What if human blood turned into a sort of rubbery slime that can bounce back into a wound and stop it from bleeding in record time?

Until now, it was a mystery how hemolymph, or insect blood, was able to clot so quickly outside the body. Researchers from Clemson University have finally figured out how this works through observing caterpillars and cockroaches. By changing its physical properties, the blood of these animals can seal wounds in about a minute because the watery hemolymph that initially bleeds out turns into a viscoelastic substance outside of the body and retracts back to the wound.

“In insects vulnerable to dehydration, the mechanistic reaction of blood after wounding is rapid,” the research team said in a study recently published in Frontiers in Soft Matter. “It allows insects to minimize blood loss by sealing the wound and forming primary clots that provide scaffolding for the formation of new tissue.”

Mysterious ooze

Hemolymph has a drastically different composition from vertebrate blood. It is devoid of red blood cells and platelets. The cells that make up hemolymph, known as hemocytes, act like white blood cells in vertebrates, carrying out functions such as eating potentially infectious bacteria and helping form clots over wounds. Some insects have blood richer in hemocytes than others. Even the larval forms of certain species may have more hemocytes in their blood than adults, with many adult butterflies and moths having hemocyte-poor hemolymph compared to the caterpillars.

When experimenting with the sphinx moth caterpillars (Manduca sexta), the researchers placed the caterpillar in a hard plastic sleeve with holes and then made an incision in one of its prolegs. The greenish hemolymph that escaped the wound dripped like water for a few seconds. However, it soon thickened into a viscoelastic fluid that dripped much more slowly. Its final drop did not detach and fall but instead retracted toward the wound.

This all happened within 60 to 90 seconds. Similar results were seen with cockroaches (Periplaneta americana) when the tip of one antenna was severed.

In both species of insects, after the hemolymph retracted, a clot began to form. The scab from this clot became so tough in cockroaches that even a tungsten needle could not penetrate it.

It’s in the blood

To investigate the structure of hemolymph clots, the scientists gathered some of the viscous (but not completely clotted) material from caterpillar and cockroach wounds and examined it using phase-contrast microscopy. Phase contrast enhances contrast and therefore makes it possible to see details (such as cells) in transparent specimens such as hemolymph. The partially clotted hemolymph was made of what are described in the study as “polymeric filaments with embedded hemocytes,” with clots from older wounds being slimier, or thicker, than those from fresher wounds.

Some specimens included pieces of crust from scabs that started to form over healed wounds. These were freeze-dried to prevent any water left from deforming them, then further observed using X-ray, micro-CT, and SEM imaging, which showed that the outer part of the crust, which was most exposed to the air, was more dense. The scab material also contained large aggregates of hemocytes that had assembled themselves into chain structures to form a clot.

How fast can hemocytes start assembling? The team went back and observed viscous but not hardened hemolymph oozing from wounds.

While bleeding stopped after about a minute, hemocytes started to form a scab around three minutes after the formation of the last drop, which retracted after turning into a viscoelastic fluid with polymers strong enough to thicken it and hold it back. Some hemocytes would form pseudopodia (much like amoebas do), which then attached to other hemocytes. The aggregates that resulted made the fluid more and more viscous and eventually formed a scab.

Insect hemolymph is not the only type of bodily fluid that demonstrates viscoelastic properties. Even saliva is more watery when it first leaves the mouth but becomes more viscous with time outside of the body, such as when it stretches down from the end of a dog’s tongue. Human blood is not viscoelastic. However, this study could have implications for human medicine in the future. The Clemson researchers think it is possible that future advances could give us some of the advantages of bugs when it comes to healing wounds.

“We hope that our findings will trigger the interest of biochemists and molecular biologists,” they said, “to design fast-working thickeners for vertebrate blood, including human blood.”

Frontiers in Soft Matter, 2024. DOI: 10.3389/frsfm.2024.1341129

Caroline Chaboo’s eyes light up when she talks about tortoise beetles. Like gems, they exist in myriad bright colors: shiny blue, red, orange, leaf green and transparent flecked with gold. They’re members of a group of 40,000 species of leaf beetles, the Chrysomelidae, one of the most species-rich branches of the vast beetle order, Coleoptera. “You have your weevils, longhorns, and leaf beetles,” she says. “That’s really the trio that dominates beetle diversity.”

An entomologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Chaboo has long wondered why the kingdom of life is so skewed toward beetles: The tough-bodied creatures make up about a quarter of all animal species. Many biologists have wondered the same thing, for a long time. “Darwin was a beetle collector,” Chaboo notes.

Of the roughly 1 million named insect species on Earth, about 400,000 are beetles. And that’s just the beetles described so far. Scientists typically describe thousands of new species each year. So—why so many beetle species? “We don’t know the precise answer,” says Chaboo. But clues are emerging.

One hypothesis is that there are lots of them because they’ve been around so long. “Beetles are 350 million years old,” says evolutionary biologist and entomologist Duane McKenna of the University of Memphis in Tennessee. That’s a great deal of time in which existing species can speciate, or split into new, distinct genetic lineages. By way of comparison, modern humans have existed for only about 300,000 years.

Yet just because a group of animals is old doesn’t necessarily mean it will have more species. Some very old groups have very few species. Coelacanth fish, for example, have been swimming in the ocean for approximately 360 million years, reaching a maximum of around 90 species and then declining to the two species known to be living today. Similarly, the lizard-like reptile the tuatara is the only living member of a once globally diverse ancient order of reptiles that originated about 250 million years ago.

Another possible explanation for why beetles are so rich in species is that, in addition to being old, they have unusual staying power. “They have survived at least two mass extinctions,” says Cristian Beza-Beza, a University of Minnesota postdoctoral fellow. Indeed, a 2015 study using fossil beetles to explore extinctions as far back as the Permian 284 million years ago concluded that lack of extinction may be at least as important as diversification for explaining beetle species abundance. In past eras, at least, beetles have demonstrated a striking ability to shift their ranges in response to climate change, and this may explain their extinction resilience, the authors hypothesize.

Complicating the mystery of beetle diversity is the fact that some branches of the beetle family tree have many more species than others. For example, dung beetles, which spend their lives rolling deftly crafted balls of excrement, are only modestly diverse. “This family is around 8,000 species, so it’s not a huge group,” says community ecologist Jorge Ari Noriega at Universidad El Bosque in Bogotá, Colombia.

By contrast, Chrysomeloidea—a superfamily containing longhorn and leaf beetles—includes 63,000 species, while Brupestoidea, a group of metallic wood- and leaf-boring beetles also known as jewel beetles for their glitzy iridescent colors, includes about 15,000 species.

This large variation in species richness among beetle lineages means that “no one explanation holds very well for any one group,” says McKenna. Still, among plant-eating beetles—which make up roughly a quarter of all beetle species—a clear pattern is emerging. Based on genetic analyses of different beetle lineages, McKenna and his colleagues have found evidence that a major factor spurring beetle diversity was the diversification of flowering plants during the Cretaceous period.

During the Cretaceous period, which started around 145 million years ago, an explosion of new flowering plant species spread across the Earth’s surface, colonizing many different habitats. Today, plants make up about 80 percent of the mass of Earth’s life. Making the most of plants as food is an ecological strategy that has helped fuel the radiation of not only beetles but also herbivorous species including ants, bees, birds, and mammals.

In the case of herbivorous beetles, their most species-rich lineages carry a fascinating assortment of genes that permit the digestion of plants, McKenna has found. Many of these genes code for enzymes that help to break down plant cell walls, allowing access to sugars stored in hard-to-digest compounds like cellulose, hemicellulose and pectin. “The lineages that have these genes were the ones that are so incredibly successful,” McKenna says.

These genes were ingenious adaptations that turned indigestible plant parts into food. They allowed herbivorous beetles to eat more and different kinds of plants, which in turn enabled the insects to move into new habitats and occupy new ecological niches. As plant-eating beetles spread out geographically and adopted different diets and lifestyles, the genetic differences between them grew, resulting in new species.

For reasons unclear, some species of plant-eating beetles lost their digestion-aiding genes as they evolved, including a gene coding for pectinase, an enzyme that enables the breakdown of pectin. Evolutionary ecologist Hassan Salem at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, Germany, explains that to compensate, some beetles evolved a different strategy for eating plants: They forged relationships with bacterial partners—called symbionts—that also aid plant digestion.

For some beetles, these special symbiotic microbes became an alternate tool for keeping plants on the menu, expanding the number of habitats where new species could evolve and thrive. For example, in the vast majority of tortoise leaf beetle species, the group Salem studies, it’s not a genetically encoded enzyme that breaks down pectin, but a bacterial symbiont. The beetles get the bacteria from their mothers: Every time a female deposits an egg, she also leaves behind a capsule containing the microbes. The tortoise beetle embryo develops inside the egg, then burrows into the capsule to digest the symbiont about a day before it emerges.

“It's the first thing it encounters in life … so it’s a very intimate association,” says Salem. When Salem and his team have experimentally removed the microbe caplets from developing larvae, the adult, germ-free beetles that emerge have a high mortality rate because they can’t access pectin in the plant cell.

In addition to making plants easier to digest, some plant-associated microbes may have paved the way for beetle diversification because they provide beetles with predator protection. In the tortoise leaf beetle Chelymorpha alternans, for example, a fungus called Fusarium—often found in crops like bananas and sweet potatoes—grows on the surface of beetle pupae during metamorphosis. “We’ve demonstrated that if you remove the fungus, then ants readily find them and feed on them,” says Aileen Berasategui, an evolutionary biologist at the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment in the Netherlands. Fusarium, in other words, may be shielding the beetles from harmful predators, further expanding beetle territory and enabling diversification.

