A deal to end the longest government shutdown, expected to pass the House later today and head to President Donald Trump’s desk, rescinds layoff notices sent to thousands of federal employees in October.
The spending plan doesn’t bring back jobs for former federal employees who received reduction-in-force (RIF) notices earlier this year and who have officially separated from the government. But it does mean their severance payments, which have been on hold since the start of the shutdown, will resume.
Former federal employees say the nearly month-and-a-half freeze on severance payments has been a less visible part of the shutdown’s financial impact, and added to the emotional toll felt by those who lost their jobs under the Trump administration.
The severance payment freeze has had a major impact on former employees at the Department of Health and Human Services.
HHS sent RIF notices to 10,000 employees in April, and another 10,000 HHS employees left the department through voluntary separation incentives. Last month, HHS sought to lay off nearly 950 additional employees, but those RIF notices are expected to be rescinded.
Thomas Nagy, Jr, HHS chief human capital officer and deputy assistant secretary for human resources, told former employees in an email obtained by Federal News Network that, “due to the current lapse in appropriations, you will not be receiving any further severance payments until funding is restored.”
Nagy told laid-off workers that they may see a “temporary debt” on their leave and earnings statement, because severance payments have been stopped, retroactive to the beginning of the lapse in appropriations.
He added that the department’s payroll provider, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, “will initiate no collections actions, and that no funds will be withdrawn from your bank account,” and that HHS will resume payments “as soon as it is legally and operationally possible to do so.”
A laid-off HHS employee’s latest leave and earnings statement, shared with Federal News Network, does not include her severance payment. Instead, it shows that she owes the agency nearly $4,000.
The employee, who requested anonymity to avoid retaliation, said no funds had been withdrawn from her account, but said the notice raised more questions than it answered.
“I have no idea if this means this is actually going to be collected from me at some point, or if this is just an error,” she said.
Aside from boilerplate emails, the former HHS employee said she received no further communication from the department. She said she’s not sure who else to contact at HHS, because her entire supervisory chain also received RIF notices, or were reassigned to different agencies within HHS.
“I don’t actually know anybody who I can ask anymore,” the former employee said, “There is nobody we can ask. That’s really upsetting.”
Federal News Network has heard from several other former HHS employees who saw negative amounts on their latest leave and earnings statements. None received any notice asking them to repay any amount.
HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard told Federal News Network in a statement that “severance payments may only continue for employees in organizations exempt from furlough based on their funding source.”
To comply with the Anti-Deficiency Act, agencies have suspended severance payments for the duration of the shutdown. It’s not immediately clear how soon those severance payments will resume, once the shutdown ends.
The Office of Personnel Management, in updated guidance sent ahead of the shutdown, told agencies that “no funds may be authorized for severance payments for days during the lapse until an appropriation is enacted.”
A Nov. 5 memo from the HHS Office of Human Capital Management, sent to Food and Drug Administration managers and supervisors, states that HHS “has suspended all severance payments to former employees due to the current lapse in appropriations.”
The memo, obtained by Federal News Network, states that the suspension of severance payments started for the pay period ending Nov. 1, and “affects all HHS organizations.”
“Due to funding constraints across multiple HHS organizations, HHS Office of Human Resources directed a department-wide suspension of all severance payments through the end of the appropriations lapse,” the memo states. “Former employees will receive retroactive severance payments once the appropriations lapse ends.”
The memo directed human resources staff at other HHS components to notify all former employees about the hold on severance payments by Nov. 7.
More than 1.4 million federal employees missed two full paychecks, and received a partial paycheck during the 43-day government shutdown. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the shutdown will cost the federal government at least $7 billion, and up to $14 billion.
More than 4,000 federal employees across the government received RIF notices in mid-October, following guidance from the White House that encouraged agencies to move forward with layoffs in the event of a funding lapse. But those RIF notices will be reversed, as part of the deal to end the government shutdown.
