The crew of Artemis II spoke with the media on Thursday, six days after returning to Earth following their mission around the Moon. After a news conference, the astronauts gave a handful of interviews, and Ars was able to speak with Orion’s pilot, Victor Glover.

Glover and Ars first connected nearly a decade ago as part of our homage to Apollo, The Greatest Leap. Glover now stands at the vanguard of our modern Apollo program, named Artemis, which aims to return humans to the Moon and establish a semi-permanent base there.

Glover, an accomplished naval aviator, first went to space in November 2020 as the pilot on the first operational Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station. Two years after he landed back on Earth, Glover was assigned to the Artemis II mission and tasked with a majority of the test piloting of the Orion spacecraft during the outbound and return journey from the Moon.

We spoke mostly about that experience at NASA’s Johnson Space Center on Thursday afternoon. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ars: You flew Dragon with touchscreens and Orion with more traditional, hands-on controls. I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but which did you prefer?

Victor Glover: You know me. We talked about Dragon a lot before, and it’s a fantastic ship to get humans to the space station. But I was really thrilled to have a translational hand controller, a THC, on Orion.

Ars: How did Orion handle compared to the simulations you did on Earth?

Glover: The real vehicle had better springs. There was less pre-play, less wobble in the stick, so when I would move something, the thruster sounds we had in the sim? Totally wrong. It was more of a rumble like driving a pickup on a dirt road.

The SM (Service Module) was nice—we could tell it was pressurizing and thrusting. It felt responsive. I could feel the push, but also I could see it in the camera instantly that there was motion. The integrated system flew so much better than the sim. That team should be very proud.

The modelers, the flight controllers, they came up with something. And even though there were pleasant surprises, overall, the real thing is better than we simulated. And that’s part of what being a test pilot is: to verify and validate manufacturing processes, software development processes, and sometimes teams. And all three of those, in this case, crushed it.

Ars: What do you think the implications are for Artemis III and Artemis IV when there will be some pretty complex rendezvous and docking operations with a lander?

Glover: The Lunar Science team won’t like it when I say this, but it’s the truth. If we had launched, done the rendezvous and proximity operations demo, and then had to emergency de-orbit, I would have considered us a massive success. Because that may be the only chance we get to test this really important capability.

We don’t plan to manually dock. It’s a crew interrupt. Boeing CFT (the Starliner Crew Flight Test in 2024, during which Butch Wilmore had to take control of the spacecraft during an emergency) has shown us when these things might need to be done. And Butch held position manually. He had to use his eyeballs to correlate where he was and just hold position. That was a critical moment for them to breathe, and for the team to collect themselves, because if they had tried to retreat or tried to continue docking with ISS, both of those would have been catastrophic.

So this capability, to me, was a huge milestone—now Artemis II gets to pass the baton to III and IV, whatever they are, docking, proximity ops again, landing. Those crews will have the peace of mind that the Artemis II test pilot said it was good to go. An engineer said it was good to go, and an F-18 pilot said it was good to go. That, to me, is unreal. We got so much juice for the squeeze on that.

Ars: But you had some fun?

Glover: It was also a ton of fun, truly a test pilot’s dream. I mean, I feel bad. I got to fly Dragon as well. I got to manually pilot Dragon. We got to do a fly-around for the port relocation. It was the first time that software got used in space, and I did that. So I got to do a few touchscreen commands and listen, I prefer a stick-and-throttle over a touchscreen any day.

But Dragon also flew like a dream. It worked. It does what they say it’s going to do. It’s really about the mission. They both are great tools. If I’m doing something where I’m so busy that I cannot stop and look down at my hands to fly, this is the biggest difference. I have to touch the screen, which means I have to look, because if I touch right next to that arrow, it doesn’t work. In Orion, I have a feel. I don’t have to look. I can focus on precision because I can look out the window the whole time. That’s the difference. So stick-and-throttle, or hand controllers, are vital depending on the type of tasks.

Ars: Did you guys ever do any flying off the books? I’m thinking of Apollo 12, during the ascent from the Moon. They’re in the shadow of the Moon, and Pete Conrad tells Alan Bean to take the Lunar Module controls for a spin when they were out of contact with Mission Control. Bean later recalled it as an unforgettable experience.

Glover: [laughs] OK, that’s good. Listen, we wanted everybody to have a meaningful role. I think you saw that everybody did critical things. Jeremy and Christina got us to the Moon and back. We [Reid and Glover] did ascent, prox-ops, and entry. But they monitored all the burns. The team really wrote the original plan for Reid and I to do all the flying, but we knew that it’s important to get this data because on future missions, you might have a doctor in that seat, and it’s important to know the vehicle from varying perspectives. We didn’t have to be sneaky because the team built a plan that capitalized on the strengths of the whole crew. Everyone got to fly it per the plan. And so Jeremy flew the vehicle, and Christina flew the vehicle.

Ars: You’ve talked about reentry, 13 minutes and 36 seconds. You called it “very intense.” You and I have talked about the heat shield concerns before. Walk me through the experience you just lived.

Glover: We got assigned on April 3, 2023. It was almost three years exactly ago. I’ve been thinking about reentry for three straight years, maybe too much. Maybe I focused on that too much, but I knew if anybody has to be on that day, I have to be a part of it. It’s not just me, but to back up Reid, or Reid backing me up. We’ve got to be in flow that day.

Having gone through something similar in Dragon was helpful. But that window on Orion was right in front of me, that view was so different. When the flames started, I was like, “That’s big. Is it supposed to be that big?” And then my brain just locked onto “OK, it all looks the same.” That’s a good sign. If I start to see changes, that’s something. And then there was a point—there’s something that I feel that I am not ready to say to the public yet.

Ars: OK.

Glover: But you know, I know what happened to Columbia, and that this is a system with no backup. But I was not worried. I wasn’t focused on that because we had already said we’re go for launch—and go for launch is go for entry. And I just said, “Hey, they need me to be on.” Reid needs me to be on. I need him to be on. What I’m saying is kind of what folks are expecting. So I need to do it like we’ve trained to do it.

And I was able to focus on that because whether or not the heat shield worked, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t go outside and hold my hands over the spot. So the best I could do is if a parachute didn’t go out, to assess “do I need to do anything?” Or if the risers didn’t cut after we hit the water, to not get flipped over, I would have had to flip a switch, and I need to flip the right switch. So I just wanted to be present.

The Artemis II crew takes time out for a group hug before returning to Earth.

Credit: NASA

Ars: What did you hear?

Glover: The sounds were something we didn’t simulate. There’s so much we didn’t model correctly on entry. But I still had to be present. Even when there was a new bump-bump-bump. Then there was the moment after the drogue parachutes released. [There was a break between the pull of the drogues and deployment of the main parachutes, when Orion started falling rapidly again.]

We were in free fall again. It wasn’t scary. I was just amazed because Dragon didn’t do that. I think the drogues on Dragon actually helped pull out the mains, so we stayed under tension. In Orion, we had a few seconds of free fall after the drogues. I just was—wow. That sensation was very vivid. And when those parachutes came out, when the mains came out, it was like God himself led us down to the water. And I had a big old grin on my face. It was intense. It went from intense to pure elation.

Ars: Where I was watching, there was silence during those final minutes, the parachutes, and the splashdown, just holding our collective breath. It was amazing. I think Artemis managed to break through.

Glover: I know we’re on to something. I know the 10 days we were up there are a big part of it, but I’m gonna say this to you as a person because, you know, I consider you a friend. A part of this is how we frame what we’re doing now, what we do next, the stories we choose to tell. There’s a lot of this we haven’t talked to you about, but now we have the challenge of keeping it going.

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 18 April 2026 at 7:27 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of March) 1,297

RIP Matrix

Here on Earth, it’s easy to know how fast you’re driving. You get a good sense of it just by seeing trees and cows pass by. And of course you also have a speedometer that counts how many times your tires rotate per second and computes a speed based on their circumference. (Fun fact: Put bigger tires on your car and your speedometer will be wrong.)

If you’re flying over an ocean, of course, there’s no visual reference, so from inside it looks like you’re motionless. But airplanes can get their airspeed by using sensors to measure the rate at which air is passing over the wings. If there’s any wind, this won’t be the same as your speed relative to the ground, but you can get that by using GPS location data from orbiting satellites.

Now imagine you are flying to Mars. Locking in a precise velocity is critical so you don’t miss your rendezvous with the planet in its solar orbit. But there’s no trees or cows, no air, not even a GPS signal to help you out. So how do you know your rate of travel? Well, you need to use some physics. The good news is that there’s more than one way to go about it.

Speed vs. Velocity

First, a word about words: Speed is how far you go in how much time—like 50 miles an hour. For an airplane using GPS coordinates, it’s easy to calculate: Just take the distance between two locations and divide by the time it took to get from point A to point B.

But that only works if you’re going in a straight line. It doesn’t work at all for a bumblebee, whose path more resembles that of a drunken sailor. In the picture below, you can see that it travels much farther than necessary to get from one place to another.

So instead of speed, in physics we use the concept of velocity, which means speed in a given direction. Even if the bee flies at a constant speed, its velocity is always changing.

To map the bee’s path, I drew an xy coordinate plane on the scene above. (For simplicity, I’m keeping it two-dimensional.) Someone looks at their watch and records a time of 1:00:05 (five seconds after 1 o’clock); at that moment the bee is at a position defined by vector r₁. At 1:00:15, it’s position vector is r₂.

We can still take the change in vector position (Δr), or displacement, and divide by the change in time (Δt = 10 seconds). But what that gives us is average velocity, which might not match the bee’s actual motion anywhere in its journey.

To get closer to the actual velocities, we’d have to use much smaller time intervals. In fact, if we make Δt small enough, that curved path can be approximated by a series of tiny line segments, giving us a pretty accurate velocity at any instant.

Velocity Is Relative

There’s one more thing we need to think about. Imagine you’re pedaling a bicycle with a little speedometer attached to the wheel, and it says you’re going 4 miles per hour. But you aren't riding on the road; you’re on the deck of a cruise ship, which is moving at 10 mph. So how fast are you going?

Well, there’s no single right answer; it depends on your frame of reference. With respect to the ship, you’re going 4 mph. But with respect to the water, your speed depends on your direction. If both ship and bike are heading west, you’d be going 14 mph. If you turned the bike around and headed east, you’d be going 6 mph. What’s more, as an observer on the shore would see, in the latter case you’d be pedaling forward and moving backward at that speed.

Often the reference frame is obvious, like the surface of the Earth. But in space, it's not always so clear. For spacecraft like the Orion on its recent trip around the moon, there are two obvious reference frames. The first is the Earth. We can measure the speed as it moves toward or away from us. This usually makes sense because that's where the flight started and where mission control sits.

But for NASA’S Artemis IV mission, which is scheduled to touch down on the lunar surface in 2028, it would be silly to use Earth as a reference frame. You could have a positive Earth-speed but be stationary with respect to the moon—not very helpful in landing maneuvers. Instead, the lander will use the moon as a reference frame. Or if you wanted to travel around the solar system, it would make sense to use the sun as your reference .

The fact is, there is no stationary reference point anywhere in the universe. All motion is relative to other motion. So now, if your brain is sufficiently scrambled, let's get into some of the ways we can measure speed in space.

Doppler Speed

Perhaps the most common method uses the Doppler effect. You already know about this. If you stand by some train tracks, you hear a high-pitched sound as a train approaches, and it shifts to a low-pitched sound as it passes, right? NNEEEEEEEEE—rrrrrraaaaaa …

What’s happening is that the sound waves are getting bunched up as the train moves toward you. That means more wave peaks hit your ear per second, and your brain interprets that higher frequency as a higher pitch. It’s the opposite as it moves away—the waves get spread out and the frequency drops. Here’s a picture. The yellow ball is you and the blue ball is the sound source:

The Doppler effect also happens with electromagnetic waves, like visible light. If a luminous object in space is moving toward us, the wave fronts are compressed, and this change in frequency alters the color of the light we perceive, shifting it toward the blue end of the spectrum. That’s called a blue shift. If the object is moving away, you get a red shift.

Radio waves are another type of electromagnetic wave, and they have a certain advantage: They’re not affected by passing through an atmosphere. So then, say we send a radio beam out into space and it reflects off a moving spaceship; then we can measure the frequency of the signal that bounces back to us and compare it to the original.

For example, say our transmission has a frequency of 100 MHz (1 x 10⁸ hertz). When the reflected wave returns to Earth, it might have a frequency of 1.00001 x 10⁸ Hz. Yes, that’s a tiny difference, but we can measure it quite accurately using some tricks about wave interference. That small Doppler shift would indicate an object moving toward us at a speed of 1,000 meters per second.

Now, this method has two limitations: First, it can only give the velocity of objects moving toward or away from us. If the spacecraft were moving left to right, perpendicular to our line of sight, there would be no Doppler shift. But that’s not a big problem—we can always use more than one radio source to track a spacecraft. It can't move perpendicular to all observers at the same time.

The other limitation is that it requires line-of-sight visibility. So when the Orion spacecraft passed behind the moon on April 6, it was invisible to ground control and on its own. The need for an outside observer would also be a deal-killer for galactic smugglers like Han Solo in Star Wars.

Inertial Measurements

Luckily, there are ways that a spacecraft can derive its own velocity. One method is inertial measurement. Basically it works by measuring acceleration, which is a change in velocity. As long as you know the velocity you started at, you can add up all the changes to track current velocity.

To get a feel for this, imagine you’re sitting in a car with a blindfold on (so you can’t see the cows). When the car takes off, you get pushed back into your seat. The greater the acceleration, the more pressure you feel—that’s your measurement system. Once the car reaches a steady speed, you can use the magnitude and duration of the acceleration to determine the change in velocity—and since you started at 0 mph, the change in velocity is your velocity after one acceleration.

Of course, this seat-of-the-pants method is pretty rough—the best you could probably infer is that you’re going slow, medium, or fast. But why not just measure velocity directly? Because you can’t feel velocity. If you don’t see the cows whizzing by, the sensation of riding at a constant speed of 100 mph is the same as riding at 25 mph. (Lesson: Never drive blindfolded.)

The same thing is true if you’re using real instruments. Spacecraft have gyroscopes and accelerometers that properly measure orientation and acceleration. But they can’t measure velocity, because when velocity is constant, there’s no net force for the instruments to “feel.” That’s straight out of Newton’s second law.

How about a simple example? Remember, acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, so a = Δv/Δt. Rearranging, we get:

Let’s use our car again, but this time we’ll get real numbers from the accelerometer in our smartphone. Say we start at a red light and then accelerate at 2 m/s² (meters per second squared) for five seconds. From the equation above, Δv₁ would be 2 x 5 = 10 m/s, so that’s our velocity. Now, after cruising for a while, we accelerate again at 1 m/s² for five more seconds. Δv₂ is then 1 x 5 = 5 m/s. Adding these two changes, our velocity is now 15 m/s. And so on.

The only problem is that inertial measurement isn’t as accurate as the Doppler method over long periods because small errors will keep accumulating. That means you need to recalibrate your system periodically using some other method.

Optical Navigation

On Earth, people have long navigated by the stars. In the northern hemisphere, just find Polaris. It’s called the North Star because Earth’s axis of rotation points right at it. That’s why it appears stationary, while the other stars seem to revolve around it. If you point a finger at Polaris you’ll be pointing north, and you can use that orientation to go in whatever direction you want.

Now, if you can measure the angle of Polaris above the horizon, you’ll also know your latitude. If the angle is 30 degrees, you’re at latitude 30 degrees. See, it’s easy. And once you can measure position, you just need to do it twice and record the time interval to find your velocity.

But celestial navigation works because we know how the Earth rotates, and that doesn’t help in a spacecraft. Oh well, can we just use the stars like you would use the cows on the side of the road? Nope. The stars are so far away, astronauts would need to travel for many, many generations to detect any shift in their position. Like the airplane flying over the sea, you’d seem to be stationary, even while traveling 25,000 mph.

But we can still use the basic idea. For optical navigation in space, a spacecraft can locate other objects in the solar system. By knowing the precise location of these objects (which change over time) and where they appear relative to the viewer, it's possible to triangulate a position. And again, by taking multiple position measurements over time, you can calculate a velocity.

In the end, even though spaceships lack speedometers, it’s possible to track their speed indirectly with a little physics. But it’s just another example of how flying in space is really, totally different—and way more complicated—than driving or flying on Earth.

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Saturday 18 April 2026 at 7:26 am AEST (my time).

News posts: 2023 5,800+ | 2024 5,700+ | 2025 5,700+ | 2026 (to end of March) 1,297

RIP Matrix

Welcome to Edition 8.37 of the Rocket Report! NASA is still climbing down from the high of the Artemis II mission, the first flight by humans to the Moon since 1972. What a mission it was! Now, attention turns to completing development of a lander to get astronauts down to the Moon’s surface. Among other things, we chronicle the latest progress of NASA’s two lunar lander contractors, SpaceX and Blue Origin, in this week’s Rocket Report.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Moonshot from the last frontier. Israel-based space launch company Moonshot Space will site its first electromagnetic accelerator in Fairbanks, Alaska, under a memorandum of understanding signed at Space Symposium with spaceport operator Alaska Aerospace Corporation (AAC), Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Moonshot, which emerged from stealth mode in December with $12 million in fundraising, is developing a high-power electromagnetic launcher system to propel payloads and enable cargo deliveries into space at hypersonic speed using electricity rather than chemical fuels, The Times of Israel reports.

Favoring the bold... “This agreement reflects AAC’s commitment to pioneer innovation in the Last Frontier,” said John Oberst, AAC’s CEO. “We are working to align infrastructure, partnerships, and regulatory pathways to support next-generation space access with visionary companies like Moonshot Space.” Moonshot’s chief operating officer and co-founder, Shahar Bahiri, admits the company’s vision is “extremely brave” and having a spaceport operator embrace it “is not taken for granted.” Moonshot’s approach is, indeed, unusual. Even if the company gets the technology to work, the kinetic launch approach comes with the downside of extreme accelerations, which could damage or destroy normal satellites. Instead, Moonshot envisions shooting raw materials in orbit for in-space manufacturing.

Rocket Lab goes electric. Rocket Lab on Tuesday added a high-performance, Hall-effect satellite thruster to its growing catalog of space technologies and flight services, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The company has established a production line capable of manufacturing up to 200 of the xenon-fueled electric thrusters, named Gauss, per year. “Proliferated constellations are now the norm for commercial and national security space users, but the propulsion systems needed to maneuver these spacecraft in orbit have simply not been reliably available at any kind of scale. Rocket Lab is solving this bottleneck with Gauss,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, in a statement.

Diversified offerings... The announcement of the Gauss thruster continues Rocket Lab’s strategy to become an end-to-end space manufacturing and services company. Beck founded Rocket Lab in New Zealand as a rocket company, a fact that’s probably not surprising given its name. Today, Rocket Lab builds and operates the highly successful Electron light-class launcher and is developing a partially reusable medium-lift rocket named Neutron. What’s more, through long-term investments and acquisitions, Rocket Lab now builds satellites, spacecraft components like solar panels, reaction wheels, and star trackers, separation systems, and a hypersonic test vehicle. With Gauss, you can add electric thrusters to the list. “We’ve successfully scaled other satellite components to thousands of units per year to meet the market’s needs for volume and speed. Now we’re giving electric satellite propulsion the same treatment,” Beck said.

SpaceX launches Cygnus to ISS. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a Cygnus cargo ship from Northrop Grumman on Saturday, kicking off a resupply flight to the International Space Station, Spaceflight Now reports. The Cygnus supply ship, named for late NASA astronaut Steve Nagel, delivered about 11,000 pounds (5,000 kilograms) of science and supplies to the ISS on Monday. The items onboard the Cygnus spacecraft included hardware for the station’s Cold Atom Laboratory for quantum technology research and a new contingency cooling system for the station’s avionics systems.