Berasategui adds that plenty of bark beetles, like ambrosia beetles, also benefit from Fusarium fungi, but in a different way. The beetles carry the fungi from tree to tree in specialized pockets called mycangia. Once the tree’s fungal infection is underway, the beetles indulge in a fungi feast.

Adapting to conduct this kind of agriculture—sowing spores that will grow into food—has also helped beetle species to exploit new habitats. “From their own nest, they take a little piece, and then … fly to a new tree where they start their own nest, they sow the new fungus, they generate this new garden,” says Berasategui. Called fungiculture, the approach has independently evolved in ambrosia beetles seven times. The evolution of new beetle species is thought to have been shaped by mutually beneficial relationships with these fungi—part of a 50-million-year history in which insects such as ants, termites and ambrosia beetles have independently evolved to farm fungi, according to a 2005 article published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics.

Plant-eating beetles have evolved other innovations that may have allowed them to speciate more than other beetle groups. In the leaf beetles that Chaboo studies, for example, the emergence in the fossil record of defensive fecal shields—structures built from a beetle’s own excretions and sloughed-off skin—“coincide with massive species radiations,” she says. Most beetle shield-users are solitary species, but some live in groups, arranging themselves in formations that protect them from predators. Fecal shield protection may have helped the beetles move into more open habitats, Chaboo says.

Whether they eat plants or dine on other fare such as carrion, beetles from all groups have evolved an impressive array of tools to solve many different problems. In that sense, beetles are a microcosm of the tree of life, McKenna says.

Resilient as beetles are, however, we can’t take their survival for granted. Insect populations are in decline in many places—“and, yes, beetles are part of that,” says Beza-Beza. How they’ll survive the impacts of humans is “one of the core questions right now,” he adds, though he’s betting there will be beetles on Earth “longer than there will be humans.”

Beetling away on scientific puzzles in the Central American cloud forest sky islands where he works, Beza-Beza has a special affinity for Ogyges politus, a beetle species that lives and feeds on rotting logs. “It only occurs in the mountains next to my hometown,” he says. “So it reminds me where I’m from … and that there are these jewels everywhere.”

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

Engineers have determined why NASA's Voyager 1 probe has been transmitting gibberish for nearly five months, raising hopes of recovering humanity's most distant spacecraft.

Voyager 1, traveling outbound some 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth, started beaming unreadable data down to ground controllers on November 14. For nearly four months, NASA knew Voyager 1 was still alive—it continued to broadcast a steady signal—but could not decipher anything it was saying.

Confirming their hypothesis, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California confirmed a small portion of corrupted memory caused the problem. The faulty memory bank is located in Voyager 1's Flight Data System (FDS), one of three computers on the spacecraft. The FDS operates alongside a command-and-control central computer and another device overseeing attitude control and pointing.

The FDS duties include packaging Voyager 1's science and engineering data for relay to Earth through the craft's Telemetry Modulation Unit and radio transmitter. According to NASA, about 3 percent of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.

Optimism growing

Suzanne Dodd, NASA's project manager for the twin Voyager probes, told Ars in February that this was one of the most serious problems the mission has ever faced. That is saying something because Voyager 1 and 2 are NASA's longest-lived spacecraft. They launched 16 days apart in 1977, and after flying by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 is flying farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history. Voyager 2 is trailing Voyager 1 by about 2.5 billion miles, although the probes are heading out of the Solar System in different directions.

Normally, engineers would try to diagnose a spacecraft malfunction by analyzing data it sent back to Earth. They couldn't do that in this case because Voyager 1 has been transmitting data packages manifesting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros. Still, Voyager 1's ground team identified the FDS as the likely source of the problem.

The Flight Data Subsystem was an innovation in computing when it was developed five decades ago. It was the first computer on a spacecraft to use volatile memory. Most of NASA's missions operate with redundancy, so each Voyager spacecraft launched with two FDS computers. But the backup FDS on Voyager 1 failed in 1982.

Due to the Voyagers' age, engineers had to reference paper documents, memos, and blueprints to help understand the spacecraft's design details. After months of brainstorming and planning, teams at JPL uplinked a command in early March to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS memory.

The command worked, and Voyager.1 responded with a signal different from the code the spacecraft had been transmitting since November. After several weeks of meticulous examination of the new code, engineers pinpointed the locations of the bad memory.

"The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working," NASA said in an update posted Thursday. "Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years."

Voyager 1's distance from Earth complicates the troubleshooting effort. The one-way travel time for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 from Earth is about 22.5 hours, meaning it takes roughly 45 hours for engineers on the ground to learn how the spacecraft responded to their commands.

NASA also must use its largest communications antennas to contact Voyager 1. These 230-foot-diameter (70-meter) antennas are in high demand by many other NASA spacecraft, so the Voyager team has to compete with other missions to secure time for troubleshooting. This means it will take time to get Voyager 1 back to normal operations.

"Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again," NASA said.

In some ways, the origin of life is looking much less mystifying than it was a few decades ago. Researchers have figured out how some of the fundamental molecules needed for life can form via reactions that start with extremely simple chemicals that were likely to have been present on the early Earth. (We've covered at least one of many examples of this sort of work.)

But that research has led to somewhat subtler but no less challenging questions. While these reactions will form key components of DNA and protein, those are often just one part of a complicated mix of reaction products. And often, to get something truly biologically relevant, they'll have to react with some other molecules, each of which is part of its own complicated mix of reaction products. By the time these are all brought together, the key molecules may only represent a tiny fraction of the total list of chemicals present.

So, forming a more life-like chemistry still seems like a challenge. But a group of German chemists is now suggesting that the Earth itself provides a solution. Warm fluids moving through tiny fissures in rocks can potentially separate out mixes of chemicals, enriching some individual chemicals by three orders of magnitude.

Feeling the heat (and the solvent)

Even in the lab, it's relatively rare for chemical reactions to produce just a single product. But there are lots of ways to purify out exactly what you want. Even closely related chemicals will often differ in their solubility in different solvents and in their tendency to stick to various glasses or ceramics, etc. The temperature can also influence all of those. So, chemists can use these properties as tools to fish a specific chemical out of a reaction mixture.

But, as far as the history of life is concerned, chemists are a relatively recent development—they weren't available to purify important chemicals back before life had gotten started. Which raises the question of how the chemical building blocks of life ever reached the sorts of concentrations needed to do anything interesting.

The key insight behind this new work is that something similar to lab equipment exists naturally on Earth. Many rocks are laced with cracks, channels, and fissures that allow fluid to flow through them. In geologically active areas, that fluid is often warm, creating temperature gradients as it flows away from the heat source. And, as fluid moves through different rock types, the chemical environment changes. The walls of the fissures will have different chemical properties, and different salts may end up dissolved in the fluid.

All of that can provide conditions where some chemicals move more rapidly through the fluid, while others tend to stay where they started. And that has the potential to separate out key chemicals from the reaction mixes that produce the components of life.

But having the potential is very different from clearly working. So, the researchers decided to put the idea to the test.

You gotta keep ’em separated

Their tests focused on a very simplified system, one that doesn't include all the complexities of fluid flow through rocks. Instead, they started with a simple system of two chambers connected by a small bit of lab tubing. So, there wasn't the potential for physical differences in the fluid flow in different cracks or changes in the chemical environment as the fluid flowed across different rock surfaces. Instead, the key difference was temperature, with the fluid flowing from a warm source to a cooler destination.

Even in that simplified system, however, a difference of 15° C was enough to get chemicals to travel between the two chambers at different paces. This resulted in some chemicals being purified by 30 percent relative to the original mixture they started out in. Others reached over 140 percent purification—all driven by nothing more than their different mobility across a temperature gradient. Starting with a mix of all 20 amino acids, a few of them ended up purified by 80 percent in this system.

Obviously, natural systems in rocks are far more complex than two chambers connected by a crack. To test something more elaborate, the researchers set up a single chamber linked to two separate ones, all held at different temperatures. Again, starting with a mix of all 20 amino acids resulted in a variety of purifications, ranging from a low in the area of fourfold, and a high of over twentyfold.

Using this data, they built a computer model of an even more elaborate system where fluid flowed through 20 individual chambers, again with temperature gradients across the system. Here, enrichment could reach 2,000-fold, although it didn't get much above 20-fold at the low end. This means that these systems can result in areas where individual chemicals are over 95 percent pure and, for some chemicals, over 99.9 percent pure.

As a final demonstration, they showed that these systems can bring together two reactants to boost a reaction between them that was otherwise rare. In this experiment, the levels of the reaction product were increased by up to five orders of magnitude.

What’s this mean?

This is likely to be a low estimate of the amount of purification that's possible, since the experiments took place in standard plastic labware. A more complicated chemical environment, like the one provided by rocks, could potentially change the mobility of chemicals even further.

That said, it's worth remembering that when given a mix of amino acids, they ended up concentrated in different locations. While this might be great for separating out a key biological molecule from a reaction mixture, it doesn't guarantee that a bunch of biologically relevant chemicals will all end up in the same location. So, it'll probably take a while to get some better ideas about what this might mean for the chemistry that might have led up to life.

But those caveats shouldn't be viewed as taking away from the work here. "Our results show the simultaneous but spatially separated, heat-flux-driven purification of more than 50 prebiotically relevant organic compounds," the authors write. And that's an impressive collection of results.

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07193-7  (About DOIs).

