In 1916, a French consular official reported finding a giant "iron hill" deep in the Sahara desert, roughly 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Chinguetti, Mauritania—purportedly a meteorite (technically a mesosiderite) some 40 meters (130 feet) tall and 100 meters (330 feet) long. He brought back a small fragment, but the meteorite hasn't been found again since, despite the efforts of multiple expeditions, calling its very existence into question.

Three British researchers have conducted their own analysis and proposed a means of determining once and for all whether the Chinguetti meteorite really exists, detailing their findings in a new preprint posted to the physics arXiv. They contend that they have narrowed down the likely locations where the meteorite might be buried under high sand dunes and are currently awaiting access to data from a magnetometer survey of the region in hopes of either finding the mysterious missing meteorite or confirming that it likely never existed.

Captain Gaston Ripert was in charge of the Chinguetti camel corps. One day he overheard a conversation among the chameliers (camel drivers) about an unusual iron hill in the desert. He convinced a local chief to guide him there one night, taking Ripert on a 10-hour camel ride along a "disorienting" route, making a few detours along the way. He may even have been literally blindfolded, depending on how one interprets the French phrase en aveugle, which can mean either "blind" (i.e. without a compass) or "blindfolded." The 4-kilogram fragment Ripert collected was later analyzed by noted geologist Alfred Lacroix, who considered it a significant discovery. But when others failed to locate the larger Chinguetti meteorite, people started to doubt Ripert's story.

"I know that the general opinion is that the stone does not exist; that to some, I am purely and simply an imposter who picked up a metallic specimen," Ripert wrote to French naturalist Theodore Monod in 1934. "That to others, I am a simpleton who mistook a sandstone outcrop for an enormous meteorite. I shall do nothing to disabuse them, I know only what I saw."

Encouraged by a separate report of local blacksmiths claiming to recover iron from a giant block somewhere east or southeast of Chinguetti, Monod intermittently searched for the meteorite several times over the ensuing decades, to no avail. A pilot named Jacques Gallouédec thought he spotted a dark silhouette in the Saharan dunes in the 1980s. But neither Monod nor a second expedition in the late 1990s—documented by the UK's Channel 4—could find anything. Monod concluded in 1989 that Ripert had likely mistakenly identified a sedimentary rock "with no trace of metal" as a meteorite.

Still, as Rutgers University physicist Matt Buckley noted on Bluesky, "This story has everything: giant unexplained meteorites, sand dunes, a guy named Gaston, ductile nickel needles, secret aeromagnetic surveys, and camel drivers." So naturally, it intrigued Stephen Warren of Imperial College London, Oxford University's Ekaterini Protopapa, and Robert Warren, who began their own search for the mysterious missing meteorite in 2020.

The trio acknowledges that there are reasonable pro and con arguments for the existence (or not) of the Chinguetti meteorite. On the con side, there is no evidence of an impact crater, although a 1951 study suggested this could be explained if the meteorite's flight path had been nearly tangential to the Earth's surface. The strongest evidence against its existence comes from a 2001 analysis of radionuclide data for the small sample Ripert brought back. That data showed that the fragment's parent could not have been more than 1.6 meters in diameter, and the 2001 authors suggested that Ripert was either mistaken or outright lied.

But a Marseille astronomer named Jean Bosler had spoken to Ripert at length about the latter's discovery and believed the man to be sincere. One detail in particular is strikingly credible: Ripert described finding "metallic needles" in one area of the meteorite that he tried to break off by hitting it with the fragment. The needles proved too ductile. In 2003, scientists discovered that iron meteorites often do indeed contain nickel-rich spikes that are similarly ductile. There is no way Ripert (or any contemporary scientist) would have known about that in 1916.

Warren et al. have their own hypothesis. "It is possible that the meteorite became covered by sand within a few years [of Ripert's discovery]," they wrote. "And because the initial searches were in the wrong direction, it is conceivable that the meteorite was missed and remains hidden in the high dunes, still waiting to be discovered." As for the unusual feature spotted by Gallouédec in the 1980s, it was probably a shale diapir, "an ephemeral phenomenon which we have observed a number of times in the area," they wrote. "These blocky dark masses stand out strikingly, silhouetted against the light-colored dunes, and are hard to fathom until seen up close."

If the Chinguetti meteorite is indeed buried in a sand dune, Warren et al. estimated that such a dune would need to be at least 40 meters high (the estimated height of the missing meteorite) and used digital elevation model (DEM) data to identify likely locations. This included determining how fast the dunes migrated; they estimated that the dunes could not have moved more than 100 meters (about 328 feet, or 0.6 miles) since 1916. They identified two areas of high dunes near Chinguetti: Les Boucles, some 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) to the south; and the Batraz region between 40-60 kilometers (25-37 miles) to the southeast. "There is nowhere else for the meteorite to hide," they argued.

That led them to the question of just how far a camel could reasonably travel over that terrain in 10 hours, both with and without burdens. (Insert your own Monty Python jokes about the airspeed velocity of an unladen African or European swallow here.) Our intrepid authors made two excursions riding camels in the area and found that burdened camels averaged daily speeds of 2.6 to 3.9 km/hr (1.6 to 2.4 mph). Unburdened camels averaged 5 km/hr (3.1 mph). Ripert and his guide probably rode largely unburdened camels, per Warren et al., who thought the faster speed would not be reasonable across less smooth terrain—plus Ripert and his guide likely would have stopped to rest along the way rather than riding for 10 straight hours.

Indeed, the chameliers who guided the authors on their two excursions said they never traveled more than four hours at a stretch before taking a three-hour break so the animals could recover. Nor would the journey have been made in a straight line, particularly at night. So the authors concluded that there was an upper limit of 50 kilometers (31 miles) and a lower limit of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from Chingiuetti since "one would think that [Ripert] would have recognized the dunes close to town."

What's needed now is a magnetometer survey over the region the authors have identified as being the most likely location of the Chinguetti meteorite, if it exists. (The 1990s expedition had a magnetometer but only took a few null measurements at the location identified by Gallouédec.) The good news is that there is such an aeromagnetic dataset already, collected as part of a project called PRISM-1. It's currently held by the Mauritanian Ministry of Petroleum Energy and Mines. The bad news is that the data and detailed maps are proprietary information, and while Warren et al. have made repeated requests, they have yet to gain access.

Alternatively, one could conduct a surface magnetometer survey on foot along the Western base of each potential dune. In December 2022, the authors did just that, focusing on a small area covering six dunes. They were able to rule out all six. To complete a full survey of the areas of interest, they estimate it would take at least three weeks. It would be much easier to analyze the PRISM-1 data, should the team be granted access.

"[E]xamination of the PRISM-I aeromagnetics data in the region south of Chinguetti... can finally resolve the question of the existence of the Chinguetti meteorite in a definitive manner," Warren et al. concluded. "If the result is negative the explanation of Ripert’s story would remain unsolved, however, and the problems of the ductile needles, and the coincidental discovery of the mesosiderite would remain."

arXiv, 2024. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2402.14150  (About DOIs).

“The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” said Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is part of a team of geoscientists studying a site at Bulqizë in Albania where miners at one of the world’s largest chromite mines may have accidentally drilled into a hydrogen reservoir.

The question Donzé and his team want to tackle is whether hydrogen has a parallel geological system with huge subsurface reservoirs that could be extracted the way we extract oil. “Bulqizë is a reference case. For the first time, we have real data. We have a proof,” Donzé said.

Greenish energy source

Water is the only byproduct of burning hydrogen, which makes it a potential go-to green energy source. The problem is that the vast majority of the 96 million tons of hydrogen we make each year comes from processing methane, and that does release greenhouse gases. Lots of them. “There are green ways to produce hydrogen, but the cost of processing methane is lower. This is why we are looking for alternatives,” Donzé said.

And the key to one of those alternatives may be buried in the Bulqizë mine. Chromite, an ore that contains lots of chromium, has been mined at Bulqizë since the 1980s. The mining operation was going smoothly until 2007, when the miners drilled through a fault, a discontinuity in the rocks. “Then they started to have explosions. In the mine, they had a small electric train, and there were sparks flying, and then… boom,” Donzé said. At first, Bulqizë management thought the cause was methane, the usual culprit of mining accidents. But it wasn’t.

