Two moon missions touched down on the lunar surface. How they unfolded was a stark contrast
Each time a robotic explorer launches from Earth, it faces innumerable challenges — any of which could cut the mission short.
California-based asteroid mining company AstroForge shared on Thursday that its Odin spacecraft, which ventured to space a week and a half ago with Intuitive Machines' Athena lunar lander, met an untimely end.
The probe was heading for an asteroid to scout for the valuable resource platinum. But Odin's team said the vehicle is likely tumbling through space, with little hope of restoring communications.
Space is hard, and every bold mission adds lessons learned. This week, a tale of two lunar landers demonstrates why scientists and engineers always expect the unexpected in the saga of space exploration.
On March 2, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the moon, making it the second private sector company to execute the feat.
Photos showcasing the spacecraft's dramatic shadow on the lunar surface and its feet within moon dust confirmed the mission's success.
The Cedar Park, Texas-based company has since shared a video of the lander's nail-biting descent just north of the moon's equator.
Blue Ghost will spend the next week collecting samples, drilling into the subsurface and capturing high-definition imagery.
The Athena lander also made it to the moon, after descending near the lunar south pole on Thursday in hopes of conducting a water-finding mission.
Initially, Intuitive Machines was scrambling to determine the spacecraft's orientation. But images from Athena's suite of cameras helped confirm that the mission ended prematurely, with the lander lying on its side inside a crater.
The lander is 820 feet (250 meters) from the target landing site of Mons Mouton, a flat-topped mountain, the Houston-based company said.
Before powering down, Athena briefly operated and transmitted data, making it the 'southernmost lunar landing and surface operations ever achieved,' according to the company.
Meet the woolly mouse, genetically modified to have several woolly mammoth-like traits.
Engineered by Colossal Biosciences, the mice have curly whiskers and hair that grows three times longer than that of typical lab mice.
Colossal is attempting to resurrect mammoths and other extinct creatures, and the mice will enable its team to test links between specific genetic sequences and physical traits that enabled the giants to endure bitterly cold environments, according to the private Dallas company.
But the new study doesn't address whether the modified mice are actually tolerant of the cold, said Robin Lovell-Badge, head of the Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics Laboratory at The Francis Crick Institute in London.
'As it is, we have some cute looking hairy mice, with no understanding of their physiology, behaviour, etc,' Lovell-Badge said via email.
The adventure of the world's biggest iceberg, known as A23a, may have come to an end after it spent five years wandering the Southern Ocean near Antarctica and, for a time, spinning around an undersea mountain.
The 'megaberg,' weighing 1.1 trillion tons (nearly 1 trillion metric tonnes) and slightly smaller than Rhode Island, ran aground on the island of South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
'Nutrients stirred up by the grounding and from its melt may boost food availability for the whole regional ecosystem, including for charismatic penguins and seals,' said Andrew Meijers, an oceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey.
Now, scientists are trying to predict what will happen to A23a next, and what impact the iceberg will have if it splits into pieces.
Archaeologists have uncovered a cache of tools that ancient human ancestors crafted from elephant and hippopotamus bones 1.5 million years ago in Olduvai Gorge, known as the 'Cradle of Humankind,' in Tanzania.
The unexpected discovery makes these the oldest known bone tools by about 1 million years. The 27 bone fragments appear to have been systematically sharpened and shaped using stone.
Researchers believe our early human ancestors took the same sophisticated techniques they used to make stone tools and applied them to carefully selected limb bones from large animals.
The finding suggests that hominins were capable of critical thinking and innovative craftsmanship, but scientists are still trying to figure out who exactly made the tools.
Let your curiosity ascend to new heights with these stories:
— For the second time this year, SpaceX's megarocket Starship exploded midflight during a test mission, disrupting air traffic and raining down flaming debris that was captured on video by onlookers in the Caribbean.
— The narwhal is often called the 'unicorn of the sea' because of its signature spiral tusk. Now, scientists have recorded the first video evidence revealing some surprising ways the Arctic whales use their tusks, including for playful behavior.
— The twin Voyager probes are each turning off a science instrument to conserve power and prevent both historic missions from ending within a few months.
Like what you've read? Oh, but there's more. Sign up here to receive in your inbox the next edition of Wonder Theory, brought to you by CNN Space and Science writers Ashley Strickland, Katie Hunt and Jackie Wattles. They find wonder in planets beyond our solar system and discoveries from the ancient world.