When we catch a whiff of perfume or indulge in a scented candle, we are smelling much more than Floral Fantasy or Lavender Vanilla. We are actually detecting odor molecules that enter our nose and interact with cells that send signals to be processed by our brain. While certain smells feel like they’re unchanging, the complexity of this system means that large odorant molecules are perceived as the sum of their parts—and we are capable of perceiving the exact same molecule as a different smell.

Smell is more complex than we might think. It doesn’t consist of simply detecting specific molecules. Researcher Wen Zhou and his team from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have now found that parts of our brains analyze smaller parts of the odor molecules that make things smell.

Smells like…

So how do we smell? Odor molecules that enter our noses stimulate olfactory sensory neurons. They do this by binding to odorant receptors on these neurons (each of which makes only one of approximately 500 different odor receptors). Smelling something activates different neurons depending on what the molecules in that smell are and which receptors they interact with. The sensory neurons in the piriform cortex of the brain then use the information from the sensory neurons and interpret it as a message that makes us smell vanilla. Or a bouquet of flowers. Or whatever else.

Odor molecules were previously thought to be coded only as whole molecules, but Zhou and his colleagues wanted to see whether the brain’s analysis of odor molecules could perceive something less than a complete molecule. They reasoned that, if only whole molecules work, then after being exposed to a part of an odorant molecule, the test subjects would smell the original molecule exactly the same way. If, by contrast, the brain was able to pick up on the smell of a molecule’s substructures, neurons would adapt to the substructure. When re-exposed to the original molecule, subjects would not sense it nearly as strongly.

“If [sub-molecular factors are part of our perception of an odor]—the percept[ion] and its neural representation would be shifted towards those of the unadapted part of that compound,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Nature Human Behavior.

Doesn’t smell like…

To see whether their hypothesis held up, Zhou’s team presented test subjects with a compound abbreviated CP, its separate components C and P, and an unrelated component, U. P and U were supposed to have equal aromatic intensity despite being different scents.

In one session, subjects smelled CP and then sniffed P until they had adapted to it. When they smelled CP again, they reported it smelling more like C than P. Despite being exposed to the entire molecule, they were mostly smelling C, which was unadapted. In another session, subjects adapted to U, after which there was no change in how they perceived CP. So, the effect is specific to smelling a portion of the odorant molecule.

In yet another experiment, subjects were told to first smell CP and then adapt to the smell of P with just one nostril while they kept the other nostril closed. Once adapted, CP and C smelled similar, but only when snorted through the nostril that had been open. The two smelled much more different through the nostril that had been closed.

Previous research has shown that adaptation to odors takes place in the piriform cortex. Substructure adaptation causes this part of the brain to respond differently to the portions of a chemical that the nose has recently been exposed to.

This olfactory experiment showed that our brains perceive smells by doing more than just recognizing the presence of a whole odor molecule. Some molecules can be perceived as a collection of submolecular units that are perceived separately.

“The smells we perceived are the products of continuous analysis and synthesis in the olfactory system,” the team said in the same study, “breath by breath, of the structural features and relationships of volatile compounds in our ever-changing chemical environment.”

Nature Human Behaviour, 2024.  DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-01849-0

Welcome to Edition 6.38 of the Rocket Report! Ed Dwight was close to joining NASA's astronaut corps more than 60 years ago. With an aeronautical engineering degree and experience as an Air Force test pilot, Dwight met the qualifications to become an astronaut. He was one of 26 test pilots the Air Force recommended to NASA for the third class of astronauts in 1963, but he wasn't selected. Now, the man who would have become the first Black astronaut will finally get a chance to fly to space.

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.

Ed Dwight named to Blue Origin's next human flight. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, announced Thursday that 90-year-old Ed Dwight, who almost became the first Black astronaut in 1963, will be one of six people to fly to suborbital space on the company's next New Shepard flight. Dwight, a retired Air Force captain, piloted military fighter jets and graduated test pilot school, following a familiar career track as many of the early astronauts. He was on a short list of astronaut candidates the Air Force provided NASA, but the space agency didn't include him. It took 20 more years for the first Black American to fly to space. Dwight's ticket with Blue Origin is sponsored by Space for Humanity, a nonprofit that seeks to expand access to space for all people. Five paying passengers will join Dwight for the roughly 10-minute up-and-down flight to the edge of space over West Texas. Kudos to Space for Humanity and Blue Origin for making this happen.

Return to flight ... This mission, named NS-25, will be the first time Blue Origin flies with human passengers since August 2022. Blue Origin hasn't announced a launch date yet for NS-25. On an uncrewed launch the following month, an engine failure destroyed a New Shepard booster and grounded Blue Origin's suborbital rocket program for more than 15 months. New Shepard returned to flight December 19 on another research flight, again without anyone onboard. As the mission name suggests, this will be the 25th flight of a New Shepard rocket and the seventh flight with people. Blue Origin has a history of flying aviation pioneers and celebrities. On the first human flight with New Shepard in 2021, the passengers included company founder Jeff Bezos and famed female aviator Wally Funk. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Revisit Astra's 2020 rocket explosion. In March 2020, as the world was under the grip of COVID, Astra blew up a rocket in remote Alaska and didn't want anyone to see it. New video published by TechCrunch shows Astra's Rocket 3 vehicle exploding on its launch pad. This was one of several setbacks that have brought the startup to its knees. The explosion, which occurred at Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex, was simply reported as an “anomaly” at the time, an industry term for pretty much any issue that deviates from the expected outcome, TechCrunch reports. Satellite imagery of the launch site showed burn scars, suggesting an explosion, but the footage published this week confirms the reality of the event. This was Astra's first orbital-class rocket, and it blew up during a fueling rehearsal.

A sign of things to come ... Astra eventually flew its Rocket 3 small satellite launcher seven times, but only two of the flights actually reached orbit. This prompted Astra to abandon its Rocket 3 program and focus on developing a larger rocket, Rocket 4. But the future of this new rocket is in doubt. Astra's co-founders are taking the company private after its market value and stock price tanked, and it's not clear where the company will go from here. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Russia's plan to “restore” its launch industry. Yuri Borisov, chief of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, has outlined a strategy for Russia to regain a dominant position in the global launch market, Ars reports. This will include the development of a partially reusable replacement for the Soyuz rocket called Amur-CNG. The country's spaceflight enterprise is also working on "ultralight" boosters that will incorporate an element of reusability. In an interview posted on the Roscosmos website, Borisov said he hopes Russia will have a "completely new fleet of space vehicles" by the 2028-2029 timeframe. Russia has previously discussed plans to develop the Amur rocket (the CNG refers to the propellant, liquified methane). The multi-engine vehicle looks somewhat similar to SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket in that preliminary designs incorporated landing legs and grid fins to enable a powered first-stage landing.

Reason to doubt ... Russia's launch industry was a global leader a couple of decades ago when prices were cheap relative to Western rockets. But the heavy-lift Proton rocket is nearing retirement after concerns about its reliability, and the still-reliable Soyuz is now excluded from the global market after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In the 2000s and 2010s, Russia's position in the market was supplanted by the European Ariane 5 rocket and then SpaceX's Falcon 9. Roscosmos originally announced the medium-lift Amur rocket program in 2020 for a maiden flight in 2026. Since then, the rocket has encountered a nearly year-for-year delay in its first test launch. I'll believe it when I see it. The only new, large rocket Russia has developed in nearly 40 years, the expendable Angara A5, is still launching dummy payloads on test flights a decade after its debut.

Biden administration proposes new commercial launch tax. In the White House's fiscal year 2025 budget proposal released last month, the Biden administration suggested that for-profit space companies start paying for their use of US airspace, The New York Times reports. Commercial space companies are exempt from aviation excise taxes that fill the coffers of the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, which pays for the FAA’s work and will get roughly $18 billion in tax revenues for the current fiscal year. The taxes are paid primarily by commercial airlines, which are charged 7.5 percent of each ticket price and an additional fee of about $5 to $20 per passenger, depending on the destination of each flight. The budget proposal also proposes raising excise taxes on private and corporate jet flights.

Sharing resources ... The FAA's air traffic controllers handle an average of 45,000 daily airplane flights transiting through US airspace. Rocket launches are several orders of magnitude more rare. The FAA licensed 117 commercial space launches last year, and the industry, dominated by SpaceX, is on track to exceed this number in 2024. While there are fewer rockets than airplanes, launches have a significant impact on FAA operations. Air traffic controllers are responsible for clearing airspace before a rocket launch and then quickly reopening the airspace after liftoff to reduce launch-induced delays to air travel. Biden's proposal for commercial launch companies to pay is based in part on an independent safety report commissioned by the FAA, which advises that the federal government update the excise taxes to charge commercial space companies. Members of the commercial space industry argue it is still at a nascent stage, and taxing the industry is “not appropriate at this time,” said Karina Drees, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

Polaris Dawn is getting closer to launch. In a series of posts on the social media platform X this week, SpaceX said the Crew Dragon spacecraft assigned to the all-private Polaris Dawn mission is heading into thermal vacuum testing. The thermal vacuum test will expose the capsule to the airless environment it will see in orbit, both inside and outside the spacecraft, when it is depressurized for the first fully commercial spacewalk in history. This capability required modifications to the spacecraft, which last flew in 2021. Billionaire Jared Isaacman will command the mission. He'll be joined by former Air Force test pilot Scott "Kidd" Poteet and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon.

