dangerous it is to try to use all the energy sources on our planet, especially those that burn. (So we’re not even a Type I civilization, more like a Type Three-quarters.) A careful journey toward Type I would involve taking advantage of all the sunlight falling on a planet from its star, but that’s just one billionth or so of a star’s total energy output. A Type II civilization would be harnessing all of it.

It’s not just that a Type II civilization would have to be massive enough to make use of all that energy, they’d also have to figure out how to capture it. The most common imagining for this is called a Dyson sphere, a massive shell or swarm of satellites surrounding the star to capture and convert all its energy. If you wanted enough material to build such a thing, you’d essentially have to disassemble a planet, and not just a small one — more like Jupiter. And then a Type III civilization would be doing that, too, but for all the stars in its galaxy (and maybe doing some fancy stuff to suck energy off the black hole at the galaxy’s core).

On the one hand, these imaginings are about as close to culturally agnostic as we can get: they require no alien personalities, no sociology, just the consumption of progressively more power, to be put to use however the aliens might like. But the Kardashev scale still rests on assumptions that are baked into so many of our visions of advanced aliens (and Earth’s own future as well). This view conflates advancement not only with technology but with growth, with always needing more power and more space, just the churning and churning of engines. Astrophysicist Adam Frank identifies the Kardashev scale as a product of the midcentury “techno-utopian vision of the future.” At the point when Kardashev was writing, humanity hadn’t yet been forced to face the sensitive feedback systems our energy consumption triggers. “Planets, stars, and galaxies,” Frank writes, “would all simply be brought to heel.”

Even in the Western scientific tradition, alternatives to Kardashev’s scale have been offered. Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin proposed one scale that measures planetary mastery and another that measured colonizing spread. Carl Sagan offered one that accounts for the information available to a civilization. Cosmologist John D. Barrow proposed microscopic manipulation, going from Type I–minus, where people can manipulate objects of their own scale, down through the parts of living things, molecules, atoms, atomic nuclei, subatomic particles, to the very fabric of space and time. Frank proposed looking not at energy consumption but transformation, noting that a sophisticated civilization does more than bring a planet to heel, it must learn to find balance between resource use and long-term survival.

Of these — again, all white American or European men — only Sagan offers a measure of advancement that isn’t necessarily acquisitive. Even the manipulation of atoms, which may seem so small and delicate, requires massive amounts of energy in the form of particle accelerators, not to mention that this kind of tinkering has also unleashed humanity’s greatest destructive force. But Sagan’s super-advanced civilization could be nothing more than a massive, massive library, filled with scholars and philosophers, expanding and exploring mentally but with no dominion over their planet or star. (Yet, one has to ask: What is powering those libraries? The internet is ephemeral, but it is not free.)

Implicit in any vision of vast progress is not just longevity but continuity. The assumption of the ever upward-sloping line is bold to say the least. In the novella A Man of the People, Ursula K. Le Guin writes of one world, Hain, where civilization has existed for three million years. But just as the last few thousand years on Earth have seen empires rise and fall, and cultures collapse and displace one another, so it is on Hain at larger scale. Le Guin writes, “There had been…billions of lives lived in millions of countries…infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings…an endless repetition of unceasing novelty.” To hope for more than that is perhaps more optimistic than to imagine we might domesticate a star. Perhaps it’s also shortsighted, extrapolating out eons of future from just the last few centuries of life on two continents, rather than a wider view of many millennia on our whole world.

All of these scales of progress are built on human assumptions, specifically the colonizing, dominating, fossil-fuel-burning history of Europe and the United States. But scientists don’t see much use in thinking about the super-advanced alien philosophers and artists and dolphins, brilliant as they might be, because it would be basically impossible for us to find them.

The scientific quest for advanced aliens is about trying to imagine not just who might be out there but how we might find them. Which is how we end up at Dyson spheres.

Dyson spheres are named for Freeman Dyson, the physicist, mathematician, and general polymath. While most SETI scientists in the early 1960s were looking for extraterrestrial beacons, Dyson thought “one ought to be looking at the uncooperative society.” Not obstinate, just not actively trying to help us. “The idea of searching for radio signals was a fine idea,” he said in a 1981 interview, “but it only works if you have some cooperation at the other end. So I was always thinking about what to do if you were looking just for evidence of intelligent activities without anything in the nature of a message.” And you might as well start with the easiest technology to detect — the biggest or brightest. So the massive spheres Dyson popularized in his 1960 paper were the result of him asking What is the largest feasible technology?

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Relics,” the Enterprise finds itself caught in a massive gravitational field, even though there are no stars nearby. The source, on the view screen, is a matte, dark gray sphere. Riker says its diameter is almost as wide as the Earth’s orbit.