Riding with the competition... This was the fourth time Northrop Grumman has turned to SpaceX to launch a cargo mission to the ISS. Northrop Grumman and SpaceX are NASA’s two primary resupply contractors for the space station program, each with its own rockets and cargo ships. But Northrop’s Antares rocket is out of service after losing access to Russian rocket engines in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Until a new booster is ready with US-made engines, Cygnus cargo ships will launch on SpaceX Falcon 9s. Officially, the next Cygnus mission is supposed to launch on the new Antares 330 rocket with US-made engines from Firefly Aerospace. We’ll see if that plan holds as Northrop and Firefly continue developing the new Antares booster stage. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China’s next reusable rocket could launch soon. China has conducted what appears to be a wet dress rehearsal, or fueling test, for its Long March 10B rocket, paving the way for a potential launch within weeks, Space News reports. The Long March 10B is a commercial variant of China’s Long March 10 rocket family being developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, the country’s top state-owned launch enterprise. While the Long March 10 and 10A will be used for crew launches to the Moon and low-Earth orbit, respectively, the Long March 10B is tailored for satellite launches. All versions of the Long March 10 family will have reusable boosters, and China appears to be readying for an attempt to recover the Long March 10B booster in the South China Sea downrange from its launch pad on Hainan Island.

Another try… This would be the third attempt by a Chinese rocket company to recover an orbital-class booster, following two failed landings on the inaugural flights of the Zhuque-3 and Long March 12A rockets in December. Those rockets use downrange landing pads in the Gobi Desert of northwestern China, while the Long March 10B booster is intended to be recovered with a net system on a ship in the South China Sea.

ESA plans for a launch abort demonstrator. The European Space Agency has opened its call for proposals to develop a Crew Launch Abort Demonstrator, a project announced last November, European Spaceflight reports. With the call now open, the agency has published additional information about the project, including a budget of 1 million euros ($1.2 million) for this initial phase of the demonstrator’s development. ESA officially opened the call for proposals on April 10 for the “system level definition phase” for the launch abort program. This is a first step, focusing on modeling a launch abort sequence with an Ariane 6 rocket, with a particular emphasis on pad abort scenarios. This phase is expected to last no longer than 12 months.

All talk?… There appears to be a connection between the Crew Launch Abort Demonstrator project and ESA’s Low-Earth Orbit Cargo Return Service, which seeks to support development of a European cargo transportation system that could undergo initial tests at the International Space Station. One of ESA’s requirements for the cargo vehicle is that it be capable of adaptation into a crew vehicle. ESA has flirted with the idea of an independent human spaceflight capability before, but none of the concepts have ever reached the launch pad. The agency has historically relied on the United States and Russia to send its astronauts into space and will probably need to look abroad for the foreseeable future. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

ULA’s Vulcan woes continue. The US Space Force is still dealing with the near-term implications of the second grounding of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket in less than two years, Ars reports. The experience is likely to influence how the Pentagon buys launch services in the future, a three-star general said Tuesday. The Vulcan rocket is one of the two primary launch vehicles the Space Force uses to put satellites into orbit, alongside SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Despite a backlog of nearly 70 launches, ULA’s Vulcan has flown just four times since debuting in January 2024. On two of those flights, the Vulcan launcher suffered anomalies with one of its solid rocket boosters. The rockets continued on into orbit, but the booster nozzle malfunctions suggest something is seriously amiss at ULA and its booster supplier, Northrop Grumman.

More swaps coming?… The Vulcan rocket is many months from returning to flight for the US military. One industry source told Ars that the Space Force may not fly another mission on Vulcan before the end of the year. Space Systems Command has moved four launches of new GPS navigation satellites from ULA to SpaceX in the past two years as Vulcan encountered delays. Col. Eric Zarybnisky, head of Space Systems Command’s Space Access office, said the military is “working through a significant number” of potential additional rocket swaps from Vulcan to another launch vehicle, likely SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy.

ESA’s first Mars rover finally has a ride. NASA confirmed Thursday that SpaceX will launch the European Space Agency’s Rosalind Franklin Mars rover, perhaps as soon as late 2028, on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, Ars reports. So why is NASA deciding which rocket will launch a flagship European Mars mission? It’s a long story involving the search for extraterrestrial life, crippling political hatchets, and, of all things, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ars explores the mission’s tortured history, a nearly quarter-century of broken promises, technical setbacks, and geopolitical drama.

Taking aim on Mars… The announcement is also notable because it is the first time SpaceX has won a launch contract for a mission to Mars. The red planet is the apple of Elon Musk’s eye, with utopian concepts for a Mars settlement to go along with SpaceX’s more tangible work on a massive rocket to actually fly there. This new rocket, named Starship, is still a ways away from reaching Mars. Therefore, it’s likely SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, no slouch itself, will make the company’s first Mars run on behalf of NASA and the European Space Agency.

Next-gen Starship tested at Starbase. The new, juiced-up version of SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket cleared a big hurdle this week on the path to its first launch, Space.com reports. That liftoff, targeted for early or mid-May, will be the 12th overall for Starship but the first for the vehicle’s “Version 3,” which is bigger and more powerful than its predecessors. The first Starship V3 vehicle fired its six Raptor engines on Tuesday while anchored on a test stand in South Texas. The static fire test follows a series of cryogenic proof tests earlier this year.

And then, Super Heavy… One day later, SpaceX fired up 33 engines on the Super Heavy booster that will send Starship V3 skyward. This short-duration test occurred directly on SpaceX’s launch pad at Starbase, Texas. The same booster was test-fired with 10 of its engines last month, but Wednesday’s static fire was the first time all 33 engines were ignited on the new Super Heavy. The upgrades debuting with Starship V3 include higher-thrust Raptor engines. Therefore, it can be said that the Super Heavy booster on Wednesday became the most powerful rocket booster ever fired. But the real fun will come with the launch, and it can’t come soon enough. It has been six months since the last Starship test flight. Starship V3 is needed to begin demonstrating in-orbit refueling, an enabling capability for turning Starship into a human-rated Moon lander for NASA’s Artemis program. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin awarded new pad at Vandenberg. Blue Origin has been chosen to move to the next phase of the process toward launching its monstrous New Glenn rocket from a yet-to-be-built facility at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, Noozhawk reports. On Tuesday, the Space Force announced the selection of the firm for a lease at Space Launch Complex-14, which would become the southern-most launch facility at Vandenberg and would be built on previously undisturbed land. “By taking the next steps to further develop heavy and super-heavy space launch capabilities at SLC-14, we’re continuing to unleash our capacity to execute full-spectrum space operations for the nation,” said Col. James Horne III, commander of Space Launch Delta 30 at Vandenberg.

Still some work to do… “Establishing a New Glenn launch site to provide efficient access to high-inclination orbits for our customers is a priority, and SLC-14 represents a viable option,” Blue Origin said in a statement. The selection of Blue Origin for Vandenberg moves the effort to the next phase, with several crucial milestones still remaining before any heavy or super-heavy rockets blast off from SLC-14. The selection will lead to talks between Blue and the Space Force to hash out the terms and conditions of a real property use agreement for the land. Teams must also complete safety and environmental assessments.

Meanwhile, at Cape Canaveral. Blue Origin crews are prepping to launch the company’s third New Glenn rocket the morning of Sunday, April 19, Florida Today reports. The Jeff Bezos-founded space company announced the two-hour launch window will extend from 6:45 am EDT to 8:45 am EDT at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The New Glenn’s first stage, reused from a launch in November, fired its seven BE-4 main engines on the launch pad shortly after sunrise Thursday. This was a key milestone for Blue Origin, marking the first time a previously flown New Glenn booster has been fired again.

But there’s something new… Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, confirmed earlier this week that the seven engines flying on this weekend’s launch are not the same ones that powered the booster on its first flight last year. Those flight-proven engines will be used on future flights, Limp said. Blue Origin aims to land the booster again after the upcoming launch, which will carry a cellular broadband satellite into low-Earth orbit for AST SpaceMobile. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

April 18: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-22 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 14:00 UTC

April 19: New Glenn | BlueBird Block 2 FM2 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 10:45 UTC

April 20: Falcon 9 | GPS III SV10 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06:57 UTC

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Posted Saturday 18 April 2026 at 7:25 am AEST (my time).

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NASA is apparently pretty serious about building a base on the Moon, and the astronauts who just flew there say it is “absolutely doable.”

Within two days of landing on Earth, the Artemis II astronauts were already back in spacesuits, working as if they had just landed in a gravity well and had ventured outside onto the lunar surface for a spacewalk.

“We were in surface spacewalk suits, doing surface geology tasks, and doing them well,” said Christina Koch, a mission specialist on the Artemis II mission. “(We were) able to complete an entire battery of very challenging surface tasks.”

“Lifted up” by lunar base

Koch made her comments on Thursday during the crew’s first news conference since returning to Earth on April 10. Their mission, a smashing success, tested a NASA rocket and spacecraft on the first human flight into deep space in more than five decades. It represents the opening salvo of NASA’s Artemis campaign and comes amid significant changes to the program.

Only a week before the Artemis II mission lifted off, when the crew was already in quarantine, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the space agency was pivoting away from a lunar space station to a surface base. Moreover, he said NASA would aggressively work to develop this lunar base in three phases over the next decade.

Koch said this announcement energized the crew and the mission.

“We were very much lifted up by the notion that we would get to contribute to astronauts doing this all over again, much sooner than we thought, and that we were going to be focused on the Moon base, on surface operations,” Koch said. “We are feeling even more excited and just ready to take that on as an agency.”

Koch said one thing she and her fellow astronauts learned was that they were well-trained to handle whatever issues arose.

“This mission taught me that the unknown is way scarier than the known,” she said. “Every single time we accomplished a mission test objective, we all looked at each other and were like, ‘ That actually went pretty well.’ That was actually not necessarily easy, because it took a ton of work, but it was easy to accomplish as a team because we had put in the work.”

Landing on the Moon is “absolutely doable”

Another crew member, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, said that as NASA takes further steps into deep space, including setting up a lunar base, astronauts and the teams supporting them on the ground must be ready for a potentially bumpy ride. And, he said, astronauts have to be willing to embrace that risk.

“We have to be willing to accept a little more risk than we were willing to accept in the past, and to just trust that we will figure it out in real time,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to pound everything flat before we go; we’re going to have to trust each other. It was very evident to us out there that this one went really smoothly. I’m not surprised—extraordinary team. But it was also very clear to us that it could get real bumpy, real fast.”

The mission’s commander, Reid Wiseman, said he had a technical epiphany 250,000 miles from Earth. He felt a strong urge to land on the Moon, and if they’d had a lander, they would have eagerly done it. The Moon, he said, was right there for the taking.

“It’s not—oh, I’m gonna eat these words—it’s not the leap I thought it was,” Wiseman said. “If you had given us the keys to the lander, we would have taken it down and landed on the Moon. It’s going to be extremely technically challenging, but this team needs to show up every day knowing it is absolutely doable, and it’s doable soon.”

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Posted Friday 17 April 2026 at 1:32 pm AEST (my time).

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At the end of last month, a scientific journal pulled a research paper on Alzheimer’s disease.

The retraction came from Neurobiology of Aging, which removed a 2011 paper claiming to show that a version of a protein called amyloid-β was responsible for memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease. On its own, that might not seem notable; bad papers can make it through peer review and are only caught after publication.

But this wasn’t an isolated case. Over the past few years, multiple studies arguing that amyloid-β is the central driver of Alzheimer’s disease have been retracted. Some scientists have even been indicted for fraud over the issue. All the while, none of the drugs targeting this protein and its pathway have had any real clinical effect.

Why does this keep happening?

Plaques and tangles

The medical condition we currently call Alzheimer’s disease was first identified in 1906, after a neuropathologist named Alois Alzheimer examined brain tissue from the autopsy of Auguste Deter, a dementia patient he had been treating. Deter was just 55 when she died, much younger than most dementia patients. Alzheimer noted that her brain tissue contained plaques, which had previously been seen in other dementia patients, as well as tangles of nerve fibers, which had not.

For the next 80 years, that was about as much as we knew about this condition that robs sufferers of their memories, skills, and personalities. And until very recently, it was only possible to diagnose it post-mortem by examining the brain for those plaques and tangles. The advent of PET scanners and the discovery of biomarkers in blood have changed that.

It wasn’t until 1984 that we identified amyloid-β accumulating in the plaques of people with Alzheimer’s. Scientists weren’t really sure what amyloid-β did, but another study found plenty of it in the brains of people with Down syndrome, who often suffer from dementia later in life. In fact, the gene that encodes amyloid-β—or more accurately, for an upstream molecule called amyloid precursor protein—is found on chromosome 21, and the signature of Down syndrome is an extra copy of that. Raising suspicions further, in 1987, patients with a familial case of Alzheimer’s were found to have a mutation in their amyloid protein precursor gene.

Something was causing amyloid-β to be cut off from its precursor, then clump together, in people with dementia. If only we could stop it from aggregating or remove the aggregates from the brain, we could stop the disease, the conventional wisdom held.

In 2006, this idea looked even better, as a paper was published in Nature showing that memory loss was associated with a specific form of amyloid-β buildup outside of neurons.

Stay on target

A potential therapeutic target gave scientists something to aim for. As with so many other poorly understood, complex diseases, they set about studying it in mice. But like so many of those other complex diseases that afflict humans, mice don’t naturally get Alzheimer’s. They do if you insert a mutated copy of the human APP gene into their genome, however. Armed with this early mouse model, scientists got to work.

In 1999, Elan Pharmaceuticals created a vaccine to a particular part of amyloid-β and then showed that mice would clear plaques from their brains after treatment with the vaccine. Better still, it worked whether the vaccine was given to very young mice, before the plaques could form, or to older mice where the plaques were already present.

Vaccines work by prompting the body to produce antibodies against whatever the vaccine recognizes. So a few years later, Elan went on to show that anti-amyloid antibodies also cleared plaques in the transgenic mice’s brains when given directly.

But there’s many a slip between mouse and man. Elan tried its vaccine in human patients suffering mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease but had to suspend the trial of 360 patients after a number developed brain inflammation. While Elan’s vaccine didn’t go anywhere, other pharmaceutical companies and biotechs were still on the case.

Trial after trial failed to arrest or reverse the disease, no matter the approach. Targeting different parts of the amyloid-β pathway also created side effects aplenty, some of them life-threatening or fatal. Regardless, amyloid-β remained the preferred target. Eventually, in 2021, the Food and Drug Administration approved an antibody called aducanumab, made by Biogen.

To call the approval controversial would be an understatement. Aducanumab had failed not one but two large double-blind, placebo-controlled phase III trials in 2019. Eventually, its makers scoured the data sets a little more, claiming to find a small reduction in amyloid-β plaque size and a small cognitive improvement in a particular group of participants.

Many scientists were outraged by the approval, and their outrage looked justified once we saw how the drug would be marketed: with a cognitive test that no one could pass. A congressional inquiry into aducanumab’s approval found it was “rife with irregularities.” But at $65,000 per patient per year, the drug represented a potential $18 billion-a-year revenue stream for Biogen.

Aducanumab was approved by the FDA in June 2021. But by early July, the regulator had already narrowed the set of people it would allow the drug to be given to, restricting it to just patients with a mild form of the disease. Biogen ended up losing money on it and removed the drug from the market in January 2024.

But only so it could concentrate on another amyloid-β-targeting antibody, this one developed with a biotech company called Eisai. This therapy, called lecanemab, was half the price of aducanumab, at $26,500 per year, and it got the nod from the FDA in 2023. There were plenty of questions about the approval because, yet again, there was very little data indicating that patients were getting any better. And there were still nasty side effects; three patients died from brain swelling and hemorrhaging.

Another antibody targeting amyloid-β, called donanemab, made headlines in 2023 when its maker, Eli Lilly, published trial data that claimed to slow the progression of the disease “by about 35 percent in the early stages.” Again, this came with the risk of severe side effects like brain swelling and bleeding. Those side effects may have been the only way to tell someone was on the drug, given that it provided extremely mild cognitive benefits.

Surely we’ve had some other ideas?

We’re now more than 40 years on from the identification of amyloid-β as the bad stuff in plaques and 30 years from being able to clear amyloid-β from the brains of mice (and, more recently, humans). Yet doing that is more likely to make an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain bleed than it is to restore cognitive function or even meaningfully slow its decline. But it’s not like we haven’t had other ideas.

Take inflammation, for instance. Brains aren’t just made of neurons; they’re surrounded by glial cells, some of which envelop the neuronal junctions. Some of these glia are similar in ways to macrophages, a kind of immune cell that goes a little haywire in heart disease and some other conditions. In 2008, a small-scale study showed that the arthritis drug etanercept, which inhibits an inflammatory cytokine called TNF-α, caused a rapid improvement in cognitive function for Alzheimer’s patients.

The only hitch? The drug needed to be infused directly into the spinal column. A larger trial that used etanercept injections under the skin didn’t run into any of the horrible side effects of the amyloid-β antibodies, but it also failed to show any real clinical benefit.

To others in the scientific community, the trigger for that inflammation is likely to be infection. Our immune system uses cytokines like TNF-α to fight infections, in addition to other chemicals like peroxynitrite, which causes oxidative stress, all of which is associated with inflammation.

Neuropathologists have identified viral infections in plaques, and a group from Tufts recently proposed a mechanism by which herpes simplex virus-1 could be driving the disease. But many other viruses have also been implicated; data-mining samples from biobanks in the UK and Finland found infections from several different viruses were associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease (as well as other neurological disorders), with the most striking correlation being viral encephalitis.

Even influenza infection was associated with a five-fold increase in the risk of developing Alzheimer’s. But again, the data is equivocal and a little confusing. In that study, the risk of developing Alzheimer’s was greatest at one year after infection and then decreased over time. But we know that the disease takes decades to progress.

Bacterial infections have also seen scrutiny. Porphyromonas gingivalis is an anaerobic bacterium that’s one of the main culprits of gum disease, and it has been linked to a range of common diseases, including things like atherosclerosis and—you guessed it—Alzheimer’s. The idea is that p. gingivalis enters the bloodstream through abrasions in the mouth and then reaches the brain; the response causes the plaques and tangles to form.

Still other research has suggested a role for our gut microbiome, the vast collection of microbes that help us digest food—more recently, we’ve discovered they do so, so much more. Here, tantalizingly, there are other hints of therapeutic targets. For example, foods that reduce inflammation, such as those high in fiber or omega-3 fatty acids, may be neuroprotective, in addition to being good for your heart. And a variant of the APOE4 gene that results in high levels of LDL cholesterol is also associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s.

The problem with any of these hypotheses is that many, many more people will be infected with a virus or bacteria that has been implicated in Alzheimer’s than will ever develop the disease. Two-thirds of people under 50 have HSV-1, for example, and they won’t all get Alzheimer’s. The same goes for people with gum disease or an influenza infection. Perhaps the disease requires multiple different pathogens to be sparked?

More likely, each of these can insult the brain and trigger plaque formation, but only in combination with other factors. Recently, a role for lithium deficiency has looked rather compelling.

The Amyloid Mafia

We would almost certainly know a lot more about those other potential causes had it not been for the so-called Amyloid Mafia. Scientists aren’t immune to groupthink, and the people responsible for deciding who got research grants and who didn’t have not been at all receptive to proposals that investigate non-amyloid mechanisms.

“You were just lucky when you weren’t beaten up by the amyloid-β or tau people if you would mention immunology,” said Michael Heneka, a neuroinflammation specialist interviewed by Nature in 2023. (Tau is another Alzheimer ’s-associated protein.)

