‘Blaze star' might go nova soon; what to expect
Located about 3,000 light years from Earth, the 'Blaze Star' is actually two stars. One is a white dwarf star, dead and shriveled, about the size of Earth. The other is an ancient red giant star that's slowly being devoured by the smaller star.
According to NASA, during a nova event, the white dwarf releases a massive explosion. The star will stay intact after this explosion, unlike during a supernova, in which the star explodes. These explosions reoccur every few years.
The explosion will create a bright spot in the sky that will last about a week. The last time the star's eruption was seen happened in 1946.
The 'Blaze Star' is located in the 'Northern Crown,' a horseshoe-shaped curve of stars located to the west of the Hercules constellation. This constellation is found by looking east.
According to NASA, the best way to locate the star is to find Arcturus and Vega, two of the brightest stars in the night sky this time of year, and drawing a line between them.
The star will be visible about four hours after sunset this month. Once it explodes, the bright nova will be about the same brightness as the North Star.
The 'Blaze Star' was originally expected to explode in 2024. The dimming of the star system that year led many to believe it would explode soonish.
'Recurrent novae are unpredictable and contrarian,' said Dr. Koji Mukai, a fellow astrophysics researcher at NASA Goddard, in a statement released last year. 'When you think there can't possibly be a reason they follow a certain set pattern, they do – and as soon as you start to rely on them repeating the same pattern, they deviate from it completely. We'll see how T CrB behaves.'
It is important to note, because of the distance between the Earth and this star system, that we're actually seeing an explosion that occurred 3,000 years ago. Because the system is 3,000 light-years away, it takes 3,000 years for the light to actually reach us.
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National Geographic
an hour ago
- National Geographic
How human hibernation could revolutionize medicine and get us to Mars
Putting people into sleep mode is a sci-fi concept that's a lot closer to becoming real than you might think. Erin Belback is part of an ongoing human trial backed by NASA that aims to replicate the effects of hibernation in humans—a potential tool for overcoming some of the physiological problems of long-duration spaceflight. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh plan to monitor her exhaled breath and body temperature to study her metabolic rate for their research. Photograph by Rebecca Hale, National Geographic Photographs by Corey Arnold The test subject had slipped into what physician Clifton Callaway describes as a 'twilight kind of sleep.' Eighteen hours after Callaway's team at the University of Pittsburgh's Applied Physiology Lab started the man on a sedative that suppressed his body's natural shivering response, his internal temperature had sunk from 98.6°F to 95°F. His heart rate and blood pressure had dropped. His metabolism—and, along with it, his need for food, oxygen, and carbon dioxide removal—had plunged 20 percent. Yet the subject could still rise from his bed, shuffle to the bathroom to empty his bladder, and, when hungry, ring a bell to ask for food or a drink—alleviating the need for a catheter or intravenous lines and ensuring he could still respond and react. The man was one of five exceedingly fit volunteers, ranging in age from 21 to 54, who quietly dozed in the semidarkness—pretend astronauts on a nine-month journey to Mars. NASA had tasked Callaway, an expert in cardiac care and induced hypothermia, with figuring out a simple way to put human beings into a state that mimics some of the key features of hibernation without the use of a ventilator or immobilizing drugs, and careful dosing of dexmedetomidine did the trick. His subject, Callaway says now, was woozy, dreamy, but still able to function in an emergency if required—'just like a bear.' Humans in hibernation mode are a classic staple of space travel in science fiction movies, whether it's HAL 9000 fatally unplugging a few of his passengers in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Chris Pratt waking up Jennifer Lawrence too soon because he's lonely in Passengers. But NASA has grand ambitions of sending astronauts to Mars, for real, as soon as the 2030s, and putting humans in hibernation mode, for real, could be the key to achieving it, which is why both NASA and the European Space Agency are supporting studies like Callaway's. A bearlike state of hibernation could, in theory, help astronauts snooze through the tedium of extended space travel and limit crewmate conflict. Their slowed metabolism could help reduce cargo: Missions would require less food and oxygen, and consequently less fuel. Space agency-funded research is even exploring whether slowing a person's metabolism weakens the health impact of harmful radiation. This would be an encouraging boost for the viability of extended travel through space, where radiation is as much as 200 times greater than on Earth. In fact, when it comes to achieving the dream of crew missions to Mars, says ESA's chief exploration scientist Angelique Van Ombergen, space radiation 'is a big showstopper.' Robert Foote, a volunteer in the NASA-supported trial in Pittsburgh, is monitored by scientists after being asleep for 20 hours. By achieving hibernation on demand, researchers could potentially unlock a wide range of medical benefits, including extending the time that doctors have to treat strokes and heart attacks. Photograph by Tim Betler, UPMC Scientists aren't studying hibernation just so we can ship astronauts ever deeper into space, though. Its physiological superpowers could save countless lives here on Earth, if we can unlock the secrets to the mysterious molecular-level changes that shift animals in and out of a state of hibernation, or 'torpor'—a miraculously reversible state of dormancy characterized by extreme lethargy, a lowered body temperature and metabolic rate, and a host of other remarkable changes. 'It's a well-established principle,' Callaway explains, 'that at low temperatures, like in hibernating animals, you tolerate lack of oxygen, lack of blood flow better and longer.' But why? Why don't bears' muscles atrophy while they sleep? How come their blood doesn't clot? And what triggers the process to begin with? In their hunt for answers, scientists are now inching closer to their most ambitious discovery yet: a central switch in the brains of hibernating animals that activates the various beneficial phenomena of hibernation, all at once. Mimicking the colder body temperature of bears during hibernation, for instance, could lessen the severity of 'reperfusion injuries,' the often devastating damage that occurs after cardiac arrest when blood flow is restored to the oxygen-deprived tissues of the body, setting off massive inflammation, oxidative stress, and cell death. It could also help extend the narrow window of time that doctors have to provide critical care during strokes and heart attacks. A clearer understanding of how hibernating bears preserve muscle mass and turn on and off insulin resistance could have other benefits: It might help us treat chronic obesity and diabetes in humans. ICU patients can lose more than 10 percent of their muscle mass in seven days. Could an induced state of hibernation stall or even stop the decline? Scientists are searching beyond bears for the answers because, of course, bears aren't the only animals that hibernate. A team at Colorado State University