Welcome to Edition 6.30 of the Rocket Report! Looking ahead, there are some interesting launches coming up in the middle of this month. Here are some we have our eyes on: Intuitive Machines' lunar lander on a Falcon 9 and a re-flight of Japan's big H3 rocket next week; then there's an Electron launch of an intriguing Astroscale mission and NASA's Crew-8 the following week. Good luck to all.

 

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.

 

 

Was Transporter created to 'kill' small launch? SpaceX's Transporter missions, which regularly fly 100 or more small satellites into low-Earth orbit on Falcon 9 rideshare missions, have unquestionably harmed small satellite launch companies. While companies like Rocket Lab or Virgin Orbit could offer smallsat operators a precise orbit, there was no way to compete on price. "The Transporter program was created a few years ago with, in my opinion, the sole purpose of trying to kill new entrants like us," said Sandy Tirtey, director of global commercial launch services at Rocket Lab, during a panel at the SmallSat Symposium on Wednesday.

 

Low-price guarantee ... The panel was covered by Space News, and the rest of the article includes a lot of comments from small launch providers about how they provide value with dedicated services and so forth—pretty typical fare. However, the story does not really explore Tirtley's statement. So, was Transporter created to kill small launch companies? As someone who has reported a lot on SpaceX over the years, I'll offer my two cents. I don't think the program was created with this intent; rather, it filled a market need (only Electron and India's PSLV were meeting commercial smallsat demand in any volume at the time). It also gave Falcon 9 more commercial missions. However, I do believe it was ultimately priced with the intent of cutting small launch off at the knees.

 

FAA investigating Virgin Galactic's dropped pin. Virgin Galactic reported an anomaly on its most recent flight, Galactic 06, which took place two weeks ago from a spaceport in New Mexico. The company said it discovered a dropped pin during a post-flight review of the mission, which carried two pilots and four passengers to an altitude of 55.1 miles (88.7 km). This alignment pin, according to Virgin Galactic, helps ensure the VSS Unity spaceship is aligned to its carrier aircraft when mating the vehicles, Ars reports.

 

Corrective actions to be required ... Virgin Galactic said it reported the anomaly to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on January 31. On Tuesday, the FAA confirmed that there was no public property or injuries that resulted from the mishap. "The FAA is overseeing the Virgin Galactic-led mishap investigation to ensure the company complies with its FAA-approved mishap investigation plan and other regulatory requirements," the federal agency said in a statement. Before VSS Unity can return to flight, the FAA must approve Virgin Galactic’s final report, including corrective actions to prevent a similar problem in the future. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

HyImpulse ships suborbital rocket to launch site. German launch startup HyImpulse has confirmed that its SR75 rocket and all related support systems have been boxed up and have embarked on the long journey to Australia, European Spaceflight reports. SR75 is a single-stage suborbital launch vehicle that is designed to be capable of delivering up to 250 kilograms to a maximum altitude of around 200 kilometers.

 

Testing a pathfinder ... The debut flight of SR75 had initially been slated to occur from SaxaVord in the United Kingdom. In fact, HyImpulse had received approval for the flight from the UK Civil Aviation Authority in mid-2023. However, with financial issues forcing work on the site to be temporarily slowed, HyImpulse was forced to look elsewhere. The launch will now take place from the South Launch Koonibba Test Range in Australia, possibly as soon as March. The test will certify several critical elements of the company’s larger orbital SL1 rocket. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

T-Minus prepares European launches. T-Minus Engineering is preparing to launch a pair of its DART rockets from the Esrange Space Centre in Sweden, European Spaceflight reports. DART is a single-stage suborbital solid fuel rocket that's around 3.5 meters tall. It features a booster with a diameter of 118 millimeters and a dart-shaped payload compartment with a diameter of 35 millimeters.

 

Putting the small into small launch ... The DART rocket can carry 0.5-kilogram payloads to an altitude of up to 120 kilometers. This will be the first time the Netherlands-based company has launched in Arctic conditions. (submitted by Ken the Bin).

 

 

Big Earth science mission launches on Falcon 9. NASA's latest mission dedicated to observing Earth's oceans and atmosphere from space rocketed into orbit from Florida early Thursday on the SpaceX launch vehicle, Ars reports. This mission will study phytoplankton, microscopic plants fundamental to the marine food chain, and tiny particles called aerosols that play a key role in cloud formation. These two constituents in the ocean and the atmosphere are important to scientists' understanding of climate change. The mission's acronym, PACE, stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem.

 

Congress kept it on track ... NASA authorized development of the PACE mission nine years ago, but the climate research satellite became a target during the Trump administration. During each of Trump's four years in the White House, the administration's annual budget request called for zeroing-out funding for PACE, along with other Earth science missions and NASA's education office. A groundswell of support from scientists also helped persuade Congress to maintain funding for PACE. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

 

Meet the (not at all creepy looking) Indian android soon to launch into space. India's space agency will send a humanoid robot into space this year, then send it back alongside actual humans in 2025 on its long-delayed Gaganyaan orbital mission, The Register reports. The robot, named Vyommitra, is due to launch into orbit during a test flight during the third quarter of this year.

 

She comes in peace ... The robot, whose name translates to "Space Friend" in Sanskrit, will be more advanced than the crash-test-dummy-like stand-ins that NASA has flown on some of its test missions. Vyommitra, by contrast, can conduct some life-support functions, operate six panels, and respond to queries from ground control. The humanoid speaks two languages: Hindi and English. The science robot will also conduct microgravity experiments while in orbit. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

 

Rocket Lab secures Neutron funding. Rocket Lab announced this week that it has closed $355 million of convertible senior notes as the company seeks to bridge to its next-generation Neutron rocket. Payload Research has the details on the financing, including an explanation of what the convertible notes mean for Rocket Lab as well as investors. Interestingly, the company's publicly traded stock plummeted 17 percent on the day of the announcement amid concerns over dilution and rising debt servicing costs.

 

Still, it gets them to Neutron ... The company estimates it will spend roughly $250 million to build the medium-lift Neutron rocket. Rocket Lab says it continues to make progress in development, and a company spokesperson reiterated that timeline to the publication, saying, "We’re still targeting to get Neutron on the pad before the end of the year." That is all well and good, but it's perhaps worth remembering that SpaceX had its Falcon 9 rocket "on the pad" in January 2009 and did not launch for the first time until June 2010. So, if we're lucky, we might see Neutron fly in 2025.

 

India targets 30 launches in the next 15 months. The launches are planned to occur during 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, India Today reports. The launch target was announced by IN-SPACe, an Indian agency that promotes commercial spaceflight. The organization said the launches will be conducted by the Indian space agency, ISRO, its commercial arm, New Space India, and private companies.

 

Taking a big step up ... Among the 14 commercial missions identified, seven are being executed by NewSpace India, including two Polar Satellite Launch Vehicles that are being developed through collaboration with an industry consortium. The private Indian companies that may attempt launches are Agnikul Cosmos and Skyroot Aerospace. If this cadence occurs, it would mark a significant step forward for India, which launched seven rockets in 2023.

 

Where are the Lane 1 bidders? The US military’s plan to diversify its stable of launch providers is running into a problem, Payload reports. None of them is likely to fly their rockets on time. Recall that, for less critical missions, Space Systems Command has opened "Lane 1" for new launch vehicles that could handle low-risk work. The first awards are expected to be announced this spring. However, the new entrants widely seen as aiming for Lane 1—Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Firefly, and ABL Space Systems—are unlikely to reach orbit by the December 15 deadline to qualify for this year’s batch of awards.

 

So, who is bidding for these contracts? ... The usual suspects. SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin bid on the Lane 1 contracts intended for unproven launchers, as well as Lane 2, a congressional source told the publication. (Blue Origin expects its New Glenn rocket to launch before the end of this year.) Companies that miss this year’s Lane 1 deadline will have another bite at the apple on an annual basis, per Col. Doug Pentecost of the military.

 

 

US military presses ahead on point-to-point. The US Air Force is advancing plans to demonstrate point-to-point rocket travel perhaps in a few years, Space News reports. Among the reasons for optimism are SpaceX’s launch rates and ability to reuse rockets, which “dramatically changes the business case,” said Gregory Spanjers, chief scientist overseeing the rocket cargo program at the Air Force Research Laboratory. Speaking on a panel January 30 at the Space Mobility Conference, Spanjers said, “We’ve looked at this for seven years, and it never makes any sense. Now we’re finding that, indeed, it’s looking a lot more attractive than it has in the past."