The bill states that between the date of enactment and Jan. 30, no federal funds may be used “to initiate, carry out, implement, or otherwise notice a reduction in force to reduce the number of employees within any department, agency, or office of the federal government.”
The Senate passed the shutdown-ending spending plan on Monday, and the House is expected to pass the bill on Wednesday. The bill includes a continuing resolution that will keep many agencies funded at current spending levels until Jan. 30, 2026.
Most, but not all, of those RIF actions have been on hold because of a preliminary injunction granted by a district court judge last month. Federal unions sued the Trump administration over the layoffs, alleging that they violated the Administrative Procedure Act. Unlike most lawsuits, the Trump administration did not appeal the district court’s ruling.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Wednesday that the administration “is very hopeful that this shutdown is going to come to an end.”
“President Trump looks forward to finally ending this devastating Democrat shutdown with his signature, and we hope that signing will take place later tonight,” Leavitt said.
Even with the rollback of the shutdown layoffs, Leavitt said the Trump administration has still taken major steps to “reduce the size of our federal bureaucracy.”
The Partnership for Public Service estimates that more than 211,000 employees have left the federal workforce this year, either through layoffs or voluntary incentives
“We’ve done a lot of great work on that front, and we will continue to. But obviously, the President’s main priority was to reopen the federal government and get people back to work, and that’s what this deal accomplishes,” Leavitt said.
The post Shutdown-ending deal stops severance freeze for laid-off federal employees first appeared on Federal News Network.
© AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Good morning, readers, and happy Friday. Welcome to This Week in Space, our Friday morning roundup of the week’s most important space news. Today we’ve got a bunch of good news, including a newfound exoplanet and a dozen new moons orbiting Jupiter. We’ve also got a report of an absolutely wild idea — a literal moonshot — for fighting climate change with moon dust.
Thursday afternoon, SpaceX ran a successful static fire test of its gigantic Starship rocket. With 33 separate Raptor engines, Starship has the most engines of any rocket ever. Together, their thrust is twice that of a Saturn V or the Space Launch System. Is anyone else amazed the struts can hold that thing on the gantry?
Only 31 of the 33 engines fired. However, that’s actually good news because it means Starship can handle multiple engine failures.
Views from drone of Booster 7's static fire test pic.twitter.com/KN4sk1nohf
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 9, 2023
SpaceX hopes to attempt a test flight for Starship in March. “That first flight test is going to be really exciting. It’s going to happen in the next month or so,” said Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer.
“We will go for a test flight and we will learn from the test flight and we will do more test flights,” Shotwell added. “The real goal is to not blow up the launch pad. That is success.”
We’ve talked about how the folks aboard the International Space Station have to become polymaths to keep up with the demands of life in orbit. This winter, among many other pursuits, NASA astronauts on the ISS have been tending tomatoes and working on avant-garde methods of space propulsion. But the most recent projects in low-earth orbit make space tomatoes sound outdated. Over the past few days, crew on the ISS have been working on plasma crystals, servicing jetpacks, and… doing space plumbing.
NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata spent Thursday doing maintenance on the station’s water recovery system and orbital plumbing for the station’s bathroom, respectively. Meanwhile, station commander Sergey Prokopyev worked inside the Columbus lab “configuring video hardware that records how clouds of highly charged particles, or plasma crystals, behave in microgravity.”
The Tarantula Nebula is the brightest star-forming region in our cosmic neighborhood. It’s not even in our galaxy — it’s in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies. But it’s so bright that it dazzles even at that distance. Astronomers recently used the Hubble space telescope to capture this image of the Tarantula Nebula in all its splendor:
What you see here is actually a joint effort between two different astronomy projects. One team sought to analyze the properties of dust grains floating between stars — a proposal dubbed Scylla by the Hubble team. Those dust grains create the dark, wispy clouds spread across the frame. The other, called Ulysses, studies interstellar dust and starlight interactions.