Picard asks, with hushed wonder, “Mr. Data, could this be a Dyson sphere?”

Data replies, “The object does fit the parameters of Dyson’s theory.”

Commander Riker isn’t familiar with the concept, but Picard doesn’t give him any trouble for that. “It’s a very old theory, Number One. I’m not surprised that you haven’t heard of it.” He tells him that a twentieth century physicist, Freeman Dyson, had proposed that a massive, hollow sphere built around a star could capture all the star’s radiating energy for use. “A population living on the interior surface would have virtually inexhaustible sources of power.”

Riker asks, with some skepticism, if Picard thinks there are people living in the sphere.

“Possibly a great number of people, Commander,” Data says. “The interior surface area of a sphere this size is the equivalent of more than two hundred and fifty million Class M [Earthlike] planets.”

In Dyson’s thinking, the goal wasn’t living space but energy — how would a civilization reach Type II? And Dyson’s writing was clearly speculative. In the paper, he wrote, “I do not argue that this is what will happen in our system; I only say that this is what may have happened in other systems.” Decades later, astrophysicist Jason Wright took up the search.

One of the great benefits to this approach, Wright told me, is that “nature doesn’t make Dyson spheres.” Wright is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, where he is director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. But while the best known version of SETI is listening for radio signals (more on that in the next chapter), Wright focuses on looking for technosignatures — evidence of technology out among the stars. Technosignatures allow you to find those uncooperative aliens Dyson thought would make the best targets. We don’t even need to find the aliens, in this case, just proof they once existed. That could be a stargate, or a distant planet covered in elemental silicon (geologically unlikely, but technologically great for solar panels), or it could be a Dyson sphere.

Wright’s first big search for Dyson spheres was called Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies, or G-HAT. Or, even better, Gˆ (because that’s a G with a little hat on it). The premise was simple: Dyson spheres don’t just absorb energy, they transform it, inevitably radiating some waste as heat which we can see as infrared radiation. So, from 2012 to 2015, Wright and his team looked at about a million galaxies, searching for a Type II civilization on its way to Type III, having ensconced enough of a galaxy’s stars in Dyson spheres that the galaxy might glow unusually bright in infrared. (They surveyed galaxies rather than individual stars because, as Wright writes, “A technological species that could build a Dyson sphere could also presumably spread to nearby star systems,” so it’s fair to think a galaxy with one Dyson sphere may have several, and several would be easier to find than just one. Might as well start there.) None were found, but you know that because you would’ve surely heard about it if Wright’s search had succeeded.

Wright prides himself on the agnosticism of this approach. He doesn’t need aliens to be looking for us or to have any certain sociological impulses. They just need technology. “Technology uses energy,” he told me. “That’s kind of what makes it technology. Just like life uses energy.” That view makes demolishing a Jupiter-sized planet to build a star-encompassing megastructure seem almost comically simple, but Wright doesn’t even see the existence of a Dyson sphere as requiring massive coordination or forethought on the aliens’ part. It is truly, in his view, a low-intensity ask. He compared it to Manhattan, a fair example of a human “megastructure,” a massive, interconnected, artificial system. “It was planned to some degree, but no one was ever like, ‘Hey, let’s build a huge city here.’ It’s just every generation made it a little bigger.” He thinks a Dyson sphere or swarm could accumulate in a similar manner. “If the energy is out there to take and it’s just gonna fly away to space anyway, then why wouldn’t someone take it?”

Wright knows the objections: that this imagines a capitalist orientation, a drive to “dominate nature” that is by no means universal, not even among human societies. But for his research to work, this drive doesn’t need to be universal among the stars. It just has to have happened sometimes, enough for us to see the results. As he put it, “There’s nothing that drives all life on Earth to be large. In fact, most life is small. But some life is large.” And if an alien were to come to Earth, they wouldn’t need to see all the small life to know the planet was inhabited. A single elephant would do the trick.

Some hypothetical alien technosignatures might be less definitive. In 2017, astronomers detected a roughly quarter-mile-long rocky object slingshotting through the solar system. They realized that this object, called ‘Oumuamua, came from outside the system — because of its speed and the path it took. It was the first interstellar object ever detected in our system. While hopes or fears that it was an alien probe were not realized, it was a reminder that alien technology could be found closer to home, lurking around our own sun.

“We don’t know that there’s not technology here because we’ve never really checked,” Wright said. “I mean, I guess if they had cities on Mars, we would notice—if they were on the surface, anyway.” But, he pointed out, much of the Earth’s surface doesn’t have active, visible technology. The same could go for the solar system beyond Earth, too. There could be alien probes or debris, like ‘Oumuamua but constructed, moving so fast or so dark that we don’t see them. Maybe there’s an alien base on the dwarf planet Ceres, or buried under the surface of Mars. The lunar monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Wright reminded me, was buried just under the surface of the moon. All those ancient interstellar gates sci-fi is fond of have to be found before they can be used. Don’t forget, until 2015, our best image of Pluto was a blurry blob. So much of what we know about even our own solar system is inference and assumption.