 

A high launch rate solves a lot of ills ... Two years ago, the Air Force awarded SpaceX a $102 million five-year contract to demonstrate technologies and capabilities to transport military cargo and humanitarian aid around the world on a heavy rocket. If Starship can achieve high launch rates, it could be relatively inexpensive for cargo containers to be released from the rocket like satellites, Spanjers added. “We can insert cargo transport as part of their regular launch rate progression and treat it just like another satellite in their flow," he said. (submitted by Jay500001 and Ken the Bin)

Next three launches

February 9: Falcon 9 | Starlink 7-13 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 00:55 UTC

 

February 9: Soyuz 2.1 | Unknown Payload | Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia | 06:00 UTC

 

February 14: Falcon 9 | Nova C lunar lander | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 05:57 UTC

 

Sending 1 kilogram to Mars will set you back roughly $2.4 million, judging by the cost of the Perseverance mission. If you want to pack up supplies and gear for every conceivable contingency, you’re going to need a lot of those kilograms.

 

But what if you skipped almost all that weight and only took a do-it-all Swiss Army knife instead? That’s exactly what scientists at NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University are testing with robots, algorithms, and highly advanced building materials.

Zero mass exploration

“The concept of zero mass exploration is rooted in self-replicating machines, an engineering concept John von Neumann conceived in the 1940s”, says Kenneth C. Cheung, a NASA Ames researcher. He was involved in the new study published recently in Science Robotics covering self-reprogrammable metamaterials—materials that do not exist in nature and have the ability to change their configuration on their own. “It’s the idea that an engineering system can not only replicate, but sustain itself in the environment,” he adds.

 

Based on this concept, Robert A. Freitas Jr. in the 1980s proposed a self-replicating interstellar spacecraft called the Von Neumann probe that would visit a nearby star system, find resources to build a copy of itself, and send this copy to another star system. Rinse and repeat.

 

“The technology of reprogrammable metamaterials [has] advanced to the point where we can start thinking about things like that. It can’t make everything we need yet, but it can make a really big chunk of what we need,” says Christine E. Gregg, a NASA Ames researcher and the lead author of the study.

Building blocks for space

One of the key problems with Von Neumann probes was that taking elements found in the soil on alien worlds and processing them into actual engineering components was resource-intensive and required huge amounts of energy. The NASA Ames team solved that with using prefabricated "voxels”—standardized reconfigurable building blocks.

 

The system derives its operating principles from the way nature works on a very fundamental level. “Think how biology, one of the most scalable systems we have ever seen, builds stuff," says Gregg. “It does that with building blocks. There are on the order of 20 amino acids which your body uses to make proteins to make 200 different types of cells and then combines trillions of those cells to make organs as complex as my hair and my eyes. We are using the same strategy,” she adds.

 

To demo this technology, they built a set of 256 of those blocks—extremely strong 3D structures made with a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer called StattechNN-40CF. Each block had fastening interfaces on every side that could be used to reversibly attach them to other blocks and form a strong truss structure.

 

A 3×3 truss structure made with these voxels had an average failure load of 900 Newtons, which means it could hold over 90 kilograms despite being incredibly light itself (its density is just 0.0103 grams per cubic centimeter). “We took these voxels out in backpacks and built a boat, a shelter, a bridge you could walk on. The backpacks weighed around 18 kilograms. Without technology like that, you wouldn’t even think about fitting a boat and a bridge in a backpack,” says Cheung. “But the big thing about this study is that we implemented this reconfigurable system autonomously with robots,” he adds.

Robotic building teams

In a lab experiment, three robots used all 256 voxels to assemble a shelter in four and a half days. The first robotic team member was a cargo handler that transported the voxels from the supply area to the right place on the structure under construction. Once there, the cargo robot handed the voxels over to a crane robot that placed them exactly where they needed to be. Finally, a fastening robot moving inside the structure attached each new voxel to the structure.

 

The robots oriented themselves exclusively using internal reference frames—they basically counted the voxels they stepped on. This meant no vision, no lidar, no advanced sensors or control systems. “In this demo, the structure was preplanned. The preplanning resolves robots bumping into each other or whether the structure is stable as it is being built. We can do that automatically,” says Cheung. “But we also tried models like finite state automata, which is how ants build their colonies. This way we could solve high-level problems like finding something and building an enclosure around it,” he claims.

 

The system is scalable in the sense that, with more voxels, structures can be made larger; with more robotic teams, they can be assembled faster. The first real-world application the team aims at is building towers on the Moon.

Towers on the Moon

The towers are needed because the landing site for the Artemis 3, a mission intended to bring human astronauts back to the silver globe, is near the Moon’s south pole. “The Sun angle there is low, so to maximize the amount of sunlight, you should put the solar panels as high as possible. You can’t bounce radio waves off the atmosphere because there is no atmosphere, so you need line of sight for communications. The antennas, too, must be as high as possible,” says Cheung.

 

The height of the towers in this location must be over 100 meters to get the job done, and pulling that off with current deployment systems would be very difficult. So, the team is now focused on demonstrating how their building blocks and robots could be used in building communication and solar towers on the Moon. “Our next papers are exactly about that. They are coming out in March,” says Gregg.

 

Science Robotics, 2024.  DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adi2746

 

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

 

 

 

Good morning. It's February 8, and today's photo comes from the skies over Arizona.

 

This is an image of NGC 2170, the reddish nebula in the center of the frame. It is a large area of cosmic dust that is reflecting the light of bright, nearby stars. There are other nebulae and bright stars in this image, all of which combine to give this image its colorful appearance.

 

The nebula can be found in the constellation Monoceros—which means "one-horned," as opposed to the more commonly used rhinoceros, which means "nose-horned."

 

The image comes from Mel Martin, who has a great collection of astrophotography on his website.

 

Source: Mel Martin

 

The Biden administration is now requiring some cryptocurrency producers to report their energy use following rising concerns that the growing industry could pose a threat to the nation’s electricity grids and exacerbate climate change.

 

The Energy Information Administration announced last week that it would start collecting energy use data from more than 130 “identified commercial cryptocurrency miners” operating in the US. The survey, which started this week, aims to get a sense of how the industry’s energy demand is evolving and where in the country cryptocurrency operations are growing fastest.

 

“As cryptocurrency mining has increased in the United States, concerns have grown about the energy-intensive nature of the business and its effects on the US electric power industry,” the EIA said in a new report, following the announcement. “Concerns expressed to EIA include strains to the electricity grid during periods of peak demand, the potential for higher electricity prices, as well as effects on energy-related carbon dioxide emissions.”

 

Digital currencies such as bitcoin are produced—or “mined”—by massive data centers that essentially solve complex equations to add new tokens to an online network known as a blockchain. As the currencies have grown in popularity, they’ve required greater and greater amounts of computing power that draw increasingly more electricity from the grid.

 

The new EIA report found that the world’s crypto miners used as much electricity in 2023 as the entire country of Australia, accounting for up to 1 percent of global electricity demand. In the US, the report said, just 137 mining facilities were responsible for up to 2.3 percent of the nation’s total electricity demand last year—roughly the same demand as the state of West Virginia.

 

Because most of the electricity generated around the world, including in the US, comes from burning fossil fuels, anything that increases energy demand also increases how much carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. The clean energy advocacy group RMI estimates that US cryptocurrency operations release 25 million to 50 million tons of CO₂ every year. That’s the same amount as the annual diesel emissions of the US railroad industry.

 

It’s an especially alarming issue in the US, where cryptocurrency operations are growing rapidly. According to the EIA report, which cites calculations by the UK-based Cambridge Judge Business School, nearly 38 percent of all bitcoin—the most popular type of cryptocurrency—was mined in the US in 2022, up from just 3.4 percent in 2020. The EIA has now identified at least 137 commercial-scale cryptocurrency mining facilities across 21 states, largely clustered in Texas, Georgia, and New York.

 

Expanding crypto operations also appear to be raising the cost of energy in some states. In 2018, a small city in upstate New York welcomed a crypto mining company to town only to see residents’ utility bills skyrocket, prompting local lawmakers to temporarily ban the company’s operations. “I’ve been hearing a lot of complaints that electric bills have gone up by $100 or $200,” Colin Read, who was mayor of Plattsburgh at the time, told Vice. “You can understand why people are upset.”

 

It’s a similar situation in Texas, said Ben Hertz-Shargel, who leads grid electrification research at the global energy consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie. Besides energy-intensive crypto mining straining the state’s already fragile energy grid, he said, ratepayers are also seeing increased electricity costs.

 

“Nearly all hours of the year, power demand from bitcoin mines pushes up the real-time cost of electricity in Texas, which is determined every 15 minutes based on supply and demand,” Hertz-Shargel said in an email. “This raises electricity costs $1.8 billion per year on homeowners and businesses in the state, a 4.7 percent increase on what they currently pay.”

