NASA Image Reveals Boston Feature That's 'One of Only Three in the World'
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
NASA Earth Observatory has unveiled a new image of Boston Harbor's drumlin islands, highlighting these rare geological formations—one of only three worldwide—that were carved out by glaciers more than 20,000 years ago.
Captured by the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager on 19 July 2024, the photograph shows an aerial view of the harbor, and the 34 islands and peninsulas that form the National and State park, drawing attention to its historical and cultural importance.
The space agency explains that during the Wisconsin Glaciation—which began between 100,000–75,000 years ago and ended about 11,000 years ago—a massive ice sheet, more than one mile thick in places, entirely covered the land that is now occupied by the small islands.
As the icy coat melted away, it left behind piles of sediment and glacial debris in hundreds of elongated, streamlined hills known as drumlins, which were later partially submerged by rising sea levels and turned into tiny islands.
Today, several of these drumlin islands make up part of the Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park, which works to preserve many distinctive geological, historical, and natural resources in the area.
Aerial view of the Boston Harbour drumlins shared by NASA.
Aerial view of the Boston Harbour drumlins shared by NASA.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat 8 - OLI
According to NASA, these little glacial islands are the only partially submerged drumlin field in North America and one of only three in the world. A similar example can be spotted in Clew Bay, Ireland.
According to local folklore, there are about 365 drumlin islands in the Irish site, one for every day of the year.
Studying the formation of these islands has given scientists new insights into the role that glaciers have played in shaping many existing land-forms.
Jasper Knight, a geoscientist at the University of Witwatersrand, in South Africa, told NASA back in 2016: "Previous ideas of slow, steady advance, or retreat, really don't hold. Glaciers are dynamic."
Only four of the Boston Harbor drumlin islands, Deer Island, Nut Island, World's End and Webb Memorial, are accessible by car, while four others, including Spectacle Island, Georges Island, Peddocks Island and Thompson Island are served by seasonal ferries, and several more are accessible by private boat.
The drumlin islands feature diverse ecosystems including salt marshes, sandy beaches, sea-grass beds, tidal pools, mudflats, grasslands and hardwood forests—alongside a wide range of wild animals and marine life, including mussels, barnacles and dozens of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians.
They also boast several historical landmarks, including the Boston Lights, America's oldest operating lighthouse, located on Little Brewster Island, open since 1716, and Fort Warren, a civil-war-era fortress on Georges Island.
The fort was used as a prison for confederate officers and government officials during the civil war, and it's known for housing confederate vice president Alexander Stephens.
Another major historical landmark is Long Wharf, opened in the 1720s, which once served as a hub for Boston's maritime trade, and is now used by recreational boats.
Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about glacial landforms? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNN
14 minutes ago
- CNN
Astronomers found a tiny moon orbiting Uranus. There are likely more waiting to be spotted
Astronomers using the powerful eye of the James Webb Space Telescope have spotted a previously unknown moon whirling around Uranus, according to NASA. The discovery boosts the number of moons known to be orbiting the ice giant to 29 — and there are likely more waiting to be found. The moon came to light through a series of 40-minute long-exposure images taken by Webb's Near-Infrared Camera on February 2. 'It's a small moon but a significant discovery, which is something that even NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft didn't see during its flyby nearly 40 years ago,' said Maryame El Moutamid, a lead scientist in the Southwest Research Institute's Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado, in a statement. El Moutamid is the principal investigator of a Webb program dedicated to analyzing the structure and dynamics of the typically hidden rings and inner moons of Uranus. The glow of Uranus' rings and the moon's tiny size, measuring about 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter, are likely what obscured it from the view of Voyager 2, the only mission that has performed flybys of Uranus and Neptune, as well as telescopes such as Hubble that have observed the solar system's outer planets. It's possible that the moon and some of the material comprising Uranus' rings have a common origin, which could mean the rings and moon are fragments resulting from the same ancient event, El Moutamid said. The moon, temporarily named S/2025 U1, could reveal how Uranus' rings are shaped, whether by gravity or an ancient event, to provide a window into the enigmatic rings' structure, stability and history, she said. 'The discovery raises questions about how many more small moons remain hidden around Uranus and how they interact with its rings,' El Moutamid said. The discovery of moons around planets in our solar system is not a very common occurrence, but it does happen from time around giant planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. 