A new paper looks at another way we might be able to detect advanced civilizations, and at its center is the need for energy. The more advanced a civilization becomes, the greater their need for energy and one of the most efficient ways, according to current theories, is to harness the energy from an actively feeding black hole. The paper suggests a civilization feeding matter into a black hole could harvest energy from it; more excitingly perhaps, the process could be detectable within 17,000 light years.
Officials said they are making progress in protecting two key institutions from the Eaton fire. Don Fregulia, an operations section chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which has joined in the Eaton fire response, said that efforts to protect Mt. Wilson had proved successful and he expected that to remain the case. “We’re actively engaged there, and so far, no loss to any values at risk at Mt. Wilson,” Fregulia said. “We’re feeling good about what we have to do up there tonight to keep that site secure.” He said the fire had also spread close to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but he said that’s a priority and crews were “making good progress there as well.”
To maximize chances of successfully bringing the first Martian rock and sediment samples to Earth for the benefit of humanity, NASA announced Tuesday a new approach to its Mars Sample Return Program. The agency will simultaneously pursue two landing architectures, or strategic plans, during formulation, encouraging competition and innovation, as well as cost and schedule savings. NASA plans to later select a single path forward for the program, which aims to better understand the mysteries of the universe, and to help determine whether the Red Planet ever hosted life. NASA is expected to confirm the program – and its design – in the second half of 2026.
In February, the first Moon landing through the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative brought NASA science to the lunar surface on Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander successfully capturing data that will help us better understand the Moon’s environment and improve landing precision and safety.
After launching into space in February, NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite mission is successfully transmitting first-of-their-kind measurements of ocean health, air quality, and the effects of a changing climate.
In June, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams safely arrived at the space station aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft following launch of their flight test. With Starliner’s arrival, it was the first time in station history three different spacecraft that carried crew to station were docked at the same time. Starliner returned uncrewed in September following a decision by NASA. Wilmore and Williams, now serving as part of the agency’s Crew-9 mission, will return to Earth in February 2025.
Deployed NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System in space, marking a successful test of its composite boom technology.
Awarded nearly $45 million to 21 higher-education institutions to help build capacity for research, and announced the recipients of grants that will support scientific and technical research projects for more than 20 universities and organizations across the United States.
The long list from which this was taken is impressive. However, we also need to note a few of the problems this year. This includes troubled commercial missions to the Moon, a Boeing crew stranded on the International Space Station after a problematic Starliner test, delays in the SpaceX Starship rocket tests, a cancelled Moon rover, budget cuts at NASA as well as layoffs at JPL, cost overruns on the Mars Sample Return mission, and a delay in the Artemis II and III launch dates.
This does not override the accomplishments, but it puts them into context at a time of changing administrations in Washington. This will come with hard questions about the viability of current missions as well as the cost of future missions.
I agree 2024 has plenty of proud moments. That said, 2025 will be a very challenging year for NASA. The agency will need solid answers to hard questions, cost effective options for struggling missions, and plenty of public support to weather calls for additional budget cuts.
I have confidence NASA will come out of this even stronger, even if it is a bit bruised in the process.
Image (Credit): JPL’s most likely scenario for the unsuccessful landing of NASAs Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on Jan. 18, 2024. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
“When running an accident investigation from 100 million miles away, you don’t have any black boxes or eyewitnesses…While multiple scenarios are viable with the available data, we have one we believe is most likely: Lack of surface texture gave the navigation system too little information to work with.”
-Statement by Ingenuity’s first pilot, Håvard Grip of JPL, in a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) publication explaining the final flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on Jan. 18, 2024. The helicopter flew 72 times over the Martian surface, far surpassing NASA’s expectations.
Image (Credit): The Roman god Mars. (worldhistory.org)
While Elon Musk has talked endlessly about going to Mars with his Starship, it seems the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in the service of Mars, God of War, has other ideas for his rocket.
A recent Washington Post article, “Elon Musk’s Martian Dreams are a Boon to the U.S. military,” stated that DOD is looking to use the Starship for Earthbound battles, such as the quick deployment of soldiers and materiel into the Chinese theater. Sending rockets directly into the war zone with troops and supplies can turn a multi-week trip into a 90 minute trip. Another option is to keep key military supplies in Low-Earth Orbit so that they can be timely delivered when needed (in the way the DOD already pre-positions military equipment at sea and elsewhere).