is investigating how the 13-lined ground squirrel can rapidly fatten and then switch off its appetite before hibernation for clues to combating obesity. UCLA researchers examining the genes of yellow--bellied marmots have recently found that 'epigenetic aging' is 'essentially stalled' during the seven to eight months they hibernate each year. Experts in Germany are exploring how bats maintain blood circulation at low temperatures, with an eye to human hibernation applications. And biologists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks are studying a squirrel that can drop its body temperature by 70 degrees and heart rate down to five beats per minute and survive eight months in subzero temperatures. Their goal is to develop a 'hibernation mimetic' drug that might safely allow clinicians to place humans into an immediate state of hibernation—without a long prep time, in a rural hospital lacking advanced equipment, or even in an ambulance racing through the streets. It would instantly dial down cellular metabolism, slow cell death, and catalyze a whole host of other biological processes associated with hibernation. (New bat discovery could help humans hibernate during space travel.) To decode hibernation's mysteries, biologists like Heiko Jansen are carefully studying the world's most notorious hibernators: bears. The 11 grizzlies housed at the Washington State University Bear Center are onetime 'trouble' bears from Yellowstone National Park and their offspring. Today they are sleeping for the benefit of science. The center's grizzlies are monitored in camera-equipped dens as they snooze through the late stages of their hibernation. For the five months they rest, their metabolism slows dramatically, reducing their need for food and oxygen. Callaway's twilight sleep experiment provides a glimpse into what might be possible for humans, but what happens in the lab and in the wild are clearly two different things. Bears don't need drugs to settle in for the winter—they have a natural 'torpor switch,' he says, which is flipped through some process that we don't fully understand. And though they're unruly, bears still offer a good comparison for our own potential: They're at least closer to us in size than a rodent, and, perhaps most critically, their temperature drop during deep sleep is well within the range of human survivability. One bright afternoon in late March, biologist Heiko Jansen stood outside a fenced-in pasture at the Washington State University Bear Research, Education, and Conservation Center in Pullman and watched as a shaggy 300-pound female grizzly bear named Kio struggled to eat a marshmallow. Other than a serious case of bedhead and the glacial pace of Kio's chewing, there were few visible clues that the dangerous, disheveled giant with the four-inch claws was undergoing a profound metamorphosis. Looking from the outside, little about Kio's metabolic process seems applicable to humans. Ten days earlier, she rose from her bed of straw and began to slowly work through a feast of bear kibble, apples, and elk bones and leg meat. It was her first meal in five months. Her salivary glands were still sluggish. Then she pooped out a 'fecal plug' composed of plants, dried feces, dead cells, and hair lodged in her lower intestine. Those three key activities—rise, eat, poop out the plug—seem to have helped flip a series of microscopic genetic switches inside her cells, catalyzing the slow-motion reversal of a host of bizarre biological cycles her body had entered into over the winter. Kio's metabolism, which had been operating at one-quarter its normal speed, kicked into gear, more than doubling by the time she was struggling with the marshmallow. Her core body temperature, hovering about 12 degrees below normal, began to rise. Two of her heart's four chambers, which had all but shut down for the winter, reopened for business. Her fat cells, for months miraculously resistant to insulin, the hormone that tells the body when to absorb sugar, started to respond to it again. Her appetite, absent for months, rumbled to life. When the grizzlies begin to stir, in March, they are awake but drowsy—their bodies beginning the process of reversing their metabolic slowdown. This bear, Adak, will be rewarded with honey and other treats after presenting his legs for a blood draw. Five months earlier, back in November, when Kio lay down and packed it in for the winter, she stopped eating, her gut entered 'stasis,' her saliva glands shut down, and she began living on her own body fat. Over the following months, she burned roughly 20 percent, or 70 pounds, of her body weight. To facilitate this, her body became resistant to insulin, a good thing for hibernators. Humans who become insulin resistant often develop diabetes—clearly a bad thing. Bears can switch that resistance on and off, depending on the season, without health consequences. If we could understand how, maybe we could figure out a way for humans to do it too? (Hibernating bears could hold a clue to treating diabetes.) The notion got a boost of confidence in 2018, when a Canadian group published the first complete grizzly bear DNA sequence. A year later, Jansen headed up a team that used a technique known as RNA sequencing to identify which genes are activated in bear muscle, fat, and liver tissue samples before, during, and after hibernation. They found seasonal changes in more than 10,000 of a grizzly's 30,723 genes. Now, in order to decode how bears switch insulin resistance on and off, Jansen has been extracting stem cells from blood samples collected from Pullman's bears at different times of year, methodically eliminating individual genes and then growing colonies of fat cells in petri dishes to see what happens. 'We're not saying that we'll find something that can reverse diabetes,' Jansen offers. 'But at least by looking at a model system, the cells that change their sensitivity, we can begin to develop some clues as to what's going on.' Kio's cardiac function might also yield insights that help treat human blood--clotting disorders. While Kio was hibernating, her heart rate slowed from 80 to 100 beats per minute to about 10. Normally this would cause her blood to clot into dangerous blockages and induce a stroke—'if that happened to us,' says Jansen, 'we'd be dead'—but hibernating bears also experience a remarkable drop in their blood-clotting platelets. It was Kio's ability to maintain muscle tone, however, that particularly transfixed some of her researchers. Unlike humans, who begin to lose muscle mass within a week of inactivity, Kio rose from her hibernation bed as fit as if she'd spent the winter chasing chipmunks. Up in Alaska, researchers Vadim Fedorov and Anna Goropashnaya are trying to unlock the mystery of how bears do this—and test the hypothesis that humans might be able to as well. The Russian-born husband-and-wife team specialize in evolutionary genetics at the University of Alaska's Institute of Arctic Biology (IAB), in Fairbanks. When they began analyzing gene expression patterns in tissue samples collected from captive black bears nearly 20 years ago, the results shocked them. Seeing as how bears stop eating and slow their metabolism during hibernation, Fedorov and Goropashnaya assumed the gene activity involved in building new muscles would be dialed down to preserve energy. Instead, the genes were just as active and even appeared to ramp up. 'We checked it several times,' says Goropashnaya. 