NASA’s Perseverance rover went to Mars with a plan: Scour the planet’s surface for evidence that can teach us about Mars’ history and tell us whether the Red Planet might once have supported life. During its two years on Mars, the rover has found silicate clay and other minerals, signs that liquid water once flowed across Mars’ surface. But none of its discoveries have had evidence of water as visually obvious as a photograph that the agency’s Curiosity rover recently captured. The rover caught a photo of sandstone rock with ripples carved out of its surface, showing that the rock was once at the bottom of a lake.
The ripples support our observations of Mars’ weather and climate. Gentle, constant winds create standing ripple patterns like these. This fits with the constant prevailing winds and planetwide dust storms we’ve seen on Mars. It’s also exciting evidence that Mars indeed had liquid water once upon a time.
Russia successfully launched a Progress capsule aboard a Soyuz rocket this week, bound for the International Space Station. The rocket launched from Russia’s Baikonur aerodrome early Thursday morning, local time. This capsule, ISS Progress 83 (83P), carries about three tons of supplies, including food, water, and air. It will dock with the Russian Zvezda module on Saturday morning, replacing the Progress capsule that left Monday afternoon.
What happens to Progress 82 once it departs? Progress capsules are expendable. This means that the crew on the ISS loads the capsules with trash from the station while it’s docked. Then, hours or days after the capsule undocks, it burns up in the atmosphere.
NASA’s CAPSTONE satellite is finally responding to hails after nearly two weeks incommunicado. A software glitch left the probe unresponsive on Jan. 26 until it rebooted itself Monday.
“The spacecraft remained overall healthy and on-course throughout the issue,” NASA said in a blog post. “On Feb. 6, an automatic command-loss timer rebooted CAPSTONE, clearing the issue and restoring two-way communications between CAPSTONE and the ground.”
The satellite has made twelve successful circuits in its near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) — twice what its original mission expected. That’s great news for NASA. CAPSTONE is trying out the fancy new NRHO orbit because it’s more fuel efficient than other lunar orbits we’ve used. In twelve orbits, CAPSTONE has only had to fire its engine twice. This smashing success means the agency may use the new orbital pattern for lunar support satellites under the aegis of its Artemis project.
Did you know Ball makes Mason jars — and parts for space telescopes? Ball made parts for Hubble and the mirrors for the JWST. In a similar fashion, Rolls-Royce appears to be branching out. Way out. The luxury automaker’s subsidiary, Rolls-Royce Holdings, has announced plans to build a nuclear engine for deep space exploration.
(Image: Rolls-Royce Holdings)
According to Rolls-Royce, the micro-reactor will use uranium as fuel for nuclear fission. The company hopes to use the micro-reactor as an energy source for trips to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
NASA’s Guaranteed Time Observation program gives a certain amount of telescope time to those who worked on the JWST. One GTO project: Making observations of NASA’s DART kinetic asteroid redirect test. However, the project brought an unlooked-for surprise. Wednesday, JWST deputy project scientist Stefanie Milam explained how the telescope broke its own speed limit watching the asteroid impact.
Webb launched with the ability to track objects moving through the sky as fast as Mars. But scientists who study fast-moving small bodies like asteroids, comets, and interstellar objects “really wanted to study objects that moved faster than Mars,” said Milam. So, the team set out to show that not only could Webb exceed this “notional speed limit,” it could go much faster. Their efforts paid off when it came time to observe the DART asteroid impact.
NASA’s DART kinetic asteroid redirect test, as seen by the JWST. Image: NASA/JPL
The video Webb captured of the Dimorphos impact showed that the telescope can move its field of regard at more than triple its original maximum speed. Most of the time, though, Milam says the telescope will confine itself to double its original turning speed. Darn.
On Thursday, Canada’s favorite astronaut, Chris Hadfield, met with King Charles III at Buckingham Palace. The two sat down to discuss “efforts to encourage sustainability in space,” according to the Royal Family’s official Twitter.