But we want to see the spacesuits ... In parallel with modifications to the Crew Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX has designed an upgraded spacesuit to protect the four Polaris Dawn crew members in the vacuum of space. SpaceX hasn't yet revealed the new spacesuit, but Isaacman posted last month that the Polaris Dawn crew completed most of the suit's "acceptance test" procedure, which involved actually putting on the final assembled suits. Upcoming milestones include a test run with the crew members inside the actual Crew Dragon spacecraft, vacuum chamber testing, and mission simulations. Other objectives for Polaris Dawn include flying to a higher orbit around Earth than any human has reached since Apollo, testing Starlink internet connectivity in space, and conducting more than 35 research experiments. Launch is scheduled for early summer.

A dozen Falcon 9 launches in March. SpaceX set a record with 12 Falcon 9 rocket launches in March, demonstrating the cadence the company must achieve to meet its goal of 144 Falcon rocket missions in a year. This number doesn't count the March 14 test flight of the Starship rocket from South Texas. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's vice president of launch, wrote on X that so far this year, the company has set records for turnaround times at all three of its Falcon 9 launch pads and with all three drone ships in Florida and California.

Repeatability … SpaceX officials have said before that the company needs to have the capacity for 13 launches in a month in order to fly 144 Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy missions in a year. This would account for delays caused by minor technical snags or bad weather. SpaceX closed out March with a launch doubleheader Saturday from two launch pads in Florida, one mission carrying a commercial TV broadcast satellite for Eutelsat and another with 23 Starlink Internet satellites. In fact, SpaceX was on track to launch another Falcon 9 rocket the same day, which would have been the 13th launch for the month of March. But bad weather delayed this Falcon 9 launch from California until April 1.

New date for Starliner. NASA announced the target launch date for the first crew flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is now no earlier than May 6, six days later than previously planned. This delay has nothing to do with Starliner, but it gives NASA and its partners some breathing room to complete other critical operations on the International Space Station. These activities include the packing and departure of a SpaceX Cargo Dragon spacecraft, a Russian spacewalk, and the relocation of a Crew Dragon capsule from one docking port to another, clearing the path for the arrival of Starliner.

Night launch … Unfortunately (in my opinion!), a lot of rather significant launches have recently occurred at night. These include NASA's Artemis I launch in 2022, the debut of Relativity's Terran 1 rocket last year, and the first flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan in January. Right now, a launch of Starliner on ULA's Atlas V rocket would happen at 10:34 pm EDT on May 6 (02:34 UTC on May 7). This is simply a consequence of the space station's orbit. A launch to the ISS must occur when the Earth's rotation brings the launch pad underneath the station's orbital path. Launches heading to the ISS from Cape Canaveral, Florida, must head to the northeast, meaning there's just one launch opportunity per day. These launch times move about 23 minutes earlier each day. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

ULA's second Vulcan launch may lack a payload. ULA's first Vulcan rocket launch in January was a resounding success, raising hopes the second Vulcan rocket could fly as soon as April. Well, now we're in April, and it appears possible Vulcan won't fly again until September or later, Ars reports. This is primarily driven by the readiness of the payload for the second Vulcan flight, Sierra Space's DreamChaser spaceplane, which will deliver cargo to the International Space Station. This will be the first flight of the reusable DreamChaser spacecraft, and a recent update to NASA's planning schedule shows it may not fly until September, and this appears to be a soft date. ULA would like to fly sooner than that to allow the Space Force to complete certification of Vulcan in time to begin launching military satellites before the end of this year.

Still waiting on BE-4s … The second flightworthy Vulcan rocket is still at ULA's factory in Alabama, and ULA is waiting on delivery of the second BE-4 engine for Vulcan's first stage from Blue Origin. One Vulcan uses two BE-4 engines, which each produce more than a half-million pounds of thrust. Development delays on the methane-fueled BE-4 engine were responsible for most of the delays in getting Vulcan to its first flight, but the BE-4s used on the January 8 debut launch "performed flawlessly" with higher specific impulse, or efficiency, than predicted, said Tory Bruno, ULA's president and CEO. However, the "pacing item" in the Vulcan supply chain remains the BE-4, he said.

Delta IV Heavy will try again. Trouble with nitrogen pumps at an off-site facility at Cape Canaveral, Florida, thwarted ULA's first try to launch the final Delta IV Heavy rocket last week. The nitrogen is used to purge parts of the Delta IV rocket during the countdown. Now, ULA is ready to try again. The new target launch date for the Delta IV Heavy is Tuesday, April 9. It will carry a classified spy satellite into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office. This will mark the retirement of the Delta rocket family after 64 years of service, and it is a significant milestone in the transition of ULA to the new-generation Vulcan rocket. Vulcan will replace the Delta IV and Atlas V rockets, but there are 17 more Atlas Vs left to fly over the rest of this decade.

Nitrogen woes … The nitrogen distribution system at Cape Canaveral, operated by Air Liquide, services all operational launch pads at the spaceport. Air Liquide did not respond to questions on the matter from Ars, but this is the same system that caused problems during the first launch campaign for NASA's Space Launch System rocket in 2022. While the issue that affected the Delta IV Heavy appears to be different, it raises questions about the infrastructure managed by Air Liquide and NASA, which oversees the nitrogen network at the Cape. The nitrogen is pumped from a plant just outside the gate of the Kennedy Space Center, then distributed through a pipeline stretching several miles to the launch pads. Nevertheless, SpaceX was able to launch two Falcon 9 rockets from Cape Canaveral over the weekend without issue.

Next three launches

April 6: Falcon 9 | Starlink 8-1 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 02:31 UTC

April 7: Falcon 9 | Bandwagon 1 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 23:17 UTC

April 9: Delta IV Heavy | NROL-70 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 16:53 UTC

A 37-year-old man is fighting for his life in an intensive care unit in Hong Kong after being wounded by monkeys during a recent park visit and contracting a rare and deadly virus spread by primates.

The man, who was previously in good health, was wounded by wild macaque monkeys during a visit to Kam Shan Country Park in late February, according to local health officials. The park is well known for its conservation of wild macaques and features an area that locals call "Monkey Hill" and describe as a macaque kingdom.

On March 21, he was admitted to the hospital with a fever and "decreased conscious level," health officials reported. As of Wednesday, April 3, he was in the ICU listed in critical condition. Officials reported the man's case Wednesday after testing of his cerebrospinal fluid revealed the presence of B virus.

B virus, also known as herpes B virus or herpesvirus simiae, is a common infection in macaques, usually causing asymptomatic or mild disease. Infections in humans are extremely rare, but when they occur, they usually come from macaque encounters and are often severe and deadly. The infection can start out a lot like the flu, but the virus can move to the brain and spinal cord, causing brain damage, nerve damage, and death. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 70 percent of untreated infections in humans are fatal.

Despite the presence of macaques around Hong Kong, the man's case is the first known B virus infection documented there. The virus was discovered in 1932, and since then only 50 human infections have been documented as of 2019, the CDC reports. Of those 50 people infected, 21 died. The agency notes that in one case, from 1997, a researcher was infected and died after bodily fluid from an infected monkey splashed into her eye. Still, contracting the virus is rare, even among people exposed to macaques. The CDC reports that there are hundreds of reports of macaque bites and scratches each year in US animal facilities, and infections remain very uncommon.

However low the risk, health officials recommend keeping your distance from wild monkeys and not feeding or touching them. If you are bitten or scratched, wash the wound immediately and seek medical attention.

The Atlantic hurricane season does not begin for another eight weeks, but we are deep in the heart of hurricane season prediction season.

On Thursday, the most influential of these forecasts was issued by Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane scientist at Colorado State University. To put a fine point on it, Klotzbach and his team foresee an exceptionally busy season in the Atlantic basin, which encompasses the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico.

"We anticipate that the 2024 Atlantic basin hurricane season will be extremely active," Klotzbach wrote in his forecast discussion.

The Colorado State forecast calls for 23 named storms, more than 50 percent higher than a typical season of 14.4 named storms; and 11 hurricanes, above a normal total of seven. Additionally, the forecast predicts that the season's accumulated cyclone energy—a summation of the duration and intensity of storms across the whole basin—will be 70 percent greater than normal. If the forecast is accurate, the year 2024 would rank among the top 10 most active Atlantic hurricane seasons in a century and a half of records.

This forecast is not out of line with other seasonal predictions. Dozens of organizations, from private groups to individual forecasters to media properties, issue these kinds of seasonal predictions. But Colorado State's is the longest-running and most influential, and its release underscores what is indeed expected to be a very busy season for tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes.

What’s driving this?

Klotzbach cites two major factors driving the busy year. The primary one is sea surface temperatures in the eastern and central Atlantic, where tropical systems develop. These seas are seeing record warm temperatures for April—indeed, in many places, the Atlantic is already as warm as it typically would be in June. Undoubtedly climate change is a central factor behind this warming.

Warm seas are one precursor to tropical systems, but they are just one condition necessary for a low-pressure system to organize into a tropical depression.

Another is low wind shear, as cross-directional winds can literally shear a storm apart. While it is not possible to forecast wind shear months ahead of a season, the presence of El Niño or La Niña in the Pacific Ocean is a pretty useful indicator.

In this case, there's more bad news. The present (weak) El Niño in the Pacific is likely to transition into a La Niña by this summer, especially in August or September. That matters because these are typically the most frenetic months for activity, and with a La Niña in place, wind shear is likely to be lower overall in the Atlantic basin.

This is the first of several forecasts Klotzbach will issue for the upcoming season, and although predictions in April typically have lower skill, it is difficult to ignore the signals out there. "While the skill of this prediction is low, our confidence is higher than normal this year for an early April forecast given how hurricane-favorable the large-scale conditions appear to be," he wrote.