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
San Andreas fault could unleash an earthquake unlike any seen before, study of deadly Myanmar quake suggests
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Faults like San Andreas don't necessarily repeat past behavior, which means the next big earthquake in California has the potential to be larger than any seen before, a new study suggests. The fresh insights into fault behavior came from studying Myanmar's devastating March earthquake, which killed more than 5,000 people and caused widespread destruction. Scientists found that the fault responsible, an "earthquake superhighway" known as the Sagaing Fault, ruptured across a larger area, and in places that they wouldn't have expected based on previous events. Faults are fractures in Earth's crust. Stress can build up along the faults until eventually the fault suddenly ruptures, causing an earthquake. As the Sagaing and San Andreas faults are similar, what happened in Myanmar could help researchers better understand what might happen in California. "The study shows that future earthquakes might not simply repeat past known earthquakes," study co-author Jean-Philippe Avouac, a professor of geology and mechanical and civil engineering at Caltech, said in a statement. "Successive ruptures of a given fault, even as simple as the Sagaing or the San Andreas faults, can be very different and can release even more than the deficit of slip since the last event." Related: Almost half of California's faults — including San Andreas — are overdue for earthquakes The San Andreas Fault is the longest fault in California, stretching about 746 miles (1,200 kilometers) from the state's south at the Salton Sea to its north off the coast of Mendocino. In 1906, a rupture in the northern section of the fault caused a devastating magnitude 7.9 earthquake that killed more than 3,000 people, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Earthquakes are notoriously unpredictable, but geologists have long warned that the San Andreas Fault will produce another massive earthquake at some point. For instance, the area nearest to Los Angeles has a 60% chance of experiencing a magnitude 6.7 or greater in the next 30 years, according to the USGS. The 870-mile-long (1,400 km) Sagaing Fault is similar to the San Andreas Fault in that they are both long, straight, strike-slip faults, which means the rocks slide horizontally with little or no vertical movement. Geologists were expecting the Sagaing Fault to slip somewhere along its extent. Specifically, they thought that the rupture would take place across a 190-mile-long (300 km) section of the fault where no large earthquakes had occurred since 1839. This expectation was based on the seismic gap hypothesis, which anticipates that a stuck section of a fault — where there hasn't been movement for a long time — will slip to catch up to where it was, according to the statement. RELATED STORIES —First-of-its-kind video captures the terrifying moment the ground tore apart during major Myanmar earthquake —Russia earthquake: Magnitude 8.8 megaquake hits Kamchatka, generating tsunamis across the Pacific —'Sleeping giant' fault beneath Canada could unleash a major earthquake, research suggests However, in the case of Sagaing, the slip occurred along more than 310 miles (500 km) of the fault, meaning that it caught up and then some. The researchers used a special technique to correlate satellite imagery before and after the event. Those images revealed that after the earthquake, the eastern side of the fault moved south by about 10 feet (3 m) relative to the western side. The scientists say that the imaging technique they used could help improve future earthquake models. "This earthquake turned out to be an ideal case to apply image correlation methods [techniques to compare images before and after a geological event] that were developed by our research group," study first author Solène Antoine, a geology postdoctoral scholar at Caltech, said in the statement. "They allow us to measure ground displacements at the fault, where the alternative method, radar interferometry, is blind due to phenomenon like decorrelation [a process to decouple signals] and limited sensitivity to north–south displacements."
Chicago Tribune
6 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
New sensors are designed to predict flooding in Chicago
As the rain came down in sheets one summer afternoon late last month, Thomas Baranowski was sitting on the back porch of his Garfield Ridge home when his wife, Rose, stepped outside. ''Oh come on, you've got to see this,'' she told him. He followed her down the steep stairwell to their basement, where water was spewing out of their flood drain 'just like a geyser,' Baranowski, 79, recalled. Though he and Rose, 80, are lifelong Chicagoans and no strangers to urban flooding, they didn't see the deluge coming — or the thousands of dollars in water damage that followed. But what if they had been given a heads-up the rain would hit their block so hard? A new initiative recently launched in Chicago is striving to do just that. Verizon, in conjunction with Chicago's Center for Neighborhood Technology and a Michigan-based startup, is equipping the city with technology that will give officials and residents alike the ability to track urban flooding in real time. The venture, project partners say, could eventually help Chicago better respond to and mitigate the impact of flash floods — especially in areas that have historically faced the brunt of torrential rain — as human-made climate change intensifies storms in the Midwest and places pressure on the city's outdated sewer system. At the core of the initiative are wireless floodwater sensors that, using sonar technology, can calculate the depth of nearby water in seconds. The idea is to deploy a network of these sensors citywide, which together will be able to track when and where water levels are rising during a storm. To date, 10 sensors have been installed from South Deering on the Far South Side to Austin on the West Side, with 40 more due for installation over coming months. This marks only the second time in the United States that technology of this kind has been deployed on a citywide scale. The sensors are the product of Hyfi, an Ann Arbor company launched five years ago by University of Michigan engineering professor Branko Kerkez and his former doctoral student, Brandon Wong, after the pair sought to devise a technological solution to changing climate conditions, according to Wong, now CEO of the startup. From California, Wong grew up around weather extremes, from