'We couldn't believe it.' At the university's Institute for Arctic Biology, Anna Goropashnaya and Vadim Fedorov are investigating how muscle tissue of squirrels and bears (squirrel tissue is projected on their lab wall for this image) is preserved in hibernation when the animals don't eat and barely move. The findings were 'illogical' but somehow correct. Scores of genes known to be part of muscle protein biosynthesis were turned up in what appeared to be a coordinated—and metabolically costly—frenzy of activity. The two presented their first paper on the phenomenon in 2011. Now, with the aid of newer DNA sequencing technologies, they're able to study twice as many genes and with far more specificity, which is what led them to the mTOR pathway, a well-known cellular 'dial' that also plays a key role in controlling the rate of cell division. Typically, when mammals are starved of nutrients, their bodies dial mTOR down to suppress cell regeneration and steer energy to protect existing cells. But in the muscles of hibernating bears, the researchers confirmed what they'd first observed years earlier: mTOR increased instead. Fedorov and Goropashnaya were stumped. If hibernating bears are building new muscle, where are they getting the nutrients to make it? Researchers at the Universities of Wisconsin and Montreal have explored one possibility: microbes. Early findings in other hibernators indicate that instead of producing urine when hibernating, animals recycle the nitrogen in urea, and microbes in their guts could be ingesting and metabolizing it into amino acids, which make new muscles. If Fedorov and Goropashnaya can identify a single, extra-powerful 'upstream' gene responsible for switching on this muscle regeneration, it could have profound medical implications. The muscles of bedbound ICU patients wouldn't melt away within weeks, and astronauts could build muscles while resting. But what if all the disparate and remarkable processes of hibernation could be globally activated all at once—with a drug? To find out, scientists are looking deeper into the animal kingdom to unlock the secrets of the most extreme hibernator of all. (It's not just bears: These hibernating animals may surprise you.) The arctic ground squirrel, a diminutive rodent with gold-tinted fur, a button nose, and a tiny pair of Bugs Bunny-like front incisors, can drastically drop its body temperature and heart rate, slow to one breath per minute, and survive months in subzero conditions. The squirrels are also, for the most part, far easier to study than bears. An arctic ground squirrel remains in hibernation in a lab at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. 'Until they open their eyes,' says Kelly Drew, the affable, silver-haired neuroscientist who directs the Center for Transformative Research in Metabolism at the IAB, after digging through a nest of cotton and wood shavings to pull out a frozen, furry snowball. 'Then they can bite.' In the early 2000s, Drew persuaded the U.S. military to fund a search for the brain chemicals that trigger hibernation in the squirrels. If she could identify those chemicals, she suggested, she could then test them on humans, in hopes of developing new ways to cool wounded soldiers on the battlefield. Drew's first breakthrough with the squirrels arrived in 2005 when an undergraduate research assistant chanced upon a paper from a Japanese lab while combing through scientific literature. The Japanese group had actually achieved the opposite of what Drew hoped to do. They'd found a drug that woke hibernating hamsters by blocking their brain cells' response to a specific chemical called adenosine. Drew assigned a graduate student to inject a synthetic version of adenosine, a drug called 6-Cyclohexyladenosine, or CHA, directly into the brains of her squirrels. Rather than blocking adenosine, which is how the caffeine in your coffee works its magic, CHA replicates its effects. When the graduate student dosed a squirrel's brain in the summer, outside of hibernation season, nothing happened. But when he repeated it closer to hibernation season, the CHA put the animal into such a deep state of torpor, the student initially thought he had killed it. 'He was super sad because that's a big deal,' Drew recalls. 'He takes the animal out for the vet to do the necropsy. The vet gets the tools out, he's going to start cutting open this dead animal, and it starts to move.' Her lab had done it. They'd found a way to put a squirrel in hibernation mode, like flipping a switch. Temporarily removed from its refrigerated hibernation den and settled on a bed of wood shavings, this arctic ground squirrel remained in a state of torpor for over an hour before beginning to stir. The squirrels survive their long hibernation by warming up for short periods every few weeks. On the opposite side of the world, at the University of Bologna in Italy, around the same time Drew's grad student stumbled on that Japanese paper about adenosine, another grad student named Domenico Tupone was charting a similar path. The focus of his laboratory research wasn't hibernation per se but a component of it: identifying the brain circuits that regulate body temperature during sleep. His team suspected that a small patch of neurons at the base of an ordinary rat's brain helped convey temperature-control signals to the periphery of the body. They temporarily immobilized those neurons with an injection, then placed the rat in a cold, dark cage. The experiment validated their hypothesis. As Tupone and his colleagues watched, the rat sank into a state of hypothermia so extreme it should have proved fatal. That's when things got weird. Six hours and four injections later, the hypothermic rat was still alive. And when the team finally removed it from its cage and warmed it up, the rat behaved, at least outwardly, as if nothing had happened. Afterward, as Tupone and his colleagues examined the brain waves picked up by a web of electrodes attached to the rodent's skull, scientist Matteo Cerri made an observation that altered the course of Tupone's future research. The peaks and valleys of the brain waves looked familiar. Cerri had seen the same patterns in hibernating animals. But there was one crucial difference. Unlike arctic ground squirrels, rats do not naturally hibernate. Tupone had to know: If a non-hibernating animal could be safely induced into hibernation, then maybe humans could do it too? In the years that followed, Tupone obsessed over scraps of paper in dimly lit bars, sketching out what a brain circuit capable of triggering hibernation in humans might look like. In bed, he tossed and turned, fantasizing about a 'revolutionary' IV-administered drug akin to Drew's 'hibernation mimetic' that paramedics could use to slow cell death on the way to the hospital. He became convinced that if it could be accomplished safely, inducing natural torpor in humans would upend basic science. The next step for both researchers, though—human trials—presented their stiffest obstacle yet. In order to administer Drew's 'hibernation mimetic' to ground squirrels, her team often had to perform invasive brain surgeries. For humans, the drug would need to be delivered via IV. The trouble is, adenosine receptors are present throughout the body, and activating them globally can trigger unwanted side effects, including cardiac arrest. After four more years of frustrating trial and error, Drew paired the drug with a compound that fixed the heart attack problem, and she's currently trying to solve the additional obstacle of fluctuating blood glucose levels, which in extreme cases can cause seizures in lab animals and even death. 'It works; it definitely cools them,' Drew says. 