Hydrogen at fault

The mine was bought by a Chinese company in 2017, and the new owners immediately sent their engineering teams to deal with explosions. They did measurements and found the hydrogen concentration in the mine’s galleries was around 1–2 percent. It only needs to be at 0.4–0.5 percent for the atmosphere to become explosive. “They also found the hydrogen was coming from the fault drilled through back in 2007. Unfortunately, one of the explosions happened when the engineering team was down there. Three or four people died,” Donzé said.

It turned out that over 200 tons of hydrogen was released from the Bulqizë mine each year. Donzé’s team went there to figure out where all this hydrogen was coming from.

The rocks did not contain enough hydrogen to reach that sort of flow rate. One possible explanation is the hydrogen being released as a product of an ongoing geological process called serpentinization. “But for this to happen, the temperature in the mine would need to reach 200–300 degrees Celsius, and even then, it would not produce 200 tons per year,” said Donzé. “So the most probable was the third option—that we have a reservoir,” he added.

"Probable," of course, is far from certain.

The question of purity

“The problem is you hear about hydrogen reservoirs in the media, millions of tons of hydrogen, but this is always purely speculative,” Donzé said. In 2023, Ars reported on a reservoir at a closed coal mine in Lorraine, France. The estimated amount of hydrogen stored there was 46 million tons.

“I called one of my colleagues in Lorraine to find out what was going on," Donzé explained. "He told me hydrogen was probably not coming from the coal itself but from the siderite, carbonates containing iron, that were beneath the coal. Plus, it was not just hydrogen but a mix of hydrogen and methane.”

Both hydrogen and methane were dissolved in water used to flood the mine. “So you degas the water and end up with roughly five percent hydrogen and 95 percent methane. What do you do with the methane? Is this still green energy? You tell me,” Donzé said.

Bulqizë was entirely different. The gas pushed out of the Bulqizë mine is 84 percent hydrogen, one of the highest concentrations on record. Moreover, the hydrogen was not dissolved in water—it bubbled through Bulqizë’s underground pools, making them look like a jacuzzi. “There are sites like Lorraine in Turkey, there is one in Oman, but [the gas there is] not pure hydrogen,” Donzé said.

So are there other places like Bulqizë?

Hydrogen recipe

“What puzzles me here is that oilers have already drilled everywhere in the world looking for oil and gas. There were millions of boreholes all over the place, and who really reported massive amounts of hydrogen stored in a big reservoir? Nobody. This is the problem,” Donzé said.

One potential explanation is that the drillers were targeting oil, not hydrogen. Perhaps if we had a list of telltale signs to look for to find hydrogen deposits, we could find them somewhere. “We haven’t published that yet, but those telltale signs are exactly what our next paper will be about. What we found in Bulqizë is the recipe, the main components of the geological configuration that is likely to hold geological hydrogen,” Donzé said.

So here's the list. The first thing to look for is ophiolite, a remnant of oceanic crust formed roughly 100 million years ago that has been uplifted by tectonic changes and made part of the continental crust. In Europe, an ophiolite massif extends for over 3,000 kilometers from Turkey to Slovenia. But the rock type alone won’t cut it. “Look for specific types of ophiolite: harzburgite, dunite, and the one with the ore—chromite. I would look for places that have all three,” Donzé said.

So Donzé’s team got busy looking for such places, and they found one. “There is a mine in Ural, central Russia, that has the exact same geological configuration as Bulqizë: harzburgite, dunite, and chromite,” said Donzé. “And guess what. They have a problem with explosions.”

Science, 2024. DOI: 10.1126/science.adk9099

Jacek Krywko is a science and technology writer based in Olsztyn, Poland. He covers space exploration and artificial intelligence research.

Welcome to Edition 6.32 of the Rocket Report! I'm writing the report again this week as Eric Berger is in Washington, DC, to receive a well-earned honor, the 2024 Excellence in Commercial Space Journalism Award from the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Cape Canaveral is the world's busiest spaceport, and this week, three leading US launch companies were active there. SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 rocket, and a few miles away, Blue Origin raised a New Glenn rocket on its launch pad for long-awaited ground testing. Nearby, United Launch Alliance began assembling an Atlas V rocket for the first crew launch of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in April. 2024 is shaping up to be a truly exciting year for the spaceflight community.

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.

Astroscale inspector satellite launched by Rocket Lab. Astroscale, a well-capitalized Japanese startup, has launched a small satellite to do something that has never been done in space, Ars reports. This new spacecraft, delivered into orbit on February 18 by Rocket Lab, will approach a defunct upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket that has been circling Earth for more than 15 years. Over the next few months, the satellite will try to move within arm's reach of the rocket, taking pictures and performing complicated maneuvers to move around the bus-size H-IIA upper stage as it moves around the planet at nearly 5 miles per second (7.6 km/s).

This is a first ... Astroscale's ADRAS-J mission is the first satellite designed to approach and inspect a piece of space junk in orbit. This is a public-private partnership between Astroscale and the Japanese space agency. Of course, space agencies and commercial companies have demonstrated rendezvous operations in orbit for decades. The difference here is the H-IIA rocket is uncontrolled, likely spinning and in a slow tumble, and was never designed to accommodate any visitors. Japan left it in orbit in January 2009 following the launch of a climate-monitoring satellite and didn't look back. ADRAS-J is a technology demonstration that could pave the way for a follow-on mission to actually link up with this H-IIA rocket and remove it from orbit. Astroscale eventually wants to use these technologies for satellite servicing, refueling, and further debris removal missions. (submitted by Ken the Bin and Jay500001)

Software error blamed for Firefly launch malfunction. Firefly Aerospace released an update Tuesday on an investigation into an upper-stage malfunction on the company's Alpha rocket in December. The investigation team, consisting of membership from Firefly, the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board, Lockheed Martin, NASA, and the US Space Force, determined a software error in the rocket's guidance, navigation, and control software algorithm ultimately caused the Alpha rocket to release its payload into a lower-than-planned orbit following a launch from California.

Upper stage woes... The software error prevented the rocket from sending the "necessary pulse commands" to control thrusters on the upper stage before its main engine was supposed to reignite. This second burn by the upper stage was supposed to circularize the rocket's orbit, but it didn't happen as planned. Still, the Alpha rocket safely released its commercial satellite payload for Lockheed Martin. Although the lower orbit caused the satellite to reenter the atmosphere earlier this month, Lockheed Martin said it was able to achieve many of the objectives of the technology demonstration mission, which focused on testing an electronically steered antenna. This was the fourth launch of an Alpha rocket, and two of them have suffered from upper-stage malfunctions during engine restart attempts. Firefly says it is preparing the next Alpha rocket to fly "in the coming months." (submitted by Ken the Bin)

A good fundraising round for Gilmour Space. Australian startup Gilmour Space Technologies has raised AU$55 million ($36 million) in a Series D funding round announced Monday, Space News reports. The funding supports the small launch vehicle startup’s campaign to manufacture, test, and begin launching rockets and satellites from the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland. Gilmour Space, founded in 2012, is developing a three-stage rocket called Eris. The first Eris test flight is expected “in the coming months, pending launch approvals from the Australian Space Agency,” according to the Gilmour Space news release.

Launching from Down Under... Gilmour Space is aiming to launch the first Australian-built rocket into orbit later this year. The Eris rocket is powered by hybrid engines, and Gilmour says it is capable of delivering about 670 pounds (305 kilograms) of payload mass into a Sun-synchronous orbit. The $36 million fundraising round announced this week follows a $46 million fundraising round in 2021. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Gilmour Space is aiming for the first flight of Eris in April, and this latest fundraising should give the company enough money to mount four test flights. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Japan's H3 rocket reaches orbit. Japan's new H3 rocket took off February 16 on its second test flight, Ars reports. Its success is an important milestone for the launch vehicle poised to power nearly all of the Japanese space program's missions into orbit over the next decade. The H3 rocket reached an on-target orbit, released two small satellites, and then deorbited its upper stage, demonstrating good performance by the rocket's core stage, strap-on solid rocket boosters, and two burns by the second stage engine. The successful test flight follows a failed mission in March 2023, when the H3 and a Japanese Earth observation satellite crashed into the sea due to an electrical glitch on the upper stage.