“What a pleasure and privilege to be asked to advise and assist, and make the King laugh,” Hadfield wrote afterward.
What a pleasure and privilege to be asked to advise and assist. And make the King laugh :) https://t.co/3dGxNLCkUJ pic.twitter.com/DH9dgkq9t9
— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) February 9, 2023
While we don’t yet have specifics, Charles is a longtime environmentalist. Could it be that the King is interested in cleaning up space junk?
Astrophysicists are pondering the pros and cons of a literal moonshot to blunt the effects of climate change. In a recent study, a group of researchers proposed launching moon dust into orbit around Earth to create a dusty shield that would reduce Earth’s exposure to the Sun. Evidently, lunar dust grains are just the right size and composition to block some of the solar energy that would hit the Earth.
For six days out of the year, the researchers say, the dust cloud would shield Earth from a few percent of the Sun’s radiation. To carry out this plan, the researchers’ numbers require dredging up some 22 billion pounds of lunar dust. They could fire the dust into orbit from the Moon or a platform in orbit — potato, poterrible idea. Surely there is some lower-hanging fruit?
In October 2019, astronomers at the Carnegie Institution for Science found 20 new moons orbiting Saturn. This made Saturn the “moon king” of the Solar System, with a total of 83. However, the same team has announced they’ve found a dozen new moons orbiting Jupiter.
Jupiter – Unsplash
Stealing the crown back from Saturn, Jupiter now has 92 known moons. Nine of the twelve new moons are retrograde, meaning they orbit “backward” against Jupiter’s orbit. All the new moons are quite small, and they had been lost in Jupiter’s glare until now.
An international team of astronomers has reported a newfound exoplanet in our cosmic backyard. The new planet, Wolf 1069 b, is between 1 and 1.4 Earth masses and just 8% bigger. Calling it Earth-like might be a stretch: Wolf 1069 b zips around its low-mass red dwarf star in just 15 Earth days. However, it’s just 31 light-years away.
Unlike our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, Wolf 1069 doesn’t show the characteristic bursts of violent flares we frequently see in red dwarf stars. This could mean it has managed to retain an atmosphere. If so, the planet’s surface temperature could be about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. If not, it’s more likely an iceball, too cold to sustain liquid water.
Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is a once-in-an-epoch visitor from the outer solar system. We haven’t seen it since the time of the Neanderthals, but it’s come back for one last visit. The outbound comet passed close to Earth last week. Now, it’s buzzing Mars.
It’s green! Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) and its twin tails. Image: NASA
The green comet will be near Mars in the constellation of Taurus for the next several days. After sunset, look high in the sky for the best shot at catching it through binoculars or a telescope. After Feb. 14, the comet will start heading toward Orion and Eridanus.
If you don’t have a good shot at viewing the comet where you are, you can still catch it online. This weekend, the Virtual Telescope Project is webcasting a free livestream of the comet’s approach to the Red Planet. The livestream will begin this Saturday, Feb. 11, at 2 p.m. EST (1900 GMT). You can watch it on the project’s website and YouTube channel.
Feature image: This week’s waning gibbous moon, taken from the International Space Station. Courtesy of NASA HQ Flickr.
Hello, folks, and welcome back to your favorite Friday roundup of all the space news fit to print. This week we’ve got experimental rocket engines, a gigantic map, and galaxies galore. The James Webb Space Telescope found hydrogen in a galaxy more than eight billion light years away, and the coldest ice ever, but it’s currently down due to a software glitch.
Closer to home, Rocket Lab launched their Electron rocket from US soil for the first time. NASA came together for a day of remembrance that somehow managed to be both somber and ineffably sweet.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. And somewhere along the way, you’ll need one of the ancient molecular clouds of dust and ice from which stars and habitable planets like Earth are born. This week, Webb scientists announced that the telescope has spotted just such a place. It’s a stellar nursery called the Chamaeleon I cloud, loaded with these primordial crystals. That’s the tableau you’re seeing in the image above — you can tell it’s from Webb by those iconic six-pointed stars. The ice contains traces of sulfur and ammonia, along with simple organic molecules like methanol. And at just ten degrees above absolute zero, it’s the coldest ice ever found.