Speaking to American Public Media, the former director of Alzheimer’s research at the National Institute of Aging said, “It became gradually an infallible belief system. So everybody felt obligated to pay homage to the idea without questioning. And that’s not very healthy for science when scientists… accept an idea as infallible. That’s when you run into problems.”

To make matters worse, it turned out that much of that confidence in amyloid-β as the one true cause was built on fake data.

That landmark 2006 Nature paper that claimed to show that a specific form of amyloid-β was the culprit causing the disease? It was retracted in 2024 after it emerged that the authors had faked some of the data, copy-pasting images of protein detections. In another case, a scientist at City University of New York was indicted last year for falsifying data that helped support the ideas behind an Alzheimer’s drug being developed by Cassava Sciences. (For a more comprehensive look at the Amyloid Mafia, check out Charles Pillar’s work.) Sadly, this kind of scientific misconduct is more common than we’d like and can be hard to detect before publication.

Those FDA drug approvals have also been tainted. In addition to the aforementioned congressional investigation that found irregularities, the head of FDA’s neuroscience office was forced to step down in 2023 after it was found that he had an inappropriately close relationship with Biogen.

Despite this litany of clinical failures and research misconduct, it would be a stretch to say that the amyloid hypothesis is dead. Only one of the five FDA-approved therapies is independent of the amyloid pathway, and while work is conducted on other areas, amyloid-β research remains the lion’s share.

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Posted Thursday 16 April 2026 at 9:21 am AEST (my time).

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Visualization shows how DESI built its 3D map of the Universe. Earth is at the center of the wedges, and every point is a galaxy.

Credit: DESI/KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/R. Proctor

In a significant milestone, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has completed its 3D map of the Universe—the highest resolution of any such map yet achieved—on schedule and with more data than expected, the collaboration announced today. Analyses of DESI data from earlier runs have already produced exciting hints of new physics—namely that the Universe’s dark energy, rather than being constant, might vary over time. The latest data must still be analyzed but could help definitively confirm or disprove those hints within the next couple of years.

“DESI’s five-year survey has been spectacularly successful,” DESI director Michael Levi of Berkeley Lab said. “The instrument performed better than anticipated. The results have been incredibly exciting. And the size and scope of the map and how quickly we’ve been able to execute is phenomenal. We’re going to celebrate completion of the original survey and then get started on the work of churning through the data, because we’re all curious about what new surprises are waiting for us.”

As previously reported, Albert Einstein’s cosmological constant (lambda) implied the existence of a repulsive form of gravity. (For a more in-depth discussion of the history of the cosmological constant and its significance for dark energy, see our 2024 story.) Quantum physics holds that even the emptiest vacuum is teeming with energy in the form of “virtual” particles that wink in and out of existence, flying apart and coming together in an intricate quantum dance. This roiling sea of virtual particles could give rise to dark energy, giving the Universe a little extra push so that it can continue accelerating. The problem is that the quantum vacuum contains too much energy: roughly 10¹²⁰ times too much.

So the Universe should be accelerating much faster than it is if the dark energy is, essentially, the cosmological constant. Still, all the observations to date indicate that it’s constant. The best theoretical fit thus far is known as the Lambda CDM model, which incorporates both a weakly interacting cold dark matter and dark energy. One alternative theory proposes that the Universe may be filled with a fluctuating form of dark energy dubbed “quintessence.” There are also several other alternative models that assume the density of dark energy has varied over the history of the Universe.

DESI is a state-of-the-art instrument and can capture light from up to 5,000 celestial objects simultaneously.

In its earliest days, the Universe was a hot, dense soup of subatomic particles, including hydrogen and helium nuclei, aka baryons. Tiny fluctuations created a rippling pattern through that early ionized plasma, which froze into a three-dimensional place as the Universe expanded and cooled. Those ripples, or bubbles, are known as baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). It’s possible to use BAOs as a kind of cosmic ruler to investigate the effects of dark energy over the history of the Universe.

That’s what DESI was designed to do: take precise measurements of the apparent size of these bubbles (both near and far) by determining the distances to galaxies and quasars over 11 billion years. Robotic positioners precisely line up optical fibers, and 10 spectrographs collect light and split it into separate colors to determine the position, velocity, and chemical composition of each object.

Each so-called “tile” is one telescope pointing to a specific spot to record spectra for several thousand objects at once. Roughly 80 gigabytes of data is collected each night and streamed to supercomputers at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. That data is then sliced into chunks to determine how fast the Universe was expanding at each point of time in the past to better model how dark energy was affecting that expansion.

The first hints that dark energy might vary over time appeared in the first full year of data. While there was basic agreement with the Lambda CDM model, when those results were combined with data from other studies—involving the cosmic microwave background radiation and Type Ia supernovae—subtle differences cropped up that suggested the dark energy might be weakening. It amounted to between 3.5 and 3.9 sigmas in terms of confidence. But the subsequent 2025 results covered the first three years of data with confidence levels between 2.8 and 4.2 sigma—just shy of the five-sigma threshold that is the gold standard for discovery.

Analysis on this latest round of data won’t be completed until 2027 or 2028 if all goes smoothly. But finishing the original planned survey, on time, with significantly more data than expected, is a major achievement in itself. Over its five years of operation, DESI has mapped over 47 million galaxies, with more to come.

“Some people have been working on this for decades, so it’s just amazing to see it come to completion,” DESI co-spokesperson Alexie Leauthaud of the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Ars. “Anyone who does science knows that you rarely achieve more than you proposed you would. And you never achieve more on time. DESI is maybe the only team I’ve ever worked with—that has actually done more than it was going to do—on time.”

A bumpy road

The DESI scientists achieved this while overcoming some pretty daunting challenges, including figuring out how to maintain operation during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Two years later, in June 2022, the Contreras wildfire spread rapidly toward Kitt Peak National Observatory, where DESI is mounted, thanks to winds and very dry conditions. DESI scientist Klaus Honscheid of Ohio State University credits “heroic” firefighters for protecting the telescopes. “We were all watching the web cameras and seeing the fire and the glow, and then suddenly it all went dark,” Honscheid told Ars. The communications and power lines had gone down. “We were sitting there for 12 hours not knowing if we still had an experiment left,” he said.

A thin slice of the map produced by the DESI five-year survey shows galaxies and quasars above and below the plane of the Milky Way.

Credit: Claire Lamman/DESI collaboration

Fortunately, the DESI team was able to resume operations fairly quickly, despite subsequent heavy rains and mudslides. Just before the fire, they had implemented an emergency communication system with a Starlink satellite. “Starlink is not viewed favorably in the astronomical community because these satellites really affect nighttime observing,” Honscheid admitted. “But in our case, they actually saved us.” And when they had to reduce the readout channels from four to two, due to a few defective CCD cameras, the team’s earlier efforts to cut reconfiguration times between exposures helped ensure the project stayed on schedule—and also preserved the quality of the data.

The team also developed a backup protocol they dubbed “Sneakernet,” driving down the mountain to NOIRLab in Tucson every morning with a hard drive of the prior night’s data for processing. That protocol proved critical just one year later when several NOIRLab observatories were hit with a cyberattack. “Again, we were very fortunate and reacted quickly,” said Honscheid. “We basically pulled the Internet plug to the instrument, and therefore we were isolated from the attacks.” They were able to keep observing thanks to the Starlink connection and Sneakernet. The cybersecurity architecture has since been completely overhauled to stave off future cyberattacks.

Getting that final tile to complete the map was delayed slightly due to certain adverse conditions: clouds, wind, atmospheric turbulence, and the location of the Moon, according to co-manager of DESI’s survey operations, Adam Myers of the University of Wyoming. DESI took all those factors into account from the start. “Bright-Time” surveys were done when reflected light from the Moon hindered observations of the faintest and most distant objects, while “Dark Time” surveys, which required good conditions across the board, constituted a kind of back-up program.

“When the original DESI survey began, we had ‘dark’ tiles over many different parts of the sky, so we weren’t as limited by conditions,” Myers told Ars. “But for the final dark tile, we had to thread the needle more, which made it seem like ‘weather’ was more of a problem. A lot of the time we were waiting to complete the final dark tile from the original program; we’d been observing plenty of ‘bright’ and ‘backup’ tiles, as well as even some tiles from newer dark programs, which span more of the sky.”

Gearing up for DESI-II

DESI’s operation has been extended until 2028 to get a deeper look at more distant and faint “luminous red” galaxies, as well as nearby dwarf galaxies and stellar streams. Plans are already underway for DESI-II, which will require a small instrument upgrade. As for further tests of the Lambda CDM model, future analysis will be able to incorporate observational data from the Vera Rubin Telescope’s sky survey as well as the Euclid Space Telescope. “We’re going to need a lot of datasets and mix them in different ways to try to figure out what the Universe is trying to tell us,” said Leauthaud.

The big question mark is whether there will be future funding for DESI and DESI-II, given the precarious state of science funding in the US. Honscheid acknowledged the uncertainty but is cautiously optimistic, in part because of the project’s success to date, and because DESI-II’s upgrade is a relatively small-ticket item.

“I’m optimistic for DESI-II, but I’m also gravely concerned more broadly by the funding landscape and the attack on science,” said Leauthaud. “Even though we may be lucky, I’m still extremely concerned for my colleagues in astronomy who have lost funding, students whose careers have been jeopardized, postdocs who have had to leave. More broadly, beyond astronomy and astrophysics, I’ve been extremely concerned about the impact on climate science and NOAA. We rely on weather services to help with our observations.”

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Posted Thursday 16 April 2026 at 9:19 am AEST (my time).

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There has been considerable debate among physicists over the last 15 years about conflicting measurements of the charge radius of a hydrogen atom’s proton—some confirming the predictions of our strongest theoretical models, others suggesting it was smaller than expected. The discrepancy hinted at possible exciting new physics. Now the debate seems to be winding down with the latest experimental measurements, described in two recent papers published in the journals Nature and Physical Review Letters, respectively. And the evidence has tilted in favor of a smaller proton radius and against new physics.

“We believe this is the final nail in the coffin of the proton radius puzzle,” Lothar Maisenbacher, of the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the Nature paper, told Ars.

As previously reported, most popularizations discussing the structure of the atom rely on the much-maligned Bohr model, in which electrons move around the nucleus in circular orbits. But quantum mechanics gives us a much more precise (albeit weirder) description. The electrons aren’t really orbiting the nucleus; they are technically waves that take on particle-like properties when we do an experiment to determine their position. While orbiting an atom, they exist in a superposition of states, both particle and wave, with a wave function encompassing all the probabilities of its position at once. A measurement will collapse the wave function, giving us the electron’s position. Make a series of such measurements and plot the various positions that result, and it will yield something akin to a fuzzy orbit-like pattern.

Quantum weirdness extends to the proton, too. Technically, it’s made of three charged quarks bound together by the strong nuclear force. But it’s fuzzy, like a cloud. And how can we talk about the radius of a cloud? Physicists rely on the charge density to do so, akin to the density of water molecules in a cloud. The radius of the proton is the distance at which the charge density drops below a certain energy threshold. And it’s possible to measure that radius by studying how the electron interacts with the proton, via either electron scattering experiments or by using electron or muon spectroscopy to look at the difference between atomic energy levels (the “Lamb shift”). The combined fuzziness of the electron and proton means that the electron can be anywhere inside that region—including inside the proton.

Hydrogen atoms are the simplest nuclei, with a single proton orbited by an electron, so that’s typically what physicists have used for their experiments to measure the proton’s charge radius. For a long time, the accepted value was .876 femtometers—a “world average” of many different measurements with sufficient error bars to allow for future measurements.

Muon spectroscopy measurements first caused the problem back in 2010. Physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics used muonic hydrogen, replacing the electron orbiting the nucleus with a muon, the electron’s heavier (and very short-lived) sibling. Since it’s nearly 200 times heavier than the electron, it has a much smaller orbital, and thus a much higher probability (10 million times) of being inside the proton. And that makes it 10 million times more sensitive as a measurement technique, because of its closer proximity to the proton.

The physicists expected to measure roughly the same radius for the proton as prior experiments, only with less uncertainty. There should be no difference (other than mass and lifetime) between the electron and the muon, theoretically. Instead, they measured a significantly smaller proton radius of 0.841 femtometers, 0.00000000000003 millimeters smaller, well outside the established error bars. It was five standard deviations from the value obtained by other methods.

If it was an experimental error—or if the underlying theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED, which describes how light interacts with matter) was somehow misapplied—it’s a significant one. Perhaps QED just needed a few careful tweaks. It could also be a hint of new physics beyond the Standard Model, but this was always considered the least likely explanation.

A puzzling discrepancy

A vacuum chamber used to measure electron transitions in atomic hydrogen

Credit: Axel Beyer/MPQ

Subsequent measurements by various groups were inconclusive. For instance, in 2013, the same international team performed muon-based experiments that confirmed their 2010 value, producing a measurement of 0.84 femtometers for the proton’s radius, with a discrepancy of 7 sigma. Another experimental variation in 2016 involved replacing the electron with a muon in a deuterium atom—a heavier isotope of hydrogen, with a neutron as well as a proton and an electron. The idea was that the presence of a neutron would alter how electrons and muons perceive the proton’s charge. That, too, was in line with the 2010 result.

However, two experiments using regular hydrogen to measure the proton radius produced mixed results: A 2017 study also confirmed the 2010 result, while a 2018 measurement was in line with the larger value before the 2010 experiment. In 2019, York University scientists opted to make an electron-based measurement of the proton radius, in hopes of bringing the various conflicting results closer to a consensus. The result: Their measurement of 0.833 femtometers agreed with the smaller value from the 2010 study.

That brings us to the latest two papers, both of which involved experiments with hydrogen atoms in a vacuum chamber. They used lasers to control the electrons and measured the transitions between energies; this enabled them to infer the exact dimensions of the proton’s charge radius. Based on the combined results, the proton has a radius of about 0.84 femtometers, or less than 1 million-billionth of a meter, once again in keeping with the 2010 measurement that kicked off the debate.

“The proton radius should be a universal property; it should give the same result no matter how you look at it,” Juan Rojo, a physicist at Vrije University Amsterdam in the Netherlands, who was not involved in either experiment, told New Scientist. “This is why these two papers are quite nice, because they provide different perspectives to the same number.”

The PRL results obtained by Yost et al. are roughly three times more precise than the 2019 measurement, according to Yost, while Maisenbacher et al’s result was twice as precise as that, reaching the coveted 5.5 sigma threshold. Using their measured value, Maisenbacher et al. were also able to precisely test the Standard Model’s prediction down to 0.7 parts per trillion, finding no discrepancies—and hence no hints of a new force or particle lurking in the shadows.

“When the proton radius first came out, all the normal hydrogen measurements showed good agreement with each other, and muonic hydrogen was an outlier,” Dylan Yost, a physicist at Colorado State University who co-authored the PRL paper, told Ars. “This gave everyone great hope that maybe there was some new physics that was really related to the difference between muons and electrons. So this is disappointing for the discovery of new physics, but it is exciting that we are performing such stringent tests of the Standard Model. We are getting results in precise agreement with theory that are reaching parts-per-trillion levels. It is a real testament to some incredible theoretical and experimental work over many decades.”

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10124-3 (About DOIs).

Physical Review Letters, 2026. DOI: 10.1103/lgl2-6cb8.

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Posted Wednesday 15 April 2026 at 7:28 am AEST (my time).

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HOUSTON—Their mission is complete. The four people who flew beyond the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission are back home in Houston with their families. But the lessons from Artemis II are just beginning to be told.

There are tangible, objective takeaways from the nine-day mission. How did NASA’s Space Launch System rocket perform? Nearly perfectly. Was the Orion spacecraft up to the job of flying to the Moon and back? Absolutely. Will engineers need to make any changes before the next Artemis mission? Yes, and that’s not terribly surprising for a program that, 20 years in, has just flown a crew to space for the first time.

Ars has covered the technical lessons from Artemis II, such as hydrogen leaks on the launch pad, helium leaks in space, and a toilet that wasn’t always available for No. 1.

But there’s something else that must be said. NASA struck gold when it selected the astronauts to fly on the Artemis II mission. NASA’s opaque formula for picking space crews worked three years ago when Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen strode across the stage inside Hangar 135 at Ellington Field. It was there that the agency held an extravagant event to announce the crew for Artemis II, complete with VIPs, spotlights, and an elaborate stage setting flanked by a supersonic jet trainer.

Three years and eight days later, Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen returned to Hangar 135 on Saturday afternoon with the same enthusiasm and excitement. But they arrived with an entirely different perspective, having wrapped up their circumlunar journey less than 24 hours earlier.

NASA again set the stage to welcome the Artemis II astronauts back to their home base in Houston. The scene wasn’t quite as glossy as NASA’s crew announcement in 2023, and it didn’t need to be. This event had more gravitas. NASA let the achievement make the noise.

The four astronauts were reunited with their families moments before the homecoming ceremony Saturday. They splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California on Friday evening, spent the night on a Navy ship, then flew to San Diego by helicopter to catch a NASA business jet for the trip back to Houston.

They had traveled more than 252,000 miles into space, more than 4,000 miles beyond the Moon, farther than any human has ventured from Earth in history. Their experience was still fresh when they took the stage in Houston.

Jeremy Hansen, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Reid Wiseman return to Houston for a reunion with their families.

Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

The eternal allure of exploration

Wiseman, the mission commander, is not usually at a loss for words. He was on Saturday, though. “I have absolutely no idea what to say,” he said. “Twenty-four hours ago, the Earth was that big out the window and we were doing Mach 39, and here we are back… at home.”

All four wore their emotions back to Ellington Field. Their preflight notions were replaced by the reality of their experience. They no longer have to answer pesky media questions about what they expect to think or feel when they reach the Moon. Now, we all want to know what it was actually like. We’re just starting to get some answers.

“This was not easy,” Wiseman said. “Being 200,000-plus miles away from home, before you launch, it feels like it’s the greatest dream on Earth, and when you’re out there, you just want to get back to your families and your friends. It’s a special thing to be human, and it’s a special thing to be on planet Earth.”

I am part of the estimated three-quarters of the human population who were not alive or too young to remember the Apollo Moon missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I became a space enthusiast, and then a space reporter, by following the Space Shuttle program.

This job has the perk of letting me meet some extraordinary people and witnessing history. I was there when NASA announced the Artemis II crew three years ago, interviewed the astronauts and numerous members of their support team, and watched the explorers leave port on April 1 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The Artemis II astronauts depart their crew quarters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on April 1.

Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Seeing the astronauts leave their crew quarters at Kennedy, I thought of the Apollo documentaries I watched as a child. But the sense of history was soon overwhelmed by the warmth of watching as each crew member said goodbye to their loved ones before boarding a ride to carry them to their rocket. The grandeur of the moment was immediately replaced with something relatable for any living, breathing human being.

The launch was a memorable visual spectacle. I’ve seen countless rockets take off before, dispatching missions to destinations like Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and beyond, thousands of times farther than Artemis II’s maximum distance. The difference this time, again, was the humanity on board.

Perhaps because I wasn’t alive during Apollo, part of me has often gravitated to robotic space missions. I identified with spacecraft like Voyager, Cassini, New Horizons, and the rovers traversing Mars as examples of real exploration. It was still possible to connect crewed platforms in low-Earth orbit, like the International Space Station, with the idea of exploring through the attainment of knowledge. With more than 25 years of uninterrupted crewed operations, the ISS has taught NASA and its international partners how to live and work in space and paved the way for the establishment of a permanent base on the Moon.

But it was easy to connect the innate drive to explore with the excitement of seeing new landscapes on Mars, the ghostly plumes of Enceladus, and the heart of Pluto. These were new worlds revealed for the first time, and each discovery sparked a bevy of new questions.

Artemis II struck the same vein, revealing things unseen by human eyes before. Like those missions far out in the Solar System, this was exploration in action. But seeing and hearing what the Artemis II astronauts saw added another dimension. It scratched an itch that a robot can’t reach. Here were human beings, people I’ve met and people you might someday meet, going through an entirely new experience.