Will H3 catch on anywhere else? ... The success of H3 means Japan won't face a gap in independent launch capability like the one experienced by the European Space Agency. The H3 is an expendable, heavier, but less expensive replacement for Japan's H-IIA and H-IIB rockets. The H-IIB is retired, and there are two H-IIA rockets left to fly before the H3 fully takes over responsibility for launching Japanese military satellites, science missions, and resupply spacecraft heading for the International Space Station. Officials from the Japanese space agency and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries want the H3 to compete for commercial launch contracts on the global marketplace, but so far, commercial uptake for the H3 lags far behind SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, United Launch Alliance's Vulcan, Europe's Ariane 6, and Blue Origin's New Glenn. (submitted by Ken the Bin and tsunam)

Atlas V assembly begins for Starliner launch. United Launch Alliance's ground team at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station kicked off the stacking of an Atlas V rocket Wednesday for the first launch of astronauts on Boeing's Starliner crew capsule. Starliner's oft-delayed Crew Flight Test is currently scheduled for launch in mid-April, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station for a mission lasting up to two weeks. Cranes raised the first stage of the Atlas V vertically on its mobile launch platform Wednesday. That will be followed by the attachment of two solid rocket boosters and the Centaur upper stage. In early April, the Starliner spacecraft will be installed on top of the Atlas V. Boeing says a successful test in January of a redesign in Starliner's parachute system helped clear the way for the Crew Flight Test.

100th Atlas V ... After two unpiloted test flights of Starliner, Boeing appears to finally be ready to put astronauts on the spacecraft. This will be the first human launch on an Atlas V rocket and the 100th flight of an Atlas V overall. ULA plans to retire the Atlas V in the coming years, with the Vulcan rocket coming online as a replacement. But the Atlas V isn't going away immediately. There are 17 Atlas V rockets left to fly, and seven of those are assigned to Starliner missions to rotate crews on the International Space Station.

First flight-ready Ariane 6 rocket arrives in Kourou. The cargo ship Canopée has completed a 10-day transatlantic voyage to deliver the core and second stages of the first Ariane 6 rocket to its launch site in French Guiana, European Spaceflight reports. The cargo ship picked up the core stage and second stage from ports located near ArianeGroup factories in France and Germany, respectively. Hardware for the Ariane 6's payload fairing and solid rocket boosters are already at the launch site in Kourou, French Guiana.

Road to the launch pad ... Operations to commence integration of the various components of the first Ariane 6 launch vehicle will now begin in full swing. This process is expected to proceed into April. The rocket will then be transported to the launch pad to complete final preparations for launch. During this period, the final qualification review will be concluded, which will certify that Ariane 6 is fit for flight. If all goes well, the maiden Ariane 6 flight will occur in the second half of June. A test model of the Ariane 6 rocket used for hotfire testing last year is now being disassembled from the launch pad, making room for the flight vehicle's arrival. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Human-rating milestone for Indian rocket. The Indian Space Research Organization has announced it has completed human-rating of a critical component of the LVM3 rocket that Indian astronauts will ride into orbit on the nation's Gaganyaan program. ISRO completed a final round of ground qualification tests for the CE20 cryogenic upper-stage engine on February 13, with the seventh in a series of vacuum ignition tests at a high-altitude test facility to simulate flight conditions. The hydrogen-fueled CE20 engine will be responsible for the insertion into low-Earth orbit of the Gaganyaan spacecraft with astronauts aboard.

Long path to get here … In order to qualify the CE20 engine for human-rating standards, four engines have undergone 39 hotfiring tests under different operating conditions for a cumulative duration of 8,810 seconds against the minimum human-rating qualification standard requirement of 6,350 seconds, according to ISRO. Also, the actual flight engine assigned to the first unpiloted Gaganyaan orbital test flight later this year has completed acceptance testing, verifying it meets stringent design specifications. Indian officials are targeting 2025 for the first crew test flight of Gaganyaan. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

The Bahamas, a destination for space enthusiasts? The Bahamas' Ministry of Tourism has signed a "letter of agreement" with SpaceX in a step toward enabling landings of Falcon 9 boosters on a drone ship within Bahamian territorial waters, rather than the current landing location in international waters. According to a statement from the Bahamian government, SpaceX is finalizing mission designs where one of the company's drone ships will be positioned for Falcon 9 booster landings at a new location among the Bahamian islands east of the Exumas. The agreement "positions the Bahamas as a global destination for witnessing booster landings," the country's tourism ministry said.

This is pretty cool … The tourism ministry said these booster landings closer to the Bahamas could be visible from cruise ships, resorts, and other tourist hotspots. "The exclusive visibility of rocket landings on an autonomous drone ship from various Bahamian islands distinguishes this destination as the only one of its kind worldwide." I've seen dozens of Falcon 9 booster landings at Cape Canaveral, and last year observed the nighttime descent of a Falcon 9 booster from a cruise ship sailing near the Bahamas. Seeing one of these landings in person is always breathtaking, but it was striking to watch a booster reentry from an entirely different perspective offshore. If more people get to see it, that's a good thing. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin is the leading contender to buy ULA. Blue Origin, the rocket company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has emerged as the sole finalist to buy United Launch Alliance, Ars reports. The sale is not official, and nothing has been formally announced. The co-owners of United Launch Alliance, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, have yet to comment publicly on the sale of the company, which, until the rise of SpaceX, was the sole major launch provider in the United States. They declined again on Wednesday. However, two sources told Ars that Blue Origin is nearing the purchase of ULA. The sources said they have not personally seen any signed agreements, but they expect the sale to be announced within a month or two.

Why would Blue buy ULA? … There is considerable overlap in the launch businesses of ULA and Blue Origin. Vulcan and Blue Origin's own large rocket, New Glenn, will both compete for government launch contracts, and both use the BE-4 rocket engines developed by Blue Origin. However, some synergies could make a combined Blue Origin-ULA a more formidable launch competitor to SpaceX. ULA has operational launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. It has large integration facilities at both locations. Additionally, it has an experienced launch team with a long track record of success, which could be useful to Blue Origin as it seeks to launch the New Glenn rocket later this year. Finally, ULA has some expertise in the storage of cryogenic fuels in space.

New Glenn on the launch pad. On Wednesday, engineers rolled a full-scale New Glenn rocket, partially made up of flight hardware, to a launch pad in Florida for ground testing, Ars reports. This is a big milestone for Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, which has delayed the debut of New Glenn for several years. In the coming weeks, Blue Origin will run the rocket and ground systems through cryogenic loading and pressure testing. This 320-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket is one of the largest ever to appear on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, matching the height of NASA's Space Launch System and nearly as tall as NASA's Saturn V rocket from the Apollo era.

Trying times ahead … While this is a big sign of progress for Blue Origin, there's a lot of work left before the rocket is ready for launch. For one thing, the New Glenn currently on the pad is composed of a flight-capable booster, but its upper stage was built purely for ground testing. This first round of testing will only involve loading the first stage with inert liquid nitrogen while filling the rocket with its actual propellants, liquid methane, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen, will not occur until summer. Blue Origin still says it plans to launch the first New Glenn rocket by the end of the year. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Count 'em, nine Starships. As SpaceX nears its first Starship launch of 2024—possibly as soon as within three weeks—from its Starbase facility in South Texas, the company is pressing regulators to increase its cadence of flights, Ars reports. During a press availability this week, the administrator for Commercial Space Transportation at the Federal Aviation Administration, Kelvin Coleman, said the agency is working with the company to try to facilitate the Starship launch-licensing process. "They're looking at a pretty aggressive launch schedule this year," he said. "They're looking at, I believe, at least nine launches this year. That's a lot of launches."

Next flight next month? … SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said his company is now targeting early to mid-March for the third launch attempt of Starship, following Starship's first two test flights last year. This flight of the highly experimental vehicle, Musk said, has a reasonably good chance of successfully reaching orbit. Coleman said that, from a regulatory standpoint, that timeline sounds "about right."

SpaceX has its eye on another Florida launch pad. One of the largest launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station will become vacant later this year after the final flight of United Launch Alliance's Delta IV Heavy rocket. SpaceX is looking to make the sprawling facility a new home for the Starship launch vehicle, Ars reports. SpaceX's interest in taking over Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37) has been rumored for months, but a new website set up to inform the public about an environmental review of SpaceX's plan confirms the company is seeking to move in. This launch pad is on property owned by the US Space Force. Once ULA flies the final Delta IV next month, the company will hand the launch facility back over to the military, which will look for a new tenant. Including SLC-37, SpaceX now has plans in place for at least four Starship launch pads: Two in Texas, and two in Florida.