“We simply couldn’t have observed these ices without Webb,” said Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist involved in the research. “The ices show up as dips against a continuum of background starlight. In regions that are this cold and dense, much of the light from the background star is blocked, and Webb’s exquisite sensitivity was necessary to detect the starlight and therefore identify the ices in the molecular cloud.”
Late Wednesday evening, aerospace startup Rocket Lab successfully launched its Electron rocket from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. This was the 33rd launch of the Electron, but its first launch from American soil.
Electron is a 59-foot, two-stage, light-duty kerosene rocket. It’s powered by nine Rutherford engines, which my colleague Ryan Whitwam notes are semi-famous in aerospace for being largely 3D printed.
The Electron isn’t reusable — but in 2021, Rocket Lab announced the Neutron. Designed for reusability, the Neutron will have about a third of the lift capacity of a Falcon 9.
Speaking of 3D-printed rocket engines: NASA announced this week that it has successfully validated a next-gen rocket engine it hopes will revolutionize rocket design. The new engine generates thrust “using a supersonic combustion phenomenon known as a detonation.” And this is no experimental error — their full-scale alpha build produced more than 4,000 pounds of thrust at full throttle.
These engines get their name (rotating detonation rocket engine, or RDRE) from the unique way they produce thrust. Detonation waves echo around a circular chamber, wringing out every bit of energy from the rocket fuel. It’s great for efficiency, but it puts the whole system under extreme pressure. Undaunted, NASA turned to an advanced additive manufacturing process, even developing its own bespoke metal alloy for the task.
According to the agency, the RDRE incorporates the agency’s GRCop-42 copper alloy into a powder bed fusion (PBF) additive manufacturing process. PBF uses a laser or particle beam to seamlessly fuse ultra-fine particles. It’s a lot like the sintering process used to make the space shuttle rocket engines — and even they had to be actively cooled by the rockets’ own cryofuel, in order to withstand the unearthly temperatures and pressures of takeoff. If the design holds up, NASA intends to use RDRE in its efforts to establish a long-term presence off-planet.
Astronomers have created a gargantuan map of the Milky Way, using a telescope built to detect dark energy. Featuring more than three billion stars, it focuses on the galaxy’s orbital plane — a region notoriously difficult to study.
Earth’s atmosphere scatters starlight so that points of light turn into point clouds. So, the astronomers just dove right in. To isolate different stars and celestial objects, the group used some extra-snazzy math to get rid of noise. This allowed them to “paint in” the proper background, letting them tell one star from another.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab. Credit: Saydjari et al., via NoirLab
“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other,” said Andrew Saydjari, lead author on the (open-access!) paper accompanying the gigantic map. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”
The history of astronomy has been all about recognizing that our place in the universe isn’t all that special. We’ve gone from the center of all existence to just another planet orbiting an average star in one of billions and billions of galaxies. However, a new simulation hints that there might be something special about the Milky Way after all.
Yepun, one of the four Unit Telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory, studies the center of the Milky Way. Yepun’s laser beam creates an artificial “guide star” to calibrate the telescope’s adaptive optics. Image: ESO/Yuri Beletsky
The model suggests that the Milky Way is far larger than it should be, based on the scale of the “cosmological wall”: an incomprehensibly huge semi-planar structure occupied by the Milky Way and other galaxies in the Local Group.
An international team of astronomers announces the discovery of cold atomic hydrogen, more than eight billion light-years from Earth. Cooler than ionized plasma but warmer than molecular hydrogen gas, atomic hydrogen is the raw fuel of coalescing stars. The researchers used gravitational lensing to spot the telltale — but deeply redshifted — 21cm line.