 

Crypto companies could mitigate some of these issues, including their impact on climate change, by developing their own renewable energy systems to reduce their reliance on the grid, Hertz-Shargel said, similar to what Big Tech companies such as Google and Amazon are doing. But not only are crypto companies not doing this, he said, they’re setting up shop next to existing renewable energy facilities, drawing clean power that would otherwise go to nearby homes and businesses.

 

“Every unit of clean energy consumed from the local wind or solar farm is simply diverted from another customer,” he said. “The net effect is that overall power demand on the grid goes up, which must be met by the increased dispatch of expensive and high-emission fossil generation.”

 

There are some cryptocurrency companies that have found ways to drastically reduce their energy footprint. In 2022, the crypto company Ethereum announced a software update that managed to reduce the carbon emissions of its mining operations by more than 99 percent.

 

Hertz-Shargel said other companies should follow Ethereum’s lead, or they may see even more government regulation in the future.

 

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

 

 

The once-exclusive club of Solar System objects that host oceans is getting increasingly crowded. On Wednesday, Nature released a paper providing evidence that Saturn's moon Mimas has a subsurface ocean beneath its heavily cratered crust. The evidence for this ocean comes in the form of orbital oddities that are seemingly impossible to explain by anything other than the presence of an ocean.

Solid looks

Of Saturn's seven major moons, Mimas orbits closest to the planet, taking less than a day to complete an orbit. It's also the smallest of the major moons, with a diameter of just under 400 kilometers (about 250 miles). Despite its diminutive size, Mimas hosts the second-largest crater on any moon in the Solar System. The Herschel Crater dominates the surface of the moon, giving it an appearance that evokes the Death Star.

 

Even outside of Herschel, the moon's surface is heavily pocked by craters, suggesting it has been static for most of the moon's history. That's in sharp contrast to moons like Europa and Enceladus, where the subsurface oceans allow the constant remodeling of their surfaces, leaving them with much sparser crater histories. So Mimas seemed like a very poor candidate for hosting an ocean.

 

Yet some oddities meant that an ocean couldn't be ruled out. Because of its proximity to Saturn, the moon is tidally locked to the planet so that its rotation is synchronized with its orbit, and one face of the moon constantly faces the planet's surface. Data from the Cassini mission, however, indicated that the synchronization isn't exact. Slight wobbles in the rotation mean that after some orbits, the rotation is slightly faster; after others, it has slowed down.

 

One possible explanation for that is a subsurface ocean. But an alternative is that Mimas' rocky core is oddly shaped, creating an opportunity for the gravitational pull of Saturn and the other moons to torque it somewhat differently each orbit. The lack of any surface geology that might hint at an underlying ocean seemingly argued for the latter option.

 

But in 2022, researchers calculated the amount of energy that would be generated by the tidal forces acting on Mimas and found that it should be enough to melt a substantial amount of the moon's ice, producing a subsurface ocean. While compelling, the evidence was based on a calculation rather than any hints from observations of Mimas itself.

Orbital oddity

That brings us to the new paper, which was written by a small team of European scientists who focused on a different aspect of Mimas' orbital mechanics, again using data from Cassini. Mimas has an elliptical orbit around Saturn, and over time, the long axis of the orbit shifts relative to Saturn. That's also caused by gravitational forces generated by the planet and other moons and provides a completely independent way of estimating what the moon's interior should look like.

 

Again, an oddly shaped rocky core was consistent with the orbital changes we've seen. But if you try to design a rocky core that is consistent with both the orbital and rotational wobbles, things get really strange. The core would need to be an oblong, pancake-shaped disk, with a shape so extreme that the edge of the disk would poke out of the icy surface of the moon at its two extremes. As the researchers dryly note, "This is incompatible with observations."

 

An ocean appears to be a far better option. The researchers estimated the extent of the ocean and found that it roughly matches the above estimate based on tidal heating.

 

So why don't we see signs of this ocean on the moon's surface? The researchers start with the present conditions and orbit and project Mimas' history back in time, estimating the amount of energy released by tidal forces. These calculations show that the ocean wouldn't have existed 25 million years ago—there simply wasn't enough heat generated. Depending on the nature of Mimas' core, it might have only come into existence as recently as 3 million years ago.

 

One explanation for why the ocean has appeared now is that Mimas had interactions with other moons that increased the eccentricity of its orbit and thus increased the tidal forces. Alternatively, if the rings of Saturn are as recent as some studies have suggested—a contention that's still controversial—then the events that led to ring formation might have also influenced Mimas' orbit.

 

It's not clear what sort of data will help us sort out these possibilities. But it's pretty clear that astronomers now have a good motivation for trying to think of things that might help.

 

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06975-9  (About DOIs).

 

 

Scientists in South Korea built a robotic dinosaur and used it to startle grasshoppers to learn more about why dinosaurs evolved feathers, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The results suggest that certain dinosaurs may have employed a hunting strategy in which they flapped their proto-wings to flush out prey, and this behavior may have led to the evolution of larger and stiffer feathers.

 

As reported previously, feathers are the defining feature of birds, but that wasn't always the case. For millions of years, various species of dinosaurs sported feathers, some of which have left behind fossilized impressions. For the most part, the feathers we've found have been attached to smaller dinosaurs, many of them along the lineage that gave rise to birds—although in 2012, scientists discovered three nearly complete skeletons of a "gigantic" feathered dinosaur species, Yutyrannus huali, related to the ancestors of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

 

Various types of dino-feathers have been found in the fossil record over the last 30 years, such as so-called pennaceous feathers (present in most modern birds). These were found on distal forelimbs of certain species like Caudipteryx, serving as proto-wings that were too small to use for flight, as well as around the tip of the tail as plumage. Paleontologists remain unsure of the function of pennaceous feathers—what use could there be for half a wing? A broad range of hypotheses have been proposed: foraging or hunting, pouncing or immobilizing prey, brooding, gliding, or wing-assisted incline running, among others.

 

 

Co-author Jinseok Park of Seoul National University in South Korea and colleagues thought the pennaceous feathers might have been used to flush out potential prey from hiding places so they could be more easily caught. It's a strategy employed by certain modern bird species, like roadrunners, and typically involves a visual display of the plumage on wings and tails.

 

There is evidence that this flush-pursuit hunting strategy evolved multiple times. According to Park et al., it's based on the "rare enemy effect," i.e., certain prey (like insects) wouldn't be capable of responding to different predators in different ways and would not respond effectively to an unusual flush-pursuit strategy. Rather than escaping a predator, the insects fly toward their own demise. "The use of plumage to flush prey could have increased the frequency of chase after escaping prey, thus amplifying the importance of plumage in drag-based or lift-based maneuvering for a successful pursuit," the authors wrote.  "This, in turn, could have led to the larger and stiffer feathers for faster movements and more visual flush displays."

 

To test their hypothesis, Park et al. constructed a robot dinosaur they dubbed "Robopteryx," using Caudipteryx as a model. They built the robot's body out of aluminum, with the proto-wings and tail plumage made from black paper and plastic ribbing. The head was made of black polystyrene, the wing folds were made of black elastic stocking, and the whole contraption was covered in felt. They scanned the scientific literature on Caudipteryx to determine resting posture angles and motion ranges. The motion of the forelimbs and tail was controlled by a mechanism controlled by custom software running on a mobile phone.

 

 

Park et al. then conducted experiments with the robot performing motions consistent with a flush display using the band-winged grasshopper (a likely prey), which has relatively simple neural circuits. They placed a wooden stick with scale marks next to the grasshopper and photographed it to record its body orientation relative to the robot, and then made the robot's forelimbs and tail flap to mimic a flush display. If the grasshopper escaped, they ended the individual test; if the grasshopper didn't respond, they slowly moved the robot closer and closer using a long beam. The team also attached electrodes to grasshoppers in the lab to measure neural spikes as the insects were shown projected Cauderyx animations of a flush display on a flat-screen monitor.

 

The results: around half the grasshoppers fled in response to Robopteryx without feathers, compared to over 90 percent when feathered wings flapped. They also measured stronger neural signals when feathers were present. For Park et al., this is solid evidence in support of their hypothesis that a flush-pursuit hunting strategy may have been a factor in the evolution of pennaceous feathers. "Our results emphasize the significance of considering sensory aspects of predator-prey interactions in the studies of major evolutionary innovations among predatory species," the authors wrote.

 

Not everyone is convinced by these results. “It seems to me to be very unlikely that a structure as complex as a pennaceous feather would evolve for such a specific behavioral role,” Steven Salisbury of the University of Queensland in Australia, who was not involved with the research, told New Scientist. “I am sure there are lots of ways to scare grasshoppers other than to flap some feathers at it. You can have feathers to scare grasshoppers and you can have them to insulate and incubate eggs. They’re good for display, the stabilization of body position when running, and, of course, for gliding and powered flight. Feathers help for all sorts of things.”

 

Scientific Reports, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-50225-x  (About DOIs).