'These planets have many moons, and some are so tiny and faint that we're still discovering them,' El Moutamid said. The newly found moon is the 14th in a system of small moons orbiting Uranus — all of which orbit closer to the planet than its largest moons: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon. 'It's located about 35,000 miles (56,000 kilometers) from Uranus' center, orbiting the planet's equatorial plane between the orbits of Ophelia (which is just outside of Uranus' main ring system) and Bianca,' El Moutamid said, referring to two other small moons circling the planet. 'Its nearly circular orbit suggests it may have formed near its current location.' Spotting the moon was no easy task because it is tiny, dark and moves quickly, which made it nearly invisible against the background glow of Uranus' rings, El Moutamid said. The high resolution and sensitivity of Webb's Near-Infrared Camera was perfectly suited to find a faint, distant object, she said. Webb's ability to capture infrared light, invisible to the human eye, has also provided glimpses of Uranus' rings and moons, atmosphere and weather during earlier observations. 'Its detection highlights both the dynamic complexity of Uranus's system and the sharp eyes of modern astronomy.' So far, all of Uranus' moons have been named for characters from the works of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. The previously unknown moon doesn't have a literary name yet, and the International Astronomical Union, which assigns official names to celestial objects, will need to approve one. Part of the difficulty in determining just how many moons orbit Uranus is the proximity of these natural satellites to the planet and the bright glare of the planet itself, said Scott Sheppard, astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC. Sheppard was not involved in the new observations but helped discover a Uranus moon in 2024. 'This new Uranus moon is a very exciting find since it is so close to Uranus and likely associated with the inner ring system,' Sheppard said. 'This discovery shows the power of the James Webb Space Telescope to be able to image deeper than we ever have before.' No other planet has as many small inner moons as Uranus, said coprincipal investigator Matthew Tiscareno, a senior research scientist of solar system dynamics and planetary rings at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Astronomers don't quite know how the diminutive moons have avoided crashing together because they're so close to one another, but the satellites may act as shepherds for Uranus' narrow rings, according to NASA. 'Their complex inter-relationships with the rings hint at a chaotic history that blurs the boundary between a ring system and a system of moons,' Tiscareno said in a statement. 'Moreover, the new moon is smaller and much fainter than the smallest of the previously known inner moons, making it likely that even more complexity remains to be discovered.' Before Voyager 2's groundbreaking views of Uranus in 1986, only five moons — its largest — had been spotted orbiting the planet, with the first two discovered in 1787 and the fifth in 1948. Voyager 2 found 10 moons during its flyby, ranging from 16 to 96 miles (26 to 154 kilometers) in diameter. Hubble and ground-based telescopes have spotted an additional 13 tiny moons, which range from 8 to 10 miles (12 to 16 kilometers) across and appear darker than asphalt, according to NASA. While the inner moons appear to be made of ice and rock, the moons beyond Oberon are likely asteroids captured in orbit around Uranus, according to the space agency. 'Looking forward, the discovery of this moon underscores how modern astronomy continues to build upon the legacy of missions like Voyager 2, which flew past Uranus on Jan. 24, 1986, and gave humanity its first close-up look at this mysterious world,' El Moutamid said in her statement. 'Now, nearly four decades later, the James Webb Space Telescope is pushing that frontier even farther.' Future Uranus exploration missions planned for the early 2030s, which include an orbiter and an atmospheric probe, could also help astronomers understand the ice giant like never before. Uranus has largely been defined by data gathered during Voyager 2's flyby, but another, more detailed visit to the ice giant, which rotates on its side, is overdue to shed light on the planet's atmospheric dynamics, complex magnetic field and what led to the creation of its extreme tilt and rings. Detailed observations could also reveal whether any of Uranus' moons are ice-covered ocean worlds. The planetary decadal survey, authored by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2022, recommended the first dedicated Uranus Orbiter and Probe as the next large NASA mission. Currently, it's unclear where the mission fits into NASA's future plans, especially as the agency grapples with the White House's proposal to slash NASA's science budget by as much as half. Sheppard said there are surely more undiscovered Uranus moons that are only a few kilometers in size, but they would be even fainter than the newly detected moon and even harder to find. 'New moons will likely be found either by taking extremely long images with JWST or a future Uranus spacecraft mission,' Sheppard said. Next, El Moutamid and her team want to uncover more details about the new moon's orbit, search for additional moons and support any planning for the Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission. 'Discovering a new moon around Uranus helps scientists better understand how its strange system formed, sheds light on its rings, and prepares us for future missions like NASA's Uranus Orbiter and Probe,' El Moutamid said. Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Inside NASA's Wild Space Mission to Defend Earth Against a Planet-Killing Asteroid