This is not to say that NASA should withdraw from robotic exploration. Without these machines, we would have had to wait generations to see the things we’ve seen on Mars and untold lifetimes to know what’s lurking deeper into the Solar System. NASA is preparing to launch a robotic rotorcraft to Saturn’s moon Titan in 2028. If you’re a fan of exploration, the prospect of flying a drone through Titan’s hazy, methane-rich atmosphere nearly a billion miles from Earth should amp you up.

This is about all of us

Sure, Artemis II didn’t land on the Moon. That will come on a future Artemis flight. But these four astronauts ventured to greater distances than Apollo and saw parts of the far side of the Moon hidden from view during those missions more than 50 years ago. Modern technology provided new opportunities for the astronauts to share their views with the world—from their view, just a fragile blue marble suspended in a cosmic void.

Speaking from the Orion spacecraft on April 4, Glover, the mission’s pilot, remarked on the view in a long-distance virtual interview with CBS News.

“One of the really important personal perspectives that I have up here is I can really see Earth as one thing,” Glover said on the eve of Easter. “You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the Universe, in the cosmos.

“Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you, and I’m trying to tell you—just trust me—you are special. In all of this emptiness—this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the Universe—you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.

“As we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we’ve got to get through this together.”

A crescent Earth sets behind the Moon’s horizon on April 6.

Credit: NASA

Back on Earth, Koch recalled seeing our home planet as she returned to Houston on Saturday.

“When we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had, and honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth. It was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the Universe,” she said. “I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me, but there is one new thing I know, and that is planet Earth, you are a crew.”

These are important messages for a world afflicted by war and division. Hansen, a Canadian mission specialist on Artemis II, encapsulated the sentiment.

“You haven’t heard us talk a lot about the science, the things we’ve learned, and that’s because they’re there, and they’re incredible, but it’s the human experience that is extraordinary for us, and it sounds like maybe for you, too. When you look up here, you’re not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you, and if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.”

Yeah, NASA (and Canada) really nailed it with this group.

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Posted Wednesday 15 April 2026 at 7:25 am AEST (my time).

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Earlier this year, a relatively unknown startup from Finland made a startling announcement: It had finally solved solid-state batteries.

Not only that, but Donut Lab, a spinoff of Verge Motorcycles, said that its solid-state battery — long considered the “Holy Grail of batteries” for their high-density, durable, fast-charging abilities — would go into production later this year.

Battery experts were understandably skeptical. After all, solid-state batteries are one of those technologies, along with artificial general intelligence and the hyperloop, that seem perpetually two years away. And while most legitimate efforts in this field — whether academic or commercial — have some level of published research or recognizable names attached, Donut Lab seemed to have emerged out of nowhere, with no known researchers or prior presence in the field. This lack of traceability immediately raised concerns about the startup’s credibility.

“I can’t say they didn’t do it,” said Eric Wachsman, the director of the Maryland Energy Innovation Institute and an expert on solid-state batteries and solid oxide fuel cells. “All I can say is they haven’t demonstrated that they have.”

The skepticism seems warranted, especially when you consider how many other people have been chasing the solid-state dream. Were we really to believe this obscure startup had beaten Toyota, Stellantis, and the entire nation of China to the punch? The odds were against it.

Donut Lab seemed to anticipate the doubt, launching a website last February called idonutbelieve.com that would serve as a platform to publish independent tests verifying that, in fact, its solid-state battery was real, and spectacular. Over the course of several weeks, the startup posted third-party results from state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland that it said proved its battery was what it said it was: a fast-charging, high-energy-density solid-state battery that wasn’t actually a supercapacitor in disguise.

“The resistance won’t disappear when we present the proof,” Donut Lab CEO and cofounder Marko Lehtimäki said in a video. “It will just intensify because this new technology is a threat to the established players in the industry.”

But Donut Lab is still hiding the ball on some key information. At CES in January, the startup said its solid-state battery has an energy density of 400Wh per kilogram—roughly twice that of typical lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries in production. Not only that, but it could charge to full in five minutes, had a practically unlimited lifespan of 100,000 charging cycles, was unaffected by heat and cold (negative 30 degrees Celsius and 100C), and contains no rare earth elements, precious metals, or flammable liquid electrolytes.

Much of that remains unsubstantiated. Even after posting five independent test reports from VTT, the startup has yet to demonstrate three of the most important metrics: chemistry, density, and cycle-life claims.

The stakes are incredibly high. Imagine an electric vehicle that can travel 700–800 miles on a single charge, and that wasn’t at risk of bursting into flames because the flammable electrolytes had been replaced with a solid material.

In lithium-ion batteries, the motion of the liquid electrolytes generates heat, and in certain situations, this can slip into a “thermal runaway” effect that results in a fire. By comparison, solid-state batteries would make it safer to quickly draw power from (or add it back to) the battery, meaning you could theoretically charge an EV faster. It also could mean, structurally, less room has to be devoted to temperature control, which could allow companies to squeeze more battery cells into the same size pack.

After reviewing the tests of the Donut battery, Wachsman said there are still significant concerns. During the extreme heat tests, for example, the pouch surrounding Donut’s battery lost its vacuum seal. Gas generation inside batteries — caused by processes like electrolyte decomposition or oxygen release — can lead to swelling and rupture of the battery pouch. But without knowing the exact chemistry of the cell, it’s difficult to say how significant it is that Donut’s battery had this failure.

Setting aside the Donut battery for a moment, solid-state batteries have struggled to graduate from the laboratory to the assembly line because of well-documented problems. These batteries are often plagued by the formation of metallic cracks called dendrites that cause them to short circuit. Think of them like cracks that form on a sidewalk when a tree root grows underneath.

Dendrites have been a thorn in the side of battery developers since the 1970s. One reason lithium-ion batteries have become ubiquitous while other approaches have stalled is that their commonly used graphite anodes are less susceptible to dendrite formation.

But new discoveries could help engineers finally overcome these hurdles. A research team from MIT recently published a study in Nature that found that chemical reactions caused by high electrical currents that weaken the electrolyte also make it more susceptible to dendrite growth. That’s why developing stronger electrolytes alone hasn’t solved the decades-old dendrite problem. And it could point to the importance of developing more chemically stable materials to finally fulfill the promise of solid-state batteries.

Progress is already being made — where else? — in China. Last month, CATL, which controls nearly 40 percent of the global battery market, filed a patent application for solid-state batteries with a reported 500Wh energy density. According to CarNewsChina, the battery maker has already been planning small-scale production in 2027. But automotive-grade cells won’t be ready likely until the end of the decade.

Other Chinese companies are rushing ahead. Automaker FAW said recently that its “liquid-solid-state” lithium-rich manganese cell with 500Wh/kg was ready for vehicle integration.

China is already laying the groundwork for mass production by the end of the decade, by which point it hopes the technology will be mature. And why wouldn’t it? This is a country that has taken EVs and battery development seriously for years, allowing it to corner the market on much of the world’s supply.

Different companies are taking different approaches. For example, Honda is committed to sulfur-based electrolytes despite emerging alternatives. Last October, Toyota announced “the world’s first practical use of all-solid-state batteries in BEVs” by 2027 or 2028. And Mercedes, using a prototype battery from startup Factorial, was able to get an electric EQS sedan a real-world range of 749 miles.

“The companies probably have a ways to go,” said Alevtina Smirnova, director of the NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Solid-State Electric Power Storage. “Because there is no comparison to what is happening now in China to what is happening here in the US.”

For its part, Donut Lab is unperturbed by the skepticism around its claims. On April 1st, Lehtimäki posted a new video addressing some of the controversy surrounding its solid-state batteries. He also revealed that Donut Lab had created a second, more production-ready version of its battery that would start shipping to customers later this year.

There was a crucial admission: The widely discussed “100,000 cycles” figure was a design target, he said, not an experimentally verified result. Actual testing has been conducted over shorter cycles, with projections extrapolated based on known variables such as charge rate, temperature, and usage conditions.

He then pivoted to a more near-term project: Donut Lab’s latest merch drop, including a “tin-foil”-covered bucket hat.

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Posted Sunday 12 April 2026 at 6:50 am AEST (my time).

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Infectious diseases borne by mosquitoes—such as malaria, dengue fever, and Zika fever—claim more than 770,000 lives worldwide each year. Understanding how mosquitoes find humans has long been a challenge in controlling the spread of these diseases. However, little has been known about how mosquitoes integrate multiple cues, including visual information and carbon dioxide, to approach their targets.

In this context, a research team led by the Georgia Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology has succeeded in automatically deriving a dynamic model governing mosquito flight by applying Bayesian inference statistical methods to a vast amount of data recording mosquito movements.

Bayesian inference is a statistical technique that probabilistically determines the most plausible model parameters from observed data. Using this method, the researchers were able to construct a mathematical model that could reproduce experimental results with high accuracy while compressing mosquito behavior to fewer than 30 parameters.

“The big question was, how do mosquitoes find a human target?” explains Cheng-Yi Fei, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. “There were previous experimental studies on what kind of cues might be important. But nothing has been especially quantitative.”

Mosquitoes Have Two Modes of Flight

The research team released two female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes into a sealed experimental space and recorded their flight paths in 0.01-second increments using two infrared cameras. The data obtained from a total of 20 experiments exceeds 53 million points, with more than 400,000 flight paths recorded. This represents the largest dataset ever collected for a study quantitatively measuring mosquito flight.

The experiment began by photographing mosquitoes flying around human subjects, who were dressed in dark-colored clothing. This observation revealed that Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were concentrating their approach on human heads. This was a fundamental discovery that served as the starting point for the entire study.

Next, the researchers experimented with subjects dressed in black on one side and white on the other. They found that although carbon dioxide and body odor were emitted equally from both sides of the body, the mosquitoes' flight trajectories were concentrated only on the black side. Although strange at first glance, this result vividly demonstrated that visual stimuli play an important role in the search for targets in a windless environment.

Furthermore, a detailed analysis of mosquitoes flying in a stimulant-free environment revealed that their flight patterns could be broadly classified into two types. One was the active state, in which they actively explored the space while maintaining a speed of approximately 0.7 meter per second. The other was the idle state, in which they flew almost without using thrust. The idle state is thought to be a preparation stage for landing and was observed more frequently near the ceiling of the experimental space.

Analysis of mosquito responses to visual stimuli revealed that mosquitoes are attracted to dark objects and slow down when they get within about 40 centimeters. However, without additional cues such as body odor, humidity, or heat, mosquitoes often flew away even after approaching their target. This suggests that visual stimuli alone are insufficient to induce landing and blood-sucking.

The response to carbon dioxide sources was entirely different. Mosquitoes that entered within a radius of about 40 centimeters of the carbon dioxide source suddenly slowed to 0.2 m/s and began flying erratically, swaying without a clear direction. Numerical simulations also showed that mosquitoes can detect carbon dioxide concentrations as low as 0.1 percent and that their detection range extends to approximately 50 centimeters from the source.

Furthermore, the mosquito response changed even more dramatically when visual stimuli and carbon dioxide were presented simultaneously. The mosquitoes began to circle around the target, and significantly more mosquitoes concentrated near the target than when either stimulus was used on its own.

According to the researchers, this behavior could not be reproduced by a model that simply added the responses to vision and carbon dioxide. In other words, it is highly likely that multiple sensory sources influence each other in the brain.

Why Do Mosquitoes Target Human Heads?

To test the prediction accuracy of the mathematical model, the research team used a subject dressed in white with a black hood as a “black sphere emitting carbon dioxide” to see how well the model could reproduce the actual distribution of mosquitoes. As a result, they succeeded in accurately predicting the mosquito density distribution around the human head. The human head often appears dark to mosquitoes and is also a part of the body that emits a lot of carbon dioxide, making it a place where two types of mosquito-attracting stimuli overlap.

In addition, to quantify the risk of mosquito bites, the researchers measured the distance at which 50 percent of their trajectories converged around the target, which was about 65 cm without stimulus. On the other hand, with visual stimulus alone, the distance was about 40 cm; with carbon dioxide alone, about 25 cm; and with a combination of visual and carbon dioxide, the distance was reduced to about 20 cm. This again showed that mosquitoes tend to approach humans more closely when multiple sensory stimuli are superimposed.

Researchers believe that the mathematical model they have developed will allow for the pre-simulation and optimization of mosquito trap designs on computers. They also hope that it will have applications to other mosquito species, including the Anopheles mosquito, which transmits malaria.

“Our work suggests that mosquito traps need specifically calibrated, multisensory lures to keep mosquitoes engaged long enough to be captured,” says MIT professor Jorn Dunkel. The team now also has an interactive web app that allows users to try out flight models of all the mosquitoes they studied.

This story originally appeared in WIRED Japan and has been translated from Japanese.

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Posted Sunday 12 April 2026 at 6:48 am AEST (my time).

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The Artemis era well and truly began Friday evening when a shiny spacecraft that had traveled 700,000 miles around the Moon, carrying four astronauts, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

For NASA, for its international partners, and for all of humanity the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission marked a return to deep space by our species after more than half a century.

It was a spectacular achievement, and NASA deserves credit for making something what is very difficult look relatively easy. But it also raises an important question: What comes next?

NASA recently revised its mission plans for Artemis III and IV, to provide a stepping stone mission before undertaking the landing of humans on the Moon. Much, and more, work needs to be done to make those flights happen. And to be perfectly blunt, the Artemis II mission that concluded Friday was the lowest hanging fruit of the Artemis Program.

“The work ahead is greater than the work behind us,” said Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, after the landing on Friday night.

What comes next involves more complex operations, requiring multiple vehicles, and ultimately going down to another planetary body. To reach its objectives, NASA will have to take the training wheels off. Here, then, is the status of the major elements that must come together to land humans on the Moon.

Space Launch System

Multiple NASA officials have praised the performance of the Space Launch System rocket during the Artemis II launch on April 1, saying it nailed the target orbit for the mission with greater than 99 percent accuracy.

The core stage for the Artemis III mission is expected to leave the factory in Michoud, Louisiana, later this month for delivery to Kennedy Space Center, Florida. Other rocket elements have already arrived, or will soon.

Meanwhile, the Mobile Launch Tower sustained moderate damage, and it will soon be returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building in Florida for refurbishment and then stacking operations for the next mission.

There’s no turning back now, Artemis II is on the way to the Moon.

Credit: NASA

Although development of the SLS rocket—which reused multiple major components from the Space Shuttle program—took far longer than expected, the program’s operational performance is improving.

If there are lingering questions about the rocket they involve its upper stage. NASA has one final Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage left, and it may (or may not) use this upper stage for the Artemis III mission in Earth orbit. Most probably they will save this final upper stage for Artemis IV, and introduce the new Centaur V upper stage for the Artemis V mission.

Orion

Despite its success on the Artemis II mission, questions remain about the Orion spacecraft for the next two flights.

As of a few months ago, production of the Artemis III Orion spacecraft was tracking toward an internal readiness date of January 2028. This was before NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced NASA was modifying the plans for Artemis III (now intended to launch in mid-2027) to fly an Earth-orbit rendezvous with a lunar lander. Artemis IV is now the lunar landing mission, with a target of 2028.

Accordingly NASA and Orion’s primary contractor, Lockheed Martin, need to increase the production rate of Orion.

NASA has already begun to assess the performance of Orion’s heat shield during Friday evening’s return, but there is only so much they can learn from this mission. That’s because, beginning with the next Orion vehicle, the space agency will use a more permeable heat shield that should improve its performance. The heat shield will be a lesser concern for Artemis III anyway, since it won’t be returning at lunar velocities (24,000 mph or higher).

A significant amount of work will need to be put into helium valves inside the propulsion system of Orion’s Service Module. Although a resolution of the helium leak observed during Artemis II is not necessary for an Earth orbit mission such as Artemis III, it absolutely must be fixed in time for Artemis IV when Orion is operating in lunar orbit.

The Orion spacecraft performed well during the Artemis II mission.

Credit: NASA

“I’m pretty sure we’re going to need to, at a minimum, tweak the design to prevent the leak rate that we have, if not fundamentally change the way the valve works,” Kshatriya said Thursday.

This issue immediately becomes one of the long poles for the Artemis IV.

Human Landing System

The biggest questions for Artemis III and Artemis IV involve the development of lunar landers by SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Ars recently interviewed NASA’s chief of exploration, Lori Glaze, and she said both companies are making a “real commitment” toward meeting NASA’s needs. But both companies have a long way to go from the prototype hardware they’re currently testing to specialized landers capable of safely landing on (and taking off from) the Moon.

Even for Artemis III, a simpler mission closer to Earth, there are serious challenges. SpaceX and Blue Origin must go through NASA’s extensive “human rating” process for their Starship and Blue Moon vehicles, respectively, before they can approach and dock with Orion.

Also, it is non-trivial for SpaceX and Blue Origin to integrate with Orion, which has fairly strict limits for thermal management and other issues. Even ensuring roughly equivalent cabin pressures between two vehicles is a significant task. Completing all of this within the next 12 to 18 months will be a difficult hill to climb.

Then, for Artemis IV, there are even greater hurdles. For SpaceX, the company must test and then become efficient at refueling Starship in low-Earth orbit for a trip to the Moon, and back. And Blue Origin, which has very limited experience in spaceflight operations, must develop a more capable version of its Blue Moon Mk. 1 lander, which is itself untested.

Both companies must also learn to operate in lunar orbit, and master landing their vehicles on the Moon and then subsequently lifting them off from the lunar surface.

There is no question that lunar lander readiness is the longest pole for both Artemis III and Artemis IV.

Spacesuits

Axiom Space, at this point, is NASA’s sole provider for spacesuits that will allow astronauts to walk on the surface of the Moon.

Additionally, Isaacman has said he would like to fly at least one AxEMU suit on Artemis III, to test it out in microgravity.

The problem is we really do not have much insight into where Axiom is in the development curve of its suit, known as the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or AxEMU. Occasionally we get updates, such as last August when the spacesuit successfully completed three crewed underwater tests.

NASA had initially selected two providers to develop a next-generation spacesuit, both for spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as for walking on the Moon. However, in 2024, Collins Aerospace backed out citing difficulties with the program. So all the pressure is on Axiom.

Commercial Landers

Eight years ago NASA initiated a modest program to pay private companies to land small payloads, typically a few dozen to a few hundred kilograms, on the Moon. Since then three companies, under the auspices of this Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, have attempted to land on the Moon. Of these Astrobotic’s mission failed, Firefly’s succeeded, and Intuitive Machines had one largely successful mission and one largely failed mission. More companies will try in the coming years.

As many as four more of these CLPS missions could fly during the next 12 months. And NASA has big plans for these companies to scale up their capabilities from landing hundreds of kilogram to tons, as part of its initiative to develop a base on the lunar surface.

Isaacman announced the three-phases of this Moon base plan at his Ignition event in Washington D.C. a few weeks ago. While these lunar services companies are not essential to the first human landings on the Moon, they are vital for delivering the cargo needed for power, communications, and other elements essential to a sustained presence on the lunar surface.

For this Artemis Program to be successful, therefore, these companies will need to soon move from the “shots on goal” phase of their development to regularly hitting home runs.

Tonight NASA will celebrate this mission, likely with some pretty wild splashdown parties. Tomorrow, the hard work begins.

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Posted Saturday 11 April 2026 at 3:45 pm AEST (my time).

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Slamming into the atmosphere at more than 30 times the speed of sound, NASA’s Orion spacecraft blazed a trail over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, returning home with four astronauts and safely capping humanity’s first voyage to the Moon in nearly 54 years.