droughts and flooding to wildfires, he said, noting he still remembers days when he'd wake up to 'ash raining' from a bright orange sky. But it wasn't until he moved out to Michigan for graduate school 12 years ago and shortly after saw historic flooding kill two people and cause millions of dollars of damage in Detroit that Wong knew he wanted to find a way to temper the impact of climate disasters. Hyfi sensors can detect how high floodwaters are rising within a 30-foot radius by generating a continuous, nearly inaudible sound wave pulse on the water's surface. To detect urban flooding, sensors are placed in low-lying areas, along viaducts and under manhole covers to see where water is pooling first or backing up, down to a city's pipes. Data the sensors collect is reported to a central server, which Hyfi then visualizes in a map of real-time flood conditions. The technology is making its Chicago debut as part of a larger effort by Verizon, using Hyfi's sensor platform, to improve flood response and stormwater management systems across the country. The initiative first rolled out in New Orleans last summer and is due to launch in Detroit over the next year, according to Donna Epps, chief responsible business officer at Verizon. For now, as sensors are piloted in Chicago, water level readings won't be widely available quite yet, Wong said, but the goal is to have data live on a public-facing platform that residents can access. Wong pointed to New Orleans, where, after an initial citywide installation of 27 Hyfi sensors, the city integrated the data into its own public alert system. The sensors could give communities and first responders a warning that flooding is imminent up to an hour before it hits, Wong says. That advance notice, Wong said, could be indispensable to local residents fearful of flood damage in their homes and for avoiding streets prone to flooding. Almost every time it's rained this year, Emmanuel Garcia has noticed that water pools on the streets and sidewalks around Belmont Cragin, where the 17-year-old has lived his entire life, he said. His family has had to stay in their apartment during storms for fear of encountering dangerous roadway conditions or having their basement flood, Garcia said. Jean Flisk, 58, who grew up in Canaryville but now lives on the Southwest Side, said she 'rain preps' her basement, which frequently floods during storms. 'If they say there's a flood warning or the rain is going to be really bad, I have to go and move everything in the basement … just in case,' she said. 'It's aggravating, it's a pain. I don't know if there's something to do.' There is, Hyfi and Verizon hope. Beyond proactively reporting floods, the project's partners imagine that over time, data can help inform long-term resilience planning, they say, particularly in areas of the city that have habitually been vulnerable to significant flooding. Hyfi and Verizon are also collaborating with the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a Chicago-based urban research group, to host community meetings where residents can give their input on where and how they'd like to see sensors used. So far, the group has hosted meetings in Chatham and Belmont Cragin, two neighborhoods troubled with chronic flooding, with several more planned for this year. The meetings were held in tandem with local organizations, including the Greater Chatham Initiative on the South Side and the Grassroots Empowerment Mission and North River Commission on the Northwest Side. With these meetings and the venture overall, the broader goal is to chart a path forward where 'we systemically even stop the flooding from happening,' Center for Neighborhood Technology CEO Nina Idemudia said. 'How do we work on improving the drainage system, improving where we make capital improvements in order to make sure the water is draining?' Sensors won't reveal new insights into which parts of Chicago are hit hardest by flooding, Idemudia said, but it could draw awareness to a long-standing need. She pointed to a 2019 study by the center that found urban flooding in Chicago disproportionately affects communities of color. 'Data is another way of accountability, right?' Idemudia said. 'It's one way to say you can't deny our current circumstances or our lived experience anymore. Here's the hard data. We're going to hold you to making changes until the outlook and impact of this data changes.' Following recent rainfall, the lived impact of urban flooding has been in full view. Since Wednesday, representatives from Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, alongside the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Small Business Administration and the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and Office of Homeland Security, have been going door to door assessing homes for damage from storms and subsequent flooding that swept through the city last month. These assessments follow disaster proclamations both Mayor Brandon Johnson and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle issued on Aug. 6 to assist residents in recovering from the July storms. They will help determine if and how much government assistance residents will qualify for, according to OEMC Emergency Services Manager Kaila Lariviere. Assessment teams have been directing their efforts based on a survey released a few weeks ago that gave residents the chance to self-report if they had been affected by the storms. Some 2,900 Cook County and Chicago residents reported damages, Lariviere said. Last Thursday, assessment teams spent the morning walking through Garfield Ridge on the Southwest Side. One of the surveyed homes belonged to Larry Anguiano, a husband and father whose basement flooded entirely in last month's storms, forcing his family to replace rugs, carpets and furniture in their home of the past five years, he told the Tribune. 'It was extremely quick,' he said, adding that since, he's been wary of it happening all over again. 'If there's that type of rain and you see it fill up in the streets, (you think), 'Oh no.'' The Baranowskis, who were also visited by damage assessment teams last week, echoed the sentiment. The past few weeks have been 'backbreaking' work to replace the walls and flooring of their flooded basement, Hope Baranowski said. The couple plans to install a flood control system because 'we can't have this happen again,' Thomas added. When Chicago received from 1.5 to 4.5 inches of rainfall across the city last week, according to the National Weather Service, the Baranowskis waited anxiously for the storms to pass. 'I was scared to death,' Hope Baranowski recalled.