Skeptics love to ask Okay, so where is everyone? But we don’t know for sure that they aren’t — or haven’t been — here.

Astronomers have discovered a new exoplanet — but this time, the way they found it may be as significant as the discovery itself. Researchers used a breakthrough combination of indirect and direct planetary detection to locate the distant world known as HIP 99770 b. It could inch us closer to finding Earth-like exoplanets among our (distantly) neighboring stars.

Direct imaging is what most casual observers would expect to lie at the heart of exoplanet hunting: using powerful telescopes with advanced optics to capture images of distant planetary bodies. However, direct imaging is most effective for planets orbiting far from their stars; an exoplanet closer to its sun is usually obscured by the star’s bright light, making it difficult to detect or image. (When they’re farther away, there’s greater contrast between the exoplanet’s and the star’s light.)

Meanwhile, indirect imaging (precision astrometry) looks for stars that appear to “wobble,” meaning their gravity may be affected by an (otherwise unseen to us) exoplanet. This method can more easily detect the presence of planets orbiting closer to their stars — like the Earth’s relationship to the Sun. As a result, indirect imaging has yielded over 5,000 exoplanet discoveries, while direct imaging has only captured about 20.

The international team of researchers, led by Thayne Currie of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) and the University of Texas at San Antonio, combined the two methods to discover the new exoplanet. First, they used data from the Hipparcos-Gaia Catalogue of Accelerations — a map tracking the precise positions and motions of nearly two million stars in the Milky Way — to identify the star HIP 99770 as a prime candidate for hosting an exoplanet. Then, they used Japan’s ultra-powerful Subaru telescope (in Mauna Kea, Hawaii) to directly image the newly discovered exoplanet, creatively titled HIP 99770 b.

European Space Agency

The European Space Agency image above illustrates that the exoplanet is about 16 times as massive as Jupiter. Despite having an orbit over three times longer than Jupiter’s orbit around our Sun, HIP 99770 b receives around the same amount of light as Jupiter because its sun is about twice as massive as ours. The researchers say it may have water and carbon monoxide in its atmosphere.

Astronomers believe the new method combining direct and indirect imaging opens an exciting new door for future discoveries. “It provides a new path forward to discovering more exoplanets, and characterizing them in a far more holistic way than we could do before,” says Currie. Additionally, the group views Gaia’s upcoming fourth data release, which will yield nearly double the previous version’s data, will make it easier to identify stars wobbling from the gravity of planetary bodies. “The discovery of this planet will spawn dozens of follow-on studies.” The team is now studying data from about 50 other stars showing promise for hosting exoplanets.

“This is sort of a test run for the kind of strategy we need to be able to image an earth,” said Currie. “It demonstrates that an indirect method sensitive to a planet’s gravitational pull can tell you where to look and exactly when to look for direct imaging. So I think that’s really exciting.”

Researchers have used machine learning to tighten up a previously released image of a black hole. As a result, the portrait of the black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 87, over 53 million light years away from Earth, shows a thinner ring of light and matter surrounding its center in a report published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The original images were captured in 2017 by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of radio telescopes around Earth that combine to act as a planet-sized super-imaging tool. The initial picture looked like a “fuzzy donut,” as described by NPR, but researchers used a new method called PRIMO to reconstruct a more accurate image. PRIMO is “a novel dictionary-learning-based algorithm” that learns to “recover high-fidelity images even in the presence of sparse coverage” by training on generated simulations of over 30,000 black holes. In other words, it uses machine learning data based on what we know about the universe’s physical laws — and black holes specifically — to produce a better-looking and more accurate shot from the raw data captured in 2017.

Black holes are mysterious and strange regions of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. They form when dying stars collapse onto themselves under their gravity. As a result, the collapse squeezes the star’s mass into a tiny space. The boundary between the black hole and its surrounding mass is called the event horizon, a point of no return where anything that crosses it (whether light, matter or Matthew McConaughey) won’t be coming back.

“What we really do is we learn the correlations between different parts of the image. And so we do this by analyzing tens of thousands of high-resolution images that are created from simulations,” the astrophysicist and author of the paper Lia Medeiros of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, told NPR. “If you have an image, the pixels close to any given pixel are not completely uncorrelated. It’s not that each pixel is doing completely independent things.”

The researchers say the new image is consistent with Albert Einstein’s predictions. However, they expect further research in machine learning and telescope hardware to lead to additional revisions. “In 20 years, the image might not be the image I’m showing you today,” said Medeiros. “It might be even better.”

