All posts tagged: NASAs

One of NASA’s Most Important Deep Space Observatories Hit by Spanish Wildfires

One of NASA’s Most Important Deep Space Observatories Hit by Spanish Wildfires

Published by skeptic

Climate change has now become a problem for the whole solar system. On Friday, wildfires in Spain overran one of three observatories the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration uses to connect with spacecraft, including Voyager 1, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the recently completed Artemis mission around the Moon. Spain declared a wildfire emergency as multiple blazes burned out of control near Madrid, with evacuation orders in place for 60,000 people. The affected area includes Robledo de Chavela, a municipality near the Deep Space Communications Complex run by NASA. Dramatic images captured by news photographers showed the radio telescopes surrounded by smoke and fire. A NASA spokesperson said in an email to WIRED that the agency successfully evacuated all personnel. They added that while the fire has now passed through the observatory complex, it remains unclear what impact the flames may have had on the sensitive equipment inside. “Any potential damage will be assessed when it is safe to do so,” the spokesperson said. They add that if conditions allow, a site assessment …

NASA’s Webb telescope detects a third giant planet orbiting Beta Pictoris

NASA’s Webb telescope detects a third giant planet orbiting Beta Pictoris

Published by Jenni Sidey

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope discovered Beta Pictoris d, a third giant planet orbiting the young star Beta Pictoris, 63 light-years from Earth. The system is now only the second known to contain at least three directly imaged planets. Astronomers identified the planet through its atmospheric “barcode,” including absorption patterns from carbon monoxide, methane and water vapor, rather than relying solely on a visible point of light hidden within the star’s bright debris disk. Beta Pictoris d is estimated to have two to four times Jupiter’s mass and may orbit more than 30 astronomical units from its star, placing it beyond Beta Pictoris b but inside the debris disk’s inner edge. The planet’s gravity may help explain gaps, clumps and other unusual structures in the disk. Its discovery also shows that spectroscopy can reveal planets concealed by dust and scattered starlight while simultaneously measuring their chemistry, temperature and motion. Beta Pictoris d spent years concealed inside one of the brightest debris disks astronomers know. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope found it not as a clean …

Nasa’s new space telescope will tackle some of the universe’s biggest mysteries

Nasa’s new space telescope will tackle some of the universe’s biggest mysteries

Published by skeptic

Nasa is about to launch a space observatory that could help settle some of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy. The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope will study how the universe began, what it is made of and how it has evolved over time. The observatory is named after Nasa’s first chief of astronomy and its first female executive. Nancy Grace Roman, who died in 2018 aged 93, made important contributions to our understanding of stars and played a crucial role in shaping Nasa’s space-based astronomy programme. The telescope is undergoing final preparations ahead of a launch set to take place from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center in late August. It is eight months ahead of its original schedule, and under budget – a rare feat for a Nasa flagship mission. Unlike the James Webb space telescope, which is designed to look at individual objects in extraordinary detail, Roman is built to survey the sky at scale. It will take in vast areas of the cosmos, allowing astronomers to build up a much broader picture of …

The Download: NASA’s new space telescope and OpenAI’s autonomous hacker

The Download: NASA’s new space telescope and OpenAI’s autonomous hacker

Published by skeptic

This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotifyand Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 OpenAI says one of its models carried out an autonomous hackIt escaped its testing sandbox and breached AI research platform Hugging Face. (Reuters $)+ OpenAI described it as a cybersecurity test that went badly wrong. (WSJ $)+ The hack is among the first known cyberattacks by an AI acting on its own. (FT $)+ Even simple AI attacks are cause for alarm, though. (MIT Technology Review) 2 France has become the first EU country to ban social media for under-15sIts parliament approved the ban, which President Macron championed. (NYT $)+ He pledged to enforce it by September, the start of the school year. (Guardian)+ But critics say it’s unconstitutional and impossible to enforce. …

50 years ago, did NASA’s Viking landers destroy the Martian life they were searching for?

50 years ago, did NASA’s Viking landers destroy the Martian life they were searching for?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Nearly half a century after NASA’s Viking landers touched Mars, one question shadows their experiments: Did they miss life, or did they destroy it while trying to prove it was there? Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Technical University Berlin, has proposed that Viking’s life-detection tests may have exposed native Martian microbes to lethal amounts of liquid water. Organisms adapted to an extremely dry world, he argues, might not have survived the treatment intended to reveal their metabolism. “NASA may have unwittingly uncovered life on Mars nearly 50 years ago and accidentally destroyed it before understanding its significance,” Schulze-Makuch argues. The idea challenges the assumptions behind the 1976 mission. Viking 1 and Viking 2 carried four experiments designed to search Martian soil for organic compounds, metabolic activity and changes associated with living organisms. Viking, Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer. (CREDIT: National Air and Space Museum) Four tests produced an uneven picture The Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer heated soil samples, separated the released compounds and identified molecules by their mass signatures. It found no organic molecules, a result …