What does this mean?

Most coastal areas along the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf will not be affected by a hurricane in any given year. I live and work in Houston, which is the largest city in the Atlantic basin that regularly sees significant hurricane threats. But even here, in the subtropics, we only see large, direct impacts from a hurricane or tropical storm about every 10 years.

What a busy season does is load the dice. More activity means a greater likelihood that one of those storms will venture closer to where one lives. So the threat of a hurricane is there every year; it's just that the threat is greater in some years.

There is an old, oft-repeated adage in hurricane forecasting circles: "It only takes one." This means that even during a slow season if there's just one hurricane and it hits you, it was a busy hurricane season for you. We experienced this in Houston back in 1983 when the very first named storm of the year, a hurricane named Alicia, made landfall near the city on August 17. There ended up being just four named storms in 1984, but unfortunately for Houston, one of them struck here.

A busy forecast like this doesn't mean a whole lot for coastal residents. We really need to be prepared every year, knowing our vulnerabilities to a hurricane, knowing when we need to evacuate, where we would go, and what we would need to take.

However, it does have implications for first responders and government organizations tasked with dealing with hurricane aftermath, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Thus, it seems prudent that the recently passed federal budget for fiscal year 2024 tucked $20.3 billion into the agency's Disaster Relief Fund.

Mars has a history of liquid water on its surface, including lakes like the one that used to occupy Jezero Crater, which have long since dried up. Ancient water that carried debris—and melted water ice that presently does the same—were also thought to be the only thing driving the formation of gullies spread throughout the Martian landscape. That view may now change thanks to new results that suggest dry ice can also shape the landscape.

It’s sublime

Previously, scientists were convinced that only liquid water shaped gullies on Mars because that’s what happens on Earth. What was not taken into account was sublimation, or the direct transition of a substance from a solid to a gaseous state. Sublimation is how CO₂ ice disappears (sometimes water ice experiences this, too).

Frozen carbon dioxide is everywhere on Mars, including in its gullies. When CO₂ ice sublimates on one of these gullies, the resulting gas can push debris further down the slope and continue to shape it.

Led by planetary researcher Lonneke Roelofs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, a team of scientists has found that the sublimation of CO₂ ice could have shaped Martian gullies, which might mean the most recent occurrence of liquid water on Mars may have been further back in time than previously thought. That could also mean the window during which life could have emerged and thrived on Mars was possibly smaller.

“Sublimation of CO₂ ice, under Martian atmospheric conditions, can fluidize sediment and creates morphologies similar to those observed on Mars,” Roelofs and her colleagues said in a study recently published in Communications Earth & Environment.

Into thin air

Earth and Martian gullies have basically the same morphology. The difference is that we’re certain that liquid water is behind their formation and continuous shaping and re-shaping on Earth. Such activity includes new channels being carved out and more debris being taken to the bottom.

While ancient Mars may have had enough stable liquid water to pull this off, there is not enough on the present surface of Mars to sustain that kind of activity. This is where sublimation comes in. CO₂ ice has been observed on the surface of Mars at the same time that material starts flowing.

After examining observations like these, the researchers hypothesized these flows are pushed downward by gas as the frozen carbon dioxide sublimates. Because of the low pressure on Mars, sublimation creates a relatively greater gas flux than it would on Earth—enough power to make fluid motion of material possible.

There are two ways sublimation can be triggered to get these flows moving. When part of a more exposed area of a gully collapses, especially on a steep slope, sediment and other debris that have been warmed by the Sun can fall on CO₂ ice in a shadier and cooler area. Heat from the falling material could supply enough energy for the frost to sublimate. Another possibility is that CO₂ ice and sediment can break from the gully and fall onto warmer material, which will also trigger sublimation.

Mars in a lab

There is just one problem with these ideas: since humans have not landed on Mars (yet), there are no in situ observations of these phenomena, only images and data beamed back from spacecraft. So, everything is hypothetical. The research team would have to model Martian gullies to watch the action in real time.

To re-create a part of the red planet’s landscape in a lab, Roelofs built a flume in a special environmental chamber that simulated the atmospheric pressure of Mars. It was steep enough for material to move downward and cold enough for CO₂ ice to remain stable. But the team also added warmer adjacent slopes to provide heat for sublimation, which would drive movement of debris. They experimented with both scenarios that might happen on Mars: heat coming from beneath the CO₂ ice and warm material being poured on top of it. Both produced the kinds of flows that had been hypothesized.

For further evidence that flows driven by sublimation would happen under certain conditions, two further experiments were conducted, one under Earth-like pressures and one without CO₂ ice. No flows were produced by either.

“For the first time, these experiments provide direct evidence that CO₂ sublimation can fluidize, and sustain, granular flows under Martian atmospheric conditions,” the researchers said in the study.

Because this experiment showed that gullies and systems like them can be shaped by sublimation and not just liquid water, it raises questions about how long Mars had a sufficient supply of liquid water on the surface for any organisms (if they existed at all) to survive. Its period of habitability might have been shorter than it was once thought to be. Does this mean nothing ever lived on Mars? Not necessarily, but Roelofs’ findings could influence how we see planetary habitability in the future.

Communications Earth & Environment, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s43247-024-01298-7

NASA has made another bold bet on the nation's commercial space industry, this time asking private companies to provide a lunar rover that can survive for up to a decade near the South Pole of the Moon.

The space agency on Wednesday announced the selection of three teams, led by Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab, to work on designs for a rover that can be used by astronauts and function autonomously when no crew is around.

Each company will work with the space agency for the next year or so to reach what is known as a "preliminary design review" for their vehicle. The initial awards are not huge; each is a few tens of millions of dollars. But this work will set the stage for a demonstration phase, which will be worth significantly more.

After this initial design work is complete, NASA will select at least one, or potentially more, companies to press ahead with a demonstration of their rover on the lunar surface later this decade or in the early 2030s.

"I'd like to send all three to the Moon," said Lara Kearney, manager of the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "But the decision will be budget driven. If all I can afford is one, we'll have one."

It's likely to be a frenetic year for the three competitors.

Asking a lot

There is a lot of money at stake. NASA is purchasing these rovers as a service and will issue task orders on an annual basis for 10 years. Over the lifetime of the contract, there is a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion for all awards. NASA would like the lunar rovers delivered to the Moon prior to the Artemis V mission—currently projected to be the third crewed flight to the Moon. The nominal date of this lunar landing is 2029, but that is likely optimistic.

Kearney said NASA expects the rovers to be capable of operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with periodic breaks for charging and surviving the lunar night. They will face harsh conditions near the South Pole, with temperature swings of up to 500° Fahrenheit, harsh radiation, and rocky terrain.

"I know we’re asking a lot of these companies, but I think they’re up to the challenge," Kearney said.

NASA is indeed asking an awful lot of the commercial space industry in the United States. Since the early success of its cargo resupply services program in the 2010s—when SpaceX and Orbital Sciences began delivering food and other supplies to the International Space Station—the space agency has gotten progressively more interested in buying services directly from the space industry. For example, the agency now contracts with SpaceX to regularly fly astronauts to the space station on Dragon vehicles owned and operated by the private company.

As NASA has built out its Artemis program, it has put an increasing amount of responsibility on private companies providing services. SpaceX and Blue Origin are tasked with building complex landers to bring astronauts down to the surface of the Moon and back up to lunar orbit. NASA has partnered with Collins Aerospace and Axiom Space to provide spacesuits, including potentially for the lunar surface. And now the agency is seeking to procure services for a durable rover that will enable astronauts to venture far from their landing sites. The rovers will have a range of at least 20 km a day and the capability to support an eight-hour Moonwalk.

Over the 10-year period, companies will have the option of relying on a single rover or sending replacements as needed.

Meet the contenders

Due to the open nature of the contracting agreement, NASA has set some high-level requirements but is allowing the companies wide latitude in their designs. The three proposals, in brief, are:

Lunar Dawn: Led by a company called Lunar Outpost, it includes principal partner Lockheed Martin and teammates General Motors, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, and MDA Space. The vehicle is being designed to not just survive but operate during the lunar night. It will also feature capabilities for robust and diverse commercial use, including a reconfigurable cargo bed that allows for the changing of payloads with a robotic arm.

Moon Racer: Led by Intuitive Machines, which recently made a soft landing on the Moon, the team's strategic partners include AVL, Boeing, Michelin, and Northrop Grumman. The team plans to deploy the rover via the Nova-D lunar lander under development by Intuitive Machines. With its proven ability to deliver cargo to the Moon, the team plans to be able to replace tires and other components of the rover as needed over the 10-year lifespan on the Moon.

FLEX: Led by Astrolab, the team includes Axiom Space and Odyssey Space Research. FLEX can carry two suited astronauts, accommodate a robotic arm to support science exploration, perform robotic cargo logistics, and survive the extreme temperatures at the lunar South Pole. Founded by veterans of SpaceX, Astrolab is taking a hardware-rich approach to development of its rover, with ample testing of its vehicle early and often. An initial mission to the Moon is planned for 2026.

One of the notable things about the announcement this week is that it has brought a number of new players into spaceflight, such as Goodyear and Michelin. One goal of NASA as it returns to the Moon and attempts to establish a sustained presence there is to broaden the lunar economy and find additional customers. Bringing in established companies from other industries has the potential to spark new ideas and opportunities in the lunar environment.