Hello to SLC-37, goodbye to LC-49 … In the near term, SpaceX plans to build a second Starship launch tower at the company's Starbase test site in Cameron County, Texas. There's also a partially built Starship launch tower at Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and now SpaceX has set its sights on SLC-37. SpaceX was previously looking at building another Starship launch pad from scratch on NASA property at Kennedy Space Center. NASA environmental studies for this location, known as Launch Complex 49, kicked off in 2021. Patti Bielling, a NASA spokesperson, told Ars the agency is no longer working on Launch Complex 49.

Next three launches

February 23: Long March 5 | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 11:30 UTC

February 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-39 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 21:59 UTC

February 29: Soyuz | Meteor-M 2-4 | Vostochny Cosmodrome, Russia | 05:43 UTC

For the first time in more than half a century, a US-built spacecraft has made a soft landing on the Moon.

There was high drama and plenty of intrigue on Thursday evening as Intuitive Machines attempted to land its Odysseus spacecraft in a small crater not all that far from the south pole of the Moon. About 20 minutes after touchdown, NASA declared success, but some questions remained about the health of the lander and its orientation. Why? Because while Odysseus was phoning home, its signal was weak.

But after what the spacecraft and its developer, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, went through earlier on Thursday, it was a miracle that Odysseus made it at all.

Losing your way

The landing attempt was delayed by about two hours after mission controllers had to send a hastily cobbled together, last-minute software patch up to the lander while it was still in orbit around the Moon. Patching your spacecraft's software shortly before it makes its most critical move is just about the last thing a vehicle operator wants to do. But Intuitive Machines was desperate.

Earlier on Thursday, the company realized that its navigation lasers and cameras were not operational. These rangefinders are essential for two functions during landing: terrain-relative navigation and hazard-relative navigation. These two modes help the flight computer on Odysseus to determine precisely where it is during descent—by snapping lots of images and comparing them to known Moon topography—and to identify hazards below, such as boulders, in order to find a safe landing site.

Without these rangefinders, Odysseus was going to faceplant into the Moon. Fortunately, this mission carried a bunch of science payloads. As part of its commercial lunar program, NASA is paying about $118 million for the delivery of six scientific payloads to the lunar surface.

One of these payloads just happened to be the Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment, a 15-kg package that contains three small cameras. With this NDL payload, NASA sought to test out technologies that might be used to improve navigation systems in future landing attempts on the Moon.

The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment's three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. So, some software was hastily written and shipped up to the lander. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?

A new home

The Odysseus lander started its descent from a circular orbit 57 miles (92 km) above the surface of the Moon, an hour and 13 minutes before its planned landing time. The lander began a powered descent, using its main engine powered by liquid oxygen and methane, 11 minutes before touchdown on this timeline. During these final, crucial minutes, Odysseus' improvised terrain-relative navigation camera scanned the surface for hazards, such as boulders, to ensure a safe landing site.

After the touchdown, the mission controllers knew it might take a minute or two to get a good signal back from the lander, which was relaying signals back to large satellite dishes on Earth. First one, then two, and then five minutes passed with an increasingly uncomfortable silence in the mission control room for Intuitive Machines. Nothing.

Finally, after 10 minutes, mission director Tim Crain called out that the lander was sending a faint signal back to Earth.

“We’re not dead yet," said Crain, who is a co-founder of the company.

A few minutes more passed. The company continued to pick up a faint signal from the high-gain antenna on the lander. “Odysseus has a new home," Crain said as the control room erupted in cheers.

Still, there were concerns because the signal was weak. Was it possible that the spacecraft was tipping or toppled over?

Finally, about two hours later, Intuitive Machines provided more definitive information on the social media site X: "After troubleshooting communications, flight controllers have confirmed Odysseus is upright and starting to send data. Right now, we are working to downlink the first images from the lunar surface."

They had made it safely.

Critical for NASA

This mission was part of a NASA initiative called the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, in which the space agency is paying private companies to deliver science experiments and other cargo to the lunar surface. The space agency is willing to tolerate some failures as the companies learn the ropes of landing on the Moon.

That Odysseus made it down to the surface and began transmitting back to Earth huge win for NASA and Intuitive Machines. It's a historic moment for the commercial space industry as previously no private spacecraft safely reached the Moon.

This is the second commercial lunar mission funded by NASA. Astrobotic's Peregrine lander launched into space on a Vulcan rocket last month. Shortly after separating from the Vulcan rocket, however, Peregrine sustained a fatal blow when one of its propulsion tanks ruptured. At NASA's request, Astrobotic sent its spacecraft plunging back into Earth's atmosphere so it could be disposed of safely.

So why is NASA supporting such risky ventures?

The space agency believes that private companies will eventually get the hang of flying vehicles to the Moon. And once the service becomes more routine, it will cost NASA a fraction of the price it would pay for traditionally developed lunar services. In essence, then, NASA is taking some short-term risks for some long-term gains. It looks like one of those risks paid off Thursday.

This story was updated shortly after publication to reflect the late-breaking news that the Intuitive Machines-built lander is upright and transmitting data.

British comedian Michael McIntyre has a standard bit in his standup routines concerning the many (many!) slang terms posh British people use to describe being drunk. These include "wellied," "trousered," and "ratarsed," to name a few. McIntyre's bit rests on his assertion that pretty much any English word can be modified into a so-called "drunkonym," bolstered by a few handy examples: "I was utterly gazeboed," or "I am going to get totally and utterly carparked."

It's a clever riff that sparked the interest of two German linguists. Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer of Chemnitz University of Technology and Peter Uhrig of FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg decided to draw on their expertise to test McIntyre's claim that any word in the English language could be modified to mean "being in a state of high inebriation." Given their prevalence, "It is highly surprising that drunkonyms are still under-researched from a linguistic perspective," the authors wrote in their new paper published in the Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association. Bonus: the authors included an extensive appendix of 546 English synonyms for "drunk," drawn from various sources, which makes for entertaining reading.

There is a long tradition of coming up with colorful expressions for drunkenness in the English language, with the Oxford English Dictionary listing a usage as early as 1382: "merry," meaning "boisterous or cheerful due to alcohol; slight drunk, tipsy." Another OED entry from 1630 lists "blinde" (as in blind drunk) as a drunkonym. Even Benjamin Franklin got into the act with his 1737 Drinker's Dictionary, listing 288 words and phrases for denoting drunkenness. By 1975, there were more than 353 synonyms for "drunk" listed in that year's edition of the Dictionary of American Slang. By 1981, linguist Harry Levine noted 900 terms used as drunkonyms.

So the sheer number of drunkonyms has been increasing, with BBC culture reporter Susie Dent estimating in 2017 that there are some 3,000 English slang synonyms for being drunk, including "ramsquaddled," "obfusticated," "tight as a tick," and my personal favorite, "been too free with Sir Richard." Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig offer a few caveats, noting that the latter number is likely inflated (much like the number of words for "snow" in Eskimo languages). Also, most drunkonyms are not frequently used and tend to fall out of use quickly rather than taking root in the broader cultural consciousness.

For their study, Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig scoured various sources to compile their own working list of drunkonyms, excluding any with "drunk" as a base (e.g., "martin-drunk") and using Excel to delete any repeated terms. They ended up with the 546 drunkonyms listed in their appendix.

Surprisingly, there were Urban Dictionary entries for McIntyre's terms "gazeboed" (2008), and "carparked," and "pyjama-ed" (2009). McIntyre first recorded this particular bit in October 2009 for a DVD, suggesting that "these terms were already in use either shortly before or around the time of McIntyre's tour"—perhaps inspired by the comedian's earlier standup performances as he worked out the material before producing a DVD for posterity. That said, the October 2009 audience responded with a lot of laughter and applause, so the drunkonyms were at least unfamiliar to many in attendance that night.

"If McInyre's hypothesis were right that any English word can be used to mean 'drunk,' it would be necessary to ensure the listeners' understanding of the innovative use of the word either through contextual clues or other linguistic means," the authors wrote. They found that the basic structure of McIntyre's drunkonyms is common enough—namely, combining "be" or "get" with an intensifying adverb ("totally") and a random word ending in "-ed." However, that alone doesn't sufficiently explain the ease with which people grasp the meaning of the new usages.

Sanchez-Stockhammer and Uhrig suggest there is an additional cultural element at play. By the time English native speakers reach adulthood, they've simply been exposed to so many drunkonyms that they can easily guess the new meaning based on context—and like any good professional comedian, McIntyre makes sure to prime his audience.