 

The world's most advanced humanoid robot, Boston Dynamics' Atlas, is back, and it's moving some medium-weight car parts. While the robot has mastered a lot of bipedal tricks like walking, running, jumping, and even backflips, it's still in the early days of picking stuff up. When we last saw the robot, it had sprouted a set of rudimentary hand clamps and was using those to carry heavy objects like a toolbox, barbells, and a plank of wood. The new focus seems to be on "kinetically challenging" work—these things are heavy enough to mess with the robot's balance, so picking them up, carrying them, and putting them down requires all sorts of additional calculations and planning so the robot doesn't fall over.

 

In the latest video, we're on to what looks like "phase 2" of picking stuff up—being more precise about it. The old clamp hands had a single pivot at the palm and seemed to just apply the maximum grip strength to anything the robot picked up. The most delicate thing Atlas picked up in the last video was a wooden plank, and it was absolutely destroying the wood. Atlas' new hands look a lot more gentle than The Clamps, with each sporting a set of three fingers with two joints. All the fingers share one big pivot point at the palm of the hand, and there's a knuckle joint halfway up the finger. The fingers are all very long and have 360 degrees of motion, so they can flex in both directions, which is probably effective but very creepy. Put two fingers on one side of an item and the "thumb" on the other, and Atlas can wrap its hands around objects instead of just crushing them.

 

 

Atlas is picking up a set of car struts—an object with extremely complicated topography that weighs around 30 pounds—so there's a lot to calculate. Atlas does a heavy two-handed lift of a strut from a vertical position on a pallet, walks it over to a shelf, and carefully slides it into place. This is all in Boston Dynamics' lab, but it's close to repetitive factory or shipping work. Everything here seems designed to give the robot a manipulation challenge. The complicated shape of the strut means there are a million ways you could grip it incorrectly. The strut box has tall metal poles around it, so the robot needs to not bang the strut into the obstacle. The shelf is a tight fit, so the strut has to be placed on the edge of the shelf and slid into place, all while making sure the strut's many protrusions won't crash into the shelf.

 

One limitation here is that at least some of the smarts in the video are pre-calculated—at one point, we see what looks like Atlas' vision processing, and it has a perfect 3D scan of the car strut ready to go. So this is either attempt number 5,000, and it has already seen the strut from all angles, or Atlas was pre-programmed with topographical data for this exact model car strut. Either way, for all the lifts in the video, Atlas is saved from trying to figure out the shape of the object in real time. Atlas has a lidar sensor on its face and can generate a point cloud of what it's looking at, so it just needs to line up the pre-baked model with the point cloud, and it has perfect knowledge of the strut topography. A harder level of difficulty would be picking up an object Atlas has never seen before, but you've got to break down the challenges into smaller parts and start somewhere.

 

When Atlas picks up a strut, it has to walk around a pallet, and as always, the robot shines when it comes to bipedal movement. The simpler way to move around the pallet would be a set of straight-line walking paths with pivots in between. Atlas' path-planning is way more complicated, though, and involves more advanced side-step moves, leaning into turns, and just dynamically stumbling around the pallet any way it can. This version of Atlas moves less like a robot and more like a drunk person, which is a big compliment. At one point, it even stumbles and recovers, drawing an excited reaction from onlookers in the background.

 

Eighty percent of patients with autoimmune diseases are female. These diseases are one of the top 10 leading causes of death for women under 65, and cases are increasing annually worldwide. There is evidence suggesting that it's females’ double complement of X chromosomes that puts them at such heightened risk for autoimmune diseases. Female cells have two X chromosomes, whereas males have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome (at least in mammals).

Shutting down an X

Different animals compensate for this sort of disparity in different ways. Male fly cells churn out twice the amount of the proteins encoded by their single X chromosome, so they end up with the same amount as female cells. Worm hermaphrodite cells reduce production of the proteins encoded by each of their X chromosomes by half, so they end up with the same amount as male cells.

 

Mammals use X inactivation, in which each female cell shuts off one of its X chromosomes and only uses the other. Which X chromosome is shut off (the paternally inherited one or the maternally inherited one) is random and independent within each cell. So women are all genetic mosaics: Their cells are not all making the same proteins since some of their cells use one of their X chromosomes and some of their cells use the other.

 

X inactivation is achieved by a complex of proteins and an RNA called Xist. The inactivated X chromosome makes Xist, which establishes an X-inactivation center on that chromosome. It then recruits proteins to bind to it, and these eventually cover up the entire chromosome so it can’t be used. Since male cells don’t have a second X chromosome, they don’t make Xist.

 

One suggestion for why women are more susceptible to autoimmune disease is the pregnancy-compensation hypothesis, which posits that women’s immune systems have to be super vigilant to cope with the potentially dangerous foreign bodies that got implanted in them regularly and frequently throughout human history (placentas and fetuses). Now, women have birth control and don’t spend most of their adult lives pregnant, but their overactive immune systems haven’t yet learned to calibrate, the idea goes, so they attack the body's own tissues.

Xisting autoimmunity

To examine the role Xist might play in autoimmune diseases, a group of researchers at Stanford University put a gene for Xist into male mouse cells. The Xist they used is mutated; it doesn’t have the gene-silencing function of regular Xist since that would shut off a chromosome, killing the mice. But it does still bind to almost all of its protein partners.

 

Most of the male mice expressing Xist developed an autoimmune disease (lupus was the specific model they used) and achieved “female-level severe pathology,” which included multi-organ autoimmune pathology along with abnormal B and cells. B cells are the ones that make the autoantibodies, and the B cells in these male mice mimicked those in females with autoimmune diseases—they were hyperproliferative and hyperinflammatory. T cells showed the same profile and made less of the molecules that usually help T cells regulate self-tolerance and immune modulation.

 

Thirty Xist binding proteins have already been reported to be targets of antibodies in human autoimmune diseases, which is what spurred this study in the first place. These researchers further identified another 28 new Xist-binding proteins to which the autoimmune sera specifically reacted.

 

Physicians and scientists have long known that (1) women get more autoimmune diseases than men; (2) dosage compensation for the second X chromosome in female cells likely played some role in that; (3) RNA-protein complexes are often targeted by autoantibodies; and (4) Xist is part of an RNA-protein complex involved in X inactivation. Yet no one had ever looked to see if Xist itself might underlie the greater propensity of women to develop autoimmune diseases. Finally, someone put all these logical pieces together and found out that it does. Hopefully, this research will reveal some new and effective targets for the diagnosis, monitoring, stratification, and treatment of this suite of diseases.

 

Cell, 2024.  DOI:  10.1016/j.cell.2023.12.037

 

 

 

Good morning. It's February 6, and today's image reveals the Jovian moon Io in a revelatory new light.

 

Over the weekend the operators of NASA's Juno spacecraft released a new batch of images showcasing a February 3 flyby of Io, the volcanically active moon orbiting Jupiter. Io, if you didn't know, is the most volcanically active world known to humans.

 

As part of its mission to closely study Jupiter, Juno has also been making periodic flybys of some of the gas giant's more intriguing moons. NASA then invites members of the public to process the raw images to tease out details.

 

Björn Jónsson has done just that for the most recent flyby of Io, producing the amazing image in this post. Of his work, Jónsson says, "The small, bright features are specular reflections from features that normally appear dark (volcanic glass?). A plume is visible at lower right, it's been brightened rel to other parts of the image & is heavily processed. North is up."

 

The plume is magical.

 

Source: Björn Jónsson

 

Genetic mutations are essential for innovation and evolution, yet too many—or the wrong ones—can be fatal. So researchers at Cambridge established a synthetic “orthogonal” DNA replication system in E. coli that they can use as a risk-free way to generate and study such mutations. It is orthogonal because it is completely separate from the system that E. coli uses to copy its actual genome, which contains the genes E. coli needs to survive.

 

The genes in the orthogonal system are copied with an extraordinarily error-prone DNA replication enzyme, which spurs rapid evolution by generating many random mutations. This goes on while E. coli’s genes are replicated by its normal high-fidelity DNA copying enzyme. The two enzymes work alongside each other, each doing their own thing but not interfering with the other’s genes.

Engineering rapid mutation

Such a cool idea, right? The scientists stole it from nature. Yeast already has a system like this, with a set of genes copied by a dedicated enzyme that doesn’t replicate the rest of the genome. But E. coli is much easier to work with than yeast, and its population can double in 20 minutes, so you can get a lot of rounds of replication and evolution done fast.

 

The researchers generated the system by pillaging a phage—a virus that infects E. coli. They took out all of the phage genes that allow the phage to grow uncontrollably until it bursts the E. coli cell it infected open. The engineering left only a cassette containing the genes responsible for copying the phage genome. Once this cassette was inserted into the E. coli genome, it could simultaneously replicate at least three different strings of genes placed next to it in the DNA, maintaining them for over a hundred generations—all while leaving the rest of the E. coli genome to be copied by other enzymes.