'We're just trying to tweak it so it's as safe as possible.' Clinicians have lots of devices to regulate temperature, 'but the human body typically fights it. By avoiding that cold defense response, which is what our hibernation mimetic does, then the clinician has the ability to dial in whatever temperature they want.' In minutes, not hours. Tupone, meanwhile, was working on parallel tracks at Portland's Oregon Health & Science University under Shaun Morrison, one of the world's experts on the brain circuits that control body temperature. Tupone's primary focus was on extending the map of temperature--related circuits into new parts of the brain, but in his spare time, he continued to hunt for the elusive hibernation switch. Around 2016, he stumbled upon a curious biological phenomenon that convinced him he was getting close. He and Morrison were attempting to confirm their map of the brain's thermoregulatory control system, in an experiment similar to the one in which the unexpected survival of those hypothermic Italian rats had blown his mind. This time, Tupone used a small knife to sever the bundle of nerves running to the rat's brain stem, cutting off the pathway that relays temperature--control signals down to the body's periphery. Once again, though, Tupone's results seemed to flip the expected rule of mammalian physiology. Rather than disabling the ability of the rat to respond to heat or cold, Tupone's incision somehow enhanced it. When Tupone wrapped the rat in a plastic blanket and ran hot water over it, its body began generating even more heat. When he used freezing cold water, the rat's brain seemed to allow its body temperature to fall even faster. An arctic ground squirrel emerges from a burrow in the foothills of Alaska's Brooks Range shortly after its eight-month hibernation. Each fall, Colorado State University scientists working at the nearby Toolik Field Station collar squirrels with devices to track body temperature data and light, which tells them if a squirrel is in or out of its burrow. In the spring, new squirrels are ear-tagged and weighed before their summer of foraging begins. The long-term study is revealing how climate change is affecting the biology of these important hibernators. Tupone and Morrison quickly concluded they had discovered something profound. The results suggested that a second, previously undiscovered brain circuit capable of modulating body temperature existed—one that facilitated the transition in and out of hibernation. They named the phenomenon 'thermoregulatory inversion' (TI). But where exactly was this circuit, and how could it be activated? After eight years of trial and error, Tupone and Morrison published a paper this past January announcing they'd found a small patch of neurons in the rat's hypothalamus—the ventromedial periventricular area (VMPeA)—that, when activated, not only seems to slow metabolism, lower body temperature, and induce brain waves and cardiac patterns unique to hibernation but also sets in motion phenomena that flip the body's normal temperature-control system on its head, facilitating the transition into and out of the torpor state. They'd found it: the elusive 'torpor switch.' Tupone believes the switch is connected to an incomplete version of the hibernation circuitry that still exists in many animals. To disable it, he hypothesizes, evolution did the most efficient thing. It simply removed the connection between the circuitry and the switch that would flip it on automatically. 'It is like you have all the cables inside your walls to turn on a light,' he says, but you've removed the connection to the switch that controls that light. 'We think humans have all the circuitry.' Our switch, he believes, just isn't connected anymore. To back up his findings, Tupone is now collaborating with Kelly Drew's lab to find the analogous circuitry—and the switch—in arctic ground squirrels. And he's laying the groundwork for a drug of his own that can flip the switch in his rats without invasive brain surgery. Each advance, though, generates more mysteries. To flip their switch on and off in the study they published in January, Tupone and Morrison had to use invasive brain surgery and manually apply a drug to the general area where it was located. Even that infinitesimally small patch of the brain still contained millions of neurons, including an entire neighborhood of unrelated neurons surrounding it. To find a drug specific enough to give to humans without immense side effects, Tupone will need to identify the precise neurons around the switch and design a drug that will target only those involved in hibernation. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. To suppress the shivering response in humans, anesthesiologists typically administer muscle relaxants or paralyzing drugs, which suppress breathing, so doctors have to intubate patients … which requires putting them into a medically induced coma. This is why induced hypothermia is not available outside hospitals. It's also not currently an option for stroke patients, because of the dangerous drop in blood pressure that often occurs during the gap between administering anesthesia and intubating a patient, which can deprive the brain of even more oxygen at a moment when dangerous blockages are already suffocating its cells. Rats don't hibernate. But what if they could? Neurologist Domenico Tupone and fellow researchers from the University of Oregon say they've identified a 'torpor switch' in rat brain neurons (projected on the wall) that can be activated to send the rodents into a deep state of hibernation. Identifying this circuitry in non-hibernators could be a breakthrough in the human hibernation effort. 'It can actually worsen a stroke,' says researcher Cal-laway, from the University of Pittsburgh. 'But boy, it sure would be nice to lower your body temperature and let your brain tolerate the stroke longer until I can get you to the cath lab and take that blood clot out.' As an emergency physician, Callaway understands better than most the potential applications for humans, as well as the challenges presented by making the leap from bears and squirrels to humans. He's been researching and refining the techniques used to induce hypothermia in cardiac and brain-injured patients since the 1990s, and he's also a former chair of the American Heart Association's Emergency Cardiovascular Care Committee, which is why NASA awarded him a grant through the Translational Research Institute for Space Health to explore whether his techniques can be applied to the metabolic needs of astronauts. So far, there are problems. The drop in blood pressure and heart rate in his five healthy volunteers was so extreme that those with cardiovascular or other medical conditions might not be able to tolerate it. And within days, all five of the 'pretend astronauts' had developed a tolerance to his sedative, suggesting, among other things, that its effectiveness would fade over time. Those are solvable problems, Callaway says. 'This is just the first step' in a process that he believes will take 10 to 15 years—a mere nap for Rip Van Winkle. 'There's a lot of science to be done,' he says. But he's excited by the progress: 'I don't think it's pie-in-the-sky anymore.' To keep the pretend astronauts inspired during the human trial, Callaway's team had plastered the walls of their lab with posters: a satellite floating in space above the swirling blues and whites of Earth; the cratered, gleaming surface of a moonlike planet; the rainbow-hued burst of starlight, radiating from a distant galaxy. For now, such destinations are accessible only in our dreams. But someday in the not too distant future, a real astronaut might awaken from a hibernation-like slumber to gaze on the real thing.
