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As astronauts and engineers like to say, space is hard. But a bright mind never stopped from dreaming big.
A Seattle-based company has resurrected NASA’s spaceplane plans, which were abandoned in 2001 due to technical difficulties. Radian Aerospace is trying to replace airplanes that launch into space from a rocket-powered sled with vertical rocket launches. However, such a reorganization will not be easy.
Meanwhile, the fate of Boeing’s Starliner under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program — ultimately deciding whether it will one day become a spacecraft that could carry astronauts to low-Earth orbit — hangs in the balance.
The spacecraft successfully launched and delivered NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station in June. But what seemed like an eight-day hiatus turned into months of questions about the Starliner’s ability to return the crew safely to Earth.
Now, thruster problems have caused NASA and Boeing to send Starliner back home without both astronauts completing the mission before going back to the drawing board.
Defying gravity
After nearly three months, the Starliner spacecraft returned to Earth without the two test pilots after detaching from the space station Friday night and parachuting into the New Mexico desert early Saturday.
Starliner is the first US-made capsule to parachute to a land landing, rather than splashing into the ocean.
Wilmore and Williams watched their spacecraft depart and will remain in the orbiting laboratory until 2025.
“There is a part of us, all of us, that we wish it could be as we had planned. We planned to have the mission land with Butch and Suni on board,” said Steve Stich, manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
Now that Starliner is back on Earth, Boeing engineers will study the spacecraft and determine what work needs to be done to fix the issues that arose during its initial flight into space. It remains to be seen how and when Starliner will be certified to regularly carry astronauts to space.
Secrets of the sea
Researchers tagged a pregnant porbeagle shark off Cape Cod in Massachusetts to track her movements and see where she would give birth.
But five months later, his tag floated to the surface of the sea, and the team realized that the shark had probably been eaten by a large predator.
The research turned into a scientific murder mystery, and two likely suspects appeared in the waters where the porbeagle disappeared: great white sharks and minnows.
The discovery shows that shark behavior is more complex than previously thought, and large sharks hunting each other may be a common behavior.
Wild kingdom
The Iberian lynx has come back from extinction after years of conservation work — and new technology could ensure a long future for Spain’s lynx population.
Loss of habitat, reduction of food sources and road accidents were the biggest obstacles for the lynx. Then, the European Union and the Spanish government funded a major project to restore habitats and prey.
But the Iberian lynx is still under threat. To protect the cats from being killed on busy highways, conservationists are installing virtual fences equipped with sensors that use sound and light alarms. And in the future, scientists may engineer scent trails that create artificial tracks to connect different lynx populations.
Another life
An asteroid 20 times larger than the one that wiped out the dinosaurs may have slammed into Jupiter’s moon Ganymede 4 billion years ago, according to new research.
The massive impact could cause the moon, the largest in the solar system, to shift on its axis.
Astronomers could get more answers to Ganymede’s history, as well as how the impact has affected the global ocean beneath its icy surface, when the European Space Agency’s spacecraft are due to arrive and study the moon in 2031.
Meanwhile, a small asteroid created a flash as it flashed through Earth’s atmosphere over the Philippines near Luzon Island this week.
Inquiries
Researchers were able to observe mouse organ function after temporarily making their skin transparent using a common substance: yellow food coloring mixed with water.
The scientists applied the mixture to the skin on the skulls and bellies of live mice. The team was then able to directly observe blood vessels in the surface of the brain as well as muscle contractions moving food through the digestive tract.
When the light-absorbing dye mixes with water, it inhibits the skin tissue’s ability to scatter light.
The scientific breakthrough, like the plot of HG Wells “The Invisible Man,” could revolutionize biomedical research and make veins more visible for blood to draw from.
Discoveries
Grab your favorite morning brew and settle in with these fresh reads:
— A team led by Cornell University researchers has engineered robots controlled by king oyster mushrooms in a feat that blends living organisms and machines.
— New photographs taken at the site of the Titanic show the extent to which the 1912 shipwreck has deteriorated in recent years and have revealed the site of a stunningly intact statue of a Roman goddess.
— An amateur archaeologist has discovered an ancient complex kite ring that has been buried at the site of a fort in north-east Scotland for over 1,000 years.
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