Temperatures outside the capsule built up to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as a sheath of plasma enveloped the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity, and its four long-distance travelers, temporarily blocking radio signals the Moon ship and Mission Control in Houston. Flying southwest to northeast, the spacecraft steered toward a splashdown zone southwest of San Diego, where a US Navy recovery ship held position to await the crew’s homecoming. Ground teams regained communications with Orion commander Reid Wiseman after a six-minute blackout.

Airborne tracking planes beamed live video of Orion’s descent back to Mission Control, showing the capsule jettison its parachute cover and deploy a series of chutes to stabilize its plunge toward the Pacific. Then, three larger main chutes, each with an area of 10,500 square feet, opened to slow Orion for splashdown at 8:07 pm EDT Friday (00:07 UTC Saturday).

In just 14 minutes, Orion bled off nearly 25,000 mph of velocity, subjecting the crew strapped into their seats to two brief periods of about 3.9 Gs.

The USS John P. Murtha amphibious transport dock ship dispatched helicopters and small boats to begin extracting Wiseman and his Artemis II crewmates: Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. Wiseman reported “four green crew members” inside the cockpit of the Orion spacecraft, confirming good health and high spirits after splashdown.

Koch exited the capsule first, joining Navy divers on an inflatable raft, or “front porch,” assembled next to the spacecraft. Glover was next, then Hansen, a Canadian astronaut, stepped out of Orion onto the front porch. Wiseman, the captain of the ship, was last to leave his seat and join the recovery team. Two helicopters were expected to hoist the astronauts from the sea and fly them them to the John P. Murtha, where they were to undergo medical checks before traveling to San Diego, then back to Houston for a reunion with their families Saturday.

History made

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman watched Artemis II return to Earth from the deck of the Navy’s recovery vessel a few miles away.

“I think about our crew members that we’ve all had an opportunity to observe over the last 10 days, absolutely professional astronauts and wonderful communicators, almost poets,” Isaacman said in remarks broadcast on NASA’s live video feed from the recovery zone. “These were the ambassadors from humanity to the stars. I can’t imagine a better crew that just completed a perfect mission right now.”

Friday’s reentry came nine days after the mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Artemis II astronauts made history in several ways. They became the first people to fly to space on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft, following an unpiloted test flight more than three years ago. A day into the mission, Orion set a course toward the Moon. Artemis II was the first human spaceflight mission to encounter Earth’s cosmic companion since the last Apollo crew returned from the Moon in December 1972.

Artemis II did not land on the Moon. That will come on a future Artemis mission, once NASA and its commercial partners—SpaceX and Blue Origin—complete development of new human-rated lunar landers. NASA’s next Artemis mission will fly in Earth orbit with an Orion spacecraft to test one or both companies’ landers closer to home. If that goes well, Artemis IV could land near the Moon’s south pole, kicking off a multi-mission campaign to set up a base on the lunar surface.

Still, this mission made its mark. Artemis II reached its farthest point from Earth and closest approach to the Moon on Monday. At 252,756 miles from Earth, Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen became the most distant travelers in human history, downlinking remarkable imagery of the Moon’s tortured terrain and a crescent Earth suspended over the lunar horizon.

Almost as soon as they arrived at the Moon, gravity started pulling the astronauts back home. The four-day homebound cruise ended with an on-target reentry, with the Orion capsule reaching a top speed of some 24,661 mph, just shy of the all-time human speed record set on the Apollo 10 mission returning from the Moon in 1969.

Reentry was one of the riskiest segments of the journey. For the crew to get home safely, the heat shield on the bottom side of the capsule had to withstand scorching temperatures—hotter than a return from the International Space Station—as Orion turned into a pressure-sealed fireball over the Pacific. The thermal barrier is designed to ablate, or erode, during reentry, but the shield cracked and chipped away in an unexpected manner on the Artemis I mission in 2022. Despite this problem, the Orion spacecraft was still able to safely splash down on Artemis I.

NASA adjusted the reentry angle for Artemis II. Orion entered the atmosphere on a steeper trajectory, shortening the heat shield’s exposure time to extreme heating. It will take several hours to several days for engineers to complete their initial inspections of the Orion spacecraft, but the successful return to Earth on Friday proved the heat shield did its job.

The capsule’s parachutes also had to work, and they did—beautifully.

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Posted Saturday 11 April 2026 at 1:22 pm AEST (my time).

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North America wouldn’t look much like it currently does without a tectonic plate that has largely been lost to the Earth’s geological history. The Farallon plate, which has since largely vanished underneath North America, helped build the West Coast by slamming large island chains into the continent as it disappeared. California wouldn’t exist without it, and one of the remaining fragments of the plate presently power the volcanoes of the Cascades.

Now, a new paper suggests that the Farallon plate is still making its presence felt far from the coasts, powering one of North America’s most distinctive phenomena: the Yellowstone hotspot, which has periodically blanketed much of the continent with ash. The new proposal suggests that the plate’s vanishing act has created stresses that have opened paths for molten rock to reach the surface.

Hot spot or not?

Geologic hot spots exist around the globe; they’re areas where deep material from the Earth’s interior finds its way to the surface far from the edges of plates. In many cases, the heat that powers these hot spots is the product of what’s called a mantle plume: a blob of hot viscous rock that convection drives to the surface of the mantle. In many cases, the plume appears to stay in place as the plates drift across it, creating a chain of progressively older islands as you move away from the hot spot.

Hotspots are generally associated with islands. The thinner oceanic crust makes it easier for molten material to find a path to the surface than it would if it had to work through the thick continental crust. But there are exceptions, most notably the Yellowstone hot spot. That appears to be behaving a bit like an oceanic hot spot, leaving a trail of massive eruptions across the Snake River Plain that terminates at the immense calderas beneath present-day Yellowstone.

That would seem to imply that Yellowstone is also powered by a mantle plume. But there are some oddities that don’t quite fit this model. For starters, the explosive, caldera-forming eruptions that created Yellowstone have a different chemistry from the massive floods of lava that created the Snake River Plain. And there’s an odd gap between the two where there’s little in the way of volcanic activity.

A paper published in yesterday’s issue of Science suggests an alternative explanation: The whole thing is enabled by stresses that are the product of the now-vanished Farallon plate.

Before the Pacific plate existed, North America ended roughly where the Rocky Mountains now stand. Offshore sat the Farallon plate, an enormous slab of oceanic crust. But as the Pacific plate formed and started spreading, it helped push the Farallon plate east, driving it under North America. This slammed a series of island chains into the continent’s west coast, progressively growing it to its present state.

In California and Mexico, the process has been completed, and North America now ends at the Pacific plate. But a fragment of the plate is still diving under areas to the north, powering the Cascade volcanoes; another does similar things in Central America.

Modeling the plumbing

The work done in the new paper involves building a geophysical model of what it refers to as the TLMPS: the translithospheric magma plumbing system. That’s the route by which molten and semi-molten material travels through the crust from the mantle below (technically, from the asthenosphere, or the upper-most part of the mantle). Various imaging studies have mapped the plumbing in some detail, suggesting that it’s fairly complex.

There appear to be two separate arms originating from the same general location at the crust-mantle boundary. One branch slopes northeast to feed the Yellowstone caldera, while a second branches off toward the Snake River Plain. The branches split in a way that the volcano-free zone between the two features results.

The researchers reasoned that, whatever else was going on to provide molten material, the paths to the surface were likely to be enabled by stresses in the crust. And that was going to depend on both the existing features in the crust (obtained largely through seismic data) as well as larger-scale processes going on in the mantle underneath. So, the model included both basic geological details, known physical processes, and a bit of history in the sense of what we know about how that section of the crust came to be.

And that’s where we come back to the Farallon plate. Its remains, having been driven beneath the North American plate, are continuing to sink and move through the mantle. That, the researchers surmise, is driving a general eastward flow of material through the viscous mantle. Just east of Yellowstone, however, that flow runs into the older border of the North American plate, where the crust is thicker and denser than the portion of the continent that was put in place by the Farallon plate.

New pathways

This thick crust causes the flow of the mantle to dip downward. And that change in flow causes a series of stresses in the crust, most notably a compressive force between the older and newer sections of the North American plate, as well as a downward drag on the older section. Adding to the local stresses is the fact that all the material that erupted to form the Snake River Plain is denser than much of the surrounding rock, which generates strain on nearby rocks as it tries to sink.

In the model, these two stresses appear to largely cancel each other out in the region just below the volcano-free gap between the Snake River Plain and Yellowstone. But on either side, the different forces create strains that could potentially open up conduits for mantle material to make its way toward the surface.

The model has some nice features. For one, it doesn’t need a mantle plume. No particular force is required to drive mantle material through the crust; instead, pathways are created by the stresses within the crust, and the mantle material simply fills them. It also explains why a single hotspot can produce two very different types of volcanism, given that the semi-molten mantle material takes different amounts of time interacting with different rocks on the two different pathways it takes.

But, while the model is driven by history in the form of the Farallon plate, it is a static picture of the present. The researchers don’t try to trace the history backward to see how these forces could have created the history of eruptions across the Snake River Plain. Nor do they explain why these features developed only at Yellowstone, when portions of the Farallon plate are sliding under most of western North America.

Overall, the work is a nice reminder that, regardless of the larger forces at play, the local details will have a big influence over how those forces play out. But it also has a lot of ideas that the community is likely to pick at and leaves a lot of space for more data to influence our picture of what’s going on under one of the most famous volcanic hot spots on Earth.

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.ady2027 (About DOIs).

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Death, taxes, and the gravitationally bound return of the Artemis II mission on Friday evening. These are the only certainties in life.

Even if the four astronauts on board the Orion spacecraft discovered a serious flaw in their spacecraft today—and to be clear, from recent images reviewed by NASA experts, everything looks just fine—there is no chance of significantly altering the Artemis II mission’s inexorable return through Earth’s atmosphere on Friday. They’re coming back one way or another.

Splashdown is predicted to occur at 8:07 pm ET (00:07 UTC Saturday), a few hundred miles off the coast of Southern California. In large and important ways, this is the most critical phase of the lunar flight. Here, then, is what to expect later today.

Final preparations

This afternoon, if necessary, the Orion spacecraft may make a small, final burn to correct its trajectory back toward Earth. This is to set up an entry into the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, a little to the southeast of Hawaii.

At 7:33 pm, or 44 minutes before splashdown, the Crew Module will separate from the Service Module. This back half of the spacecraft, built by the European Space Agency, has provided the majority of power to Orion during the last nine days, as well as its propulsion. This will expose the Crew Module’s heat shield for the first time.

Four minutes later, using small reaction control thrusters, the Crew Module will raise itself away from the Service Module and take a final opportunity to fine-tune the angle of its entry into the atmosphere. This positioning is pivotal, as the heat shield must be oriented to properly absorb all of the heat from atmospheric reentry.

“Let’s not beat around the bush—we have to hit that angle correctly,” said Jeff Radigan, one of the mission’s flight directors.

Entry interface

After coasting for about 20 minutes following separation, the Crew Module will encounter the upper fringes of Earth’s atmosphere. NASA uses the anachronistic measurement of 400,000 feet for this altitude, which is 76 miles, or 122 km. Anyway, things will start to get very real at 7:53 pm ET as the spacecraft and crew begin to feel the effects of the thickening air.

Orion will hit the atmosphere at nearly 24,000 mph (38,600 kph), accelerating all the way as it succumbs to Earth’s gravity. Outside the spacecraft, temperatures will steadily increase, approaching 3,000° F (1,650° Celsius). The crew will be comfortable inside their entry suits, which include temperature-controlled air.

About 24 seconds after reentry, the spacecraft will largely be engulfed in plasma, leading to a six-minute blackout period. During this time, the astronauts will not be able to speak with Mission Control. And on Earth, we’ll be left in the dark about what’s happening above, when what is absolutely the most critical phase of the mission unfolds.

The heat shield

During the Artemis I mission in November 2022, a similar heat shield on an uncrewed Orion spacecraft did not fail. But it experienced behavior that was far outside the expectations of NASA engineers: Chunks of ablative material at Orion’s base that were intended to protect the spacecraft during its return fell away.

This led to a two-year investigation and an independent review. In December 2024, NASA announced it would not redesign the heat shield for Artemis II and would instead modify the entry profile from a longer “skip” reentry to a shorter one.  During Artemis I, as the vehicle descended from about 400,000 to 100,000 feet, it was under a “heat load” of various levels for 14 minutes. With Artemis II, this time will be reduced to eight minutes.

The Orion heat shield as seen after the Artemis I flight.

Credit: NASA

There has understandably been a lot of consternation about the heat shield. Initially, the commander of Artemis II, Reid Wiseman, was very skeptical about using the same one. But over time, he and the other Artemis II crew members have been won over by NASA’s engineers, who have extensively studied the problem.

NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, also had questions when he took the job in December 2025. But in January, after a review, Isaacman announced he had “full confidence” in Orion’s heat shield using the new entry profile. He invited Ars Technica to Washington, DC, to sit in on a technical briefing at the time. From this detailed information, it sure seemed like NASA had put in the hard work and testing to back up its decision.

Even so, you’ve got to go fly to be sure. And that’s what will happen this evening.

“There’s no question that I’ll be anxious,” said Amit Kshatriya, the space agency’s top civil servant, this week. “We’ve done the work. It’s impossible to say you don’t have irrational fears left. But I don’t have any rational fears.”

Splashdown

After the heat shield bears the brunt of the heating, Orion will jettison the “forward bay cover” at the top of the spacecraft at about 35,000 feet. This protective cover must be cast off for three small, drogue parachutes to deploy at about 22,000 feet. After three pilot parachutes deploy, the mains are due to come out at about 6,000 feet. The aim is to slow the spacecraft to 20 mph at splashdown.

Parachutes have been deploying from returning spacecraft for nearly seven decades. Even so, it’s a nervous moment since there is no backup. If they fail, the mission fails.

Under a nominal reentry, the crew will experience two brief periods of 3.9 Gs. However, in some scenarios, these G-loads could reach 7.5 Gs, entry flight director Rick Henfling said.

After splashdown, recovery crews from the USS John P. Murtha will approach Orion and deploy an inflatable device at Orion’s hatch, known as the “front porch.” Winds and seas at the recovery area are forecast to be calm. Recovery crew members, in a nominal scenario, will extract astronaut Christina Koch first, followed by Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, and finally Wiseman.

They will then be transported by two helicopters back to the recovery ship for an initial checkout. If all goes well, the triumphant astronauts will fly back to Houston on Saturday morning to be reunited with their family members.

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Posted Saturday 11 April 2026 at 4:56 am AEST (my time).

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Welcome to Edition 8.36 of the Rocket Report! Thank you for your indulgence of our missing the report last week, as we focused on the launch and progress of the Artemis II mission. And we are so thrilled it has been going smoothly, with brilliant imagery of the far side of the Moon. Of course, arguably the most difficult part of the flight remains ahead of the crew and Orion spacecraft: atmospheric reentry on Friday evening. We will, of course, have full and continuing coverage for you.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Alpha rocket may launch offshore. Seagate Space Corporation announced on Monday a “memorandum of understanding” with Firefly Aerospace to explore the development of an offshore launch platform that enables a sea-based launch capability for the Alpha rocket. Seagate Space said it will work closely with Firefly to mature the design of an integrated offshore launch system capable of supporting Alpha.

A clean break … “Partnering with Firefly to align our Gateway platform with their Alpha vehicle is a major step toward making offshore launch a practical reality for the industry,” said Sean Fortener, president and COO at Seagate Space. The company said its Gateway technology represents a “clean break” from legacy barge conversions and repurposed vessels. The launch platform would open up additional orbits and inclinations for Alpha.

Isar Aerospace stands down from Thursday launch attempt. The Germany-based launch company had said its latest launch window for the second launch of the Spectrum rocket would open at 20:00 UTC on Thursday, April 9. However, about an hour before the opening of the window, the company said it was standing down to “evaluate a suspected leak in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV). The teams are assessing and will determine next steps.”

Seeking to be the first … The launch attempt from a site in Norway follows the initial flight of the Spectrum rocket about a year ago, during which the rocket cartwheeled upside-down and fell a short distance from its Arctic launch pad. Isar is attempting to become the first European launch startup to reach orbit. The Spectrum rocket is designed to have a lift capacity of up to 1 metric ton to low-Earth orbit.

PLD Space secures bank loan. Spanish launch services provider PLD Space has secured a 30 million euro ($35,111,839) loan from the European Investment Bank, a month after closing a 180 million euro ($210,671,034) Series C funding round, European Spaceflight reports. PLD Space made the announcement on Tuesday, explaining the loan would fund “the final development stage” of its MIURA 5 rocket. While the company did not disclose detailed terms of the loan, it confirmed that the financing would take the form of venture debt, which is repaid directly over time rather than exchanged for equity.

Access now “essential” … “As space becomes increasingly strategic, access is no longer a luxury. It is essential to our security, our economy, and our future,” said European Union Commissioner for Defense and Space Andrius Kubilius. The Series C funding announced earlier will be focused on what comes next, with the company scaling production and industrial infrastructure as it prepares to transition to commercial operations following what it hopes will be a successful inaugural launch. The two-stage MIURA 5 rocket may make its debut later this year.

Phantom Space acquires thermal components company. Phantom Space said on April 2 it had acquired Thermal Management Technologies, a company that builds advanced satellite thermal components for in-space applications. With the acquisition, the Arizona-based rocket and satellite developer is aiming to spur development of its in-orbit data center constellation—called Phantom Cloud—which is targeting an initial deployment in mid-2027, Payload reports.

Waiting on Daytona … “TMT’s technology is a critical piece of the puzzle for our constellation,” Phantom CEO Jim Cantrell said. “They have deep expertise in satellite thermal components, and we see immense potential in their technology to improve the performance and reliability of our orbital infrastructure.” Phantom is also developing the Daytona launch vehicle, the debut for which has now been pushed back to the “latter half” of 2027. Also, it’s hard to believe, but we recently passed the fifth anniversary of the infamous Phantom rendering. Time flies even if rockets do not.

Tianlong-3 fails on debut launch. The first launch of the Tianlong-3 rocket from Chinese commercial firm Space Pioneer failed Friday after suffering an anomaly in its ascent phase, Space News reports. State media Xinhua confirmed the failure with a short text report a few hours after liftoff. The specific cause is under further analysis and investigation, the report stated. Space Pioneer is one of the more promising Chinese launch startups, raising funds of $350 million to date.

Intended to compete with the Falcon 9 … Tianlong-3 is a 72-meter-long, two-stage launch vehicle using a kerosene-liquid oxygen propellant mix. Designed for partial reusability, it is capable of carrying 17 to 22 metric tons to low Earth orbit. The first stage is powered by nine Tianhuo-12 variable thrust engines. The rocket is among a number of new, potentially recoverable rockets developed by commercial and state entities preparing for debut flights, including the Zhuque-3 and Long March 12A. Both rockets successfully reached orbit but failed with first-stage recovery attempts in December.

Ariane 6 may be comparable in price to Falcon 9 in some cases. The European Space Agency has disclosed that launching the Sentinel-1D Earth observation satellite aboard an Ariane 62 rocket in November 2025 cost 82,070,773 euros ($96,055,192), European Spaceflight reports. ESA’s disclosure marks the first public indication of Ariane 62 launch pricing, enabling a more direct comparison with other launch systems such as Falcon 9.

Different customers, different prices … In December 2022, NASA, in partnership with ESA, announced that it would launch the Sentinel-6B mission aboard a Falcon 9 at a cost of approximately $94 million, around 90 million euros ($105,335,517) at December 2022 exchange rates. On this basis, Ariane 62 appears broadly comparable in price to Falcon 9 for dedicated institutional missions. However, SpaceX clearly has a sliding price scale, and it is believed to have an internal launch cost for its own Starlink missions of approximately $15 million.