National Geographic
2 hours ago
- National Geographic
The future of spaceflight—from orbital vacations to humans on Mars
NASA aims to travel to the moon again—and beyond. Here's a look at the 21st-century race to send humans into space. Today, NASA's Commercial Crew Program is expanding on the agency's relationship with private companies. Through it, NASA is relying on SpaceX and Boeing to build spacecraft capable of carrying humans into orbit. Once those vehicles are built, both companies retain ownership and control of the craft, and NASA can send astronauts into space for a fraction of the cost of a seat on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft. SpaceX, which established a new paradigm by developing reusable rockets, has been running regular cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station since 2012. And in May 2020, the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft carried NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the ISS, becoming the first crewed mission to launch from the United States in nearly a decade. The mission, called Demo-2, is scheduled to return to Earth in August. Boeing is currently developing its Starliner spacecraft and hopes to begin carrying astronauts to the ISS in 2021. Other companies, such as Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, are specializing in sub-orbital space tourism. Test launch video from inside the cabin of Blue Origin's New Shepard shows off breathtaking views of our planet and a relatively calm journey for its first passenger, a test dummy cleverly dubbed 'Mannequin Skywalker.' Virgin Galactic is running test flights on its sub-orbital spaceplane, which will offer paying customers roughly six minutes of weightlessness during its journey through Earth's atmosphere. With these and other spacecraft in the pipeline, countless dreams of zero-gravity somersaults could soon become a reality—at least for passengers able to pay the hefty sums for the experience. Apollo 1 Crew Apollo 1 astronauts "Gus" Grissom (left), Edward White, and Roger Chaffee pose in front of the Saturn 1 launch vehicle at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. On the morning of January 27, 1967, the crew was sitting atop the launch pad for a pre-launch test when a fire broke out in their capsule, killing all three astronauts. The investigation into the fatal accident led to major design changes for future launch vehicles. Looking to the moon Moon missions are essential to the exploration of more distant worlds. After a long hiatus from the lunar neighborhood, NASA is again setting its sights on Earth's nearest celestial neighbor with an ambitious plan to place a space station in lunar orbit sometime in the next decade. Sooner, though, the agency's Artemis program, a sister to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and 1970s, is aiming to put the first woman (and the next man) on the lunar surface by 2024. Extended lunar stays build the experience and expertise needed for the long-term space missions required to visit other planets. As well, the moon may also be used as a forward base of operations from which humans learn how to replenish essential supplies, such as rocket fuel and oxygen, by creating them from local material. Such skills are crucial for the future expansion of human presence into deeper space, which demands more independence from Earth-based resources. And although humans have visited the moon before, the cratered sphere still harbors its own scientific mysteries to be explored—including the presence and extent of water ice near the moon's south pole, which is one of the top target destinations for space exploration. NASA is also enlisting the private sector to help it reach the moon. It has awarded three contracts to private companies working on developing human-rated lunar landers—including both Blue Origin and SpaceX. But the backbone of the Artemis program relies on a brand new, state-of-the-art spacecraft called Orion. Currently being built and tested, Orion—like Crew Dragon and Starliner—is a space capsule similar to the spacecraft of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, as well as Russia's Soyuz spacecraft. But the Orion capsule is larger and can accommodate a four-person crew. And even though it has a somewhat retro design, the capsule concept is considered to be safer and more reliable than NASA's space shuttle—a revolutionary vehicle for its time, but one that couldn't fly beyond Earth's orbit and suffered catastrophic failures. Capsules, on the other hand, offer launch-abort capabilities that can protect astronauts in case of a rocket malfunction. And, their weight and design mean they can also travel beyond Earth's immediate neighborhood, potentially ferrying humans to the moon, Mars, and beyond. By moving into orbit with its Commercial Crew Program and partnering with private companies to reach the lunar surface, NASA hopes to change the economics of spaceflight by increasing competition and driving down costs. If space travel truly does become cheaper and more accessible, it's possible that private citizens will routinely visit space and gaze upon our blue, watery home world—either from space capsules, space stations, or even space hotels like the inflatable habitats Bigelow Aerospace intends to build. The United States isn't the only country with its eyes on the sky. Russia regularly launches humans to the International Space Station aboard its Soyuz spacecraft. China is planning a large, multi-module space station capable of housing three taikonauts, and has already launched two orbiting test vehicles—Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2, both of which safely burned up in the Earth's atmosphere after several years in space. Now, more than a dozen countries have the ability to launch rockets into Earth orbit. A half-dozen space agencies have designed spacecraft that shed the shackles of Earth's gravity and traveled to the moon or Mars. And if all goes well, the United Arab Emirates will join that list in the summer of 2020 when its Hope spacecraft heads to the red planet. While there are no plans yet to send humans to Mars, these missions—and the discoveries that will come out of them—may help pave the way.