 

The scientists then tweaked the mutation rate of the orthogonal DNA-replicating enzyme, eventually enhancing it 1,000-fold. To test if the system could be used to evolve new functions, they inserted a gene for resistance to one antibiotic and saw how long it took for that gene to mutate into one conferring resistance to a different antibiotic. Within twelve days, they got 150 times more resistance to the new antibiotic. They also inserted the gene encoding green fluorescent protein and increased its fluorescence over 1,000-fold in five days.

Evolving detoxification

Not 20 pages later, in the same issue of Science, Frances Arnold’s lab has a paper that provides evidence of how powerful this approach could be. This team directed the evolution of an enzyme the old-fashioned way: through sequential rounds of random mutagenesis and selection for the desired trait. Arnold won The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 for the directed evolution of enzymes, so she knows what she’s about. In this recent work, her lab generated an enzyme that can biodegrade volatile methyl siloxanes. We make megatons of these compounds every year to stick in cleaning products, shampoos and lotions, and industrial products, but they linger in the environment. They contain carbon-silicon bonds, which were never a thing until humans made them about 80 years ago; since nature never made these bonds, there is no natural way to break them, either.

 

“Directed evolution with siloxane was particularly challenging,” the authors note in their introduction, for various technical reasons. “We started from an enzyme we had previously engineered for other chemistry on siloxanes—that enzyme, unlike the natural enzyme, showed a tiny bit of activity for siloxane Si-C bond cleavage. The overall project, however, from initial discovery to figuring out how to measure what we wanted, took several years,” Arnold said. And it is only the first step in possibly rendering siloxanes biodegradable. The accelerated continuous evolution that the new orthologous system allows will hopefully greatly facilitate the development of enzymes and other proteins like this that will have applications in research, medicine, and industry.

 

We do not (yet) have machines that can efficiently assemble long stretches of DNA or make proteins. But cells do these things extremely efficiently, and E. coli cells have long been the ones used in the lab as little factories, churning out whatever genes or proteins researchers program into them. Now E. coli can be used for one more molecular task—they can be little hotbeds of evolution.

 

Science, 2024.  DOI: 10.1126/science.adi5554, 10.1126/science.adk1281

 

Most of us want to stay on this planet as long as possible. While there are still differences depending on sex and region, we are now living longer as a species—and it seems life spans will only continue to grow longer.

 

Researcher David Atance of Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, and his team gathered data on the trends of the past. They then used their findings to project what we can expect to see in the future. Some groups have had it harder than others because of factors such as war, poverty, natural disasters, or disease, but the researchers found that morality and longevity trends are becoming more similar regardless of disparities between sexes and locations.

 

“The male-female gap is decreasing among the [clusters],” they said in a study recently published in PLOS One.

Remembering the past

The research team used specific mortality indicators—such as life expectancy at birth and most common age at death–to identify five global clusters that reflect the average life expectancy in different parts of the world. The countries in these clusters changed slightly from 1990 to 2010 and are projected to change further by 2030 (though 2030 projections are obviously tentative). Data for both males and females was considered when deciding which countries belonged in which cluster during each period. Sometimes, one sex thrived while the other struggled within a cluster—or even within the same country.

 

Clusters that included mostly wealthier countries had the best chance at longevity in 1990 and 2010. Low-income countries predictably had the worst mortality rate. In 1990, these countries, many of which are in Africa, suffered from war, political upheaval, and the lethal spread of HIV/AIDS. Rwanda endured a bloody civil war during this period. Around the same time, Uganda had tensions with Rwanda, as well as Sudan and Zaire. In the Middle East, the Gulf War and its aftermath inevitably affected 1990 male and female populations.

 

Along with a weak health care system, the factors that gave most African countries a high mortality rate were still just as problematic in 2010. In all clusters, male life spans tended to differ slightly less between countries than female life spans. However, in some regions, there were differences between how long males lived compared to females. Mortality significantly increased in 1990 male populations from former Soviet countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and this trend continued in 2010. Deaths in those countries were attributed to violence, accidents, cardiovascular disease, alcohol, an inadequate healthcare system, poverty, and psychosocial stress.

Glimpsing the future

2030 predictions must be taken with caution. Though past trends can be good indicators of what is to come, trends do not always continue. While things may change between now and 2030 (and those changes could be drastic), these estimates project what would happen if past and current trends continue into the relatively near future.

 

Some countries might be worse off in 2030. The lowest-income, highest-mortality cluster will include several African countries that have been hit hard with wars as well as political and socioeconomic challenges. The second low-income, high-mortality cluster, also with mostly African countries, will now add some Eastern European and Asian countries that suffer from political and socioeconomic issues most have recently been involved in conflicts and wars or still are, such as Ukraine.

 

The highest-income, lowest-mortality cluster will gain some countries. These include Chile, which has made strides in development that are helping people live longer.

 

Former Soviet countries will probably continue to face the same issues they did in 1990 and 2010. They fall into one of the middle-income, mid-longevity clusters and will most likely be joined by some Latin American countries that were once in a higher bracket but presently face high levels of homicide, suicide, and accidents among middle-aged males. Meanwhile, there are some other countries in Latin America that the research team foresees as moving toward a higher income and lower mortality rate.

Appearances can be deceiving

The study places the US in the first or second high-income, low-mortality bracket, depending on the timeline. This could make it look like it is doing well on a global scale. While the study doesn’t look at the US specifically, there are certain local issues that say otherwise.

 

A 2022 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that pregnancy and maternal care in the US is abysmal, with a surprisingly high (and still worsening) maternal death rate of about 33 deaths per 100,000 live births. This is more than double what it was two decades ago. In states like Texas, which banned abortion after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, infant deaths have also spiked. The US also has the most expensive health care system among high-income countries, which was only worsened by the pandemic.

 

The CDC also reports that life expectancy in the US keeps plummeting. Cancer, heart disease, stroke, drug overdose, and accidents are the culprits, especially in middle-aged Americans. There has also been an increase in gun violence and suicides. Guns have become the No. 1 killer of children and teens, which used to be car accidents.

 

Whether the US will stay in that top longevity bracket is also unsure, especially if maternal death rates keep rising and there aren’t significant improvements made to the health care system. There and elsewhere, there’s no way of telling what will actually happen between now and 2030, but Atance and his team want to revisit their study then and compare their estimates to actual data. The team is also planning to further analyze the factors that contribute to longevity and mortality, as well as conduct surveys that could support their predictions. We will hopefully live to see the results.

 

PLOS One, 2024. DOI:  10.1371/journal.pone.0295842

 

Land hermit crabs have been using bottle tops, parts of old light bulbs and broken glass bottles, instead of shells.

 

New research by Polish researchers studied 386 images of hermit crabs occupying these artificial shells. The photos had been uploaded by users to online platforms, then analyzed by scientists using a research approach known as iEcology. Of the 386 photos, the vast majority, 326 cases, featured hermit crabs using plastic items as shelters.

 

At first glance, this is a striking example of how human activities can alter the behavior of wild animals and potentially the ways that populations and ecosystems function as a result. But there are lots of factors at play and, while it’s easy to jump to conclusions, it’s important to consider exactly what might be driving this particular change.

Shell selection

Hermit crabs are an excellent model organism to study because they behave in many different ways and those differences can be easily measured. Instead of continuously growing their own shell to protect their body, like a normal crab or a lobster would, they use empty shells left behind by dead snails. As they walk around, the shell protects their soft abdomen but whenever they are threatened they retract their whole body into the shell. Their shells act as portable shelters.

 

Having a good enough shell is critical to an individual’s survival so they acquire and upgrade their shells as they grow. They fight other hermit crabs for shells and assess any new shells that they might find for suitability. Primarily, they look for shells that are large enough to protect them, but their decision-making also takes into account the type of snail shell, its condition and even its color—a factor that could impact how conspicuous the crab might be.

 

Another factor that constrains shell choice is the actual availability of suitable shells. For some as yet unknown reason, a proportion of land hermit crabs are choosing to occupy plastic items rather than natural shells, as highlighted by this latest study.

Housing crisis or ingenious new move?

Humans have intentionally changed the behavior of animals for millennia through the process of domestication. Any unintended behavioral changes in natural animal populations are potentially concerning, but how worried should we be about hermit crabs using plastic litter as shelter?

 

The Polish research raises a number of questions. First, how prevalent is the adoption of plastic litter instead of shells? While 326 crabs using plastic seems like a lot, this is likely to be an underestimation of the raw number given that users are likely to encounter crabs only in accessible parts of the populations. Conversely, it seems probable that users could be biased towards uploading striking or unusual images, so the iEcology approach might produce an exaggerated impression of the proportion of individuals in a population opting for plastic over natural shells. We need structured field surveys to clarify this.