"We're able to bring in these non-traditional space companies," said Justin Cyrus, chief executive of Lunar Outpost. "There's also a new block of new space companies that are helping to drive value in the ecosystem."

Now, the hard work begins.

In February, NASA celebrated the arrival of the first US-made lander on the Moon in more than 50 years, an achievement that helps pave the way for the return of American astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade. But the clock was ticking for Intuitive Machines' Odysseus spacecraft after touching down on February 22 near the Moon's south pole.

Each day and night on the Moon lasts two weeks. When the Sun sets, a solar-powered lunar lander like Odysseus is starved of energy. Temperatures during the lunar night plummet, bottoming out at around minus 280° Fahrenheit (minus 173° Celsius).

Over the course of two weeks, these cold temperatures can damage sensitive spacecraft equipment, killing a lander even if it could start generating power again at lunar sunrise. Surviving the night requires heat and electricity, and NASA officials say nuclear power is one of the most attractive solutions to this problem.

Freezing to death

“We do anticipate having to deploy nuclear systems on the lunar surface," said Jay Jenkins, program executive for NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

"Honestly, it’s not unrealistic that we’ll want to do be able to do this within five years or less. We are starting to buy payloads that are meant for investigations that go beyond one lunar day," Jenkins said during a Nuclear Regulatory Commission conference earlier this month.

The commercial Odysseus lander was part of CLPS. Intuitive Machines had a $118 million contract with NASA to deliver science and tech demo payloads to the lunar surface.

As expected, Intuitive Machines declared the end of the Odysseus mission last month when ground teams confirmed that the lander did not make it through the night. Just in case it woke up, engineers tried listening for a signal from the spacecraft, nicknamed Odie, but didn't hear back.

"This confirms that Odie has permanently faded after cementing its legacy into history as the first commercial lunar lander to land on the Moon," Intuitive Machines posted on X.

“Because of the extreme temperatures through the lunar night, typically, you don’t come back to life," said Peter McGrath, chief operating officer of Intuitive Machines, before the launch of Odysseus last month. "The batteries don’t survive, the boards crack on the computers and the avionics boxes, and even though you may be able to collect power through the solar arrays, you really don’t have anything that functions, so we’ve been looking at how to keep landers alive.”

India's Chandrayaan 3 lander also didn't make it past its first lunar day after it arrived on the Moon last August. There are exceptions, though. Japan's SLIM lander touched down on the Moon in January and is still alive, even though Japanese engineers expected it would succumb to cold temperatures during its first lunar night. Japan's space agency said some temperature sensors and unused battery cells on SLIM are starting to malfunction, but the "majority of functions" have survived so far.

The first phase of America's return to the Moon, initially consisting of robotic commercial missions and then larger human-rated landers, will have the same limitations as Odysseus. The next series of commercial landers set to launch to the Moon under contract with NASA are all designed to operate for one lunar day. The first human landing on the Moon under NASA's Artemis program, Artemis III, will spend up to six days on the lunar surface. The astronauts won't stay the night.

NASA's long-term goal is to build a sustainable presence on the lunar surface. Mission lifetimes of one or two weeks won't cut it for a Moon base.

"Right now, all the CLPS deliveries basically land at lunar morning and they end at lunar evening," Jenkins said. "That’s very very limiting, especially for experiments that we would like to go for a very long time, for months or years, in order to monitor geophysical properties, or in order to monitor various other aspects of the Moon."

NASA also wants to venture into permanently shadowed craters at the Moon's south pole. The bottoms of these craters haven't seen sunlight for billions of years, and observations from orbit suggest these cold traps harbor water ice, a valuable resource for future lunar explorers.

“So survive-the-night capability, or STN, is very highly desirable," Jenkins said.

Around-the-clock operations

Until now, nearly all of NASA's funding for the Artemis program has gone to developing rockets, spacecraft, and landers. This week, the space agency announced contractors to perform feasibility studies for a lunar rover to carry astronauts from point to point on the lunar surface.

Once these key pieces of the architecture are in place, they will need a new kind of power source, and the nuclear option is attractive. Reactors could continuously run a Moon base or a science outpost and make permanently dark craters accessible for astronauts or robots to reach water ice that could be converted into rocket propellant or air.

“I think the only way you’re going to have a sustainable presence on the surface of the moon is using nuclear power," said McGrath, an executive at Intuitive Machines, which is investing in several types of nuclear power systems.

NASA and the US military are providing funding for these efforts, beginning with the test of a nuclear thermal propulsion in orbit in 2027. This demonstration will involve a small nuclear reactor, similar to one that could be used to generate power on the Moon. The reactor will rapidly warm up liquid hydrogen propellant; the gas expands and is passed out a nozzle, creating thrust vastly more efficiently than a conventional rocket.

In a separate program, NASA awarded relatively low-cost preliminary design contracts in 2022 for three industrial teams to work on concepts for 40-kilowatt-class, six-metric-ton nuclear fission reactors to operate on the lunar surface. Some of the same companies working on the nuclear rocket program, like Lockheed Martin and BWXT, are working with NASA to apply the reactor technology to the Moon.

“We are making investments in a modular reactor for a lunar surface demonstration," said Prasun Desai, deputy associate administrator for NASA's space technology directorate.

Buoyed by its successful Moon landing, Houston-based Intuitive Machines is also part of these NASA nuclear design contracts. It is partnering with X-energy, a nuclear energy startup, in a joint venture called IX. X-energy and Intuitive Machines were founded by Kam Ghaffarian, a billionaire entrepreneur who also founded Axiom Space.

“We started as a lander company, but we're doing a lot of things about how do we prolong missions and keep things alive," McGrath said at a recent discussion hosted by the Beyond Earth Institute. "There's a lot of value in nuclear (power) on spacecraft because you can actually move without worrying about power draw from the Sun and do missions as well as transit through space. So it gives you a lot more operational capability.”

Westinghouse leads the third team that won NASA funding in 2022 to work on a Moon-based nuclear reactor design. These three industrial consortiums are completing work under Phase 1 of the NASA reactor program. The agency plans to open a competition for Phase 2 next year, with a target date of delivering a nuclear reactor to the Moon in the early 2030s. Budget constraints delayed this delivery date by a few years from NASA's previous plan.

"On the Moon, the reactor will complete a one-year demonstration followed by nine operational years," NASA said in a statement. "If all goes well, the reactor design may be updated for potential use on Mars."

So far, NASA officials are pleased with the lunar design concepts proposed by the nuclear industry. "They came back with some very innovative approaches to solving the problem," said Anthony Calomino, manager of NASA's space nuclear technology portfolio.

A 40-kilowatt reactor could produce electrical power for 33 average US households, according to NASA. This is enough to run lunar habitats, rovers, backup power grids, or science experiments on the Moon.

Surviving the night

Nuclear reactors have flown in space before. The Soviet Union launched around 40 military satellites powered by fission nuclear reactors, and some of these are still in Earth orbit today. The United States sent one experimental nuclear reactor into orbit in 1965.

Numerous NASA interplanetary probes have relied on a different type of nuclear power source, called a Radioisotope Thermal Generator (RTG), which converts heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. These missions include the Voyagers, the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn, and NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers.

It doesn't generate electricity, but there is another simpler, near-term solution that can allow robotic landers and rovers to safely hibernate during the cold lunar night. These devices, called Radioisotope Heater Units (RHUs), are like tiny RTGs, with a pellet of plutonium about the size of a pencil eraser outputting about 1 watt of heat, enough to protect sensitive spacecraft components from thermal damage.

China's Chang'e 3 and Chang'e 4 robotic lunar landers used RHUs to survive the long lunar night. McGrath said Intuitive Machines is investigating this capability for its future landers. But these heaters won't enable around-the-clock operations.

"In terms of a near-term operational need, we need to see that fission power system also on the surface of the Moon," said Scott Pace, a space policy expert who served as executive secretary of the National Space Council in the Trump administration.

RTGs and RHUs are produced by the Department of Energy, while the technology NASA eyes for the Moon comes from commercial suppliers. In 2018, NASA successfully tested a 10-kilowatt fission reactor in a vacuum chamber simulating the environment of space. But the commercial space nuclear power industry is still a fledgling industry.

“We have been behind the 8-ball," said Mike Beavin, a former space policy adviser at NASA and now an industry consultant at the Beyond Earth Institute's panel discussion last month. "In my personal opinion, I think we’re probably about a decade back from where we should be in the development of space nuclear systems. Where we were with commercial space 20 years ago is kind of like where we are now with space nuclear."

Winning hearts and minds

Historically, launching nuclear material into space hasn't been free from controversy. Anti-nuclear activists protested at Cape Canaveral, Florida, before the launches of NASA's Galileo and Cassini spacecraft in 1989 and 1997. These robotic spacecraft safely launched and orbited Jupiter and Saturn, relying on plutonium power generators. The launches of NASA's plutonium-powered Mars rovers in 2011 and 2020 didn't have the same level of protest.

“The 1997 Cassini protests I think were really a high point of opposition," said Alex Gilbert, director of space and planetary regulation at Zeno Power, which won a $15 million funding award from NASA last year to develop a radioisotope power system utilizing americium instead of plutonium. Zeno is also partnering with Intuitive Machines.

Jeffrey King, a nuclear engineering professor at Colorado School of Mines, isn't so sure this new age of space-based nuclear power will avoid dissent.

“I do think we need to be prepared and have our messaging on target," he said at a recent symposium hosted by the Universities Space Research Association and the Space Policy Institute. "You can see it if you pay attention, and that opposition is going to come.”