Scientific American
2 hours ago
- Scientific American
NASA's Juno Mission Leaves Stunning Legacy of Science at Jupiter
The NASA spacecraft tasked with uncovering the secrets of Jupiter, king of the planets, is running out of time. The Juno probe has already survived far longer than anticipated—its path around the solar system's largest planet has repeatedly flown it through a tempest of radiation that should have corroded away its instruments and electronics long ago. And yet here it is: one of the greatest planetary detectives ever built, still pirouetting around Jupiter, fully functional. But it may not be for long. September 2025 marks the end of Juno's extended mission. Although it could get another reprieve—an extended-extended mission—the spacecraft cannot carry on forever. Eventually the probe is fated to plunge into Jupiter's stormy skies, to lethal effect. Regardless of when that happens, the spacecraft's legacy is indelible. It revealed a whole different Jupiter than scientists thought they knew. Oddly geometric continent-size storms, in strange yet stable configurations, dance around its poles. Its heaviest matter seems to linger in its skies, while its abyssal heart is surprisingly light and fuzzy. Its innards don't resemble the lasagnalike layers found in rocky worlds; they look more like mingling swirls of different kinds of ink. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. And Juno wasn't simply trying to understand Jupiter. It set out to uncover how the entire solar system was born. Jupiter, after all, was the first planet to piece itself together after the sun exploded into existence. Hidden underneath the planet's cloud tops, there is a recording of the beginnings of everything we see around us. 'That's the story behind why Juno was created: to go and look inside Jupiter every way we knew how, to try to figure out what happened in the early solar system that formed that planet—and what role that planet had in forming us,' says Scott Bolton, the mission's principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Tex. Whenever a mission studies a planet or moon up close, 'you're going to be surprised' at what it finds, says Juno project scientist Steve Levin of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But what you really want is 'to make the theorists throw everything out the window and start over.' Juno has torn up more textbooks than any other planetary science mission. 'It's been quite a ride,' Levin says. And scientists will never look at Jupiter, or the solar system, in the same way again. Jupiter, the Roman god, was often up to no good. According to myth, he obscured his mischief with a blanket of clouds so that nobody could see what he was up to. His wife, though, had the power to see through these clouds and monitor his shenanigans. Her name was Juno. In the late 1970s the two Voyager space probes gave humanity its first spectacularly detailed look at the gas giant. Unlike the deific Juno, they couldn't see Jupiter's buried secrets—but they were sufficiently inspiring for Bolton, who was a college student at the time. 'I had been a huge Star Trek fan and had fantasized about traveling around and wondering what the rest of the universe was like,' he says. When someone from JPL gave a talk at his school and showcased Voyager 1's jaw-dropping shots of Jupiter and its maelstroms, he was sold. 'I'd never seen anything like it.' In 1980 Bolton got a job at JPL, just as Voyager 1 was about to greet Saturn. Later he became part of the Galileo project, a mission to study Jupiter's atmosphere and magnetic field that orbited the planet from 1995 to 2003. It was the first spacecraft to orbit an outer planet and the first to drop a probe through its atmosphere. Although Galileo began to paint a picture of Jupiter in three dimensions, so much about the world—especially its core, the depth and nature of its storms, and its unseen polar regions—remained a mystery. Bolton ultimately came to an inescapable conclusion: science needed to make the mythical Juno real. As the new millennium dawned a spacecraft took shape, to the tune of $1.1 billion. A triumvirate of solar panels powered a suite of cloud-piercing instruments, some able to pick up on different types of radiation emanating from deep within the planet. One piece of tech can measure how the spacecraft is affected by small changes in the planet's gravitational field, allowing scientists to determine Jupiter's inner structure. Because every bit of added weight counts for a lot in spaceflight, the earliest Juno plans lacked a visual camera. It didn't need one to achieve its scientific objectives. But Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, a Juno team member and a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., recalls Bolton saying: 'We can't fly to Jupiter without a camera.' The mission may be all about sensing what's below those clouds. But who doesn't want to catch a glimpse of alien hurricanes and vaporous whirlpools, too? JunoCam, led by Hansen-Koharcheck, was added to the payload. The biggest issue mission designers faced was figuring out how to shield the probe. The space environment enveloping Jupiter is thoroughly unpleasant. A torus of radiation, not only deadly to humans but also highly degrading to any electronics, zips around the planet's equator. Eventually this radiation will murder any spacecraft in its wake. To delay the inevitable, Juno deploys two radiation-dodging tricks. The first is to orbit in a way that repeatedly takes it over Jupiter's poles, where radiation is minimal. During each circuit, Juno gets as close as 3,100 miles to the planet's cloud tops, allowing it to conduct detailed scientific observations while spending a limited time bathed in aggressive radiation. The second is that its most vital electronics are encased inside a titanium vault. The spacecraft's hull is showered by more than 100 million dental x-rays' worth of radiation. Anything inside the vault receives about 800 times less. Juno's mission team hoped these strategies would keep the spacecraft alive for at least a year, but the scientists had only educated guesses to work with. 'No one's ever done a polar orbit. No one's ever slipped between the radiation belts,' says Heidi Becker, a researcher at JPL and the member of the Juno team responsible for monitoring the radiation environment. The only way to know was to go. 'I've been looking up at Jupiter for a very long time,' Becker says. She felt like the planet was teasing the Juno team before launch: 'Okay, bring it. Let's see if you can do it.' Juno left Earth in 2011 and reached Jupiter after a 1.7-billion-mile journey. It quickly took up a polar orbit of the elephantine world, and Becker and the team were overwhelmingly relieved when they realized that the radiation hadn't immediately exterminated the spacecraft. The scientists were also glad they'd packed that camera. The moment Juno opened its eyes, it witnessed a parade of colors rushing about with unrelenting force. The ever-changing landscapes weren't just painterly. 