On the count of three, engineers in the Johns Hopkins University control room erupt in cheers. It's early fall 2022, and amid rows of computer monitors and a dozen television screens, the team exchanges high fives and congratulations. Then a new countdown begins, and the engineers get back to work preparing one of the most important NASA missions this century. For weeks, Elena Adams has been leading her team at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, through rehearsals of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). The mission represents the agency's ambitious bet that it can take aim at asteroids on a collision course with Earth and strike them with a projectile, nudging them far enough off course to prevent a world-ending impact. The mission is still weeks away. But as DART's head engineer, the strong-willed yet unceasingly joyful Adams wants to ensure that her team is ready for any outcome. With more than a decade of experience at APL and a black belt in tae kwon do, Adams has fearlessly led her team through building and testing the spacecraft. No detail can be overlooked, so today the team members are practicing how they'll react to a successful mission, right down to those celebratory high fives. They're also preparing to stomach the worst: missing the asteroid entirely. The whole world will be watching us, she recalls thinking. So if the mission succeeds, she says in her slight Russian accent, 'we're not going to do this lame handshake thing.' Though the days are fast ticking by, that success is far from assured. DART is the first-ever test of what NASA calls a kinetic impactor—a projectile intent on transferring its momentum to an asteroid in an elegant suicidal smash. In other words, the team plans to ram a speeding spacecraft into an asteroid to knock it off its path. The logistics are mind-boggling. DART's target, a few million miles from Earth, is only the size of a tall building, the smallest asteroid ever visited by a spacecraft. The craft will be traveling at thousands of miles per hour; accurately reaching the asteroid is akin to throwing an arrow from southern France and hitting an apple on the U.S. East Coast. The slightest error would cause DART to blast by its target in an instant, rendering the $325 million mission moot. Making the task even more challenging, the engineers assembled at APL will cede control of their craft for the final moments of the mission. DART is designed to operate its last hours autonomously, located too far from Earth for fast manual corrections to its trajectory. Adams knows that if all goes according to plan, a successful impact—and her team's celebrations—will be witnessed by a worldwide audience. So she runs the drill again, guiding the scientists as they attempt to ensure that humanity won't meet the same fate as the dinosaurs. Planetary defense scientists were at first a small, hardy bunch. A hodgepodge field encompassing astronomers, planetary scientists, and engineers, it united around taking seriously the question of how to protect Earth from cosmic threats, including impacts from asteroids and comets. At astronomy conferences in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they worried about 'the giggle factor'—the sense that their work veered toward science fiction. To Naomi Murdoch, a planetary scientist at France's ISAE-SUPAERO who researches asteroids' surfaces and evolution, asteroids are fascinating but also potentially dangerous. Like planets, asteroids are rocky objects locked in slow, orbital dances around the sun. Ranging in diameter from a few feet to 300-plus miles, they are cosmic leftovers from when our solar system formed more than four billion years ago. Over the past few decades, astronomers have used ground- and space-based telescopes to detect over 38,000 near-Earth asteroids, defined as those whose closest distance to the sun comes within 1.3 times the average distance between our planet and the sun. Fewer than 30 percent are deemed 'potentially hazardous asteroids,' those that are at least 460 feet wide. NASA predicts that one of those could impact Earth once every 10,000 years. Three percent exceed 0.6 mile in diameter and could strike our planet with devastating results once every few hundred millennia. Murdoch first joined planetary defense efforts in 2007, after she learned that scientists were already considering how to deflect rogue asteroids by bumping into them. 'The probability is low that an asteroid will hit us,' she says. 