"We can say that the wide range of words observed in the already existing lists of drunkonyms seems to support the view that there is a large number of words that one could potentially use to creatively express drunkenness in English," the authors concluded. That said, "There is ample potential for future studies into the question... as our productive constructions only apply to less than half of all drunkonyms" collected in their appendix.

We look forward to future insights into the structural forms of "blotto," "slug-nutty," or "stocious."

Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 2024. DOI: 10.1515/gcla-2023-0007  (About DOIs).

Most of NASA is a pretty buttoned-down place these days. Nearly 70 years old, the space agency is no longer the rambunctious adolescent it was during the race to the Moon in the 1960s. If you go to a NASA field center today, you're much more likely to get dragged into a meeting or a review than witness a rocket engine test.

One way to describe the space agency today is "risk averse." Some of this, certainly, is understandable. NASA is where flight director Gene Kranz famously said during the Apollo 13 rescue, "Failure is not an option." Moreover, after three major accidents that resulted in the death of 17 astronauts—Apollo 1 and space shuttles Challenger and Columbia—NASA takes every conceivable precaution to avoid similar tragedies in the future.

But there does come a point where NASA becomes so risk averse that it no longer takes bold and giant steps, succumbing to paralysis by analysis. As one long-time NASA engineer told me several years ago, only partly tongue-in-cheek, it took a minor miracle for engineers designing the Orion spacecraft to get a small window on the vehicle through the rigorous safety review process.

Happily, however, there are still corners of the space agency where the mad scientists are free to play. One of these is in the science "directorate" of NASA, where about seven years ago, a handful of scientists and engineers were trying to figure out a way to get some experiments to the Moon without busting their limited budget. Flying a phalanx of such missions the old way would have cost billions of dollars. They didn't have that kind of money, nor all the time in the world.

These scientists, including the leader of the directorate, Thomas Zurbuchen, knew that the Moon was about to become a red-hot target for exploration.

Back to the Moon

For decades after Apollo, NASA had basically ignored the Moon. It was, as Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin said, magnificent but desolate. The space agency turned its robotic exploration efforts to Mars and beyond, and its human program remained in low-Earth orbit. The Moon? It was cold and gray, dry and airless.

But by the mid-2010s, Zurbuchen and other scientists were increasingly convinced that there were deposits of water ice at the lunar poles in permanently shadowed craters. Moreover, NASA's human exploration program was finally getting serious about going back into deep space, and it was clear that the Moon would be the first stop. Finally, there was a sense of urgency as China started to land rovers on the Moon and set out plans to build a lunar base near the South Pole.

So NASA's scientists knew they wanted to get experiments, rovers, and other things to the Moon—nothing too massive, mostly payloads from a few dozen to a few hundred kilograms—to reassess the lunar surface and determine what resources were there and how we might get at them. The idea was to do cool science but also prepare the way and support human activity on the Moon. But NASA's science division didn't have billions of dollars to throw at a lunar program like the human exploration division.

So Zurbuchen and his team faced a choice. They could save up for a handful of big, expensive missions flown by traditional contractors. Or they could try something new.

The commercial space industry, spurred in part by the Google Lunar xPrize that was never won, was starting to make some noise about developing small lunar landers. Could NASA provide some incentives for a few of these companies to finish their landers and deliver experiments to the Moon?

At a cost of a few hundred million dollars a year, such a commercial plan made some sense. But there were risks. Getting into space was hard enough. Actually landing on the Moon? That's very hard. A lander must be powered all the way down to the surface since there is no atmosphere for braking, and due to a lag in communications, it must be done autonomously. And, oh yeah, there are boulders and craters all over the Moon, so your lander had better have a smart navigation system on board.

Zurbuchen knew this would be risky and that NASA would have to accept some failures. Private companies, doing this for less money, would have to shed much of NASA's rigorous safety procedures. To help his administrators understand what he and the commercial companies wanted to do, Zurbuchen used the phrase "shots on goal" to describe the plan.

He knew the private companies would miss some shots.

Meet CLPS

Most Americans have never heard of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. (It's a clunky name, so space nerds generally refer to it by CLPS, pronounced "clips.") But that's starting to change now that companies are putting their landers into space.

NASA first asked the industry who would be interested in bidding on Moon missions in 2018, and a year later, the space agency announced its first awardees. A Pittsburgh-based startup, Astrobotic, won $79.5 million; Houston-based Intuitive Machines won $77 million, and Orbit Beyond won $97 million. Launches were intended to occur by 2020.

But pretty quickly, it became clear that the companies wouldn't make that deadline. While they made credible technical progress, they also had setbacks. Astrobotic had propulsion problems. Intuitive Machines accidentally blew up a propellant tank during testing. And in 2020, Orbit Beyond waved the red flag and dropped out of its contract award, saying it could not complete the task. The pandemic compounded each company's woes, slowing down work and impacting the aerospace industry supply chain.

Beyond the technical challenges, a bigger issue was finances. To win NASA contracts, the companies bid lower amounts. They hoped to recoup some of their costs by selling some of the payload space on their landers to commercial customers. And they did sell some slots, but building Moon landers turns out to be pretty expensive. NASA found ways to help where it could. By asking Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines to change their landing sites to more interesting (and challenging to reach) locations on the Moon, NASA officials managed to add a few tens of millions of dollars to these otherwise fixed-price contracts. Still, the companies were cash-strapped.

Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines finally completed their vehicles simultaneously in late 2023. Due to the vagaries of launch and other external factories, Astrobotic's Peregrine lander flew first, on a Vulcan rocket on January 8. Shortly after separating from the Vulcan rocket, however, Peregrine sustained a serious blow when one of its propulsion tanks ruptured. At NASA's request, Astrobotic sent its spacecraft plunging back into Earth's atmosphere so it could be disposed of safely.

Will VIPER be predator or prey?

Although Astrobotic won plaudits for its transparent communication during the mission, this failure raises a significant quandary for NASA. Peregrine was supposed to be a pathfinder for the company, testing procedures and software for landing on the lunar surface. But because the spacecraft never got close to the lunar surface, it's unclear whether Astrobotic's landing technology works.

That's a big problem because the company's next mission entails flying the significantly larger and more complex Griffin lander. The first Griffin flight is supposed to deliver NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, to the Nobile crater near the South Pole of the Moon. This is a rather significant payload that cost NASA more than $400 million to develop. (In addition, Astrobotic received a $199.5 million contract to deliver the rover).

The agency has previously resisted pressure to move the lander's delivery to a more traditional contracting method. But what will happen now that Peregrine has failed? I think it's likely that NASA will want to see Griffin fly at least once before risking the VIPER mission on Griffin for its debut flight. NASA is probably also studying alternative options for delivery, including a more traditional procurement or possibly working with the Indian government.

Whatever NASA decides, it will be telling about the extent of the space agency's confidence in its commercial lunar partners.

With Astrobotic's first mission over, the focus has now turned to Intuitive Machines. The company's Odysseus lander launched last week on a Falcon 9 rocket, and if all goes well, it will attempt to land on the Moon on Thursday at around 5 pm ET (23:00 UTC). It would go a long way toward showing the viability of the CLPS program if Odysseus could stick the landing. But this is no sure thing.

Including Astrobotic, there have been three non-governmental missions flown to date that have attempted to land on the Moon. The others, Israel-based SpaceIL’s Beresheet and ispace Japan’s Hakuto-R, also failed. To date, then, the private companies are batting 0.000.

Will anyone survive?

If I haven't been clear until now, let me be so before continuing. I think CLPS is a daring program—exactly the type of risk-taking that NASA should be following in non-critical missions outside of human spaceflight. If CLPS works, in a few years, the space agency will have laid the foundation for a highway to the Moon. US companies could provide rapid, regular transport to the Moon for pennies on the dollar of what the agency would have been charged for highly specialized, one-off missions in the past.

In short, if we're ever to expand the sphere of human activity to the Moon, we really need programs like CLPS to succeed. For that reason I, and many other people who dream of a vibrant future for humanity in space, are rooting like hell for its success.

At the same time, many of us worry about whether it will survive.

First of all, Astrobotic's failure is concerning. If Intuitive Machines also fails, it's not difficult to envision key members of Congress asking why NASA is spending all of this money on commercial landers. (To date, NASA has eight CLPS missions on contract with various providers: Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, Draper Laboratory, and Firefly Aerospace. The total value is more than $1 billion). Some of these Congressional members would be happy to shut down the commercial program and reward the traditional contractors who contribute to their campaigns.