A commercial launch of nuclear material into space would also open new challenges in federal regulation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will hold joint responsibility to ensure public safety.

"Whoever the mission owners are who want to do this, they would have to go through multiple steps, potentially, of licensing and safety reviews," said Tina Gosh, a senior reactor systems engineer at the NRC.

Jenkins, from NASA's CLPS commercial lunar lander program, is pushing for clarity on the regulatory requirements for commercial nuclear power systems. NASA's most recent nuclear-powered missions have launched on United Launch Alliance's soon-to-be-retired Atlas V rockets, so the agency is beginning the process to certify other launchers, like SpaceX's Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and ULA's Vulcan, for nuclear payloads.

“We’ve got commercial entities that want to comply, but they don’t know what to comply with," Jenkins said. "We all know we want to be able to handle these things safely. We want to be sure that we don’t have a bunch of live nuclear sources around that astronauts are going to have to tiptoe around.”

There are other power options for 24/7 operations on the Moon. Astrobotic, another one of NASA's lunar lander contractors, is working on a concept to robotically reel out up to a kilometer of cable on the Moon's surface. This cable could route electricity from solar arrays into shadowed areas and could be particularly useful near the lunar poles, where mountains at the rims of some craters range high enough to receive near-constant sunlight.

Astrobotic has a different concept called the Nighttime Integrated Thermal and Electricity (NITE) system, which could produce power as a byproduct of exothermic chemical reactions. This non-nuclear generator design requires no radioactive materials and wouldn't need to go through a potentially lengthy, expensive nuclear launch approval process, Astrobotic says.

Ultimately, it's up to commercial companies like Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic to decide how to satisfy NASA's desire for landers that can survive the lunar night, "whether it's a battery solar array arrangement or whether it's a commercial radioisotope arrangement, or even fission," Jenkins said.

"We do anticipate that commercial radioisotopes are going to take a significant role with the CLPS providers in order to provide the survive-the-night capability," Jenkins said. "You can do things with solar arrays and batteries, but the battery mass just becomes enormous when you start trying to operate for two consecutive weeks of night.”

The last time NASA was this serious about nuclear power in space was a generation ago. NASA spent around $400 million on Project Prometheus, which would have developed nuclear reactors to supply electricity to ion engines, before canceling it in 2005 to free up money for the Constellation Moon program. Constellation was later canceled in 2010.

There are geopolitical angles to consider, too.

The head of Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said this month that Russia and China are "seriously considering a project" to put a nuclear power unit on the Moon in the 2030s. Russia's space program is in decline, but the country is a major player in the global nuclear power sector. In contrast to Russia, China's space program is well-funded, and the Chinese nuclear sector is growing fast.

China has "leapfrogged" the United States in a few areas of space-based nuclear power, McGrath said. China recently demonstrated a Stirling power converter, which could be used on a future space nuclear fission reactor, on the Tiangong space station.

“We’re not pushing hard enough, and we’re not pushing fast enough," Beavin said last month. “I do think we are ahead, but they’re closing the gap, that’s for sure."

This story was updated to reflect NASA's announcement April 3 of lunar rover contractors.

The flare-up of highly pathogenic bird flu continues to widen in US livestock after federal officials confirmed last week that the virus has spread to US cows for the first time. The virus has now been detected in dairy cows in at least five states, a single person in Texas exposed to infected cows, and an egg farm in Texas, all spurring yet more intense monitoring and biosecurity vigilance as the situation continues to evolve.

As of Tuesday, seven dairy herds in Texas, two in Kansas, and one each in Idaho, Michigan, and New Mexico had tested positive for the virus. The affected dairy herd in Michigan had recently received cows from one of the infected herds in Texas. It remains unclear if there is cow-to-cow transmission of the flu virus.

The virus—a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza or HPAI—has been devastating wild birds worldwide for the past several years. Throughout the devastating outbreak, the flu virus has spilled over to various species, including big cats in zoos, river otters, bears, dolphins, seals, squirrels, and foxes. While cows were an unexpected addition to the list, federal officials noted last week that affected dairy farms had found dead wild birds on their farms, suggesting that wild birds introduced the virus to the cows, not an intermediate host.

On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Protection reported that a person in Texas who had contact with infected dairy cows had tested positive for the HPAI. The person's only symptom was eye redness. The CDC said the person was treated with an antiviral for flu and was recovering. It is the second case of HPAI found in a person in the US. The first case was in a person in Colorado who was directly exposed to poultry infected with the virus. In that case, the person's only symptom was fatigue over a few days. The person recovered. The CDC considers the risk of HPAI to the general public to be low.

Low risk

Meanwhile, the virus continues to spread to less-surprising animals: chickens. On Tuesday, Cal-Maine Foods, Inc., the country's largest producer of fresh eggs, reported that HPAI was detected in one of its facilities in Texas. The facility is located in Parmer County, which sits at the border of Texas and New Mexico. It's unclear if the egg facility is close to any of the affected dairy herds. Cal-Maine, following the US Department of Agriculture biosecurity protocols, immediately shut down the facility. Approximately 1.6 million hens and 337,000 pullets—young hens—were culled. Cal-Maine said the hens represented about 3.6 percent of the company's total flock.

Since the outbreak began in wild birds, the virus has led to the deaths of over 82 million commercial and backyard birds in the US, with 48 states affected and over 1,000 outbreaks reported. The infections have spurred increases in egg and poultry prices.

It's unclear if the virus will have the same effect on milk or beef, but so far, it appears that it will not. In the infected herds, the virus appears to only be affecting a small percentage of animals, particularly older animals, and they generally recover. As the USDA puts it there's "little to no associated mortality reported." Milk from sick cows is always diverted from the milk supply, but even if milk contaminated with HPAI were to make it into the supply, the virus would be destroyed in the pasteurization process.

Still, the continued, widespread outbreak and spillovers of HPAI in various species highlight the ever-present risk that influenza viruses could mix together, combining genetic fragments of different strains (genetic reassortment) to create a new strain that could spark outbreaks or even a pandemic in humans. In the current outbreak among dairy cattle, federal researchers were quick to check the genetic sequence of the HPAI, finding that, so far, the strain lacks mutations in key genetic regions that would signal the virus has become more infectious to humans. For now, the USDA and the CDC report that the risk to the public is low.

Icy ocean worlds like Europa or Enceladus are some of the most promising locations for finding extra-terrestrial life in the Solar System because they host liquid water. But to determine if there is something lurking in their alien oceans, we need to get past ice cover that can be dozens of kilometers thick. Any robots we send through the ice would have to do most of the job on their own because communication with these moons takes as much as 155 minutes.

Researchers working on NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's technology development project called Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) might have a solution to both those problems. It involves using an AI-guided space snake robot. And they actually built one.

Geysers on Enceladus

The most popular idea to get through the ice sheet on Enceladus or Europa so far has been thermal drilling, a technique used for researching glaciers on Earth. It involves a hot drill that simply melts its way through the ice. “Lots of people work on different thermal drilling approaches, but they all have a challenge of sediment accumulation, which impacts the amount of energy needed to make significant progress through the ice sheet,” says Matthew Glinder, the hardware lead of the EELS project.

So, instead of drilling new holes in ice, the EELS team focuses on using ones that are already there. The Cassini mission discovered geyser-like jets shooting water into space from vents in the ice cover near Enceladus’ south pole. “The concept was you’d have a lander to land near a vent and the robot would move on the surface and down into the vent, search the vent, and through the vent go further down into the ocean”, says Matthew Robinson, the EELS project manager.

The problem was that the best Cassini images of the area where that lander would need to touch down have a resolution of roughly 6 meters per pixel, meaning major obstacles to landing could be undetected. To make things worse, those close-up images were monocular, which meant we could not properly figure out the topography. “Look at Mars. First we sent an orbiter. Then we sent a lander. Then we sent a small robot. And then we sent a big robot. This paradigm of exploration allowed us to get very detailed information about the terrain,” says Rohan Thakker, the EELS autonomy lead. “But it takes between seven to 11 years to get to Enceladus. If we followed the same paradigm, it would take a century,” he adds.

All-terrain snakes

To deal with unknown terrain, the EELS team built a robot that could go through almost anything—a versatile, bio-inspired, snake-like design about 4.4 meters long and 35 centimeters in diameter. It weighs about 100 kilograms (on Earth, at least). It’s made of 10 mostly identical segments. “Each of those segments share a combination of shape actuation and screw actuation that rotates the screws fitted on the exterior of the segments to propel the robot through its environment,” explains Glinder. By using those two types of actuators, the robot can move using what the team calls “skin propulsion,” which relies on the rotation of screws, or using one of various shape-based movements that rely on shape actuators. “Sidewinding is one of those gaits where you are just pressing the robot against the environment,” Glinder says.

The standard sensor suite is fitted on the head and includes a set of stereo cameras providing a 360-degree viewing angle. There are also inertial measuring units (IMUs) that use gyroscopes to estimate the robot’s position, and lidar sensors. But it also has a sense of touch. “We are going to have torque force sensors in each segment. This way we will have direct torque plus direct force sensing at each joint,” explains Robinson. All this is supposed to let the EELS robot safely climb up and down Enceladus' vents, hold in place in case of eruptions by pressing itself against the walls, and even navigate by touch alone if cameras and lidar don’t work.

But perhaps the most challenging part of building the EELS robot was its brain.