'But at the same time, it is the only natural disaster that we can predict and act against.' Even still, prediction efforts aren't always airtight. In February 2013, a house-sized asteroid exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia, releasing the energy of nearly a half million tons of TNT and injuring 1,600 people. The asteroid's fiery descent to Earth had been missed by space agencies but captured on the dashcams of Russian cars as it shattered windows and caused tens of millions of dollars in damages. Chelyabinsk was a wake-up call. Planetary defense scientists now had the attention of space agencies across the globe. That year, NASA turned to a European planetary defense proposal that had been floating around the space community for a decade. Called Don Quijote (reflecting the Spanish spelling of the popular novel's title), the idea went beyond asteroid monitoring into asteroid deflection, suggesting that one spacecraft ram into an asteroid and a second craft photograph the crash so scientists could perform real-time forensics. While space agencies had landed satellites on asteroids before—and even designed one to deliberately smash into a comet with NASA's Deep Impact mission in 2005—no one had ever set out to move a target. Doing so would rely on an engineering concept many learned in high school science: exchanging momentum between a gumball (a spacecraft) and a bowling ball (an asteroid). NASA and its partners began designing an entirely new craft that could travel on a precise trajectory at thousands of miles per hour, aimed at a target large enough to study but small enough to nudge off course. To lead the DART project, NASA selected APL, which had previously developed targeting algorithms for the U.S. Navy's air defenses and also oversaw NASA's first mission land on an asteroid. They'd work with Don Quijote scientists as well as the European Space Agency (ESA), which was tasked with building the secondary observer spacecraft. With $325 million to spend, the journey to protect Earth was on. But DART would be more challenging than any previous asteroid mission, and the stakes couldn't be higher. 'Planetary defense isn't the highest priority thing that we do here at NASA on a day-to-day basis,' Air Force veteran and NASA's planetary defense officer Lindley Johnson has said. 'But the day could come when it becomes the most important thing that we do.' If sending a spacecraft to bully an asteroid was an engineering challenge, determining if the collision worked would test the limits of astronomers to track tiny objects millions of miles away. APL scientists knew that a high-speed kinetic impactor such as DART might nudge the asteroid off course by a only few millimeters per second. (Astronomers calculate changes in an asteroid's trajectory by recording changes in the time it takes to orbit another object.) Such a tiny difference would be nearly impossible to measure from the observer spacecraft; instead it would require powerful ground-based telescopes to track the asteroid's orbit around the sun for years. Andy Cheng, then-chief scientist of APL's space department and DART's co-leader, had pondered that problem ever since Don Quijote was first proposed in 2003. Cheng, now in his 60s, was no stranger to the difficulties of studying asteroids; he had served as the project scientist for NASA's mission to land on a comet and spent a year as NASA's deputy chief scientist in addition to his then-30 years at APL. But while stretching one morning in 2011, Cheng had a light-bulb moment. Some asteroids—estimates hover around 15 percent—travel with a rocky companion in what's known as a binary system, where two asteroids orbit each other. If a kinetic impactor were to strike an asteroid's companion, Cheng realized, astronomers could measure how much its orbit changed around the main asteroid, where one cycle takes hours, not years. 'The idea wouldn't leave my head,' he recalls, and upon hearing it, his colleagues agreed that the plan could solve one of DART's biggest barriers. The next step was to pick the victims: Didymos and Dimorphos, a pair of asteroids with diameters of a half mile and 525 feet, respectively. The larger had first been spotted in 1996; its smaller companion was discovered in 2003. The duo, whose names mean 'twin' and 'two forms' in Greek, takes about two years to journey around the sun, never posing a threat to Earth. The timing was perfect: In the fall of 2022, they would be around 6.7 million miles away, the closest they would be for the next 40 years. The closeness of the binary crucially meant that ground-based telescopes would be able to photograph the consequences of the collision. So while Adams and her engineers designed the spacecraft for its intended target, Cheng worked with Nancy Chabot, DART's coordination lead in charge of overseeing the science teams, to gather a crew of astronomers to watch it explode. The team recruited Tim Lister, an astronomer and astrophotographer based at Las Cumbres Observatory near Santa Barbara, California, a worldwide telescope network built to observe fleeting events like asteroid movements. DART 'was a chance to be involved with a mission that was going to demonstrate what we could possibly do to save the Earth,' says Lister. When approached about bringing Las Cumbres on board, it was an easy yes for him. To determine how much the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos changed after impact, Lister and other team members would first need to nail down its existing path, using an astronomy technique called a light curve. Planets, moons, comets, asteroids, and even grains of space dust all scatter light like a glass bead catching an afternoon sunbeam. Telescopes observe this scattered light—the light curve—to track the object. In a binary system, when a smaller asteroid passes in front of a larger one, the amount of scattered light dips momentarily, as if a wandering fly blocked part of the glint from the bead. By tracing the periodic dips in Didymos's light curve, astronomers could see how long it took Dimorphos to orbit its companion: approximately 11 hours and 55 minutes. The same technique would be used after impact, along with precise radar measurements. Together they would help reveal if that orbit stretched by a few seconds, or even minutes—a sure sign that the rock pile had been sufficiently knocked off course. While determining Dimorphos's new orbit was the astronomers' main goal, the mission also offered the rare opportunity to study an asteroid up close. Planetary scientists knew where Dimorphos and Didymos were in our solar system and about how big they were, but little else—not their masses, composition, or surface texture. Everything scientists learned about these asteroids could inform critical kinetic impactor missions in the future, when human lives were at stake. 