Falcon 9 stretches its reuse milestone. SpaceX’s fleet-leading Falcon 9 booster made a record-breaking 34th flight on March 30 with a mission to deploy a batch of 29 satellites for the company’s Internet service, Spaceflight Now reports. SpaceX is currently targeting up to 40 uses per Falcon 9 first stage.

Accumulating a lot of experience … Booster 1076 entered the SpaceX fleet in 2021 and since then has launched missions including CRS-22, Crew-3, Turksat 5B, Crew-4, CRS-25, Eutelsat Hotbird 13G, SES O3B mPOWER-A, PSN Satria, Telkomsat Merah Putih 2, Galileo L13, Koreasat-6A Crew-6, and USSF-124, plus 22 batches of Starlink satellites. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Atlas V launches heaviest payload. United Launch Alliance launched its latest Atlas 5 rocket, which carried a batch of 29 Amazon Leo satellites to low-Earth orbit early on April 4, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission was the largest and heaviest payload carried to orbit by an Atlas 5 rocket to date, according to ULA.

Upper stage performance is key … The previous four missions for Amazon Leo that launched on Atlas 5 rockets carried 27 satellites each. ULA and Amazon Leo were able to increase the payload stack to 29 as “a result of detailed engineering work between ULA and Amazon,” according to ULA. Amazon pointed to ULA’s use of the RL10C-1-1 engine on the rocket’s upper stage as a key reason why they were able to add two more satellites to the mission.

SLS rocket successfully delivers Artemis II crew to orbit. On April 1, the Space Launch System rocket majestically launched the Orion spacecraft into orbit from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Ars reports. A few minutes after liftoff, as Artemis II headed east over the Atlantic Ocean, the astronauts got their first glimpse of the full Moon through their forward windows. “We have a beautiful moonrise,” Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman reported. “We’re heading right at it.”

Two for two … The SLS rocket has now launched two times, both successfully. In the days afterward, NASA engineers said the rocket had inserted Orion into its proper orbit with greater than 99 percent accuracy, better even than the Artemis I mission in late 2022. The Mobile Launch tower was being prepared for movement back into the Vehicle Assembly Building in Florida for minor repairs and to prepare for the stacking of the SLS rocket for the Artemis III mission. The program is preparing to support a launch in 2027.

NASA’s Moon program depends on reusable launch. This is not the kind of talk you would hear from past NASA administrators, but it is entirely true. This week, the US space agency’s chief, Jared Isaacman, said almost off-handedly that the long-term success of the Artemis program depended on SpaceX and Blue Origin succeeding with their reusable launch systems, Starship and New Glenn, Ars reports.

Saying truths out loud … “A big key to our strategy—to not just return to the Moon but to stay and build a base—is the rapid reusability of heavy-lift launch vehicles,” Isaacman said during an Artemis II news conference. “The more they get experience doing that, the more options that are available to us for Artemis III.” One of the most refreshing things about Isaacman’s tenure has been his willingness to say true, but previously taboo things out loud.

Starship launch delayed until May. SpaceX’s next Starship test flight will take place in May and ‌not April as previously scheduled, Reuters reports. SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted on social media platform X that the next flight of Starship’s V3 vehicle was four to six weeks away, or in the first ⁠two weeks of May. SpaceX’s debut of the V3 Starship iteration has been delayed for months as the company has packed dozens of upgrades into the vehicle to make it more reliable and suitable for NASA missions, like ‌landing ⁠on the moon under the Artemis program.

Half a year since previous launch … SpaceX’s previous ⁠Starship test launch, its 11th, occurred in October. The final flight of the V2 version of the rocket, this mission was largely successful. The delay comes as NASA is pushing aggressively to accelerate its Artemis program, which will require either SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon vehicle to land humans on the Moon. So NASA really needs to see Starship flying frequently.

Next three launches

April 11: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-21 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 02:39 UTC

April 11: Falcon 9 | CRS NG-24 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 11:41 UTC

April 14: Kinetica 1 | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 04:00 UTC

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Emperor penguins have braved cold, storms, starvation and predation to breed, ensuring their population survives. But climate change might defeat the iconic Antarctic birds.

On April 9, the largest of all penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) were officially moved from threatened to endangered status by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The network of about 17,000 scientists and experts from over 160 countries maintains the IUCN Red List, a running tally of how threatened different species are in the wild.

“Endangered” status means the birds are now considered to face “a very high risk of extinction in the wild.”

It’s the breakup and loss of sea ice around Antarctica that is driving the birds toward the brink, scientists say. Over the last decade, Antarctica has seen record lows in the expanse of sea ice that fringes the continent, and the breakup of the ice is also occurring earlier in the year. That’s devastating for emperor penguins, which require “fast” ice — sea ice that is immobile for most of the year — to breed and raise their young. If the ice breaks apart too soon, it puts the chicks in grave danger of drowning or freezing to death, as the young birds don’t yet have waterproof feathers. 

A colony of Emperor penguins congregate on sea ice near the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Climate change is reducing the ice extent and causing it to break up earlier, putting the birds’ chicks at risk.

Stuart Holroyd/Alamy

In 2022, satellites observed the catastrophic loss of five separate emperor penguin breeding colonies near the Bellingshausen Sea: The sea ice beneath them broke apart, leading to an estimated loss of some 10,000 chicks.

Current emperor penguin populations are estimated at around 595,000 adults, a decrease of 10 percent to 22 percent relative to 2009. The current population number is expected to halve by 2080, IUCN says. 

“The emperor penguin’s move to Endangered is a stark warning: Climate change is accelerating the extinction crisis before our eyes,” Martin Harper, CEO of BirdLife International, said in a statement. The organization led the emperor penguin assessment.

An Antarctic fur seal cares for her pup on South Georgia Island in Antarctica.

Johnny Johnson/The Image Bank/Getty Images

The loss of sea ice is also responsible for rapidly shunting the Antarctic fur seal (Arctocephalus gazella) several notches closer to extinction, the IUCN report says. In 1999, the animals were considered of “least concern” on the IUCN Red List, with the adult population of Antarctic fur seals at around 2,187,000. But by 2025, that population had plunged to 944,000, a dramatic drop that has earned the seals endangered status.

Climate change is also the culprit in the seals’ decline: Rising ocean temperatures and shrinking sea ice are pushing their primary food source, tiny crustaceans called krill, to deeper ocean depths. As a result, seal pups are far less likely to survive their first year.

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Apart from pesky issues with the spacecraft’s toilet and waste disposal system, most of the Artemis II mission has proceeded like clockwork. NASA has made few changes to the flight plan since the launch of the lunar flyby mission April 1.

But ground controllers revamped the timeline Wednesday as the Artemis II astronauts zoomed toward Earth after a close encounter with the Moon earlier this week. The four astronauts were supposed to take manual control of their Orion spacecraft, named Integrity, for a piloting demonstration Wednesday night.

Instead, mission managers canceled the demo to make time for an additional test of the ship’s propulsion system. The goal was to gather data on a “small leak” of helium gas, which Orion uses to push propellant through a series of tanks and pipes to feed the spacecraft’s rocket engines, said Jeff Radigan, NASA’s lead flight director for the Artemis II mission.

The spacecraft burns hydrazine fuel mixed with an oxidizer, nitrogen tetroxide, to power its main engine and thrusters for in-space maneuvers. The leak on Artemis II is in the helium pressure supply to the oxidizer side.

“The leak is not to space. It’s internal to the system across some of our valves, and we really need to characterize that to see what, if any, modifications we might need to make in the future,” Radigan said.

The valves are inside the European-built service module, which the Orion spacecraft will jettison just before reentering the atmosphere Friday evening. The Orion crew module will guide astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen to a safe splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. The service module will burn up in the atmosphere.

Plenty of margin

The helium leak has not affected the propulsion system’s performance so far. “All of our burns have performed nominally,” Radigan said.

Orion’s trajectory is so close to preflight predictions that NASA has canceled some of the mission’s course correction burns. The midcourse burns that have occurred were all low-impulse maneuvers using the service module’s smaller jets, which don’t require the helium system to recharge pressure.

Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, said mission managers were aware the Orion spacecraft had a “low leak rate” of helium before launch. Engineers also observed a helium leak during the unpiloted flight of the Orion spacecraft on the Artemis I mission in 2022.

Officials decided to proceed with the launch because the spacecraft did not need the full capability of its propulsion system on Artemis II, which followed a “free return trajectory” using the Moon’s gravity to slingshot the capsule back to Earth. This mission required no complex maneuvers to enter orbit around the Moon.

As of Wednesday, nearly 80 percent of the way through the Artemis II mission, the spacecraft had consumed just 40 percent of its fuel. “Clearly, we had put a lot of margin into this mission to make sure we could fly it properly,” said Debbie Korth, NASA’s deputy Orion program manager.

The only burn of the mission to use the service module’s larger main engine was the trans-lunar injection maneuver, or TLI burn, on the second day of the flight. This engine firing propelled the Orion spacecraft out of Earth orbit on a path around the Moon. That’s when the ground teams noticed the helium leak rate start to rise.

Speaking with reporters Thursday, NASA officials said the leak is not a concern for the mission’s return to Earth because the Orion crew module has an independent set of tanks, valves, and thrusters to steer the spacecraft through reentry. The leaky valves will be discarded with the rest of the service module around 20 minutes before Artemis II hits the atmosphere.

But unlike crew module, the service module won’t be recovered. This means engineers won’t have a chance to inspect the valves, so Mission Control ran the propulsion system through a series of checks Wednesday, in lieu of the manual piloting demo. Officials wanted to assess how thermal effects from flying the spacecraft in different orientations—such as pointing toward or away from the Sun—might affect the leak, according to Branelle Rodriguez, NASA’s Orion vehicle manager for the Artemis II mission.

NASA flight director Jeff Radigan (left) and capsule communicator Amy Dill (right) monitor the Artemis II

mission from the White Flight Control Room at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Production risk

Artemis II is, first and foremost, a test flight. It is only the second time an Orion spacecraft has flown to deep space, and the first time it has carried humans. The primary goal of the mission is to learn about the spacecraft’s performance.

“We knew that we have leaky valves to begin with, and we want to make sure that we’re characterizing that leak rate as well as we can,” said Kshatriya, a former NASA flight director. “The leak rate we saw in flight is now an order of magnitude higher than what we saw on the ground. It’s still acceptable, but that will lead us to probably an extensive redesign of that valve system.”

The next flight of an Orion spacecraft will be on the Artemis III mission. Under a new plan announced earlier this year, Artemis III will not travel to the Moon but will fly closer to Earth, either in low-Earth orbit or to a somewhat higher altitude. There, the Orion spacecraft will rendezvous with one or both commercial lunar landers selected by NASA for future voyages to the Moon’s surface. The tests in Earth orbit will pave the way for Artemis IV, NASA’s first attempt to put humans on the lunar surface since 1972.

Artemis IV is when Kshatriya said NASA must have new helium valves ready to go. “I don’t need those valves to hold pressure in the same way for a LEO [low-Earth orbit] orbiting mission, but for a lunar orbit mission, I do.”

NASA’s schedule currently puts the launch of Artemis III in 2027 and Artemis IV in 2028. Kshatriya said he was confident NASA, working the European Space Agency and Airbus, which builds the service module, will be able to fix the valve problem in time for Artemis IV. Manufacturing of the Artemis IV service module is largely complete.

“I’m pretty sure we’re going to need to, at a minimum, tweak the design to prevent the leak rate that we have, if not fundamentally change the way the valve works,” he said.

Valves are a common bugaboo on rockets and spacecraft. Nearly every US human spaceflight program has dealt with malfunctioning or leaky valves. Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule suffered helium leaks in its propulsion system, along with other issues, during a test flight to the International Space Station in 2024. Helium valves on the Space Launch System rocket had to be replaced in the run-up to the Artemis I and Artemis II launches. SpaceX, too, has scrubbed launches due to valve problems. The list goes on.

“There are a lot of options for how to take care of this problem,” Kshatriya said of the issue on the Orion spacecraft. “If anything, I’d characterize it as a production redesign risk for the Artemis IV mission, which I think we can get in front of, and which is why we put so much attention on it during this mission to make sure [we understand] what we’re seeing.”

The big lesson NASA learned on Artemis I involved the capsule’s heat shield. The ablative thermal barrier burned away unevenly as the craft reentered the atmosphere, but Orion still made it to a safe, on-target splashdown. NASA officials said they are confident the heat shield will hold up on Artemis II after adjusting the path Orion will take through the upper atmosphere. A new heat shield design will debut on Artemis III.

NASA engineers spent two years investigating the heat shield issue after Artemis I. Kshatriya does not expect the valve redesign to take as long.

“It’s not a safety of flight, safety of crew, must-work function like the heat shield investigation sent us down,” he said. “It’s going to take work to get it right, but it’s not of that magnitude.”

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Almost as soon as researchers started exploring the capabilities of the CRISPR/Cas9 system, they recognized its potential use in targeted gene editing. But the intervening decades have seen slow progress as people worked to determine how to do so in a way that would be safe for use in humans. It was only a little over two years ago, decades after CRISPR’s discovery, that the FDA approved the first CRISPR-based therapy, for sickle-cell anemia.

Now, following up on that success, a large Chinese collaboration has followed up with a description of an improved gene editing system that produces more focused changes and fewer mistakes. And they’ve used it to produce a therapy that addresses a disease that’s closely related to sickle-cell anemia: β-Thalassaemia.

Gene editing and its limits

The CRISPR/Cas-9 system provides bacteria with a form of immunity. It uses specially structured RNAs (called guide RNAs) that can base-pair with a targeted sequence. The Cas-9 protein then recognizes this structure and cuts the DNA nearby. This is quite effective when the guide RNA can base-pair with a DNA virus, as the resulting cut will inactivate the virus.

There are a couple of ways to use this for DNA editing in organisms such as ourselves. Both of these take advantage of the fact that the DNA repair systems in cells will often chew back the ends of these cuts before linking them back together again. This will frequently lead to small deletions at the site of the cut, which can be used to disable genes. The size of these deletions will vary, so you have to do some DNA sequencing to find one that disables the gene you’re interested in, but doesn’t do any additional damage.

Alternately, any deleted sequence can sometimes be repaired using a matching sequence, which is typically found on the other copy of the same chromosome. If the CRISPR-based cut is accompanied by lots of copies of a modified sequence, then it’s possible for repair systems to insert the modifications into the genome, providing a true editing capability. But again, this process is error-prone, so people typically need to edit a bunch of cells and sequence the DNA to make sure the right changes are made.

And lurking in the background is the risk that CRISPR/Cas9 will end up cutting at a similar-looking sequence somewhere else in the genome. These off-target cuts can have unpredictable effects, and most gene-editing experiments require additional screening to eliminate any cells that have them.

All of which is why the first CRISPR-based therapies are taking place in blood stem cells, since those can be grown in culture. The approach involves making edits in lots of cells, then screening for those cells that lack off-target edits and selecting those where the on-target edit has had the intended outcome. What we’re not seeing much of yet is the sort of edit that needs to take place in a large population of cells in the body, since if anything goes wrong there, we’re unlikely to be able to tell or do anything about it if we did find a problem.

Like CRISPR, but better

All that said, a lot of work has been put into trying to make a more precise version of CRISPR, and the new study takes advantage of some of that. One of the approaches used here involves getting rid of Cas9, since the double-stranded breaks it makes are the source of a lot of the unpredictable outcomes. Instead, these methods generally involve one or more single base changes. And other methods have been used to limit the activity to only a single site in the genome, avoiding any off-target edits.

The system used here involves a protein that chemically lops off a nitrogen from the base cytosine (C), converting it to something that base-pairs more like thymidine (T). This is fused to a protein that can stick to the CRISPR-style guide RNA that targets the sequence of choice. It’s also present in an inactive form and requires a separate enzyme (a protease) to activate it. A key part of that enzyme is also tethered to the guide RNA complex, so the mutation-generating enzyme will only be activated when the full guide RNA complex is present.

One complication here is that the mutations this system creates—the C->T changes—are common enough that our cells have enzymes that specifically repair them. So, one other thing that’s linked in to the guide RNA complex is a bacterial protein that inhibits this DNA repair system. Essentially, this complex not only makes mutations in specific places, but also blocks them from being fixed at those locations.

So, while any one of these activities—the base editor, the enzyme that activates it, and the repair inhibitor—might get activated transiently in the wrong place, creating mutations requires all three of them to be around for a while. And that is thought to require specific targeting of a perfect sequence match to the guide RNA.

The research team spent a fair bit of time in the paper showing that this is the case. They find that mutations are generated at the intended site with lower efficiency than some competing systems (about 30 percent compared to over twice that frequency), but the benefit is a complete absence of off-target edits.

Fixing the disease

A large range of mutations cause β-Thalassaemia, and it’s unrealistic to think that all of them could be fixed with a single editing system. So instead, the researchers took an approach that had been under consideration for decades: reactivating the fetal version of the gene. This version has a higher affinity for oxygen than normal hemoglobin, allowing it to grab oxygen from the hemoglobin in the mother’s bloodstream. This gene is normally shut down in adults.

We’ve identified a key protein that binds specifically to DNA near the gene and is essential for shutting it off. The gene edits here simply damage the site that this inhibitor binds, allowing the fetal gene to be active in adults. This edit was done in blood stem cells obtained from these patients, and only those cells that grew from successful edits with no off-target problems were transplanted back.

The clinical trial here is just a basic safety test, involving only five ß-thalassaemia patients. After doing the editing on their stem cells, they were treated with a chemotherapy that wipes out their existing stem cell population. This procedure has some notable side effects, and those were all seen in these patients, but all five remained enrolled in the trial for at least a year after getting the transplant.

And it worked. After a few weeks, hemoglobin levels in the blood started rising, and all of the patients met the trial’s key success metric: over six months without needing a transfusion to control their β-Thalassaemia.

Overall, the biggest problem that the researchers see with this approach is the expense. All of the cell culture and DNA sequencing add up, and the transplant protocol involves some significant medical interventions. And none of these steps can really be skipped without compromising safety. Long term, given the health management required for people with β-Thalassaemia, it’s entirely possible that this balances out, though. We’ll have to wait a while to hear about quality-of-life changes, but those are likely to be significant as well.

While there may be questions regarding the cost, the results really highlight how gene editing is transitioning from a promising technology with some significant challenges to something we can use to produce multiple therapies. And, though there are still a lot of limits to how we can apply these initial next-generation approaches, it’s clear there are a lot of additional ideas that could produce generations beyond these.

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10342-9  (About DOIs).

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On the home stretch of their nine-day mission, the four astronauts flying aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft are just beginning to reflect on their experience of flying beyond the Moon.

Their memories of Monday’s encounter with the Moon are still fresh as they return to Earth, heading for reentry and splashdown in the Pacific Ocean on Friday evening.

“I’m actually getting chills right now just thinking about it. My palms are sweating,” said Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission. “But it is amazing to watch your home planet disappear behind the Moon. You can see the atmosphere. You could actually see the terrain on the Moon projected across the Earth as the Earth was eclipsing behind the Moon. It was just an unbelievable sight, and then it was gone. It was out of sight.”

Flying more than a quarter-million miles from home, father than any humans in history, the astronauts flew into a radio blackout for 40 minutes. Out of contact with Earth, the crew continued snapping pictures and shared a batch of maple cookies supplied by Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, the first person not from the United States to ever travel to deep space.

“We took about three or four minutes, just as a crew, to really reflect on where we were, and then it was right back into the science,” Wiseman told reporters in a long-distance press conference Wednesday night. “We still haven’t even begun to reflect on this mission. We had a little bit of a light work day yesterday, and we were starting to journal and reflect a little bit. And there’s a lot that our brains have to process. Human minds should not go through what these just went through, and it is a true gift.”

Soon after reaching their closest point to the Moon, some 4,000 miles away, the astronauts flew into the shadow of the Moon. For Victor Glover, pilot of Artemis II, this was one of the “greatest gifts” of the mission.