Los Angeles Times
7 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Zero-G Biology
El Segundo-based Varda Space Industries is using space-based technology to manufacture complex pharmaceuticals in orbit, leveraging microgravity to create unique drug formulations for clients. — An El Segundo company has a novel solution to creating complex pharmaceuticals – using space tech to launch them into orbit The next frontier for medicine is closer to Los Angeles than San Francisco but feels like another galaxy. That's because it's about 300 miles straight up above sea level – in low-Earth orbit. Varda Space Industries, an El Segundo microgravity-enabled life sciences company, uses low-Earth orbit to develop unique drug formulations. It's a space-age approach to medicine that launches a capsule containing chemical compounds beyond Earth's atmosphere, where microgravity allows pharmaceutical formulations to be created in a process differently than on the surface. The capsules then reenter the atmosphere with their precious cargo. It became the first company to complete a manufacturing mission conducted outside of the International Space Station last year. Two more missions followed in early 2025 and a fourth launched on June 22. Varda plans to launch one more capsule this year and has four scheduled in 2026, which are all booked to capacity. 'What's special about next year is that the last two capsules will be going up on the same rocket. It will be the first time where we have two spacecraft in orbit at once, and we'll start to move into a fleet mentality,' said Will Bruey, chief executive and co-founder of Varda. Bruey, a former SpaceX engineer co-founded the company in 2021 with Delian Asparouhov, a former principal at Khosla Ventures. The company's growth is supported by a new round of investment. In July, the company announced a $187-million Series C round led by Natural Capital and Shrug Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Khosla Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Lux Capital and Also Capital. That brings total funding to $329 million. It will use the additional funds to scale operations so that it an expand its capsule production capacity, as well as open additional ground test facilities for pharmaceutical development. Additional capacity could eventually help lower costs – the average mission costs several million dollars today, although the finances are not measured by traditional revenue figures because there is potential to structure deals with royalties from the research and development conducted now. To support its additional manufacturing capabilities, it signed a 10,000-square-foot lease near its El Segundo headquarters for a dedicated lab space that will design molecules and test them prior to launch. The new laboratory will facilitate more complex experiments and allow it to research small molecules and move into more complex biologics. It currently has roughly 130 employees, and that number could increase to 180 within the next 12 months. Bruey envisions a time when there is a steady stream of capsules launching into, and returning from, space for biotech research, with launches on a weekly or daily basis. The company envisions scaling operations by launching more frequently, rather than trying to increase the size of their capsules to accommodate more experiments at a single launch. He likened it to his first job as a pizza delivery driver where the goal was to deliver many pizzas hot and fast to a large number of customers rather than waiting for a large order that required a semitruck to make the delivery. The capsules and satellite buses that carry them are constructed at the company's 61,000-square-foot headquarters where it forges raw materials into space vehicles. Those are then transported to Vandenberg Space Force Base up the coast near Santa Barbara for launch aboard a SpaceX rocket. Reusable rockets have lowered the cost of access to space and opened a range of in-space activities. Increased launch capabilities from companies, such as Long Beach-based Relativity Space, could lower costs even further as the lower-earth-orbit economy becomes more attainable as a destination for manufacturing, biotech, data centers and other technologies. Inside of the Varda capsule, custom-made lab equipment holds raw components that are mixed to form the targeted chemical compound. The device itself is small – measuring less than two feet tall by one foot wide. It has proprietary technology that is different from lab equipment on Earth. For example, a gas bubble that forms during an experiment on Earth would escape due to gravity, but it's not able to do so in space, so the equipment needs to account for environmental factors. Molecules could take a day or more to form, so the capsule remains in space for an extended period of time to complete the experiment. It also must preserve the temperature during re-entry and secure it from vibrations to ensure that the molecule is not destroyed. The capsule re-enters the atmosphere at speeds that reach Mach 25. Re-entry is supervised at the company's mission control center inside the headquarters building, where teams oversee both the capsule re-entry and its novel cargo. The capsule acts like a hypersonic wind tunnel at top speeds, so Varda has secured contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense to test materials for other applications beyond pharmeceutical