'Asteroid surfaces are really unintuitive places,' says Murdoch, a veteran of ESA's early planetary defense efforts who helped develop models of how the surface of Dimorphos might respond to DART. 'We're often too biased by what we see on Earth to correctly predict what's going to happen.' Every new variable tested by Murdoch and the science team—from the composition of Dimorphos's surface, to the angle of impact, to the mass of the asteroid—yielded wildly different results. During some simulations, the asteroid barely budged; in others, DART plowed into the rocky surface, knocking Dimorphos way off course. But after years of work creating simulations that sometimes took weeks to run on supercomputers, the team had narrowed in on a goal: striking the small asteroid with enough oomph to increase the time it took to orbit Didymos by 73 seconds. Seven to 10 minutes would be a triumph. Then, two major crises shook the DART team. The first came in December 2016, when ESA couldn't secure enough funding for its observer spacecraft and canceled the program. With the mission severed in half, 'we questioned whether NASA would also pull out,' Chabot says. 'It was a pretty dark time.' But NASA remained committed, and thoughts turned to how to continue. First, they needed to reassemble the crew. 'We weren't just gonna kick all of our European scientists off the team,' says Chabot—a group that included Murdoch and the visionaries behind Don Quijote. So DART took the unusual step of allowing non-NASA-affiliated scientists to participate, which included people from 29 countries, some joining only months before impact. If 'they had something to contribute, we would welcome them in,' Chabot says. NASA then needed to find a replacement for ESA's observer spacecraft. The team turned to Italy, which had volunteered to design and operate a stowaway instrument called the Light Italian Cubesat for Imaging of Asteroids, or LICIACube. No larger than a shoebox, LICIACube would pop out of a spring-loaded compartment on the spacecraft 15 days before impact to get its space bearings in time to photograph our first cosmic clash with an asteroid. Borrowing from a design used on NASA's Artemis I mission, the Italian aerospace company Argotec would have less than three years to build the tiny satellite. Back in the APL clean room, Adams and her team were hard at work engineering the main spacecraft, which faced a grueling hundred-million-mile journey across the blackness of space. Integration Review, a NASA checkpoint to determine whether a mission is permitted to proceed with assembling and testing a spacecraft, was fast approaching. Before starting to build, the team needed to prove that every component of the craft could perform as expected—and survive long enough to do so. The first peril for the spacecraft would be its launch upon a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with vibrations violent enough to rattle its instruments loose or disrupt its sensitive electronics. It would also face both blistering and chilling temperatures in space, as well as the force of traveling at four miles per second—about 26 times faster than a commercial jet. Even more exacting, DART would also rely on new variations of three mostly unproven technologies: giant solar arrays to power its flight once in space, an ion propulsion system, and autonomous navigation software called the Small-body Maneuvering Autonomous Real Time Navigation System (SMART Nav). Led by APL software systems engineer Michelle Chen, SMART Nav would take the wheel for the craft's final four hours to avoid the 1.5-minute time delay between human commands and spacecraft execution. With the spacecraft traveling at breakneck speeds, the software would need to be highly efficient, processing an image from DART's camera and telling the craft where to point while preserving fuel—all within a second. In March 2020, Adams led the DART team as they sailed through the Integration Review. Then, with less than a year and a half to launch, the second crisis arrived: The COVID-19 pandemic sent everybody home. As Adams watched her computer screen fill with boxes of her colleagues' faces, she wondered how her team could possibly engineer the mission from quarantine. 'You can't put a spacecraft together without actually being there,' she says. Though most normal activities on Earth had screeched to a halt, Didymos and Dimorphos still journeyed around the sun right on schedule. So, after a few weeks of quarantine, a small group of engineers returned to APL as essential workers. Ironically, strict air filtration standards for spacecraft builds made the clean room a safe environment. The once-bustling floors were eerily quiet, with machinery and tools left where they were last used before quarantine. Large platforms suspended spacecraft parts underneath ceilings that towered 60 feet. Engineers wore the usual uniform—white lab coats, booties, gloves, hair nets—but added face masks, some sewn by the APL personnel who make thermal blankets for spacecraft. The jobs of dozens of engineers were completed by only a handful, staggering in shifts to assess the spacecraft one by one. Supply-chain issues abounded, and those assembling the spacecraft were forced to inspect parts manufactured by contractors over Zoom. Other engineers dialed in from home. 