'They're like works of art,' says Bolton—impressionistic-looking spirals and streams, folding, arching and blooming in full view. Juno may be a scientific mission, but it also revealed Jupiter as a living van Gogh painting hanging in the sky. Within moments of falling into orbit, Juno revealed wonders—starting with the planet's freakish atmosphere and its gargantuan storms. When the probe peeked at Jupiter's poles, 'we saw something nobody's seen before,' Levin says. JunoCam and Juno's infrared mapping instrument, JIRAM, spied an octagonal collection of eight storms surrounding a central cyclone at the north pole. The south pole, meanwhile, had a pentagonal group of five storms circling another one in the middle. Each cluster of cyclones is larger than the U.S. The JIRAM image of the northern circumpolar cyclones resembled a 'beautiful, gigantic jack-o'-lantern in space,' Becker says. These geometric storms didn't just look striking—they had no precedent. 'The first time we saw the storms, I was with a bunch of people from the science team,' Levin says. 'Somebody literally said: 'Are you sure you got the right planet?' And they were only half joking.' The arrangement at each pole seemed oddly stable: storms moved around and jostled one another, but none disappeared. And to date, no one has a definitive explanation for why the number of storms at each pole differs, nor why their dance routine never seems to change. 'The way those cyclones are stable at the poles is still a mystery,' says Alessandro Mura, a researcher at the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome and the lead for Juno's infrared mapping instrument. The most famous storm on Jupiter is its Great Red Spot—a rust-hued monster large enough to encompass the entire Earth. First seen a couple of centuries ago, it's known to change shape over time, and one day it may vanish. But until Juno arrived, astronomers' knowledge of it was surficial. By probing the radiation emitted by the spot's churning gases and by measuring its gravitational pull, the Juno team realized it reached a depth of about 300 miles below the cloud tops —almost 55 times deeper than Mount Everest is tall. Unsurprisingly, for a planet wreathed in storms, Jupiter experiences a lot of lightning; the Voyager missions caught bolts flashing through its clouds back in 1979. But Juno ' discovered a type of lightning that doesn't exist on Earth,' Becker says, which seemingly defied the laws of physics. Like many spacecraft, Juno has a star camera, an instrument that uses those diamantine dots to determine its orientation in space and aid its navigation. The camera can also spot lightning, which appears as bright specks. When Juno looked at the dark side of Jupiter, it spied tiny little flashes made by very high-altitude lightning bolts. That didn't make any sense. To produce lightning, liquid water needs to collide with ice crystals to create a spark. In 1979 the Voyager mission detected lightning coming from deep water clouds, where the suffocating pressure of the overlying atmosphere created temperatures high enough for liquid water to exist. But the lightning flashes picked up by Juno came from the upper echelons of Jupiter's atmosphere, a location so frigid that only ice crystals should exist there. After studying Jupiter's titanic clouds for a time, the Juno team worked out what was happening. The planet's cloud tops contain plenty of ammonia, and storms can launch ice into the sky that then binds to that ammonia. The chemical acts like antifreeze on the water-ice, causing it to turn into liquid droplets. And when those droplets smash into the upwardly propelled ice crystals, you get electricity—and vertiginous lightning. But this epiphany brought another mystery into focus. Sure, ammonia-ice clouds likely dominate Jupiter's skyline—but Juno found that some parts of the uppermost atmosphere have a dearth of ammonia. That didn't track: Jupiter's atmosphere looks incredibly turbulent—like a thoroughly whisked raw egg—so all its components should be mixed up, with a more or less even distribution of gases. How can many parts of the planet have 90-mile-deep wells lacking ammonia? 'There was no theory that could even remotely explain this,' says Chris Moeckel, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. His first thought was that 'there's no way this is right.' But the data were sound. A complicated idea arose to make sense of the phenomenon. When the sky-high ammonia turns upwelling water-ice into liquid, the water and ammonia bond to form a peculiar slush with a water-ice shell. Ultimately softball-size globules of slush encased in ice fall back into the planet, where they melt at depths thought to be too extreme for Juno's instruments to detect. For a few years this theory seemed a bit too baroque to be true. But Moeckel and his colleagues became convinced thanks to the power of Juno's microwave radiometer. The instrument can measure radio waves that betray the presence of different chemical compounds. During one of its orbits, Juno noted a burst of ammonia production at an exceptional depth within the planet. According to Moeckel, this was a telltale sign that icy orbs had rained down from the sky and thawed, releasing their trapped water-ammonia slush. Researchers referred to this unique weather phenomenon as mushballs. 'It's such a stupid name,' Moeckel says. 'But it works.' Juno also trained its instruments on Jupiter's magnetic field, the largest structure in the solar system, which reaches at least as far as its neighboring planet, Saturn. But Juno discovered that Jupiter's magnetic field is wonky and asymmetric—more messy in the northern hemisphere than the south. There is also an intense concentration of magnetism near the equator, a patch (confusingly) called the Great Blue Spot. These characteristics are odd, but the existence of such a gargantuan field at all is the really strange part because Jupiter lacks the sloshing liquid iron and nickel responsible for Earth's magnetic field. Instead Jupiter contains an ocean of hydrogen, one under so much pressure that electrons are torn off individual hydrogen atoms, transforming it into an exotic, metal-like electrical fluid that generates its mighty magnetic field. Below the hydrogen sea lies an even bigger mystery—the question of what's inside the planet's innermost core. What Juno found there left scientists reeling. Before the spacecraft arrived, there were two prevailing notions about Jupiter's interior. The first was that the planet may have a compact core of rocky and metallic matter, not dissimilar to the cores of other worlds. If such a core exists, then Jupiter likely formed through the gradual clumping together of gas and solid matter, like the planets of the inner solar system. The second hypothesis was that there is no core at all. Instead Juno might find a ball of hypercompressed gas, suggesting Jupiter's formation was a bit like a failed star, one that didn't gather enough gas to trigger a thermonuclear ignition. 