The Download: NASA’s new space telescope and OpenAI’s autonomous hacker

Shape-shifting mirrors on NASA’s new space telescope could unveil Jupiters like our own

Published by skeptic

“I hope it’s remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for … finding Earth 2.0,” says Brandon Creager, the instrument’s lead mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, this new telescope will carry a roughly 300-megapixel wide-field camera that will enable it to capture images about 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s widest exposures at a similar resolution. These capabilities will help astronomers unpack the mysterious identities of dark matter and dark energy—and to detect around 100,000 new exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, whose presence can be inferred from the way they distort the starlight of more distant stars. Javier Viaña, a research scientist at Harvard who has had two projects selected for Roman’s highly competitive first year of observing, compares the leap to moving from “interviewing a handful of people” to “conducting a global census.” Another camera will use the coronagraph, blocking out a star’s light as it observes one stellar system at a time. The instrument will allow …

NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft Sent Back Some Awesome Photos of Mars

NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft Sent Back Some Awesome Photos of Mars

Published by skeptic

A common road trip activity is stopping at a roadside attraction to see something really cool. It turns out that NASA spacecraft do this from time to time as well. The Psyche spacecraft, on its way to the asteroid belt to study its namesake asteroid, made a stop by Mars and, among other things, took some pretty epic pictures of the planet as it flew by.  The flyby occurred on May 15, with the idea that Psyche would use Mars as a gravitational slingshot to change the spacecraft’s direction and send it on its merry way. However, NASA rarely lets opportunities like this slip through its fingers, so while Psyche was flying by Mars, NASA had the spacecraft measure the red planet with every tool that Psyche has onboard, capturing all sorts of data and several breathtaking images.  The big winner is a series of time-lapse images taken daily by the spacecraft as it approached Mars, which were then stitched together. The final image forms an eye-like shape, making it unique because of the angle …

50 years later, Viking 1’s legacy is powering NASA’s next giant leap on Mars

50 years later, Viking 1’s legacy is powering NASA’s next giant leap on Mars

Published by Jenni Sidey

Half a century after NASA first placed working hardware on Mars, the agency is preparing to explore not only the planet’s surface, but its skies. The story began on July 20, 1976, when Viking 1 touched down in the western reaches of Chryse Planitia, a broad plain north of the Martian equator. It was NASA’s first successful landing on Mars. Viking 2 followed on Sept. 3, 1976, landing in another region of the Red Planet. A Soviet probe, Mars 3, had reached the ground in 1971, but stopped transmitting less than two minutes later. The Viking spacecraft arrived as paired landers and orbiters. They returned more than 52,000 images. The landers added over 4,500 more, giving humanity its first sustained view from the ground. Viking 1. (CREDIT: NASA) Mars comes into focus Mars still appeared through Earthbound telescopes as a mottled orange sphere with few recognizable features. NASA flybys in the 1960s captured grainy images of small portions of the planet. Then Mariner 9 entered orbit in 1971 and photographed about 85 percent of the …

NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Just Woke Up From a Long Nap Ahead of Exploring Beyond Pluto

NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Just Woke Up From a Long Nap Ahead of Exploring Beyond Pluto

Published by skeptic

It takes a long time to reach anything at the edge of our solar system, and sometimes even spacecraft need to take a nap on a long journey. NASA’s New Horizons did just that, and the agency says the spacecraft woke itself up on schedule after a 321-day sleep, the longest nap it’s ever taken. Flight controllers at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory put the spacecraft to sleep on Aug. 7, 2025, with the world’s longest sleep timer. New Horizons woke itself up using its onboard commands on June 23. NASA reports that the spacecraft survived its long sleep without any issues and is “healthy.” “Every status report through this hibernation period was ‘green,’ meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week,” said Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager at APL, in a statement on Tuesday.  Exploring Pluto and Arrokoth was New Horizons’ primary mission, but NASA has extended the mission to go for as long as New Horizons can keep waking itself up from its long, frequent naps. APL operators will …

NASA’s risky bid to save Swift telescope before solar drag pulls it into Earth’s atmosphere

NASA’s risky bid to save Swift telescope before solar drag pulls it into Earth’s atmosphere

Published by Jenni Sidey

NASA is preparing for a rescue that sounds more like a stunt than routine mission control: send a robot into orbit, find an aging telescope that was never built to be serviced, grab it with three mechanical arms, and drag it to safety before it falls back to Earth. The telescope is the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a spacecraft launched in 2004 to catch gamma-ray bursts, some of the most violent explosions in the universe. Swift was meant to last two years. More than two decades later, it is still valuable, still in demand, and now sinking. A recent stretch of heightened solar activity has made the problem worse. As the sun becomes more active, Earth’s upper atmosphere expands. That adds drag for satellites in low Earth orbit, pulling them down faster if they have no propulsion of their own. Swift, flying low enough to stay in steady contact with scientists on the ground, has been losing altitude under that pressure. NASA could have let it go. Many aging missions end that way. The Neil …