'I can't tell you how many times I watched screws being put in remotely,' Adams says. Amid the challenges of lockdown came confounding engineering hurdles. When a model of DART's camera was put through a launch vibration simulation, its mirror shattered, prompting a redesign of its mounts. And the star trackers, which would help the camera point, seemed to capture too much noise. That required another redesign of its mounts. Then, in February 2021, the team faced another hurdle: NASA leadership pushed back the launch date by four to six months. The decision, due to supply chain issues and a need to reinforce and retest the camera mirror for launch stress, was 'a really tough time' for the project, Chabot says. While the spacecraft would still arrive at Dimorphos in fall 2022, there was less time to work out any post-launch kinks. In other words: There would be no margin for error. Finally, launch day arrives—November 24, 2021. Engineers gather at California's Vandenberg Space Force Base, many of them together for the first time since the start of the pandemic. With hearts in their throats, they watch as the product of years of their work begins to shake violently, carried up into the cosmos aboard a fiery SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Humanity's first cosmic roughhouser officially begins its journey at 1:21 a.m. ET; no parts break on the ascent. Mission operators at APL coax DART to release its solar arrays around 4 a.m.; each of these has been designed to unfurl from compact cylinders to 28 feet in length once airborne. After two weeks, the camera begins surveying the twinkling stars that will guide it over the next 10 months to its final destination. Though its path is set on Dimorphos, the camera takes some time to stargaze, snapping more than 150,000 pictures of celestial bodies as engineers at APL calibrate its optics. The first problem arises a few short weeks away from impact, when it becomes apparent that the star trackers are still catching too much noise. The engineers discover that when a certain heating system turns on, the trackers can drift by 20 microns—about 20 percent of the width of a human hair. That's enough to make DART miss its target half of the time. So they hastily write new software that will allow the spacecraft to cycle heat differently. NASA has fitted the craft with a secondary ion-propulsion system that uses xenon propellant, which it wants to test for future missions. Now that's causing problems too. During a trial run, engineers spot strange readings from DART's power system, forcing them to stop the propulsion system and rely solely on the main thrusters to avoid endangering the spacecraft. As impact day approaches, preparations ratchet up. In July 2022, powerful telescopes in Arizona and Chile confirm the orbit and location of Dimorphos. At APL, Adams and her colleagues, now working in person, lead practices of every scenario they can dream up, including one in which Dimorphos turns out to be donut-shaped and they fly right through its belly. Chen's team tests SMART Nav's targeting using the moons of Jupiter. LICIACube deploys successfully. Astronomers track other asteroids as test runs for impact. And Lister refines the software he plans to use for the light curves, finally getting it working just two days ahead of the scheduled collision. 'We get exactly one shot at this,' says Lister. 'We couldn't just tell the spacecraft to back off a bit and do it tomorrow because we're not quite ready yet.' On September 26, 2022, thousands of astronomers, planetary scientists, and engineers gather at watch parties around the world to follow NASA TV's livestream of DART's final hours. Their screens show the spacecraft camera's view, one jolting photo every second. In the APL control room, the team of engineers work away at their computers, buoyed by specially made fortune cookies that Adams had snuck under their chairs before work with messages that read, 'Today you will make an impact.' With four hours to go until the planned collision, SMART Nav takes the reins. Though DART has been targeting Dimorphos for months, its cameras won't pick up the asteroid until it is an estimated 90 to 75 minutes away, which it will transmit back to APL as a tiny pixel of light. Didymos, which had come into view as a large, gray mass 45 days earlier, still fills much of the screen. Despite the practice runs, Adams, with Chen sitting behind her, watches excitedly as the minutes tick down. Hundreds turn into 90, then 80. If Dimorphos doesn't appear from behind Didymos by 70 minutes to impact, the engineers need to consider manually intervening to retarget. When the clock hits 75, Adams pulls a few people into a huddle. She doesn't need to remind them that if DART missed, an accurate U-turn would take two years, and there wasn't enough fuel on board for that. Then, with 73 minutes remaining, a new pixel of light appears on screen, the team's first glimpse of the tiny asteroid. For the next hour, Dimorphos remains just a speck of light on the NASA screens, not much different from the stars that had guided its journey. With two and a half minutes