Space snake brains

Joysticking EELS around on Enceladus was out of the question due to the huge communication lag, so the team went for nearly complete autonomy. Ground control will be limited to issuing general commands like “explore this area” or “look for life.” “Think of it like Tesla self-driving software, only you have a vehicle with 48 steering wheels, 48 sets of pedals, working in a space where there are no roads, no stop signs, and no speed limits,” Thakker explains. The AI driving the EELS robot was built around a hierarchical layered software architecture organized into two categories of modules called estimators and controllers.

The lowest-level estimators take information from internal sensors like IMUs and torque force sensors in the segments and use it to determine the robot’s state—whether it is falling, slipping, or hitting something. One level higher are estimators that build a map of the environment and figure out the robot’s location based on feeds from cameras and lidar. The highest-level estimator reasons about risk and figures out when to move fast and when to play it safe. Controllers responsible for taking action range from the basic actuator control systems at the lowest level to task and motion planning at the highest level.

“There are two sides to your mind. There is an intuitive side which is fast, biased, and very low powered, and there is a logical side that asks questions, evaluates answers, and tries to make sense of what is actually going on. We are trying to use the same framework where there are two such subsystems,” says Thakker. The intuitive side of EELS was built using machine learning, in which the robot trained itself how to move. The logical side is a physics-based model with hard-wired safety rules that prevent the robot from exceeding certain speeds or tacking slopes above a specific grade, and so on. All this should make the EELS robot do well on alien icy worlds.

If it ever gets there.

“Currently we are not part of any flight mission,” says Robinson. According to him, though, the EELS architecture can be used in many other destinations, including Earth. “When we were testing EELS on Athabasca Glacier in Canada, we were using it to do actual science. We designed a science instrument that measured the salt content in the water flowing in the glacier. There are terrestrial and space applications for a snake robot. You can use it for search and rescue, looking into rubble piles and so on. But Enceladus remains a source of inspiration for us,” Robinson claims.

Science Robotics, 2024 DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adh8332

Today's quantum computing hardware is severely limited in what it can do by errors that are difficult to avoid. There can be problems with everything from setting the initial state of a qubit to reading its output, and qubits will occasionally lose their state while doing nothing. Some of the quantum processors in existence today can't use all of their individual qubits for a single calculation without errors becoming inevitable.

The solution is to combine multiple hardware qubits to form what's termed a logical qubit. This allows a single bit of quantum information to be distributed among multiple hardware qubits, reducing the impact of individual errors. Additional qubits can be used as sensors to detect errors and allow interventions to correct them. Recently, there have been a number of demonstrations that logical qubits work in principle.

On Wednesday, Microsoft and Quantinuum announced that logical qubits work in more than principle. "We've been able to demonstrate what's called active syndrome extraction, or sometimes it's also called repeated error correction," Microsoft's Krysta Svore told Ars. "And we've been able to do this such that it is better than the underlying physical error rate. So it actually works."

A hardware/software stack

Microsoft has its own quantum computing efforts, and it also acts as a service provider for other companies' hardware. Its Azure Quantum service allows users to write instructions for quantum computers in a hardware-agnostic manner and then run them on the offerings of four different companies, many of them based on radically different hardware qubits. This work, however, was done on one specific hardware platform: a trapped-ion computer from a company called Quantinuum.

We covered the technology behind Quantinuum's computers when the company was an internal project at industrial giant Honeywell. Briefly, trapped ion qubits benefit from a consistent behavior (there's no device-to-device variation in atoms), ease of control, and relative stability. Because the ions can be moved around easily, it's possible to entangle any qubit with any other in the hardware and to perform measurements on them while calculations are in progress. "These are some of the key capabilities: the two-qubit gate fidelities, the fact that you can move and have all the connectivity through movement, and then mid-circuit measurement," Svore told Ars.

Quantinuum's hardware does lag in one dimension: the total number of qubits. While some of its competitors have pushed over 1,000 qubits, Quantinuum's latest hardware is limited to 32 qubits.

That said, a low error rate is valuable for this work. Logical qubits work by combining multiple hardware qubits. If each of those qubits has a high enough error rate, combining them increases the probability that errors will crop up more quickly than they can be corrected. So the error rate has to be below a critical point for error correction to work. And existing qubit technologies seem to be at that point—albeit barely. Initial work in this area had either barely detected the impact of error correction or had simply registered the errors but not corrected them.

As the draft of a new manuscript describing this work puts it, "To the best our knowledge, none of these experiments have demonstrated logical error rates better than the physical error rates."

Microsoft is also well-positioned to be doing this work. Its role requires it to translate generic quantum code into the commands needed to be performed on Quantinuum's hardware—including acting as a compiler provider. And in at least part of this work, it used this knowledge to specifically optimize the code to cut down on the time spent moving ions around.

Error correction actually corrects errors

The work involved three experiments. In the first, the researchers formed a logical qubit with seven information-holding hardware qubits and three ancillary qubits for error detection and correction. The 32 qubits in the hardware allowed two of these to be created; they were then entangled, which required two gate operations. Errors were checked for during the initialization of the qubits and after the entanglement. These operations were performed thousands of times to derive error rates.

On individual hardware qubits, the error rate was 0.50 percent. When error correction was included, this rate dropped to 0.05 percent. But the system could do even better if it identified readings that indicated difficult-to-interpret error states and discarded those calculations. Doing the discarding dropped the error rate to 0.001 percent. These instances were rare enough that the team didn't have to throw out a significant number of operations, but they still made a huge difference in the error rate.

Next, the team switched to what they call a "Carbon code," which requires 30 physical qubits (24 data and six correction/detection), meaning the hardware could only host one. But the code was also optimized for the hardware. "Knowing the two-qubit gate fidelities, knowing how many interaction zones, how much parallelism you can have, we then optimize our error-correction codes for that," Svore said.

The Carbon code also allows the identification of errors that are difficult to correct properly, allowing those results to be discarded. With error correction and discarding of difficult-to-fix errors, the error rate dropped from 0.8 percent to 0.001 percent—a factor of 800 difference.

Finally, the researchers performed repeated rounds of gate operations followed by error detection and correction on a logical qubit using the Carbon code. These again showed a major improvement thanks to error correction (about an order of magnitude) after one round. By the second round, however, error correction had only cut the error rate in half, and any effect was statistically insignificant by round three.

So while the results tell us that error correction works, they also indicate that our current hardware isn't yet sufficient to allow for the extended operations that useful calculations will require. Still, Svore said, "I think this marks a critical milestone on the path to more elaborate computations that are fault tolerant and reliable" and emphasized that it was done on production commercial hardware rather than a one-of-a-kind academic machine.

We still need more and better qubits

Making sure this work is actually a milestone and not a detour, however, will require many additional improvements, as we're going to need a lot more than two rounds of error correction during any useful computations. Quantinuum's Jenni Strabley said there are a number of ways her company plans to push its technology forward. Some focus on further reducing the error rates of performing operations on the ions it uses for qubits. "Every 10th of a percent, every 100th of a percent counts because this is exponential in the overall circuit fidelity," Strabley said. "These two-qubit gates are used a lot. So a very, very small change in the qubit fidelity can make a big impact in the circuit fidelity."

Ions provide an advantage here, she argued, because their behavior is dictated by physics rather than device-to-device variations found in manufactured hardware. "You can really come up with very, very, very good error models for these systems and then just systematically beat those [errors] down," Strabley told Ars. "What's the long pole in the tent? OK, this is what we've got to work on. You get that down, then it's the next long pole in the tent, and so on."

One of the things Quantinuum expects to do in this regard is switch to barium ions for its qubits (it's currently using ytterbium ions). Strabley said that laser sources available to control barium ions have lower noise, which should improve performance.

The second requirement will be a lot more hardware qubits—having 32 hardware qubits limits the error-correction system tests that can be done on the current hardware. The challenge for Quantinuum will be expanding the number of qubits without losing the any-to-any connectivity that's currently possible. (While the company had initially expected to scale qubit counts rapidly, it has instead kept counts low while focusing on reducing errors.)

The current configuration looks like a racetrack oval, but expanding the length of the oval isn't a long-term solution, as ions will end up impractically distant from each other. Within two years, the company expects to move to a configuration that Strabley compared to the streets and avenues of Manhattan's road grid, which includes managing what she called a "weird" magnetic field at the four-way intersections. Eventually, it will also need to manage the equivalent of interstates that allow ions to transit to different grid systems.

Nothing like real hardware

In the meantime, Strabley was excited to see error correction done on actual hardware. While it's possible to make good models for individual qubits that run on normal computing hardware, she told Ars that qubit counts have been reaching the edge of what's realistically possible to run simulations with without resorting to approximations. "The time of 'we can just simulate it' is—if it's not done, it's nearly done," Strabley said. "We're really in the age of 'you just have to go do it on the hardware.'"

And she said that going to the hardware is revealing things that weren't obvious from modeling collections of qubits. "You can do a lot of work on these error-correcting systems—in simulation, in theory—but there's no substitute for running these on the hardware because you're going to learn a lot. And we did learn of additional errors that were coming into effect," she said. "Some of these errors, like what we call a memory error, we started to see some impact of that. And it's not an error that we've looked at as carefully, so we now have a battery of things we want to do to reduce that. "

Good morning. It's April 2, and today's photo comes from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. It showcases a globular cluster, NGC 1651, in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

This cluster of stars is about 120 light-years across. Like other such globular clusters, it is generally spherical, as the stars are bound to one another by gravity. Thus, there is a higher concentration of stars near the center of the cluster.

Pretty much every bright light in this image is a star but for a lovely spiral galaxy. Can you find it?

Source: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Girardi, F. Niederhofer