SpaceX could conduct Starship’s first orbital flight test as early as the week after next. On Thursday, the private space firm tweeted new photos of the super heavy-lift rocket at its Boca Chica facility in Texas. “Starship fully stacked at Starbase,” SpaceX said of the images. “Team is working towards a launch rehearsal next week followed by Starship’s first integrated flight test ~week later pending regulatory approval.” That same day, SpaceX owner Elon Musk offered an even more aggressive timeline. “Starship is stacked & ready to launch next week, pending regulatory approval,” he said on Twitter.

The date of Starship’s first orbital flight has been a moving target for nearly two years. At the start of February, a week after SpaceX successfully carried out the rocket’s first-ever stacked fueling test, Musk said the company would attempt to launch Starship in March if its remaining tests went well. Days later, SpaceX attempted to static fire all of the vehicle’s 33 first-stage Raptor engines, something it had not tried to do before. The trial was a critical step toward Starship’s first orbital flight, though the rocket didn’t exactly ace the test, with two engines failing before the end of the firing.

Still, the timeline Musk shared this week may be overly optimistic. According to Space.com, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) set a provisional April 17th launch window for Starship. However, the outlet reports the FAA has yet to grant SpaceX a launch license for the rocket, something it will need to do before Starship can legally fly.

NASA has launched an innovative air quality monitoring instrument into a fixed-rotation orbit around Earth. The tool is called TEMPO, which stands for Tropospheric Emissions Monitoring of Pollution instrument, and it keeps an eye on a handful of harmful airborne pollutants in the atmosphere, such as nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde and ground-level ozone. These chemicals are the building blocks of smog.

TEMPO traveled to space hitched to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. NASA says the launch was completed successfully, with the atmospheric satellite separating from the rocket without any incidents. NASA acquired the appropriate signal and the agency says the instrument will begin monitoring duties in late May or early June.

TEMPO sits at a fixed geostationary orbit just above the equator and it measures air quality over North America every hour and measures regions spaced apart by just a few miles. This is a significant improvement to existing technologies, as current measurements are conducted within areas of 100 square miles. TEMPO should be able to take accurate measurements from neighborhood to neighborhood, giving a comprehensive view of pollution from both the macro and micro levels.

This also gives us some unique opportunities to pick up new kinds of data, such as changing pollution levels throughout rush hour, the effects of lightning on the ozone layer, the movement of pollution related to forest fires and the long-term effects of fertilizers on the atmosphere, among other data points. More information is never bad. 

NASA

TEMPO is the middle child in a group of high-powered instruments tracking pollution. South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer went up in 2020, measuring pollution over Asia, and the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-4 satellite launches in 2024 to handle European and North African measurements. Other tracking satellites will eventually join TEMPO up there in the great black, including the forthcoming NASA instrument to measure the planet's crust.

You may notice that TEMPO flew into space on a SpaceX rocket and not a NASA rocket. This is by design, as the agency is testing a new business model to send crucial instruments into orbit. Paying a private company seems to be the more budget-friendly option when compared to sending up a rocket itself. 

NASA has finally named the astronauts that will orbit the Moon during the Artemis 2 mission. Commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch will fly for the US, while the Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen will represent his country. The crew will spend up to 21 days aboard an Orion capsule that will spend about 42 hours in high Earth orbit before touring the Moon and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

Koch is best known for the longest stay in space by a female astronaut. Wiseman, meanwhile, is a Navy pilot who was also a test pilot in the F-35 Lightning II program. Glover made history by participating in the first operational Crew Dragon mission in 2021. Hansen is a fighter pilot and one of four current Canadian astronauts.

If Artemis 2 remains on track, it should launch in November 2024 and will represent the first time humans have flown to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Artemis 1, an uncrewed lunar flyby mission, launched in November last year and broke an Apollo flight record with its roughly 26-day trip. People won't land on the Moon until Artemis 3's scheduled launch in December 2025. That mission will use a variant of SpaceX's Starship for the actual landing.

NASA has been steadily building publicity for Artemis in recent months. In March, it unveiled the spacesuit for the Artemis 3 landing. The Axiom Space-made prototype accommodates more body types and is more flexible, letting astronauts kneel and otherwise  

The crew selection comes as NASA appears to have overcome the setbacks that plagued its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, including engine trouble, fuel leaks, Hurricane Ian and Tropical Storm Nicole. With that said, the agency originally wanted an Artemis lunar landing in 2024. The current timeline assumes there won't be any significant technical hurdles, and there are no guarantees of that between SpaceX's ongoing Starship issues (it still hasn't conducted an orbital flight test) and the inherent challenges of putting people on the Moon.

Developing...