and 500 miles left, SMART Nav turns off to avoid transmitting shaky images, leaving the spacecraft coasting undirected by people or software. Like a game of darts, SMART Nav has taken its aim at the board; the spacecraft will either hit a bull's-eye, or miss the target. Moments later, Didymos slides out of view, indicating that SMART Nav has correctly narrowed in on Dimorphos. Finally, with just a minute to impact, the asteroid's crater-pocked, boulder-filled surface appears on screen, revealing itself for the first time to the legions of scientists following the project. From California to Maryland, cheers ring out: DART is headed straight for the center, which thankfully looks nothing like a donut. At 7:14 p.m. ET, the last image fills the televisions of the APL control room: a horizontal sliver of gray, jagged boulders before the image cuts out to piercing red static, DART's last attempt to communicate home over seven million miles of cold, dark space. Impact. Despite the preparations, the celebrations feel organic. 'I think we had like five or six different cheers [rehearsed],' Chen says. But 'the look on everybody's faces... there's no way you could rehearse that.' After hugging her team, Adams steps out of view of the cameras and cries. 'Emotionally, you've been running so fast for so long,' she says. 'We all came in the next day not knowing what to do.' For Adams and Chen, the work is largely over. But hundreds of scientists around the world are getting started on the mission's next phase. Scientists had estimated that gathering enough observations to calculate the new orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos—the proxy for DART's success—would take weeks, followed by an extensive campaign to study its composition and shape. But at 3 a.m. PT, from his home in Southern California, Shantanu Naidu, a radio astronomer with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, logs on to his work computer to check the initial radar observations. He finds that Dimorphos is out of sync with his earlier predictions—by a lot. While NASA had hoped for a 73-second orbital bump, Naidu sees a staggering change. The asteroid's orbit appears to have stretched by 36 minutes. 'I didn't tell anyone about these results,' he later said, worried that they were too extreme to be accurate. 'Maybe I should wait for the next day's data.' But the excitement is too great and he shares his estimates to the DART team over Slack less than 24 hours after impact. The news spreads fast within the team. And as 42.5 cumulative days of observations across telescopes on all seven continents eventually confirm, Naidu isn't far off. Dimorphos's orbit around Didymos has shortened from 11 hours 55 minutes to 11 hours 22 minutes—a whopping 33 minutes, plus or minus two. 'We were pretty floored,' says Chabot. Then the trickle of results turns into an avalanche of exciting observations. 'As nighttime would go around the globe... [results] were just coming in hour after hour after hour,' Chabot recalls. The scientists first notice a giant, high-speed plume of ejecta rising from Dimorphos's surface, then watch as it forms into tails tens of thousands of miles long that follow the asteroid for weeks. Photographed with LICIACube, ground-based observatories, and even the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the plume of dust and boulders is so large—10,000 tons in total—that some astronomers initially speculate that DART has blown up the asteroid entirely. 'What the heck is that? Is that real?' Lister recalls asking his colleagues. While Dimorphos had not in fact exploded, scientists discover that it is a type of asteroid known as a 'rubble pile,' a loosely held conglomerate of boulders prone to dramatic spews of material when hit. Planetary scientists think the release of material gave the asteroid some kickback, pushing it even farther off its orbit around Didymos. However, the moment wasn't entirely explosion-free: part of the plume was unused xenon gas from the faulty ion thruster. In the following weeks, planetary scientists also learn that DART's impact had set Dimorphos on a slightly unstable course around Didymos, wobbling like a top. They even find that the impact changed Dimorphos's shape from a lumpy sphere to an elongated watermelon, taking a chunk off with it. The DART mission officially ended in the fall of 2023 when the binary system traveled too close to the sun for telescopes to follow it. To keep studying the changes to Dimorphos and inform any future kinetic impactors, ESA's Hera spacecraft will arrive at the cosmic crime scene in December 2026. For now, asteroid monitoring efforts will continue in force, buoyed by DART's success. 'We have no idea how to prevent hurricanes or earthquakes,' NASA's Johnson says. 'But we're a long ways now along the road of preventing an impact from an asteroid or comet.' For the first five decades of its existence, NASA was tasked with exploring the cosmos and Earth's place within it. But the more astronomers learned about the space rocks whizzing by our pale blue dot, the clearer it became that knowledge couldn't protect us from a wayward asteroid any more than scales and spikes protected the dinosaurs. If we wanted to persist in space, we could no longer be cosmic bystanders. Millions of miles away, a chunk of boulders glued together by gravity and forged from the same ancient elements that built the planets likely has a missing chunk etched by a vending machine–sized hunk of metal. A newly laid sign, for any meandering asteroids nearby, that Earth now packs a Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life? Solve the daily Crossword