There are also valid questions about how big of a "commercial" market there is for these services. There are some nifty private payloads on these early CLPS missions, but they mostly seem to be one-off exhibitions. There is no clear signal yet that long-term industrial customers will be signing up for these missions. For the time being, NASA is paying most of the freight.

Finally, there are financial concerns.

Intuitive Machines is a publicly traded company. Like a slew of other new space firms, it went public via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, for an infusion of cash. Also like a lot of other new space companies, its revenues have lagged expenses. In its most recent financial statement, Intuitive Machines reported $40.7 million in cash and cash equivalents. This is balanced against operating losses, through the first three quarters of 2023, of $50.3 million. There is plenty of chatter in the industry about how the other lander companies are struggling financially as well. Regarding cash flow, they seem to be living hand to mouth.

What it will take to survive

Representatives of Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, Firefly, and Draper all appeared on stage last week together during a panel discussion at the ASCENDxTexas conference. Toward the end, a NASA official, Jennifer Lopez, asked each company representative what the space agency could do to support their efforts further and help ignite commercial activity on the Moon.

The answers were insightful—in the sense of what NASA could do to help and about the challenges the companies face.

Lindsay Papsidero, senior director of civil and commercial space at Astrobotic, said the companies need help with long-term planning and financial stability. "The thing that would make all of the businesses healthy is block buys," she said. "If we could offer commercial customers a regular schedule. It could become a trains-leaving-the-station-type approach."

In a block buy, NASA would contract with one or more companies to provide a certain number of missions, perhaps six or eight, well in advance. This would allow the lander companies to be more efficient in allocating capital and hiring employees. There is also precedent for it, as NASA used this approach to buy cargo launches to the International Space Station from SpaceX and Orbital Sciences. About 50 commercial cargo missions have launched during the last 11 years under this program. Such block buys, of course, would represent a significant financial commitment from NASA.

A senior official from Intuitive Machines, Bob Pavelko, said NASA should continue planning for and developing infrastructure to support extended activities on the lunar surface. This includes communications, navigation, and power from either fission reactors or large solar arrays. "These services are required to sustain commercial activity," he said.

And a program manager for space systems at Draper, Chris Boger, said NASA needs to remain supportive of the CLPS program despite its propensity for early failures. The companies involved, he said, have put many years and many millions of dollars into reaching the point of starting to launch landers to the Moon. The expectation is that NASA will stay strong and continue to support this emerging marketplace.

"We've invested a lot to get here, and we're close," Boger said. "NASA should stay focused and stay committed to seeing this through."

That task would probably be a lot easier if Odysseus sticks the landing on Thursday.

Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk said the first human to be implanted with the company's brain chip is now able to move a mouse cursor just by thinking.

"Progress is good, and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of. Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking," Musk said Monday during an X Spaces event, according to Reuters.

Musk's update came a few weeks after he announced that Neuralink implanted a chip into the human. The previous update was also made on X, the Musk-owned social network formerly named Twitter.

Musk reportedly said during yesterday's chat, "We're trying to get as many button presses as possible from thinking. So that's what we're currently working on is: can you get left mouse, right mouse, mouse down, mouse up... We want to have more than just two buttons."

Neuralink itself doesn't seem to have issued any statement on the patient's progress. We contacted the company today and will update this article if we get a response.

“Basic ethical standards” not met

Neuralink's method of releasing information was criticized last week by Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor and head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and Jonathan Moreno, a University of Pennsylvania medical ethics professor.

"Science by press release, while increasingly common, is not science," Caplan and Moreno wrote in an essay published by the nonprofit Hastings Center. "When the person paying for a human experiment with a huge financial stake in the outcome is the sole source of information, basic ethical standards have not been met."

Caplan and Moreno acknowledged that Neuralink and Musk seem to be "in the clear" legally:

Assuming that some brain-computer interface device was indeed implanted in some patient with severe paralysis by some surgeons somewhere, it would be reasonable to expect some formal reporting about the details of an unprecedented experiment involving a vulnerable person. But unlike drug studies in which there are phases that must be registered in a public database, the Food and Drug Administration does not require reporting of early feasibility studies of devices. From a legal standpoint Musk's company is in the clear, a fact that surely did not escape the tactical notice of his company's lawyers.

But they argue that opening "the brain of a living human being to insert a device" should have been accompanied with more public detail. There is an ethical obligation "to avoid the risk of giving false hope to countless thousands of people with serious neurological disabilities," they wrote.

A brain implant could have complications that leave a patient in worse condition, the ethics professors noted. "We are not even told what plans there are to remove the device if things go wrong or the subject simply wants to stop," Caplan and Moreno wrote. "Nor do we know the findings of animal research that justified beginning a first-in-human experiment at this time, especially since it is not lifesaving research."

Clinical trial still to come

Neuralink has been criticized for alleged mistreatment of animals in research and was reportedly fined $2,480 for violating US Department of Transportation rules on the movement of hazardous materials after inspections of company facilities last year.

People "should continue to be skeptical of the safety and functionality of any device produced by Neuralink," the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine said after last month's announcement of the first implant.

"The Physicians Committee continues to urge Elon Musk and Neuralink to shift to developing a noninvasive brain-computer interface," the group said. "Researchers elsewhere have already made progress to improve patient health using such noninvasive methods, which do not come with the risk of surgical complications, infections, or additional operations to repair malfunctioning implants."

In May 2023, Neuralink said it obtained Food and Drug Administration approval for clinical trials. The company's previous attempt to gain approval was reportedly denied by the FDA over safety concerns and other "deficiencies."

In September, the company said it was recruiting volunteers, specifically people with quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Neuralink said the first human clinical trial for PRIME (Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface) will evaluate the safety of its implant and surgical robot, "and assess the initial functionality of our BCI [brain-computer interface] for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts."

Quasars initially confused astronomers when they were discovered. First identified as sources of radio-frequency radiation, later observations showed that the objects had optical counterparts that looked like stars. But the spectrum of these ostensible stars showed lots of emissions at wavelengths that didn't seem to correspond to any atoms we knew about.

Eventually, we figured out these were spectral lines of normal atoms but heavily redshifted by immense distances. This means that to appear like stars at these distances, these objects had to be brighter than an entire galaxy. Eventually, we discovered that quasars are the light produced by an actively feeding supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy.

But finding new examples has remained difficult because, in most images, they continue to look just like stars—you still need to obtain a spectrum and figure out their distance to know you're looking at a quasar. Because of that, there might be some unusual quasars we've ignored because we didn't realize they were quasars. That's the case with an object named J0529−4351, which turned out to be the brightest quasar we've ever observed.

That’s no star!

J0529−4351 had been observed a number of times, but its nature wasn't recognized until a survey went hunting for quasars and recognized it was one. At the time of the 2023 paper that described the survey, the researchers behind it suggested that it had either been magnified through gravitational lensing, or it was the brightest quasar we've ever identified.

In this week's Nature Astronomy, they confirmed: It's not lensed, it really is that bright. Gravitational lensing tends to distort objects or create multiple images of them. But J0529−4351 is undistorted, and nothing nearby looks like it. And there's nothing in the foreground that has enough mass to create a lens.

So, how do you take an instance of an incredibly bright object and make it even brighter? The light from a quasar is produced by an accretion disk. While accretion disks can form around black holes with masses similar to stars, quasars require a supermassive black hole like the ones found at the center of galaxies. These disks are formed of material that has been captured by the gravity of the black hole and is in orbit before falling inward and crossing the event horizon. Light is created as the material is heated by collisions of its constituent particles and gives up gravitational energy as it falls inward.

Getting more light out of an accretion disk is pretty simple: You either put more material in it or make it bigger. But there's a limit to how much material you can cram into one. At some point, the accretion disk will produce so much radiation that it drives off any additional material that's falling inward, essentially choking off its own food supply. Called the Eddington limit, this sets ceilings on how bright an accretion disk can be and how quickly a black hole can grow.

Factors like the mass of the black hole and its spin help set the Eddington limit. Plus, the amount of material falling inward can drop below the Eddington limit, leading to a bit less light being produced. Trying various combinations of these factors and checking them against observational data, the researchers came up with several estimates for the properties of the supermassive black hole and its accretion disk.