 

Second, why are some individual crabs using plastic? One possibility is that they are forced to due to a lack of natural shells, but we can’t test this hypothesis without more information on the demographics of local snail populations. Or perhaps the crabs prefer plastic or find it easier to locate, compared with real shells? As the authors point out, plastic might be lighter than the equivalent shells affording the same amount of protection but at lower energy cost of carrying them. Intriguingly, chemicals that leach out of plastic are known to attract marine hermit crabs by mimicking the odor of food.

 

 

This leads to a third question about the possible downsides of using plastic. Compared to real shells plastic waste tends to be brighter and might contrast more with the background making the crabs more vulnerable to predators. Additionally, we know that exposure to microplastics and compounds that leach from plastic can change the behaviour of hermit crabs, making them less fussy about the shells that they choose, less adept at fighting for shells and even changing their personalities by making them more prone to take risks. To answer these questions about the causes and consequences of hermit crabs using plastic waste in this way, we need to investigate their shell selection behavior through a series of laboratory experiments.

Pollution changes behavior

Plastic pollution is just one of the ways we are changing our environment. It’s by far the most highly reported form of debris that we have introduced to marine environments. But animal behavior is affected by other forms of pollution too, including microplastics, pharmaceuticals, light, and noise, plus the rising temperatures and ocean acidification caused by climate change.

 

So while investigating the use of plastic waste by hermit crabs could help us better understand the consequences of certain human impacts on the environment, it doesn’t show how exactly animals will adjust to the Anthropocene, the era during which human activity has been having a significant impact on the planet. Will they cope by using plastic behavioral responses or evolve across generations, or perhaps both? In my view, the iEcology approach cannot answer questions like this. Rather, this study acts as an alarm bell highlighting potential changes that now need to be fully investigated.

 

 

Before Neanderthals and Denisovans, before vaguely humanoid primates, proto-mammals, or fish that crawled out of the ocean to become the first terrestrial animals, our earliest ancestors were microbes.

 

More complex organisms like ourselves descend from eukaryotes, which have a nuclear membrane around their DNA (as opposed to prokaryotes, which don’t). Eukaryotes were thought to have evolved a few billion years ago, during the late Palaeoproterozoic period, and started diversifying by around 800 million years ago. Their diversification was not well understood. Now, a team of researchers led by UC Santa Barbara paleontologist Leigh Ann Riedman discovered eukaryote microfossils that are 1.64 billion years old, yet had already diversified and had surprisingly sophisticated features.

 

“High levels of eukaryotic species richness and morphological disparity suggest that although late Palaeoproterozoic [fossils] preserve our oldest record of eukaryotes, the eukaryotic clade has a much deeper history,” Riedman and her team said in a study recently published in Papers in Paleontology.

Really, really, really old tricks

During the late Palaeoproterozoic, eukaryotes most likely evolved in the wake of several major changes on Earth, including a drastic increase in atmospheric oxygen and shifts in ocean chemistry. This could have been anywhere from 3 billion to 2.3 billion years ago. Riedman’s team explored the layers of sedimentary rock in the Limbunya region of Australia’s Birrindudu basin. The fossils they unearthed included a total of 26 taxa, as well as 10 species that had not been described before. One of them is Limbunyasphaera operculata, a species of the new genus Limbunyasphera.

 

What makes L. operculata so distinct is that it has a feature that appears to be evidence of a survival mechanism used by modern eukaryotes. There are some extant microbes that form a protective cyst so they can make it through harsh conditions. When things are more tolerable, they produce an enzyme that dissolves a part of the cyst wall into an opening, or pylome, that makes it possible for them to creep out. This opening also has a lid, or operculum. These were both observed in L. operculata.

 

While splits in fossilized single-cell organisms may be the result of taphonomic processes that break the cell wall, complex structures such as a pylome and operculum are not found in prokaryotic organisms, and therefore suggest that a species must be eukaryotic.

Didn’t know they could do that

Some of the previously known species of extinct eukaryotes also surprised the scientists with unexpectedly advanced features. Satka favosa had a vesicle in the cell that was enclosed by a membrane with platelike structures. Another species, Birrindudutuba brigandinia, also had plates identified around its vesicles, although none of its plates were as diverse in shape as those seen in different S. favosa individuals. Those plates came in a large variety of shapes and sizes, which could mean that what has been termed S. favosa is more than one species.

 

The plated vesicle of S. favosa is what led Riedman to determine that the species must have been eukaryotic, because the plates are possible indicators that Golgi bodies existed in these organisms. After the endoplasmic reticulum of a cell synthesizes proteins and lipids, Golgi bodies process and package those substances depending on where they have to go next. Riedman and her team think that Golgi or Golgi-like bodies transported materials within the cell to form plates around vesicles, such as the ones seen in S. favosa. The hypothetical Golgi bodies themselves are not thought to have had these plates.

 

This sort of complex sorting of cellular contents is a feature of all modern eukaryotes. “Taxa including Satka favosa... are considered [eukaryotes] because they have a complex, platy vesicle construction,” the researchers said in the study. These new fossils suggest that it arose pretty early in their history.

 

Eukaryotes have evidently been much more complex and diverse than we thought for hundreds of millions of years longer than we thought. There might be even older samples out there. While fossil evidence of eukaryotes from near their origin eludes us, samples upwards of a billion years old, such as those found by Riedman and her team, are telling us more than ever about their—and therefore our—evolution.

 

Papers in Paleontology, 2023.  DOI: 10.1002/spp2.1538

 

What exactly is bitcoin mining doing to the electric grid? In the last few years, the US has seen a boom in cryptocurrency mining, and the government is now trying to track exactly what that means for the consumption of electricity. While its analysis is preliminary, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that large-scale cryptocurrency operations are now consuming over 2 percent of the US's electricity. That's roughly the equivalent of having added an additional state to the grid over just the last three years.

Follow the megawatts

While there is some small-scale mining that goes on with personal computers and small rigs, most cryptocurrency mining has moved to large collections of specialized hardware. While this hardware can be pricy compared to personal computers, the main cost for these operations is electricity use, so the miners will tend to move to places with low electricity rates. The EIA report notes that, in the wake of a crackdown on cryptocurrency in China, a lot of that movement has involved relocation to the US, where keeping electricity prices low has generally been a policy priority.

 

One independent estimate made by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance had the US as the home of just over 3 percent of the global bitcoin mining at the start of 2020. By the start of 2022, that figure was nearly 38 percent.

 

The Cambridge Center also estimates the global electricity use of all bitcoin mining, so it's possible to multiply that by the US's percentage and come up with an estimate for the amount of electricity that boom has consumed. Because of the uncertainties in these estimates, the number could be anywhere from 25 to 91 Terawatt-hours. Even the low end of that range would mean bitcoin mining is now using the equivalent of Utah's electricity consumption (the high end is roughly Washington's), which has significant implications for the electric grid as a whole.

 

So, the EIA decided it needed a better grip on what was going on. To get that, it went through trade publications, financial reports, news articles, and congressional investigation reports to identify as many bitcoin mining operations as it could. With 137 facilities identified, it then inquired about the power supply needed to operate them at full capacity, receiving answers for 101 of those facilities.

 

If running all-out, those 101 facilities would consume 2.3 percent of the US's average power demand. That places them on the high side of the Cambridge Center estimates.

Finding power-ups

The mining operations fall in two major clusters: one in Texas, and one extending from western New York down the Appalachians to southern Georgia. While there are additional ones scattered throughout the US, these are the major sites.

 

The EIA has also found some instances where the operations moved in near underutilized power plants and sent generation soaring again. Tracking the history of five of these plants showed that generation had fallen steadily from 2015 to 2020, reaching a low where they collectively produced just half a Terawatt-hour. Miners moving in nearby tripled production in just a year and has seen it rise to over 2 Terawatt-hours in 2022.

 

These are almost certainly fossil fuel plants that might be reasonable candidates for retirement if it weren't for their use to supply bitcoin miners. So, these miners are contributing to all of the health and climate problems associated with the continued use of fossil fuels.

 

The EIA also found a number of strategies that miners used to keep their power costs low. In one case, they moved into a former aluminum smelting facility in Texas to take advantage of its capacious connections to the grid. In another, they put a facility next to a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania and set up a direct connection to the plant. The EIA also found cases where miners moved near natural gas fields that produced waste methane that would otherwise have been burned off.

 

Since bitcoin mining is the antithesis of an essential activity, several mining operations have signed up for demand-response programs, where they agree to take their operations offline if electricity demand is likely to exceed generating capacity in return for compensation by the grid operator. It has been widely reported that one facility in Texas—the one at the former aluminum smelter site—earned over $30 million by shutting down during a heat wave in 2023.