The article states that the U.S. Air Force already has a five-year contract with SpaceX to make this rocket-based delivery possible. Space News reported on the $102 million contract award to SpaceX back in January 2022, which was to help “determine exactly what a rocket can achieve when used for cargo transport, what is the true capacity, speed, and cost of the integrated system.” A similar contract was awarded to Blue Origin in December 2021.
The space domain remains completely underdeveloped regarding providing terrestrial materiel support and offers an ideal platform to sustain smaller units of action within the joint force, which would otherwise divert aircraft or naval vessels that could be used to support larger formations…Space-based logistics can facilitate the delivery of blood, weapons, 3D-printed parts, power, and food to the joint force and has the potential for delivery time to be measured in minutes, not hours or days. The impetus for this idea can be traced to the Cold War.
The Army story makes reference to a separate 2022 The Journal of theJoint Forces Staff College article, “The World in 90 Minutes or Less: Rocket Logistics and Future Military Operations,” that discusses the pros and cons of this rocket-based approach. The article also cites numerous companies in addition to SpaceX that should be considered for this new approach, including United Launch Alliance (ULA), Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman, and Blue Origin.
In terms of advantages, the journal article notes:
The most significant difference between Rocket Logistics and conventional methods is the speed of delivery; rockets are expected to transport tons of material across the planet in under ninety minutes by using an orbital trajectory to reduce transit time. This presents a variety of logistical options to deliver valuable cargo within tactically relevant timelines, as opposed to hours or days (e.g. fourteen hours of flight time for a plane traveling from New York City to Nairobi, Kenya). The second advantage of Rocket Logistics is that movement above 100 kilometers in altitude is not governed by national airspace regulations. This means that the rocket would only need permission to access the nation’s airspace from which it departed and the nation in which it will land.
Of course, there are some limitations, including limited launch facilities, specific fuel needs, long turnaround time, and G-forces that may limit the types of cargo carried. For instance, the journal article notes:
While cargo aircraft are relatively sedentary in their acceleration profiles, a rocket can produce more G-forces than fighter aircraft. NASA and civilian space companies recognize this and limit flight parameters for the protection of cargo. Despite acceleration limitations, G-forces must be considered when planning the operational usage of rocket cargo.
There is a lot of money to be made in wars, and potentially more ongoing demand than a risky mission to Mars. Is this the future of SpaceX? Will it become further wrapped into the military-industrial complex (with its Starlink and other assets) at the expense of missions off planet?
The planned review of NASA and other federal agencies by the Trump administration may have an answer. But one thing you can be sure of, particularly with Musk in the middle of the review, is that SpaceX will be making plenty of money whether its goal is landing on the Red Planet or defeating Red China.
Image (Credit): Wolf-Rayet 124 (WR 124), a hot star just about to go supernova, as captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team)
Fast forward to now, and Zwicky’s namesake, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)—a National Science Foundation-funded sky survey that began operations in 2017 using the 48-inch telescope—has detected about a hundred thousand supernovae. These detections, in turn, have led to the spectroscopic classification and confirmation of more than 10,000 supernovae, making ZTF the largest supernova survey to date. “There are trillions of stars in the universe, and about every second, one of them explodes. Reaching 10,000 classifications is amazing, but what we truly should celebrate is the incredible progress we have made in our ability to browse the universe for transients, or objects that change in the sky, and the science our rich data will enable,” says Christoffer Fremling, a staff astronomer at Caltech. Fremling leads the Bright Transient Survey (BTS), ZTF project that discovers and classifies new supernovae.
Dry river channels and lake beds on Mars point to the long-ago presence of a liquid on the planet’s surface, and the minerals observed from orbit and from landers seem to many to prove that the liquid was ordinary water. Not so fast, the authors of a new Perspectives article in Nature Geoscience suggest. Water is only one of two possible liquids under what are thought to be the conditions present on ancient Mars. The other is liquid carbon dioxide (CO2), and it may actually have been easier for CO2 in the atmosphere to condense into a liquid under those conditions than for water ice to melt.
In the next decade, researchers will start probing the atmosphere of planets as small as Earth and Venus orbiting nearby stars. But although these two solar system planets are similar in size and bulk density—so that some call them “twins”—their atmospheres are nothing alike. Would scientists be able to set them apart if seen from light-years away?A team led by the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA) pretended Venus was faraway in another planetary system—an exoplanet—and asked what kind of information they could extract. The results were published in an article in the journal Atmosphere and prove that techniques being used to study large hot exoplanets can be effectively applied to those with a diameter 10 times smaller.
Our Awesome Universe 