Extremely bright

For the supermassive black hole's size, the researchers propose two possible estimates: one at 17 billion solar masses, and the other at 19 billion solar masses. That's not the most massive one known, but there are only about a dozen thought to be larger. (For comparison, the one at the center of the Milky Way is "only" about 4 million solar masses.) The data is best fit by a moderate spin, with us viewing it from about 45 degrees off the pole of the black hole. The accretion disk would be roughly seven light-years across. Meaning, if the system were centered on our Sun, several nearby stars would be within the disk.

The accretion rate needed to power the brightness is just below the Eddington limit and works out to roughly 370 solar masses of material per year. Or, about a Sun a day. At that rate, it would take about 30 million years to double in size.

But it's rare to have that much material around for one to feed that long. And a look through archival images shows that the brightness of J0529−4351 can vary by as much as 15 percent, so it's not likely to be pushing the Eddington limit the entire time.

Even so, it's difficult to understand how that much material can be driven into the center of a galaxy for any considerable length of time. The researchers suggest that the ALMA telescope array might be able to pick up anything unusual there. "If extreme quasars were caused by unusual host galaxy gas flows, ALMA should see this," they write. "If nothing unusual was found in the host gas, then this would sharpen the well-known puzzle of how to sustain high accretion rates for long enough to form such extreme supermassive black holes."

The whole accretion disk is also large enough that it should be possible to image it with the Very Large Telescope, which would allow us to track the disk's rotation and estimate the black hole's mass.

The system's extreme nature, then, may actually help us figure out its details despite its immense distance. Meanwhile, the researchers wonder whether other unusual systems might remain undiscovered simply because we haven't considered that an object might be a quasar instead of a star.

Nature Astronomy, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41550-024-02195-x  (About DOIs).

Famed naturalist Charles Darwin amassed an impressive personal library over the course of his life, much of which was preserved and cataloged upon his death in 1882. But many other items were lost, including more ephemeral items like unbound volumes, pamphlets, journals, clippings, and so forth, often only vaguely referenced in Darwin's own records.

For the last 18 years, the Darwin Online project has painstakingly scoured all manner of archival records to reassemble a complete catalog of Darwin's personal library virtually. The project released its complete 300-page online catalog—consisting of 7,400 titles across 13,000 volumes, with links to electronic copies of the works—to mark Darwin's 215th birthday on February 12.

“This unprecedentedly detailed view of Darwin’s complete library allows one to appreciate more than ever that he was not an isolated figure working alone but an expert of his time building on the sophisticated science and studies and other knowledge of thousands of people," project leader John van Wyhe of the National University of Singapore said. "Indeed, the size and range of works in the library makes manifest the extraordinary extent of Darwin’s research into the work of others.”

Darwin was a notoriously voracious reader, and Down House was packed with books, scientific journals pamphlets, and magazine clippings that caught his interest. He primarily kept his personal library in his study: an "Old Study" and, after an 1877 addition to the west end of the house, a "New Study." A former governess named Louise Buob described how Darwin's books and papers inevitably spilled "into the hall and corridors, whose walls are covered with books."

The French literary critic Francisque Sarcey remarked in 1880 that the walls of the New Study were concealed "top to bottom" with books, as well as two bookcases in the middle of the study—one filled with books, the other with scientific instruments. This was very much a working library, with well-worn and often tattered books, as opposed to fine leather-bound volumes designed for display. After Darwin died, an appraiser valued the scientific library at just 30 pounds (about 2,000 pounds today) and the entire collection of books at a mere 66 pounds (about 4,400 pounds today). Collectors now pay a good deal more for a single book that once belonged to Darwin.

The two main collections of Darwin's books—amounting to some 1,480 titles—are housed at the University of Cambridge and Down House, respectively, but that number does not include the more ephemeral items referred to in Darwin's own records. According to the folks at Darwin Online, tracking down every single obscure reference to a publication was a case study in diligent detective work since Darwin often only hurriedly jotted down a few notes, with crucial information like author, date, or even the source of a clipping often missing.

Many of these have now been identified for the first time. One of the project's major sources was a handwritten 426-page compilation from 1875, whose abbreviated entries eventually yielded 440 previously unknown titles originally in Darwin's library. They also scoured Darwin's reading notebooks, Emma Darwin's diaries, a 1908 catalog of books donated to Cambridge, and the Darwin Correspondence (30 volumes in all), as well as historic auction and rare book catalogs.

The newly discovered items in Darwin's library include works by philosophers John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, as well as Charles Babbage and what was at the time a controversial book on gorillas: Paul du Chaillu's Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. The naturalist also owned a copy of an 1826 article on the habits of the turkey buzzard by ornithologist John James Audubon. His personal library also included less heady fare, like a coffee table book of heliotrope illustrations, an 1832 road atlas of England and Wales, an 1852 treatise on investments, a book about chess, an illustrated 1821 book on the Nomenclature of Colours, and a book on the "water cure" for chronic disease. (Darwin was a devotee of the water cure—not to be confused with the method of torture—for his many ailments.)

As impressive as the Darwin Online catalog currently is, the project is still ongoing. "There can be no doubt that further works that belonged to Darwin and his family remain to be recorded here," the folks at Darwin Online wrote, and the project welcomes any information that leads to those missing works.

Active geology—and the large-scale chemistry it can drive—requires significant amounts of heat. Dwarf planets near the far edges of the Solar System, like Pluto and other Kuiper Belt objects, formed from frigid, icy materials and have generally never transited close enough to the Sun to warm up considerably. Any heat left over from their formation was likely long since lost to space.

Yet Pluto turned out to be a world rich in geological features, some of which implied ongoing resurfacing of the dwarf planet's surface. Last week, researchers reported that the same might be true for other dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt. Indications come thanks to the capabilities of the Webb telescope, which was able to resolve differences in the hydrogen isotopes found on the chemicals that populate the surface of Eris and Makemake.

Cold and distant

Kuiper Belt objects are natives of the distant Solar System, forming far enough from the warmth of the Sun that many materials that are gasses in the inner planets—things like nitrogen, methane, and carbon dioxide—are solid ices. Many of these bodies formed far enough from the gravitational influence of the eight major planets that they have never made a trip into the warmer inner Solar System. In addition, because there was much less material that far from the Sun, most of the bodies are quite small.

While they would have started off hot due to the process by which they formed, their small size means a large surface-to-volume ratio, allowing internal heat to radiate out to space relatively quickly. Since then, any heat has come from rare collision events or the decay of radioactive isotopes.

Yet New Horizons' visit to Pluto made it clear that it doesn't take much heat to drive active geology, although seasonal changes in sunlight are likely to account for some of its features. Sunlight is less likely to be an influence for worlds like Makemake, which orbits at a distance one and a half times Pluto's closest approach to the Sun. Eris, which is nearly as large as Pluto, orbits at over twice Pluto's closest approach.

Sending a mission to either of these planets would take decades, and none are in development at the moment, so we can't know what their surfaces look like. But that doesn't mean we know nothing about them. And the James Webb Space Telescope has added to what we know considerably.

The Webb was used to image sunlight reflected off these objects, obtaining its infrared spectrum—the amount of light reflected at different wavelengths. The spectrum is influenced by the chemical composition of the dwarf planets' surfaces. Certain chemicals can absorb specific wavelengths of infrared light, ensuring they don't get reflected. By noting where the spectrum dips, it's possible to figure out which chemicals are present.

Some of that work has already been done. But Webb is able to image parts of the spectrum that were inaccessible earlier, and its instruments are even able to identify different isotopes of the atoms composing each chemical. For example, some molecules of methane (CH₄) will, at random, have one of their hydrogen atoms swapped out for its heavier isotope, deuterium, forming CH₃D. These isotopes can potentially act as tracers, telling us things about where the chemicals originally came from.

Unexpected findings

Both Eris and Makemake have lots of methane ice on their surfaces, and there are indications of nitrogen ice on Eris, though not Makemake. Strikingly, carbon monoxide appears to be absent from most bodies, even though it's a major component of the ices found on comets, which are also thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt. That's the first hint that something odd might be going on with the surfaces of these bodies.

Also missing is any sign of the more complicated organic molecules that are typically formed when methane is exposed to radiation. These include ethane, ethylene, and acetylene. Water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia also failed to show up in the spectrum.

None of this means these chemicals aren't present on the planets. It just indicates that they're probably not major components of its surface.

The researchers also looked for the presence of methane with different isotopes of its carbon and hydrogen. These include two different versions of carbon (carbon-12 and -13), as well as hydrogen and deuterium. These measurements were converted into ratios between the two isotopes and the ratios compared to those of other bodies in the Solar System.