 

To better understand the implications of this major new drain on the US electric grid, the EIA will be performing monthly analyses of bitcoin operations during the first half of 2024. But based on these initial numbers, it's clear that the relocation of so many mining operations to the US will significantly hinder efforts to bring the US's electric grid to carbon neutrality.

 

 

A typical lawn sprinkler features various nozzles arranged at angles on a rotating wheel; when water is pumped in, they release jets that cause the wheel to rotate. But what would happen if the water were sucked into the sprinkler instead? In which direction would the wheel turn then, or would it even turn at all? That's the essence of the "reverse sprinkler" problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, have grappled with since the 1940s. Now, applied mathematicians at New York University think they've cracked the conundrum, per a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters—and the answer challenges conventional wisdom on the matter.

 

“Our study solves the problem by combining precision lab experiments with mathematical modeling that explains how a reverse sprinkler operates,” said co-author Leif Ristroph of NYU’s Courant Institute. “We found that the reverse sprinkler spins in the ‘reverse’ or opposite direction when taking in water as it does when ejecting it, and the cause is subtle and surprising.”

 

Ristroph's lab frequently addresses these kinds of colorful real-world puzzles. For instance, back in 2018, Ristroph and colleagues fine-tuned the recipe for the perfect bubble based on experiments with soapy thin films. (You want a circular wand with a 1.5-inch perimeter, and you should gently blow at a consistent 6.9 cm/s.) In 2021, the Ristroph lab looked into the formation processes underlying so-called "stone forests" common in certain regions of China and Madagascar. These pointed rock formations, like the famed Stone Forest in China's Yunnan Province, are the result of solids dissolving into liquids in the presence of gravity, which produces natural convective flows.

 

In 2021, his lab built a working Tesla valve, in accordance with the inventor's design, and measured the flow of water through the valve in both directions at various pressures. They found the water flowed about two times slower in the nonpreferred direction. And in 2022, Ristroph studied the surpassingly complex aerodynamics of what makes a good paper airplane—specifically what is needed for smooth gliding. They found that paper airplane aerodynamics differ substantially from conventional aircraft, which rely on airfoils to generate lift.

 

 

The reverse sprinkler problem is associated with Feynman because he popularized the concept, but it actually dates back to a chapter in Ernst Mach's 1883 textbook The Science of Mechanics (Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargerstellt). Mach's thought experiment languished in relative obscurity until a group of Princeton University physicists began debating the issue in the 1940s.

 

Feynman was a graduate student there at the time and threw himself into the debate with gusto, even devising an experiment in the cyclotron laboratory to test his hypothesis. (In true Feynman fashion, that experiment culminated with the explosion of a glass carboy used in the apparatus because of the high internal pressure.)

 

One might intuit that a reverse sprinkler would work just like a regular sprinkler, merely played backward, so to speak. But the physics turns out to be more complicated. “The answer is perfectly clear at first sight,” Feynman wrote in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985). “The trouble was, some guy would think it was perfectly clear [that the rotation would be] one way, and another guy would think it was perfectly clear the other way.”

 

 

Mach proposed that there would be no rotation with a reverse sprinkler: the reaction force on the nozzle as it sucks in water pulls the nozzle counter-clockwise, while the water flowing into the inside of the nozzle pushes it clockwise. The two forces cancel each other out in this steady-state scenario. Feynman's own experiment showed a slight tremor when pressure was first applied to pump water through the nozzle, and then the sprinkler returned to its original position and remained still.

 

But others suggested that if the friction was low enough and the inflow rate high enough, a reverse sprinkler will start to turn in the opposite direction of an ordinary sprinkler, thanks to the formation of a vortex inside. As Philip Ball wrote at APS Physics, since Feynman's efforts, "some experiments have shown steady reverse rotation, some showed only transient rotation, and some situations led to unsteady rotation that changed direction or proceeded in a direction that depended on the experimental geometry."

 

Enter Leif Ristroph and colleagues, who built their own custom sprinkler that incorporated ultra-low-friction rotary bearings so their device could spin freely. They immersed their sprinkler in water and used a special apparatus to either pump water in or pull it out at carefully controlled flow rates. Particularly key to the experiment was the fact that their custom sprinkler let the team observe and measure how water flowed inside, outside, and through the device. Adding dyes and microparticles to the water and illuminating them with lasers helped capture the flows on high-speed video. They ran their experiments for several hours at a time, the better to precisely map the fluid-flow patterns.

 

 

Ristroph et al. found that the reverse sprinkler rotates a good 50 times slower than a regular sprinkler, but it operates along similar mechanisms, which is surprising. “The regular or ‘forward’ sprinkler is similar to a rocket, since it propels itself by shooting out jets,” said Ristroph. “But the reverse sprinkler is mysterious since the water being sucked in doesn’t look at all like jets. We discovered that the secret is hidden inside the sprinkler, where there are indeed jets that explain the observed motions.”

 

A reverse sprinkler acts like an "inside-out rocket," per Ristroph, and although the internal jets collide, they don't do so head-on. "The jets aren’t directed exactly at the center because of distortion of the flow as it passes through the curved arm," Ball wrote. "As the water flows around the bends in the arms, it is slung outward by centrifugal force, which gives rise to asymmetric flow profiles." It's admittedly a subtle effect, but their experimentally observed flow patterns are in excellent agreement with the group's mathematical models.

 

Physical Review Letters, 2024. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.044003  (About DOIs).

 

Listing image by NYU's Applied Mathematics Laboratory

 

Welcome to Edition 6.29 of the Rocket Report! Right now, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is the only US launch vehicle offering crew or cargo service to the International Space Station. The previous version of Northrop Grumman's Antares rocket retired last year, forcing that company to sign a contract with SpaceX to launch its Cygnus supply ships to the ISS. And we're still waiting on United Launch Alliance's Atlas V (no fault of ULA) to begin launching astronauts on Boeing's Starliner crew capsule to the ISS. Basically, it's SpaceX or bust. It's a good thing that the Falcon 9 has proven to be the most reliable rocket in history.

 

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.

 

 

Virgin Galactic flies four passengers to the edge of space. Virgin Galactic conducted its first suborbital mission of 2024 on January 26 as the company prepares to end flights of its current spaceplane, Space News reports. The flight, called Galactic 06 by Virgin Galactic, carried four customers for the first time, along with its two pilots, on a suborbital hop over New Mexico aboard the VSS Unity rocket plane. Previous commercial flights had three customers on board, along with a Virgin Galactic astronaut trainer. The customers, which Virgin Galactic didn't identify until after the flight, held US, Ukrainian, and Austrian citizenship.

 

Pending retirement ... Virgin Galactic announced last year it would soon wind down flights of VSS Unity, citing the need to conserve its cash reserves for development of its next-generation Delta class of suborbital vehicles. Those future vehicles are intended to fly more frequently and at lower costs than Unity. After Galactic 06, Virgin Galactic said it will fly Unity again on Galactic 07 in the second quarter of the year with a researcher and private passengers. The company could fly Unity a final time later this year on the Galactic 08 mission. Since 2022, Virgin Galactic has been the only company offering commercial seats on suborbital spaceflights. The New Shepard rocket and spacecraft from competitor Blue Origin hasn't flown people since a launch failure in September 2022. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Iran launches second rocket in eight days. Iran launched a trio of small satellites into low-Earth orbit on January 28, Al Jazeera reports. This launch used Iran's Simorgh rocket, which made its first successful flight into orbit after a series of failures dating back to 2017. The two-stage, liquid-fueled Simorgh rocket deployed three satellites. The largest of the group, named Mehda, was designed to measure the launch environments on the Simorgh rocket and test its ability to deliver multiple satellites into orbit. Two smaller satellites will test narrowband communication and geopositioning technology, according to Iran's state media.

 

Back to back ... This was a flight of redemption for the Simorgh rocket, which is managed by the civilian-run Iranian Space Agency. While the Simorgh design has repeatedly faltered, the Iranian military's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has launched two new orbital-class rockets in recent years. The military's Qased launch vehicle delivered small satellites into orbit on three successful flights in 2020, 2022, and 2023. Then, on January 20, the military's newest rocket, named the Qaem 100, put a small remote-sensing payload into orbit. Eight days later, the Iranian Space Agency finally achieved success with the Simorgh rocket. Previously, Iranian satellite launches have been spaced apart by at least several months. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

Rocket Lab's first launch of 2024. Rocket Lab was back in action on January 31, kicking off its launch year with a recovery Electron mission from New Zealand. This was its second return-to-flight mission following a mishap late last year, Spaceflight Now reports. Rocket Lab's Electron rocket released four Space Situational Awareness (SSA) satellites into orbit for Spire Global and NorthStar Earth & Space. Peter Beck, Rocket Lab's founder and CEO, said in a statement that the company has more missions on the books for 2024 than in any year before. Last year, Rocket Lab launched 10 flights of its light-class Electron launcher.