development. This is also a third line of business – microgravity testing on materials for government and private clients – similar to the way that experiments are conducted on the International Space Station but with full automation and with the results delivered faster and at a lower cost than waiting for transportation to and from the space station. The typical Varda mission can last about two months. Varda is the first and only company to receive a special vehicle operator license under FAA Part 450. The W-4 mission is the first time the agency has issued that license, which allows it to reenter W-series capsules as needed without submitting new safety methodologies to the FAA for each identical flight. It has permission from the FAA to reenter capsules through 2029 before needing to renew the license. The W-4 mission is the maiden flight for Varda's next-generation spacecraft, which includes an in-house platform to navigate the spacecraft during the mission. While in orbit, the satellite bus provides the capsule with power, communications, attitude control and propulsion. When the capsule is ready for re-entry, it separates from the satellite bus and reenters, where it is recovered. Several startups have conducted test flights, such as German firm Atmos Space Cargo, California-based Outpost Space and Inversion Space, but none of these companies have successfully launched and landed a commercial mission. Meanwhile, SpaceX is reportedly interested in developing similar biotech capabilities to Varda. In some ways, the competition has helped Varda by lending validity to its approach to the larger biotech community, which is taking greater interest due to more capacity and competition. 'More people are getting to see the huge opportunity. We're actually pretty excited,' said Bruey. 'We've collaborated with SpaceX the last five years. Our partnership right now is focused on the launch aspect, and we'll continue to collaborate.' In February, Colorado-based Sierra Space, a commercial space and defense company that is building the Dream Chaser spaceplane, announced initiatives to advance research and development of biopharmaceutical solutions in low-Earth orbit during its inaugural mission to the International Space Station. Plans include conducting experiments to identify new ways to deliver cancer therapies to patients on Earth in collaboration with Merck. Another challenge for Varda is companies that are developing commercial space stations, such as Axiom Space, Blue Origin and Starlab Space. While these are in current development, they still have several years before they could come online. 'Once the commercial space stations have real estate in space, they will sell capacity or manufacturing,' said Dr. Leon Alkalai, chief executive at Mandala Space Ventures (and an investor in Varda). However, Varda has a real advantage built in to its ethos. 'Rather than thinking of manufacturing as a service, Varda is making it part of their core competency and betting on the value-add component to make themselves part of the value chain.' Overall, the space economy currently generates $613 billion in revenue, according to a recent report from The Space Foundation, which tracks revenue and spending on space technology. It projects that the space economy could grow to $1 trillion by 2032 at the current growth rate. Asparouhov credited an experiment published by pharmaceutical developer Merck in 2019 regarding the International Space Station as inspiration for Varda. That experiment demonstrated microgravity could develop higher-quality and more uniform crystallization. The applications could lead to new drug formations or entirely new medicines. For example, there is potential for medication that needs to be given intravenously to be recalibrated into a shelf-stable pill format. The company focus is both a biotech formulation platform and a space operation. It doesn't discover the molecules or choose what targets to go after. Rather, its business is to work within the pharmaceutical supply chain during the manufacturing process to open formulations that wouldn't otherwise exist. In a sense, the Varda system is a specialized piece of lab equipment that can introduce a new type of environment for biotech research. Bruey likened it to the introduction of other technologies such as cold and refrigeration, which have major implications on drug development. Crystallization and growth continue on Earth following the initial microgravity development. It's akin to a sourdough starter, which can be expanded to many loaves of bread once it's initially formed. Crystallization processes are commonly used in the manufacture of small molecules and small protein therapeutics. However, it has been challenging to identify the optimal crystallization processes for biologic drugs due to their large size and the flexibility of their structure. Once the drugs are developed, they are still required to go through testing, clinical trials and would need regulatory approval. A traditional drug development timeline could take a decade on average, and Bruey stated that he hopes that Varda's initial microgravity molecules could be available by the end of the decade for commercial use. 'The partners that we have see us as a pharmaceutical company. They don't see us as a space company. They bring us a drug that is having a particular problem, and we go solve it for them and hand it back,' said Asparouhov.