Named for the daughter of Apollo, Chariklo is a centaur: a Kuiper belt object that orbits out past Saturn. It’s the first of its kind ever found with a confirmed ring system. The thing really is tiny; it’s about 160 miles in diameter and has less than two percent the mass of Earth. But a new report from Webb shows even that much mass is enough to sustain two slender rings, for a time.
In a remarkable stroke of scientific luck, the telescope was pointed just right to catch Chariklo as it passed in front of a star. When it did, the star’s light fluttered in a way that betrayed the presence of the rings.
Chariklo has two thin rings — the first rings ever detected (in 2013) around a small Solar System object. When Webb observed the occultation, scientists measured dips in the brightness of the star. These dips corresponded exactly as predicted to the shadows of Chariklo’s rings. pic.twitter.com/sqH08v1lOB
— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) January 25, 2023
Nothing less than delighted, the astronomers report that Chariklo’s rings are two and four miles wide, respectively. But the asteroid actually has something in common with the Chamaeleon I cloud. Chariklo’s surface is covered in exotic phases of water ice that only Webb can see.
Principal investigator Dean Hines added, “Because high-energy particles transform ice from crystalline into amorphous states, detection of crystalline ice indicates that the Chariklo system experiences continuous micro-collisions that either expose pristine material or trigger crystallization processes.” It’ll be up to the JWST to find out more.
Unfortunately, observations of Chariklo and other celestial bodies will have to wait a while. The JWST had a software glitch this week. Per NASA, the telescope’s Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) “experienced a communications delay within the instrument, causing its flight software to time out.” Unfortunately, this led to a software gridlock.
The telescope is unavailable for science observations because NASA and the Canadian Space Agency are doing root-cause analysis to figure out and fix the problem. But NASA emphasizes that the telescope is fine. There’s no damage and no indication of any danger. If it’s a software problem, it may well be a software fix.
Now that it’s been on Mars for a while, the Perseverance rover has filed an authoritative report on Martian weather. The number one takeaway: It’s cold on the Red Planet! The average surface temperature is -67C.
It’s also windy on Mars. Since Mars has an atmosphere, it has surface weather. It also has an axial tilt, so it has seasons, just like Earth. Dust storms can envelop Mars’ entire northern hemisphere.
Plumes of darker, subsurface dust waft to the surface when the sun warms Martian sands beneath transparent sheets of ice. Mars’ shifting winds then blow these plumes of dust into V-shaped patterns. Astronomers are using the plumes to learn more about Mars’ weather and surface climate. Image: NASA
Perseverance is covered in a suite of sensors that constantly monitor wind speed and direction, atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, and dust. Together, they make the rover’s Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA).
Here, you can see the MEDA sensors extending from the rover’s mast below the iconic ChemCam.
“The dust devils are more abundant at Jezero than elsewhere on Mars and can be very large, forming whirlwinds more than 100 meters in diameter. With MEDA we have been able to characterize not only their general aspects (size and abundance) but also to unravel how these whirlwinds function,” says Ricardo Hueso, of the MEDA team.
Perseverance has captured numerous dust devils as they sweep through Jezero Crater. However, to get that data, MEDA’s exposed sensors also face damage from the harsh radiation environment, extreme temperature swings, and the ever-present Martian dust. A dust devil in January of last year kicked up enough debris that it damaged one of MEDA’s wind instruments. Still, the rover perseveres.
Every year, NASA holds a memorial for staff, astronauts, and alumni who have died. 2023’s Day of Remembrance holds a somber significance, as Feb. 1 is the 20th anniversary of the Columbia disaster. Unfortunately, this year’s fallen also included Apollo 7 pilot Walt Cunningham, who passed earlier this month. Cunningham was the last surviving member of the Apollo 7 crew.
Photo Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani via NASA HQ Flickr
As in years past, NASA staff gathered this week at space centers and labs around the country, to honor the sacrifices of those who have given their lives in pursuit of exploration and discovery. But they did it in a way only NASA could do. They held nationwide town-hall safety meetings, to reflect on and improve NASA’s aerospace safety culture.