“When that actually happened, it just blew us all away,” Glover said. “I mean, you heard the reaction real-time… Launching on April 1 meant the far side wasn’t as illuminated as we were hoping.”

Artemis II launched April 1 on the first opportunity in a six-day launch window. Launching on that date meant only about 20 percent of the far side of the Moon would be in sunlight when the Orion spacecraft reached the point of flyby. But the trajectory set up by an April 1 launch allowed for a rare cosmic alignment, with the Moon passing directly between the Orion spacecraft and the Sun. A launch later in the April window would have seen more of the far side in sunshine, but no eclipse.

The real-time reaction to the eclipse was pure joy. “We just went sci-fi,” Glover said at the time of the flyby. “It is the strangest-looking thing.”

Glover also noted the stark view of the Moon’s terminator, the transition between day and night. “There were holes, craters that appeared to be just endless, bottomless pits, and then peaks that seemed to be, I couldn’t tell how high,” Glover said Wednesday.

The Artemis II crew onboard the Orion spacecraft (left to right): Victor Glover, Jeremy Hansen, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch.

Credit: NASA

More to come

The astronauts beamed down some of their lunar imagery through the Orion spacecraft’s laser communications link. The rest of the photos, along with more detailed recordings of their observations, will come back to Earth when the mission ends on Friday.

The Earth is getting larger in Orion’s windows as gravity pulls the astronauts back home. Their speed will increase until they hit the top of the atmosphere at some 25,000 mph. After streaking high over the Pacific Ocean, the capsule will deploy three main parachutes to slow its descent for a gentle splashdown off the coast of Southern California, where a US Navy recovery ship will await its homecoming.

The splashdown will mark the end of Artemis II’s nine-day voyage, the first trip to the Moon by humans since 1972. Artemis II is a test flight designed to pave the way for future crew landings near the Moon’s south pole, and the eventual construction of a lunar base. It is also the first time people have flown inside NASA’s Orion Moon ship, a capsule somewhat larger than the three-person Apollo command module.

“We have loved living in Orion,” said Christina Koch, mission specialist on Artemis II. “In fact, we’ve all said that sometimes you can forget where you really are, because we’re in this small space that just gives us everything we need.”

Living in microgravity makes the cramped quarters seem a little more accommodating. The astronauts can take advantage of every corner of the spacecraft.

“It is bigger in microgravity, and yes, we are bumping into each other 100 percent of the time,” Koch said. “A phrase that you often hear in the cabin is, ‘Don’t move your foot. I’m just going to reach for something right under it.’”

NASA named the crew members for the Artemis II mission three years ago. Now, the astronauts will have their names in the history books. With Artemis II, the number of people alive who have traveled to the vicinity of the Moon has nearly doubled. Just five of the 24 men who flew to the Moon are still alive. Four of them walked on its surface.

“I will miss this camaraderie. I will miss being this close with this many people and having a common purpose, a common mission,” Koch said. “This sense of teamwork is something that you don’t usually get as an adult. I mean, we are close, like brothers and sisters, and that is a privilege we will never have again.”

One of the most poignant moments of the mission was a tribute to Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020. On Monday, as the crew neared the Moon, Hansen radioed down the crew’s request to name a crater for Carroll.

“When Jeremy spelled Carol’s name, C-A-R-R-O-L- L, I think, for me, that’s when I was overwhelmed with emotion,” Wiseman said. “And I looked over and Christina was crying. I put my hand down on Jeremy’s hand as he was still talking. I could just tell he was trembling, and we all pretty much broke down right there. And just for me, personally, that was kind of the pinnacle moment of the mission. For me, that was, I think, where the four of us were the most forged, the most bonded, and we came out of that really focused on the day ahead.”

One big test remains in front of the Artemis II crew. Reentry and splashdown will be one of the riskiest moments of the mission. On Artemis I, the first unpiloted test flight of the Orion spacecraft, the capsule’s heat shield began to break apart during reentry. The thermal barrier on the bottom of the capsule had enough margin to withstand the charring, and the spacecraft safely splashed down. If astronauts had been onboard, they would have been fine.

On Artemis II, NASA will fly the capsule at a different angle during reentry to ease the thermal stress on the heat shield. “We’ve still got two more days, and riding a fireball through the atmosphere is profound as well,” Glover said.

Soon after Wednesday night’s call with reporters, the crew pointed a video camera out of one of Orion’s windows. Nearly 200,000 miles away, the crescent Earth appeared to hang in a black void, resembling the smile of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. It was a reminder of the words of astronaut Jim Lovell, who remarked on the “vast loneliness” in deep space as he flew around the Moon on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968. “It makes you realize what you have back there on Earth. The Earth, from here, is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space,” said Lovell, who died last year.

Hansen, Artemis II’s Canadian crew member, added to this sentiment.

“We live on a fragile planet in the vacuum, in the void of space,” Hansen said. “We know this from science. We’re very fortunate to live on planet Earth. Another perspective that I’ve sort of learned from others through life is that our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy, to find the joy in lifting each other up by creating solutions together instead of destroying. When you see it from out here, it doesn’t change it. It just absolutely reaffirms that. It’s almost like seeing living proof of it.”

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In the 1970s, the late Jane Goodall observed a community of chimpanzees in Gombe, Tanzania, breaking into two factions; the males in one group ended up killing all the males in the rival group over the next four years, along with one female chimp. But the case was considered an anomaly, although there is genetic evidence suggesting this kind of split is a rare event occurring every 500 years or so. Now researchers have observed the largest known community of Ngogo chimpanzees in Uganda also permanently splitting into two rival groups with a similar outbreak of violence, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.

“What’s especially striking is that the chimpanzees are killing former group members,” said co-author Aaron Sandel, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, Austin. “The new group identities are overriding cooperative relationships that had existed for years. I would caution against anyone calling this a civil war. But the polarization and collective violence that we have observed with these chimpanzees may give us insight into our own species.”

The authors analyzed 24 years’ worth of data from social networks, 10 years of GPS tracking, and 30 years of demographic data on the Ngogo chimps in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. They identified three distinct phases to the split. First there was an abrupt shift as chimp relationships became polarized into two distinct clusters: Western and Central. The chimps then spent the next two years increasingly avoiding those in their rival cluster; there were very few interactions across clusters, and Western male chimps started patrolling their territory, showing increased aggression toward Central males. By 2018, the fissure had become permanent.

Finally, the authors observed the outbreak of lethal violence resulting in the deaths of six adult males in 2018; the violence extended to the killing of 14 infant chimps in 2021. There were 14 additional chimp deaths between 2021 and 2024 that were not directly observed, and the authors suggest they may also have been killed since there had been no signs of illness in any of those animals. All the observed violent attacks were committed by the western group of chimps, despite being smaller in number. This contradicts the usual intergroup conflict models of power imbalance, in which larger groups are thought to have the advantage.

Fracturing social networks

In a related perspective, James Brooks—a primatologist at the German Primate Center in Gottingen, Germany, who was not involved with the study—noted that 50 years ago, a community of wild bonobos split permanently into two groups without the same kind of intersectional violence; the groups coexist peacefully to this day. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain this very different outcome, most notably the idea that there was a relative abundance of food in the bonobos’ environment. Sandal et al.’s findings challenge that hypothesis, however, since the chimps also seemed to have an abundance of food and yet were not able to peacefully coexist once they had split into two factions.

Sandel et al. offer several possibilities for why the Ngogo chimps split into two camps. The original group had grown to nearly 200 chimps, much larger than other chimp communities, and there were more than 30 adult males, pushing the limits of maintaining inter-community relationships. There may have been some feeding competition as well; although the Ngogo territory has abundant resources, there can be local variations in availability. And once there was reproductive isolation between the two groups, there would be a corresponding increase in competition among males.

Even those factors might not have been sufficient, but the authors also identified three possible catalysts. In 2014, five adult males and one adult female died of unknown causes, although several had shown signs of illness. Those losses likely disrupted the social network by weakening social ties across clusters. There was also a new alpha male from the western cluster the following year, coincidentally, the same time when the first sustained separation occurred. The two prior alphas had been from the central cluster, so that change in the dominance hierarchy may have exacerbated inter-group tensions.

Finally, there was a respiratory outbreak in January 2017 that killed 25 chimps, which could have sped up the final separation. “Taken together, these events suggest how networks may fracture in the face of multiple demographic and social changes,” the authors concluded.

“A hostile split among wild chimpanzees is a reminder of the danger that group divisions can present to human societies,” Brooks wrote in his perspective. “However, humans also engage with, bond, and cooperate at multiple levels across intersecting groups. The group relationships of humans are nuanced, diverse, and flexible. This flexibility enables deep cooperation but also underlies acts of violence. Humans must learn from studying the group-based behavior of other species, both in war and at peace, while remembering that their evolutionary past does not determine their future.

“If relational dynamics alone can drive polarization and lethal conflict in chimps without language, ethnicity, or ideology, then in humans, those cultural markers might be secondary to something more basic,” said Sandel. “If that’s true, then we may have the potential to reduce societal conflicts in our personal lives, and that gives me hope. As our paper concludes, it may be in the small, daily acts of reconciliation and reunion between individuals that we find opportunities for peace.”

Science, 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adz4944 (About DOIs).

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During their flyby of the far side of the moon, the Artemis II astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft saw as many as six flashes emerging from the lunar surface. Surprisingly, they were witnessing small meteorites impacting the ground and producing brief flashes of light.

NASA's control room recorded the team's surprise during the mission livestream, although the cameras did not pick up the flashes. According to the astronauts, the flashes were white or blue-white and lasted less than a second. The cameras they were using to document the moon weren't fast enough to record them.

The crew was flying between 6,000 and 7,000 kilometers away. Under normal conditions, these impacts would have gone unnoticed. However, at the time they were studying the solar eclipse, which left the far side of the moon completely dark. That extreme contrast allowed them to distinguish the brief flashes that emerged from the surface.

Before the trip, the Artemis II team trained to identify possible meteorite impacts on the moon. They immediately recognized what they were seeing and reported it according to their protocols. NASA later confirmed that these were natural collisions on the satellite, a scenario they have been monitoring for years. The agency has not yet released a statement, but the conversation was recorded on the YouTube livestream.

The Problem of Meteorites on the Moon

Since the idea of building permanent lunar bases first arose, different teams have assessed the risks to future inhabitants. Today, the two major challenges are “moonquakes” and meteorite impacts. For the former, there are plans to install seismographs to help understand the phenomenon. For the meteorites, astronomers already know the approximate frequency, and observations such as the six recent flashes help to refine existing models.

On Earth, the atmosphere destroys most meteorites before they reach the ground. Only the larger ones make it through, and it's a rare scenario. The moon lacks that protective layer, which means any fragment of space rock ends up impacting the surface. The hundreds of millions of lunar craters prove it.

In space exploration, even small objects can pose a risk. For example, a micrometeorite traveling at tens of kilometers per second can puncture thin materials or damage essential equipment. Fragments whose surface area exceed centimeters act as high-energy projectiles, similar to bullets, and could compromise a habitat. Objects larger than 1 meter across generate craters; while they're extremely rare, they pose a real risk.

Even so, space agencies are already contemplating these scenarios. Future lunar exploration suits will incorporate multilayer covers and pressure sensors to reduce the risk of micrometeorite punctures. Habitats will follow the same logic and add additional shielding in the most exposed areas. There are even plans to build research centers inside caves and craters to reduce exposure.

At NASA, calm prevails. The fact that Artemis II has seen six luminous impacts in less than a day does not mean the risk for future missions increases. This was the first time in decades that a crew observed the far side of the moon in complete darkness. The lunar surface is constantly being hit. The rare thing is to have human eyes seeing it happen in real time.

This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

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Posted Friday 10 April 2026 at 5:02 am AEST (my time).

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The data pipeline from NASA’s Artemis II mission opened to full blast a few hours after looping behind the far side of the Moon on Monday night, when the Orion spacecraft established a laser communications link with a receiving station back on Earth.

A cache of high-resolution images began streaming down through this connection. NASA released the first batch to the public Tuesday. Most of the images were taken by the four Artemis II astronauts using handheld Nikon cameras fitted with wide-angle and telephoto lenses. They also had iPhones to capture views out the windows of their Orion Moon ship, named Integrity.

After reaching their farthest point from Earth, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen are accelerating back to Earth for reentry and splashdown Friday evening to wrap up the first crewed lunar mission in more than 53 years.

Throughout their encounter with the Moon, the astronauts radioed down their impressions of what they were seeing. Their callouts vacillated from descriptions riddled with scientific jargon to exclamations of awe and joy. Geologists inside NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston were giddy with excitement. This was the first time humans have explored another planetary body in nearly 54 years. Thanks to a fortunate bit of celestial mechanics, the Artemis II astronauts saw portions of the far side of the Moon that previously were observed only by robotic missions.

But those robotic spacecraft are loaded with sophisticated scientific instruments viewing the Moon in light waves across the electromagnetic spectrum. They have laser altimeters, radars, and magnetometers, and dust and plasma sensors to interrogate the Moon and its surroundings. And unlike Artemis II, robotic orbiters have surveyed the Moon for decades. Their discoveries include detecting signs of water ice inside craters at the Moon’s south pole, one of the most compelling reasons to send humans back to the surface.

How much are eyeballs really worth?

Despite the short window for lunar observations on Artemis II, NASA came up with 10 science objectives for the crew to pursue from the cockpit of Integrity. NASA selected a team of scientists to formulate a list of things for the Artemis II crew to look for on and above the Moon, gave the astronauts a crash course in geology, and took them on field trips to Iceland, Canada, and the American Southwest for hands-on field experience.

So, what can a few hours of peering out the window from 4,000 miles away really tell us about the Moon? A little, but not a lot.

“I think the biggest value here is the PR,” said Clive Neal, a planetary geologist at the University of Notre Dame. “I mean, it’s getting the public excited. At our launch party, I had one of my grandkids, and one of my great-grandkids there as well, and the excitement just in there was palpable. Palpable. I’m having a flashback to the ’60s now.”

The Moon has no meaningful atmosphere, and its surface is frozen in geologic time. The only notable changes happen when something strikes the Moon from space. Little has changed since the Apollo astronauts last left the Moon in 1972, and in any case, NASA and international space agencies have kept a close watch ever since.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen uses a Nikon camera to view the Moon.

Credit: NASA

Every 10 years, the National Academies convene a panel of planetary scientists to set priorities for Solar System exploration. These decadal surveys help NASA decide where to send missions, and what kind of scientific questions they should seek to answer. None of the results from Artemis II are likely to answer these big questions.

“Is there going to be decadal-level science out of Artemis II? Probably not,” Neal told Ars in an interview this week. “This is a technology demonstration mission … This is primarily to have a crew there to check out the engineering and make sure that things are working.”

From a scientific perspective, what’s most intriguing about Artemis II is figuring out how to incorporate humans into planetary exploration. For more than 50 years, generations of scientists have learned to only explore other worlds through the electronic eyes of robots. With NASA’s return to the Moon, they must learn to take advantage of human observations.

This requires a shift in how ground teams design instruments, plan science campaigns, and select targets for their observations. It also necessitates a change in culture. Astronauts on the lunar surface or in lunar orbit will provide real-time feedback loop for the army of scientists looking over their shoulders from Earth. During the Apollo program, it took multiple landings to fine-tune how this works.

Should we take a closer look at this rock? Should we go see that outcrop? Humans can make these key decisions in seconds or minutes, rather than days, weeks, months, or in some cases, years.

The experience of the Artemis II flyby also informed spacecraft engineers about the utility of the Orion spacecraft as an observation platform, and the optical quality of the capsule’s windows. The astronauts reported some issues with glare from the Sun and the Earth. They MacGyvered a makeshift window shroud using a T-shirt to help overcome the glare so they could better see the lunar surface.

“We confirmed that we can achieve science through orbital observations and through integrating science into flight operations,” said Kelsey Young, NASA’s science lead for the Artemis II mission.

Human eyes are remarkably good at sensing color gradients and brightness changes. “Right away, they started describing the green around Aristarchus plateau and different brown hues ,and these colors really help tell us nuances about the chemistry of lunar material,” Young said after the flyby.

Glover, Artemis II’s pilot, noted his perception of the Moon’s three-dimensionality during the flyby: “You really get a sense that we’re flying over something with elevation and terrain.” The astronauts were able to glimpse craters, mountains, and ridges at different angles as the Orion capsule arced behind the Moon. “Every vantage point is different,” Young said.

Resembling a “handprint” to the Artemis II crew, this view highlights contrasting dark and light features on the Moon’s surface. From top to bottom, the darker regions include Oceanus Procellarum, Mare Humorum—known as the “Sea of Moisture”—and the crater Byrgius A.

Credit: NASA

Robots lead the way

Far below Artemis II, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was circling just 30 miles from the lunar surface. LRO is perhaps the most advanced robotic spacecraft ever sent to the Moon. Since 2009, LRO has imaged the Moon with a black-and-white camera capable of resolving extraordinary granular detail on the lunar surface. But the orbiter’s wide-angle multispectral camera is not as sharp. Each Nikon camera flown on Artemis II, when paired with a 400mm lens, could theoretically offer comparable resolution to LRO’s color imagery collected 100 times closer to the surface.

“Our plan is never going to be take better images than LRO. That’s impossible,” said Ariel Deutsch, a member of NASA’s Artemis II science team, before the mission’s launch. “Our goal is to instill and promote and maximize the human science that can be done on this mission as the crew views the moon and the lunar environment with human eyes for the first time in several decades.”

Scientists also asked the astronauts to report their perception of color and tone on the night side of the Moon, where only the muted hues of sunlight reflected off the Earth illuminates the surface.

“The only illumination source on the Moon will be Earthshine, which is a different spectrum,” Deutsch said in a presentation last month at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. “How does that affect the perception of color and tone?”

The crew members summarized their observations in periodic updates radioed down to Mission Control on Monday. They also recorded more detailed verbal descriptions onboard the spacecraft, and were tasked with making drawings and annotations to go along with their photographs. This data will come back to Earth when Orion returns Friday.

“We tell the crew that their verbal descriptions are actually going to be the monumental scientific dataset from this mission, and that’s because, as humans, the crew provides critical perceptual context that just can’t be replicated with robotic sensors,” Deutsch said. “The crew has perception and spatial awareness and they have the ability to react and to adapt to what they’re seeing in an instant.”

This quick perception allowed the astronauts to see several brief flashes of light, each lasting a fraction of a second, on the dark side of the Moon. The flashes occurred as tiny fragments of cosmic material, or micrometeoroids, impacted the lunar surface.

“It’s a pinprick of light,” Hansen said. “I would suspect there were a lot more of them … it is just a momentary flash, no color, about the size of a star, and it really only lasts milliseconds, a half a second at most.”

This was not surprising to Neal. “It’s a reminder that the surface is continually bombarded, and this is something that we’ve tried to monitor,” he said.

Lunar impact flashes are routinely visible through telescopes on Earth. Astronomers were watching the Moon as Artemis II made its close approach Monday, and if scientists can correlate their own observations with those from the astronauts, they can get a better handle on how many impacts are missed by ground-based telescopes. Constraining the number of impact events will be important as engineers design shielding for a future Moon base.

“Impact flashes are caused by micrometeoroid impacts hitting the Moon and they really help tell us about the dynamic lunar environment, which is of course also important when we think about future missions,” Young said.

Harrison “Jack” Schmitt poses with the American flag on the surface of the Moon.

Credit: NASA

Scouting for the future

Deep craters carved from the lunar crust by much larger, ancient impactors were also on the target list for the Artemis II astronauts. Some of the craters have prominent rays emanating out from their center. The rays consist of material excavated from the Moon’s deep underground during an asteroid or comet impact. The energy of the collision threw this material dozens or hundreds of miles from the impact site.