Bodies that far from the Sun are thought to be composed of materials that have similar isotopic ratios to the raw material that went into building the Solar System since the original isotopes have been frozen in place. Those closer to the Sun are expected to be dynamic enough to undergo chemical reactions that can alter these original ratios. So the results of the Webb imaging seemed strange, as the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratios are much lower than expected for early Solar System material, as registered in a sampling of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by the Rosetta mission.

By contrast, the ratio between the two different carbon isotopes was about what you'd expect, suggesting that whatever was altering the hydrogen-to-deuterium ratio wasn't simply doing it as a function of isotope weight.

Making sense of it all

So the researchers were left with a number of mysteries. One was the unexpected hydrogen isotopes. Another was the fact that many of the expected ices seemed to be missing in the spectrum. Finally, that much methane on the surface should have reacted to produce more complex organic chemicals, as seen on other bodies of the Solar System. But those were missing as well.

The researchers noted that the hydrogen isotope ratios looked a lot like those from water found in icy bodies throughout the Solar System. So they decided to check whether some of the methane could have been formed sometime after Makemake and Eris.

The idea would involve water either reacting with a simple carbon compound, such as carbon monoxide, to produce methane or participating in the breakdown of more complex organic chemicals. Either would result in methane with a similar isotope ratio to the water that is seen elsewhere in the Solar System. But the reactions that can do so require temperatures significantly above the boiling point of water. That's a bit unexpected for icy bodies like Makemake or Eris, which don't undergo the sort of gravitational interactions that create oceans on moons like Enceladus and Mimas.

But estimates of the radioactive decay in the rocky cores of these bodies would likely create sufficiently high temperatures for a chunk of their history. This is especially true of Eris, which has a high density that suggests a relatively large rocky core. Implicit in this analysis is that the heat was probably sufficient to have created a sub-surface ocean and driven enough circulation in the ices of the crust to have brought the methane formed to the surface.

A striking possibility is that some aspects of this process might still be going on. That would explain the relative absence of complex organic chemicals on the surface of Eris and, to a lesser extent, Makemake (which has a somewhat reddish tint). This could be accounted for if some process were still bringing fresh methane to the surface. It doesn't necessarily involve a sub-surface ocean, but it will involve enough heat to cause parts of the crust to circulate between the surface and the core/crust boundary.

It's important to recognize that this work is built on a number of assumptions and approximations and can't be viewed as the last word on things. The ideas here would benefit from a better sampling of material in comets, which should share a lot of the basic chemistry with these dwarf planets but lack the potential for internal heating.

Still, given what we've learned about Pluto and other icy bodies, the ideas here don't seem as radical as they might have a few decades ago. What does seem radical is our ability to measure isotope ratios in planets that far from Earth.

Icarus, 2024. DOI: 10.1016/j.icarus.2024.115999, 10.1016/j.icarus.2023.115923  (About DOIs).

Nearly three decades ago, the European Space Agency launched its largest and most sophisticated Earth observation satellite to date, the European Remote Sensing 2 satellite, on an Ariane 4 rocket. The spacecraft functioned well for more than 15 years before the space agency decided it was reaching the end of its operational lifetime.

Over the course of a number of maneuvers, operators lowered the satellite's altitude from 785 km (488 miles) to 573 km (356 miles) during the year 2011, allowing it to eventually be dragged into Earth's atmosphere for disposal. As part of this process, the satellite's propellant tanks were drained. This was to minimize the risk of a catastrophic explosion that could have generated a large amount of space debris, the agency said.

Now, more than a dozen years later, the European Remote Sensing 2 satellite is due to re-enter Earth's atmosphere this week. The problem is that the satellite will make an uncontrolled reentry, so European operators don't know where it will land. The trade-off for draining propellant more than a decade ago is that there is no fuel to ensure the satellite falls into a remote patch of ocean.

Rather, there is a very, very tiny chance it could fall on someone's head. Because it is such a big satellite, fragments as large as 52 kg (115 pounds) could reach the surface.

When it’s coming

To its credit, the European Space Agency has been perfectly transparent about all of this. It has even set up a page that provides daily tracking updates on the satellite's deteriorating orbit.

As of today, Monday, February 19, the space agency estimates the reentry will take place at 5:14 am CT (11:14 UTC) on Wednesday, February 21. The prediction has an accuracy of within 15 hours. Much of the uncertainty is due to solar activity, which affects the density of the upper atmosphere that is slowly dragging the satellite down.

It's likely that the satellite will start to break up into fragments at about 80 km (50 miles) above the surface.

Should we be concerned?

Not really. This is a big satellite to be sure, with a current mass of about 2.3 metric tons. But none of these materials are toxic, and most likely the bits of satellite that don't burn up will fall into the ocean.

To be fair, the risk is non-zero. But it is quite low. Such large objects re-enter Earth's atmosphere every month, if not more frequently. No human has ever been killed by a piece of falling space debris. Based on some recent estimates, you're about 65,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning than a piece of falling space debris. So it's probably safe to venture outside on Wednesday.

The European Space Agency is being so transparent about the European Remote Sensing 2 satellite because it is working to become a global leader in space sustainability and the reduction of orbital debris. This is part of a campaign to be more responsible stewards of low-Earth orbit and the planet's atmosphere.

The cut flowers could pay for themselves and even turn a profit.

Flowers grown on inexpensive floating platforms can help clean polluted waterways, over 12 weeks extracting 52 percent more phosphorus and 36 percent more nitrogen than the natural nitrogen cycle removes from untreated water, according to our new research. In addition to filtering water, the cut flowers can generate income via the multibillion-dollar floral market.

In our trials of various flowers, giant marigolds stood out as the most successful, producing long, marketable stems and large blooms. Their yield matched typical flower farm production.

Why it matters

Water pollution is caused in large part by runoff from farms, urban lawns, and even septic tanks. When it rains, excess phosphorus, nitrogen, and other chemicals wash into lakes and rivers.

These nutrients feed algae, leading to widespread and harmful algae blooms, which can severely lower oxygen in water, creating “dead zones” where aquatic life cannot survive. Nutrient runoff is a critical issue as urban areas expand, affecting the health of water ecosystems.

Water pollution is an escalating crisis in our area of Miami-Dade and Broward counties in Florida. The 2020 Biscayne Bay fish kill, the largest mass death of aquatic life on record for the region, serves as a stark reminder of this growing environmental issue.

How we do our work

We study sustainable agriculture and water pollution in South Florida.

Inspired by traditional floating farm practices, including the Aztecs’ chinampas in Mexico and the Miccosukees’ tree island settlements in Florida, we tested the idea of growing cut flowers on floating rafts as a way to remove excess nutrients from waterways. Our hope was not only that the flowers would pay for themselves, but that they could provide jobs here in Miami, the center of the US cut-flower trade.

We floated 4-by-6-foot (1.2-by-1.8-meter) mats of inexpensive polyethylene foam called Beemats in 620-gallon (2,300-liter) outdoor test tanks that mirrored water conditions of nearby polluted waterways. Into the mats, we transplanted flower seedlings, including zinnias, sunflowers, and giant marigolds. The polluted tank water was rich in nutrients, eliminating the need for any fertilizer. As the seedlings matured into plants over 12 weeks, we tracked the tanks’ improving water quality.

Encouraged by the success of the marigolds in our tanks, we moved our trials to the nearby canals of Coral Gables and Little River. We anchored the floating platforms with 50-pound (22.7-kilogram) weights and also tied them to shore for extra stability. No alterations to the landscape were needed, making the process simple and doable.

What still isn’t known

The success of the giant marigolds might be linked to the extra roots that grow from their stems known as adventitious roots. These roots likely help keep the plants stable on the floating platforms. Identifying additional plants with roots like these could help broaden plant choices.

Future raft designs may also need modifications to ensure better stability and growth for other cut-flower and crop species.

What’s next

Our promising findings show floating cut-flower farms could be a sustainable option for mitigating water pollution.

One of us (Locke-Rodriguez) is expanding this research and working to scale up floating farms in South Florida as a demonstration of what could take place in the many locations facing similar issues worldwide.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Jazmin Locke-Rodriguez, Post Doctoral Associate in the Institute of Environment, Florida International University, and Krishnaswamy Jayachandran, Professor of Agroecology, Florida International University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.