'Actually neither of those was true,' Bolton says. Juno used gravitational detective work to sense the core. The spacecraft is constantly communicating with Earth using radio waves. Jupiter's uneven mass means that Juno speeds up at times and slows down at others, depending on the strength of the gravitational pull it's experiencing. These speed changes cause subtle shifts in the wavelengths of the radio transmissions Juno sends and receives—effects that scientists can use to determine the internal structure of Jupiter. What they found was at first nonsensical. Deep within the metallic hydrogen ocean Juno detected an innermost core of, well, something; it's probably solid, but researchers can't tell. 'It's blending gradually into the surrounding layers,' says Ryan Park, a researcher at JPL and one of the leads on the gravity experiment on Juno. The hydrogen and the core material seem to mingle. The situation is very different from Earth's depths, where a lighter rocky mantle floats atop a denser iron and nickel core, between which is a distinct and definitive boundary. 'We frankly don't know how to explain that,' Levin says. And it gets weirder still. The sun and Jupiter are rich in both hydrogen and helium but are also expected to contain a smattering of heavier elements. Jupiter, a huge planet that most likely ate up rocky and icy planet-size shards during its formation, should contain far more heavy elements than the sun. And indeed, Juno found that Jupiter has three to four times as many heavy elements as our star. The problem, though, is that these elements appear to be found in the upper atmosphere—and the innermost core is comparatively lacking. All that heavy stuff should sink, via gravity, into the core. But apparently it hasn't. If the core is so light, then what could it possibly be made of? Scientists are scrambling for answers. This fuzzy core doesn't fit with anyone's model for planetary formation. Some scientists have suggested a giant meteor crashed into a once solid core, smashing it up and forcefully mixing it with the metallic hydrogen ocean. Levin wonders whether we simply don't understand the physics yet. 'We're talking about temperatures and pressures much higher than anything we're used to,' he says—conditions so severe that it's difficult to create them in laboratories. Other blockbuster findings from Juno concern Jupiter's moons. The probe's reconnaissance of two icy orbs—the pockmarked Ganymede and the ocean-concealing Europa (the target of a recently launched NASA habitability mission)—created breathtaking portraits of these dynamic worlds while also revealing some unusual chemistries. But a moon named Io got most of Juno's attention—and, consequently, generated the most shocking surprise. 'Io is a very peculiar moon because it's the most volcanic body of all,' Mura says. Its surface, an amalgam of burnt orange, sickly yellow and crimson hues, is covered in rocky cauldrons filled with lava, as well as volcanoes whose explosions propel magmatic matter into space. Up there the material is ionized by sunlight before plunging into Jupiter's skies, creating extremely bright auroral lights. Since the 1970s scientists have understood that Io's volcanism is powered by its elliptical orbit around Jupiter. When it's closer to Jupiter, it gets a bigger pull from the planet's gravity; when it's farther away, that pull is weaker. This back-and-forth kneads the moon like putty, creating tides in solid rock more than 300 feet high. All that motion creates a lot of friction, an abundance of heat—and a plethora of magma. Many thought that this mechanism, known as tidal heating, was so powerful that it created a continuous ocean of magma under the surface rather than the smaller, individual magma reservoirs that fuel Earth's volcanoes. The Galileo mission seemed to back that idea up: it detected an electrically conductive layer under Io's crust suggestive of a magma sea. But when Juno flew perilously close to Io on two occasions, getting within 900 miles of the violent surface, it found no trace of a shallow magma ocean. Mura now suspects Io's magma is partitioned into a maze of rocky tunnels, occasionally bubbling up into open rocky maws wherever the tunnels reach the surface. Nobody knows for sure; in typical Juno style, the observations have raised more questions than answers. But at least while scientists ponder possible solutions, they can marvel at Io's unbound ferocity. 'We discovered the largest eruption ever recorded,' Bolton says. In December 2024 Juno's infrared instrument detected a heat spike in the moon's southern hemisphere that briefly blinded the spacecraft's JIRAM instrument: a paroxysmal outpouring of lava spread over 40,000 square miles, enough to cover a quarter of California. It's producing more energy than the total annual energy output of humanity. 'And we still see it going on,' Bolton adds. By all accounts, Juno should be dead by now. The radiation should have already broken it or at least one of its instruments. Somehow it lasted well beyond its prime mission timeline, which ended in 2021. If an additional three-year extension is approved, Juno could get a better look at the planet's ghostly ring system, and some of its lesser-known innermost moons. But there's no telling how long the aging spacecraft could survive. 'It could grow old, and something could fail,' Bolton says. Perhaps 'the radiation will kill something so important that we can't function anymore.' Whenever the vehicle's end comes, it will go out in flames, spiraling toward the gas giant it spent its entire life interrogating. 'Eventually Juno will crash into Jupiter on its own,' Bolton says. But the spacecraft's legacy is already clear. Juno revealed Jupiter to be a far more confounding place than anyone dared imagine, forcing scientists to throw out reams of outdated ideas about planetary formation. It's also revealed how future spaceflight missions can defend themselves from the worst radiation in the solar system. The Juno team, having emulated its namesake's god-defying powers, is openly proud, Becker says. 'What an amazing success story for NASA.'