 

Another recovery ... Around 17 minutes after liftoff, the Electron's first-stage booster splashed down in the Pacific Ocean under parachute. A recovery vessel was stationed nearby downrange from the launch base at Mahia Peninsula, located on the North Island of New Zealand. Rocket Lab has ambitions of re-flying a first stage booster in its entirety. Last August, it demonstrated partial reuse with the re-flight of a Rutherford engine salvaged from a booster recovered on a prior mission. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

PLD Space wins government backing. PLD Space has won the second and final round of a Spanish government call to develop sovereign launch capabilities, European Spaceflight reports. Spain's Center for Technological Development and Innovation announced on January 26 that it selected PLD Space, which is developing a small launch vehicle called Miura 5, to receive a 40.5-million euro loan from a government fund devoted to aiding the Spanish aerospace sector, with a particular emphasis on access to space. Last summer, the Spanish government selected PLD Space and Pangea Aerospace to each receive 1.5 million euros in a preliminary funding round to mature their designs. PLD Space won the second round of the loan competition.

 

Moving toward Miura 5 ... "The technical decision in favor of PLD Space confirms that our technological development strategy is sound and is based on a solid business plan," said Ezequiel Sanchez, PLD Space's executive president. "Winning this public contract to create a strategic national capability reinforces our position as a leading company in securing Europe's access to space." Miura 5 will be capable of launching about a half-ton of payload mass into low-Earth orbit and is scheduled to make its debut launch from French Guiana in late 2025 or early 2026, followed by the start of commercial operations later in 2026. PLD Space will need to repay the loan through royalties over the first 10 years of the commercial operation of Miura 5. (submitted by Leika)

 

Japanese launch startup sets a date. Space One, a Japanese company developing its own small launch vehicle, announced January 26 that it has set a launch date for its Kairos rocket. The first Kairos launch is slated for March 9, during a one-hour launch window opening at 11 am local time in Japan. Space One aims to become the first Japanese private company to launch a rocket into orbit, breaking into a sector long dominated by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, with its H-IIA and H3 rockets that were developed with government funding. The Kairos rocket will attempt to place a small Earth-imaging satellite into orbit for the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office, an intelligence agency of the Japanese government responsible for the country's spy satellite fleet.

 

Is this real? ... At the end of 2022, Japanese news reports indicated Space One was on track for the first flight of the Kairos rocket in February 2023. Obviously, that didn't happen, and the program has been delayed several times since the company's founding in 2018. But there's reason to take this announcement seriously, with the specificity of the launch date and the statement from a Japanese intelligence agency regarding its satellite that will be aboard the Kairos rocket. The launch will occur at a privately run facility called Spaceport Kii, located roughly 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of Osaka. (submitted by tsuname)

 

 

Falcon 9, meet Cygnus. For the first time, SpaceX has launched a Northrop Grumman-owned Cygnus supply ship on a cargo delivery mission to the International Space Station, CBS News reports. This launch, using a Falcon 9 rocket, occurred on January 30 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. It was SpaceX's 10th launch so far in 2024. Northrop Grumman launched 17 of its previous 20 Cygnus cargo missions on the company's own Antares rocket from Wallops Island, Virginia. While Antares was grounded after a launch failure, Northrop Grumman contracted with United Launch Alliance for three flights aboard Atlas V rockets. Now, Antares is undergoing a major redesign after Northrop Grumman lost access to Russian engines, and there are no more Atlas Vs available to buy.

 

Only game in town ... Falcon 9's launch availability and reliability have positioned it as the only option for companies needing to put a sizable payload into orbit at any time in the next year or two. That was the dilemma faced by Northrop Grumman, a SpaceX competitor in the market to resupply the ISS, in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. The fallout of the war meant Northrop Grumman could no longer import Russian rocket engines for the Antares rocket, and the supply chain for Antares' Ukrainian-made first stage tanks also became suspect. Northrop Grumman has partnered with Firefly Aerospace to redesign Antares with new US-built engines, but the new rockets won't fly until at least late next year. That means Cygnus cargo ships will have to launch at least three times on SpaceX rockets to fill the gap. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

ESA gives “go” to dismantle Ariane 6. This is actually a good thing. The European Space Agency said on January 31 that preparations are underway to begin taking apart an Ariane 6 rocket on its launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana. This follows a series of ground tests in the second half of last year, culminating in a long-duration hold-town test-firing of the Ariane 6's Vulcain 2.1 engine in November. This largely completed the qualification of the Ariane 6 rocket for its maiden flight, now scheduled for June or July of this year. With the tests complete, technicians will dismantle the full-scale test version of the Ariane 6 launcher and prepare the launch site for the arrival of the first flight-worthy Ariane 6 rocket in the coming weeks.

 

Upper stage news ... One unresolved technical issue on the Ariane 6 program stems from an aborted test of the upper stage's Vinci engine on a test stand in Germany in early December. While ESA said engineers are still investigating why the engine shut down prematurely during this test, the agency said it doesn't appear to be a problem for the Ariane 6 maiden flight. "Based on the results of the analysis performed, we can confirm that the launch period for the Ariane 6 inaugural flight is unchanged," ESA said in a statement. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

 

 

Starlab to launch on Starship. The Starlab commercial space station will launch on SpaceX's Starship rocket, Ars reports. Starlab is a joint venture between the US-based Voyager Space and the European-based multinational aerospace corporation Airbus. The venture is building a large station with a habitable volume equivalent to half the pressurized volume of the International Space Station and will launch the new station no earlier than 2028. Starlab will have a diameter of about 26 feet (8 meters). It is perhaps not a coincidence that Starship's payload bay can accommodate vehicles up to 26 feet across in its capacious fairing.

 

Single launch solution … While it took 37 space shuttle flights to assemble and outfit the International Space Station, Starlab will launch on a single Starship flight. Marshall Smith, Voyager Space's chief technology officer, said the single launch solution saves money on development and integration. The Starlab station could launch with science payloads already integrated into the vehicle and should be ready for human habitation almost immediately, he said. Starlab is one of several commercial space station concepts in development, alongside the Orbital Reef complex from Blue Origin and Sierra Space, Axiom Space's planned commercial outpost, and another commercial station being developed by a startup named Vast.

 

Owning Starship. The Pentagon has approached SpaceX about potentially taking over Starship for sensitive and potentially dangerous missions as a government-owned, government-operated asset instead of contracting the company to launch payloads, Aviation Week reports. A senior SpaceX adviser discussed the proposal at a conference this week. SpaceX typically builds and operates its own rockets and spacecraft, but the concept the military has in mind would involve the government owning a Starship rocket. The Air Force Research Laboratory already has a contract with SpaceX to study using Starship for quick-response, long-range cargo delivery around the world.

 

Going beyond … This concept, if pursued, would go beyond the Rocket Cargo program. According to Aviation Week, the idea is similar to how the Air Force moves cargo. At times, the service contracts with private carriers to deliver cargo, but for certain critical missions it uses service “gray tail” aircraft. In this hypothetical case, the military could take a Starship off the line for a specific mission and return it to SpaceX after it is complete. (submitted by Ken the Bin, JAY500001, and Medmandan)

 

Endeavour goes vertical. A complete space shuttle is standing upright for the first time in more than a decade, collectSPACE reports. Earlier this week, two large cranes carefully lifted NASA's retired winged orbiter Endeavour off a Los Angeles side street into the air and then lowered it onto an already-standing external tank with twin solid rocket boosters. No, this is not the plot of a kitschy sci-fi film where the space shuttles make a comeback. Instead, Endeavour, the youngest of NASA's surviving space shuttle orbiters, will be displayed vertically in launch configuration at the Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center at the California Science Center. The new center won't open to the public for at least a few more years. Until now, Endeavour has been displayed to the public horizontally inside a temporary housing.

 

A unique display … With Endeavour now hanging on the side of its external tank and inert boosters, construction crews in Los Angeles will start building the museum structure around it. The shuttle hardware is so big that there wasn't a way to get Endeavour inside the structure after it was already built. Endeavour will be the only shuttle displayed in its launch-ready configuration. Atlantis is housed at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, with its payload bay doors open to appear as it would in orbit. Discovery appears with its landing gear down as if it just landed at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.

Next three launches

February 2: Jielong 3 | Unknown Payload | Bo Run Jiu Zhou Barge, China | 03:00 UTC

 

February 2: Long March 2C | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 23:45 UTC

 

February 4: Falcon 9 | Starlink 7-13 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 02:43 UTC