Newsweek
2 hours ago
- Newsweek
Doing Your Hair May Expose You to as Much Pollution as Standing in Traffic
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Blow-drying, straightening, or curling your hair in the morning might seem harmless—but it could be filling your lungs with as much pollution as standing on a busy highway, scientists warn. A research team led by professor Nusrat Jung and Ph.D. student Jianghui Liu of Purdue University, Indiana, found that a 10–20-minute heat-based hair routine can release more than 10 billion tiny particles into the air—which may then be inhaled into the lungs. These can cause health problems like breathing difficulties, lung inflammation and even cognitive decline. "This is really quite concerning," Jung said in a statement. "The number of nanoparticles inhaled from using typical, store-bought hair-care products was far greater than we ever anticipated." A stock image of a woman applying hair product to her curls. A stock image of a woman applying hair product to her curls. PeopleImages/iStock / Getty Images Plus What Counts as a "Typical" Hair Routine? "A typical 10-to-15-minute hair care routine, like the ones in our study, involved using one or more hair care products combined with heated styling tools such as flat irons, and curling wands," Jung told Newsweek. "In controlled experiments, volunteers performed realistic styling routines using five different hair products (hair cream, hair serum, hair lotion, and hair spray) and three types of appliances conditions that mirror what many people do in everyday life." During these hair-care routines, Jung explained, volatile and semi-volatile ingredients like so-called cyclic siloxanes are released into the air. When they encounter the hot surfaces of styling tools—which can exceed 300 degrees Fahrenheit—these compounds evaporate and form ultrafine nanoparticles. "We measured airborne concentrations reaching upward of 10 billion nanoparticles per cubic centimeter in the breathing zone, which is comparable to what one might encounter while standing in dense highway traffic," Jung continued. "It is important to note that the figure represents airborne concentration, not the total number inhaled. Inhalation depends on factors such as breathing rate, proximity, ventilation, styling temperature, type of product and routine duration. "However, because styling typically happens close to the face and in less ventilated spaces like bathrooms, the potential for meaningful inhalation exposure is substantial." A stock image of a woman styling her long at home with a modern hair curler. A stock image of a woman styling her long at home with a modern hair curler. Sergii Kolesnikov Hidden Chemicals In earlier research, Jung's team found that heat makes hair products release even more harmful chemicals. A notable example is D5 siloxane—a common ingredient in sprays, creams, and serums. "When we first studied the emissions from hair care products during heat surges, we focused on the volatile chemicals that were released, and what we found was already quite concerning," Jung said. "But when we took an even closer discovered that these chemicals were generating bursts of anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 nanoparticles per cubic centimeter." D5 siloxane is widely used because it makes products smooth and stable. But the European Chemicals Agency has called it "very persistent, very bio-accumulative." Europe has already restricted its use in some cosmetics. "D5 siloxane has been found to lead to adverse effects on the respiratory tract, liver and nervous system of laboratory animals," Jung said. When heated, these ingredients can form huge numbers of nanoparticles that travel deep into the lungs—posing health risks that are still poorly understood. "And now it appears that the airborne hazards of these products—particularly 'leave-on' formulations designed to be heat-resistant, such as hair sprays, creams and gels—are even greater than we expected," Liu said. According to them, the deepest parts of the lungs get the highest dose of these nanoparticles when inhaled. The team concluded that heat-based hair styling is a major indoor source of these particles, which have been underestimated until now. How to Reduce the Risk The best advice, according to Jung and Liu, is to avoid using hair products with heating tools altogether. If that's not realistic, make sure to improve ventilation. "If you must use hair care products, limit their use and ensure the space is well ventilated," Liu said. "Even without heating appliances, better ventilation can reduce exposure to volatile chemicals, such as D5 siloxane, in these products." Jung added that future studies should look even more closely at how these particles form and what they're made of. "By addressing these research gaps, future studies can provide a more holistic understanding of the emissions and exposures associated with heat-based hair styling, contributing to improved indoor air pollution assessments and mitigation strategies," she said. Do you have a tip on a health story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about air pollution? Let us know via health@ Reference Liu, J., Jiang, J., Patra, S. S., Ding, X., Huang, C., Cross, J. N., Magnuson, B. H., & Jung, N. (2025). Indoor Nanoparticle Emissions and Exposures during Heat-Based Hair Styling Activities. Environmental Science & Technology, 59(32), 17103–17115.