Subtle color changes along the rays might provide hints of where future lander missions, with or without crews, might investigate different eras of the Moon’s geologic history. One place on the Moon that stood out to the Artemis II astronauts was Ohm crater, a nearly 40-mile-wide basin on the lunar far side.

“It’s those kind of nuanced observations that could ultimately inform future landed missions, future crewed missions, to understand where can we go to maximize the scientific value,” Young said. “These ultimately get at chronology of the Solar System, at how the inner Solar System has evolved over time, which connects to the Moon being the witness plate for our planet and for the inner Solar System.”

Scientists believe the Moon formed about 4.5 billion years ago, just 65 million years after the Solar System itself came into being, when a giant proto-planet collided with the proto-Earth.

“The crew observing things like they did with Ohm, where they can say, ‘With my eyes, I can see this distinction,’ can ultimately tell us that future observations of high-priority landing sites could tell us something similar,” Young said. “This is how we start to really bite away at these really, really fundamental science questions of not just our understanding of the Moon but also … Earth.”

This is all well and good. But the Artemis program’s most lasting scientific discoveries will almost certainly only come when astronauts get down to the surface. That may happen in 2028, depending on how fast SpaceX and Blue Origin can move forward with their commercial landers.

Neal said one of the big takeaways from Artemis II, apart from the performance of the Orion spacecraft itself, will be to teach NASA how to make geology part of human spaceflight again. The last Apollo landing mission in 1972 included astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, the only professional geologist to travel to the Moon.

“We have much more productive science return with humans in the picture at the Moon than we do with them out the picture,” Neal said. “And we see that with the Apollo missions, the landed missions.”

Members of the Artemis II science team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Credit: NASA/Luna Posadas Nava

Observations from future missions orbiting closer to the Moon than Artemis II might also offer some scientific return. There wasn’t much point, Neal said, in adding spectrometers or other types of instruments to the Artemis II crew’s toolkit. They were simply too far away to make any unique spectral measurements not already available in NASA’s archive.

Still, the views returned from Artemis II inspire awe.

“The big thing for me was reliving when I was a kid growing up, watching my Mum praying every time they went behind the Moon,” Neal said. “I had a few flashbacks, but the big thing is listening to the excitement of science team. Kelsey Young, who was on the NASA broadcast, just couldn’t stop smiling.”

“You might think that, after looking at hundreds of images taken of the lunar surface, I would get sick of it,” Young said. “I have not, nor do I anticipate getting sick of it.”

“It was quite infectious,” Neal said. “The Earthrise image that they took is one for the ages.”

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Posted Thursday 9 April 2026 at 5:18 pm AEST (my time).

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NASA’s Artemis II mission has yet to return to Earth—it will do so on Friday evening, splashing down into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego—but the agency is already nearing some key decisions on the next Artemis mission.

The US space agency announced six weeks ago that it was modifying its Artemis timeline to insert a mission before beginning planned lunar landings. This new mission, designated Artemis III and intended to fly in Earth orbit rather than to the Moon, would attempt to “buy down” risk to give the lunar landing mission (now Artemis IV) a higher chance of success.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday afternoon that the space agency is debating about which orbit to fly Artemis III in before locking in a blueprint, noting that the first “senior level” Artemis III mission design discussion had taken place earlier in the day.

Where will it occur?

“One of the questions is what the initial orbit will be for Artemis III,” Isaacman said during a news conference. “Is it going to be LEO or HEO? There are pros and cons for each of them, for sure.”

Low-Earth orbit, or LEO, is designated as a distance of about 160 km to 2,000 km above the Earth’s surface. High-Earth orbit is considered to be greater than 36,000 km from the Earth’s surface, above geosynchronous orbit.

During Artemis III, the Orion spacecraft will launch (presumably with four astronauts) on a Space Launch System rocket from Florida. In Earth orbit, they will rendezvous with one or both of NASA’s Human Landing Systems. These are the Starship vehicle’s upper stage under development by SpaceX and a modified Blue Moon lander being built by Blue Origin.

A rendezvous in low-Earth orbit would potentially allow NASA to fly the SLS rocket without using an Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS. This is valuable because it could then save this final remaining ICPS stage for the Artemis IV mission (for future SLS missions, NASA would use a Centaur V upper stage, also provided by United Launch Alliance). For an Artemis III mission in a higher orbit, however, NASA would need the ICPS to push Orion there.

A rendezvous in high-Earth orbit would better mimic thermal and other conditions near the Moon, and this might be a more benign environment for the Orion spacecraft, which is sensitive to thruster pluming and other thermal issues. High-Earth orbit would also provide a stiffer test for Orion’s modified heat shield.

The closest Apollo analog to this plan, the Apollo 9 mission, during which the Apollo spacecraft tested rendezvous with the Lunar Module, took place in low-Earth orbit between 200 and 500km.

What will Orion dock with?

The other major unknown is which of the lunar landers Orion will dock with. NASA’s preference is to perform a test with both Starship and Blue Moon to get good data on their performance and confidence in their handling.

Isaacman seemed to think this was possible for a mission in 2027. “There are a lot of things based on the information we have available today, from feedback from our vendors, that we know are achievable,” he said.

But that will depend on the readiness of Starship and Blue Moon. Starship V3, the latest generation of SpaceX’s massive rocket, is undergoing final testing before a debut launch that could take place in about a month. And Blue Origin’s initial Blue Moon Mk. 1 lander is, Isaacman said, “wrapping up” vacuum-chamber testing at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Isaacman said it is important for SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to reach higher launch cadences to support not just Artemis III but many future missions to the lunar surface. NASA is clearly watching both closely.

“We’ll all have a sense of which path we’re going to go down based on launch cadence of our two HLS (human landing system) providers, both of which have launches coming up in the next month or less,” Isaacman said. “A big key to our strategy—to not just return to the Moon but to stay and build a base—is the rapid reusability of heavy-lift launch vehicles. The more they get experience doing that, the more options that are available to us for Artemis III.”

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NASA’s Artemis II mission, carrying four astronauts on an out-of-this-world journey, flew around the Moon on Monday.

The crew members took turns describing the stunning landscape below and captured images of Earth rising behind the Moon, in communications with Mission Control in Houston. What they did not send back in real time, due to a lack of communications bandwidth, was this high-resolution imagery.

That changed on Monday night, when Orion established an optical link with ground stations on Earth to send high-resolution images back to the planet. NASA has been uploading them to Johnson Space Center’s Flickr page.

And what those images reveal is awe-inspiring.

The lunar surface fills the frame in sharp detail, as seen during the Artemis II lunar flyby, while a distant Earth sets in the background.

Credit: NASA

During their flyby, the astronauts were able to take advantage of both a rising and setting Earth, as well as a solar eclipse. The moment of totality was brilliant.

This image shows the Moon fully eclipsing the Sun.

Credit: NASA

Inside the Integrity spacecraft, the four astronauts— Mission Specialist Christina Koch (top left), Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen (bottom left), Commander Reid Wiseman (bottom right), and Pilot Victor Glover (top right)—had to wear shades for the initial phase of the eclipse.

The eclipse glasses are identical to what NASA produced for the 2024 total solar eclipse.

Credit: NASA

During their flyby of the Moon, the spacecraft got to within 4,067 miles (6,545 km) of the Moon’s surface.

The Artemis II crew captures a portion of the Moon coming into view along the terminator.

Credit: NASA

Only a portion of the Moon is visible in frame below, with its curved edge revealing a bright sliver of sunlight returning after nearly an hour of darkness.

This image shows the Sun beginning to peek out from behind the Moon as the eclipse transitions out of totality.

Credit: NASA

Each astronaut took turns photographing and documenting the Moon, both for audiences back on Earth and for the lunar science community.

Glover, the pilot on Artemis II, said the astronauts had trouble taking photos that did the view justice.

“What we’re seeing, we’re just not picking up on the cameras,” Glover said. “After all the amazing sights that we saw earlier, we just went sci-fi. It just looks unreal. You can see the surface of the Moon [from] the Earthshine. You can actually see a majority of the Moon. It is the strangest-looking thing.”

Artemis II Pilot Victor Glover and Mission Specialist Christina Koch gather images and observations of the lunar surface.

Credit: NASA

Humanity has seen similar images to the one below, beginning with the iconic Earthrise image captured by Apollo 8. But these are the highest-resolution images of the phenomenon and hint at a future with far more time spent near, and on, the Moon’s surface.

Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 pm EDT, April 6, 2026.

Credit: NASA

The Artemis II mission is now speeding back toward Earth, with the spacecraft due to splash down on Friday evening off the coast of California.

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Posted Wednesday 8 April 2026 at 5:19 am AEST (my time).

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After staring at the Moon for almost eight hours Monday, the commander of NASA’s Artemis II mission finally ran out of ways to describe what he was seeing.

“No matter how long we look at this, our brains are not processing this image in front of us. It is absolutely spectacular, surreal,” said Reid Wiseman, the 50-year-old Navy test pilot leading the four-person crew circumnavigating the Moon. “There are no adjectives. I’m going need to invent some new ones to describe what we’re looking at outside this window.”

Live images from the Orion spacecraft showed the Moon growing larger during final approach Monday. Video from GoPro cameras outside the capsule streamed down in low-resolution format, due to limitations on bandwidth coming back from deep space, but the Artemis II astronauts were expected to downlink sharper telephoto snapshots overnight Monday into Tuesday morning.

In three years of training, Wiseman and his crewmates—Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—learned how to pilot and operate their Orion Moon ship, named Integrity. The astronauts trained for emergencies and prepared themselves to accept the risk of flying the first crew mission on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule. Artemis II is the first human mission to the vicinity of the Moon in more than 53 years, so NASA put the astronauts through geology and photography courses to document their observations of the lunar surface.

The preparation is paying off. The Orion spacecraft has performed well since its launch last week, and the crew looped behind the Moon on Monday, reaching their closest point to the lunar surface at a distance of 4,067 miles (6,545 kilometers) at 7 pm EDT (23:00 UTC). Two minutes later, Artemis II arrived at the mission’s most distant point from Earth at a range of 252,756 miles (406,771 kilometers), setting a new record for the farthest anyone has traveled into space.

Those milestones occurred as the spacecraft flew behind the Moon, as seen from Earth, with no way for mission controllers in Houston to contact the astronauts inside Integrity. After about 40 minutes without radio contact, Artemis II reemerged from behind the Moon and restored communications with engineers in Houston.

The faint glow of the solar corona is visible as a soft halo of light as the Moon eclipses the Sun, seen by the

Artemis II astronauts on Monday. Venus is seen at the left side of the image.

Credit: NASA

The cherry was the main event

Before this point in the lunar flyby, the four astronauts periodically radioed their impressions of the Moon’s deep craters, mountain peaks, and volcanic markings. At the same time, they took photos and logged their observations on tablets carried inside the spacecraft. Their snappy language reflected a familiarity with lunar geology. All four astronauts, none of whom were trained geologists before Artemis II, spent time in classrooms and traveled on geology field trips to learn about the Moon ahead of their launch.

Then, the lights went out. The Sun disappeared behind the Moon, revealing a scene that defied description. Silhouetted against the Sun, the Moon was bathed only in “Earthshine”—the faint, hued sunlight reflected off the continents, oceans, clouds, and ice caps that make up the Earth a quarter-million miles away.

From the viewpoint of Integrity, the Moon eclipsed the Sun for nearly an hour. The alignment was pure luck based on the mission’s trajectory following its launch April 1. Artemis II could have flown a slightly different path around the Moon based on when it launched, and most of the trajectories would not have allowed for an eclipse. With an April 1 launch, the eclipse became the cherry on top of the lunar sundae.

Glover, the pilot on Artemis II, told mission control the astronauts had trouble taking photos that did the view justice.

“What we’re seeing, we’re just not picking up on the cameras,” Glover said. “After all the amazing sights that we saw earlier, we just went sci-fi. It just looks unreal. You can see the surface of the Moon [from] the Earthshine. You can actually see a majority of the Moon. It is the strangest looking thing.”

About 30 minutes later, Glover added: “I’m really glad we launched on April 1 because humans have probably not evolved to see what we’re seeing. It is truly hard to describe. It is amazing.”

Artemis II pilot Victor Glover.

Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Eclipse chasers on Earth know that the Moon’s passage in front of the Sun offers a rare opportunity to see the solar corona, the Sun’s outer atmosphere. The super-heated corona extends millions of miles into space. For the Artemis II astronauts, the corona created a halo-like effect around the perimeter of the Moon.

“It’s glowing behind the entire Moon,” Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen said. “I thought it would look dark against the black sky or deep space, but the Sun is lighting up the entire limb of the Moon. You can see the entire perimeter of it … You can still make out little bits of topography around the entire limb. Just bumps as you go around it.”

Glover, 49, continued with his narration, identifying stars and planets not easily visible when the spacecraft is illuminated in sunlight.

“That was an absolutely spectacular, magnificent experience,” Wiseman said after the end of the eclipse. “Houston, if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary for tomorrow, that would help my vocabulary out a bit.”

Awesome in every sense

The cosmic eclipse capped a remarkable day at the Moon that began with a wakeup call recorded by former astronaut Jim Lovell before his death last year. Lovell flew around the Moon twice, first on Apollo 8 in 1968, the first crew mission to see the Moon up close. He was later the commander of Apollo 13, which set the previous human spaceflight distance record in 1970. Apollo 13 zoomed around the Moon after famously aborting its lunar landing mission.

“Welcome to my old neighborhood!” Lovell said in the prerecorded message. “When Frank Borman, Bill Anders, and I orbited the Moon on Apollo 8, we got humanity’s first up-close look at the Moon and got a view of the home planet that inspired and united people around the world. I’m proud to pass that torch on to you—as you swing around the Moon and lay the groundwork for missions to Mars … for the benefit of all. It’s a historic day, and I know how busy you’ll be. But don’t forget to enjoy the view. So, Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy, and all the great teams supporting you–good luck and Godspeed from all of us here on the good Earth.”

A short time later, Artemis II passed Lovell’s Apollo 13 record. Jenni Gibbons, an astronaut in mission control, marked the moment with a radio call to the Orion spacecraft. Hansen responded with the crew’s request to name two craters on the Moon, one for their Integrity spaceship and the other for Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll, who died of cancer in 2020.

“There’s a feature in a really neat place on the Moon, and it is on the near side-far side boundary. In fact, it’s just on the near side of that boundary. So at certain times of the Moon’s transit around Earth, we will be able to see this from Earth,” Hansen said of Carroll Crater. “It’s a bright spot on the Moon. We would like to call it Carroll.”

It was an emotional moment for the crew, and for many watching the mission from the ground. After sharing an embrace and wiping away tears, the astronauts settled into their lunar observations. A camera inside the Orion crew cabin recorded the commemoration, seen below.

From an Earthbound perspective, Artemis II approached the Moon from the side, with parts of both faces of the lunar surface visible to the crew. As the spacecraft got closer, it traveled toward the far side, giving the astronauts a view of lunar terrain never before seen by human eyes in daylight. The far side of the Moon was about 20 percent illuminated for Monday’s flyby.

Before Artemis II, only robotic missions had imaged large swaths of the far side, including the full-width Mare Orientale, an ancient impact basin stretching nearly 600 miles in diameter. Artemis II got a long glimpse. The astronauts described the three concentric rings, essentially circular mountain ranges, emanating from Mare Orientale’s lava-filled center. To the naked eye, the rings looked as if they were dusted with chalk or snow, Glover said.

Glover then narrated his view of the terminator, the boundary between night and day on the Moon. “It is the most rugged that I’ve seen it from a lighting perspective,” he said. “There are islands of terrain out there that are completely surrounded by darkness, which indicates some real variation in terrain. Up to the north, there is a very nice double crater. It looks like a snowman sitting there 5 or 10 degrees below the pole, along the terminator.”

Of course, scientists have known for decades what Mare Orientale and the rest of the Moon’s far side look like, thanks to a series of robotic missions. Those precursor missions, including the still-operating Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), have more instruments in their scientific toolkits than Artemis II.

But the crew’s observations have some value. Artemis II flew much farther from the Moon than LRO, providing a wider field-of-view for the astronauts and their handheld Nikon cameras. From more than 4,000 miles away, the crew’s Nikons were expected to capture images with resolution comparable to LRO’s wide-angle color camera more than 100 times closer to the surface. Just as important, the Artemis II flyby gave astronauts a chance to offer a human perspective that robots can’t provide. The real-time observation and feedback loop between the crew and mission control served as a practice run for future landing missions.

This visualization of Artemis II’s trajectory shows the spacecraft’s predicted location Wednesday, April 8, after the lunar flyby.

Credit: NASA/Kel Elkins (Science and Technology Corporation) Ernie Wright (USRA)

Looking back and looking ahead

From his perch a few thousand miles away, Glover imagined himself walking on the Moon. “I was walking around there on the surface, climbing, and off-roading in amazing terrain,” he said.

Gibbons, back on Earth, wished the crew well as they arced behind the Moon shortly after 6:30 pm EDT (22:30 UTC): “From all of us, it’s a privilege to witness you carrying the fire past our farthest reach. Thank you. Godspeed.”

In his final radio transmission before lunar occultation, Glover harkened to the reading from the book of Genesis by the Apollo 8 crew as they circled the Moon in 1968.

“As we get close to the nearest point to the Moon and the farthest point from Earth, as we continue to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos, I would like to remind you of one of the most important mysteries there on Earth, and that’s love,” Glover said. “Christ said, in response to what was the greatest command, that it was to love God with all that you are. And he also, being a great teacher, said … to love your neighbor as yourself. So as we prepare to go out of radio communication, we’re still able to feel your love from Earth, and to all of you down there on Earth and around Earth, we love you from the Moon.”

Out of view, Artemis II soared to the apogee, or farthest point, in its flight path, and Earth’s gravity began pulling the Orion spacecraft back home. The mission is tracking along a free return trajectory, meaning the gravitational influences of the Earth and the Moon are steering the capsule toward atmospheric reentry without needing any major rocket burns. A few more course correction maneuvers are planned in the coming days to fine-tune the trajectory.

The crew’s encounter with the Moon concluded with a long-distance call from President Donald Trump on Monday night.

The Trump administration, despite proposing cuts to NASA’s budget, is pushing the agency to land humans on the Moon by the end of 2028, when Trump’s term in the White House comes to a close and before China’s lunar program can deliver its own crew to the surface.

The timeline is aggressive, and may not be achievable, but NASA has more Artemis missions in the pipeline. After a recent revamp of the Artemis program, NASA now plans to launch the Artemis III mission as soon as next year on a flight in low-Earth orbit to dock with at least one of the two human-rated lunar landers under development by SpaceX and Blue Origin. Artemis IV will follow with a lunar landing attempt, assuming everything goes as planned.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen, NASA mission specialist Christina Koch, commander Reid Wiseman, and

pilot Victor Glover after arriving at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, for Artemis II launch preparations.

Credit: NASA/Jim Ross

The longer-term strategy calls for additional crew and robotic landers to deliver equipment to build a base near the Moon’s south pole, somewhat comparable to the international research facilities in Antarctica.

Koch, a spacecraft engineer and Antarctic explorer before joining NASA’s astronaut corps, told reporters before the launch of Artemis II that she hoped this mission would be “the start of an era where everyone, every person on Earth, can look at the Moon and think of it as also a destination.”

She echoed those thoughts in remarks from the Moon on Monday.

“The truth is the Moon really is its own unique body in the Universe,” Koch said. “It’s not just a poster in the sky that goes by. It is a real place, and when we have that perspective and we compare it to our home on the Earth, it just reminds us how much we have in common.”

Updated at 10:45 am EDT on April 7 with new images.

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Posted Wednesday 8 April 2026 at 5:16 am AEST (my time).

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