Ask not for whom the safety alarm tolls; it tolls for thee. NASA safety-culture town hall meeting at its Washington headquarters after the Arlington memorial service. Image: NASA/Keegan Barber via NASA HQ Flickr
What a fitting way to honor lives lost, while still reaching for the stars. Town-hall safety culture meetings. We love you guys. Never change.
Steady as she goes: After a year’s delay and a missed launch window, NASA’s Psyche mission team is getting the spacecraft in shape to launch this year. In a blog post, the agency said, “After a one-year delay to complete critical testing, the Psyche project is targeting an October 2023 launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.”
When it launches, Psyche will carry a technology demo for NASA’s shiny new Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) network. DSOC systems will use lasers for high-bandwidth communications between Earth and the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Beyond a deluge of scientific data, NASA expects that the network will be able to handle high-def images and video.
Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is a long-period comet that last visited Earth in the time of the Neanderthals. Now it’s back for another close approach. And although we didn’t know this when we found it last year, it turns out the comet’s tail glows pale green, like a luna moth under a streetlight.
The robin’s-egg glow of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)’s tail shines against its twin tails. Image: Dan Bartlett/NASA
At first, astronomers thought it might require binoculars to catch a glimpse of the thing. However, as ExtremeTech’s Adrianna Nine writes, the comet is now visible to the naked eye in places across much of the Northern Hemisphere.
Our verdant visitor will continue its brightening trend while it sails toward Earth. It will make its closest approach to us on February 2: perhaps too soon for a Valentine’s Day spectacular, but right on time for Imbolc, Candlemas, and Groundhog Day.
The Perseverance rover has spent almost two Earth years on Mars, which is just a single Martian year. With a full seasonal cycle in the books, researchers from the University of the Basque Country in Madrid have released the first detailed weather report from Perseverance. The study, published in Nature Geoscience, explores how temperature, wind speed, and atmospheric pressure vary over time in Jezero Crater.
Perseverance is equipped with seven major scientific instruments, including the MEDA (Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer). This tool is under the supervision of researcher José Antonio Rodríguez-Manfredi, who works at the university’s Centre for Astrobiology (CAB). MEDA includes sensors that can monitor temperature, pressure, wind speed, humidity, and dust concentrations.
Jezero Crater is near the planet’s equator, but it never gets very warm there. Perseverance reports the average temperature is -67 degrees Fahrenheit (-55 degrees Celsius), but the temperature swings wildly throughout the day, with temperatures between 50 and 60 degrees Celsius warmer during the day than at night. As temperatures drop off at night, so does the wind. The CAB researchers report that heating of the thin Martian atmosphere generates turbulent air movements due to convection. When the sun sets, the air settles. Perseverance recorded strong winds moving to the southeast during the day, reaching speeds of 82 feet (25 meters) per second. In the afternoon, winds dropped to just 13 feet (4 meters) per second, and the wind often died completely from 4 to 6 a.m. local time.
Here, you can see the MEDA sensors extending from the rover’s mast below the iconic ChemCam.
Pressure sensors in MEDA show a marked change throughout the year. The daily thermal cycle causes its own fluctuations, of course, but the melting and refreezing of the planet’s carbon dioxide ice caps produce a denser atmosphere during the Martian summer and a thinner one in the winter.
NASA chose Jezero Crater as the landing zone because there’s a huge ancient river delta inside it that could contain evidence of ancient life. As it turns out, Jezero Crater also has an extraordinary number of whirlwinds (or dust devils, if you prefer) compared with other regions on Mars. Perseverance regularly detected very large whirlwinds measuring more than 328 feet (100 meters) in diameter.
While it’s nice to have a weather report from another world, it’s more than a novelty. A better understanding of the Martian atmosphere will help NASA plan future automated missions, as well as hypothetical future crewed Mars landings. Perseverance can pave the way while it searches for its next prized rock sample.
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