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Jupiter is not just the oldest planet orbiting the sun—it’s also the largest. So when the young gas giant went on a rampage through the inner solar system, it shaped the fate of everything in its path. Speeding towards the Sun, Jupiter’s massive gravitational force hurled debris into interstellar space, stunting the growth of would-be planets. Earth might have been doomed had Saturn not pulled Jupiter back. Today, Jupiter resides in the outer solar system, where its gravity bends the paths of asteroids and stokes volcanic activity on its moon Io. But it could one day wreak havoc again. (Premiering July 31 at 9 pm on PBS)

Jupiter's massive gravitational force has made it both a wrecking ball and a protector of Earth.

The Planets: Jupiter

Rockets are becoming cheaper and more powerful than ever before thanks to stunning new technologies. As companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic make space more accessible, and NASA returns to crewed spaceflight, a new era of space exploration seems to be on the horizon. But will this seeming rocket Renaissance become more than just hype? NOVA explores the latest rocket technologies and the growing role private citizens may have in space. (Premiered February 13, 2019)

With new technologies, NASA and private companies are promising a new renaissance in space travel.

Rise of the Rockets

Black holes are the most enigmatic and exotic objects in the universe. They’re also the most powerful, with gravity so strong it can trap light. And they’re destructive, swallowing entire planets, even giant stars. Anything that falls into them vanishes…gone forever. Now, astrophysicists are realizing that black holes may be essential to how our universe evolved—their influence possibly leading to life on Earth and, ultimately, us. In this two-hour special, astrophysicist and author Janna Levin takes viewers on a journey to the frontiers of black hole science. Along the way, we meet leading astronomers and physicists on the verge of finding new answers to provocative questions about these shadowy monsters: Where do they come from? What’s inside? What happens if you fall into one? And what can they tell us about the nature of space, time, and gravity? (Premiered January 10, 2018)

Take a mind-blowing voyage to the most powerful and mysterious objects in the universe.

Black Hole Apocalypse

Koch Foundation

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Ultimate Space Telescope

Discover how NASA engineers built and launched the most ambitious telescope of all time.
How did NASA engineers build and launch the most ambitious telescope of all time? Follow the dramatic story of the James Webb Space Telescope—the most complex machine ever launched into space. If it works, scientists believe that this new eye on the universe will peer deeper back in time and space than ever before to the birth of galaxies, and may even be able to “sniff” the atmospheres of exoplanets as we search for signs of life beyond Earth. But getting it to work is no easy task. The telescope is far bigger than its predecessor, the famous Hubble Space Telescope, and it needs to make its observations a million miles away from Earth—so there will be no chance to go out and fix it. That means there’s no room for error; the most ambitious telescope ever built needs to work perfectly. Meet the engineers making it happen and join them on their high stakes journey to uncover new secrets of the universe. (Premiering July 13 at 9 pm on PBS)

Discover how NASA engineers built and launched the most ambitious telescope of all time.

The second-ever direct image of a black hole features Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Image Credit: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration

Scientists capture first-ever image of our galaxy’s supermassive black hole

On Thursday morning, an international team of astrophysicists and other researchers released the world’s first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, 27,000 light-years from Earth. The event marks “the dawn of a new era of black hole physics,” the team<a href="https://twitter.com/ehtelescope/status/1524737908892049408"> announced on Twitter</a>.More than 4 million times the mass of our sun, the black hole, named Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A*, pronounced “sadge ay star,” for short) is so dense and massive that no light can escape its gravity. The visible light in the new image comes from bright stars, gas, and other space matter swarming around the black hole itself.
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The image is the first visual evidence of Sgr A*’s existence; the black hole was previously only indirectly confirmed by observations of stars in orbit around it. The image comes from the Event Horizon Telescope’s (EHT) international consortium. A group of more than 300 scientists helped with the effort to capture it, “compiling information from radio observatories around the world,” Bill Chappell <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1098472567/image-black-hole-milky-way">reports for NPR</a>. (The EHT, named for the event horizon, or “point of no return” from a black hole, consists of eight radio telescopes scattered across the globe.)In 2019, the EHT team compiled an <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/first-black-hole-image/">image of Pōwehi</a>, a supermassive black hole 55 million light-years away in the galaxy Messier 87. Similar in appearance to Sgr A* but much more massive, Pōwehi is 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun.The much smaller Sgr A* proved difficult for scientists to visually capture: It’s a “dynamic environment” full of burbling and gurgling, Feryal Özel, a professor of astronomy and physics at the University of Arizona, told NPR. And the necessity to look through both the Earth’s atmosphere, gas clouds, and interstellar dust near the Milky Way’s center added to the challenge, Özel said. “It took several years to refine our image and confirm what we had, but we prevailed," Özel told NPR. And, despite its meager distance from Earth compared to Pōwehi, Sgr A* is far enough away to appear “to us to have about the same size in the sky as a donut on the Moon,” the EHT team stated <a href="https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/astronomers-reveal-first-image-black-hole-heart-our-galaxy">in a press release.</a>Hot gas whirling around Sgr A* at nearly the speed of light made capturing an image of this black hole considerably more difficult than Pōwehi, the EHT team said in the press release. “The brightness and pattern of the gas around Sgr A* was changing rapidly as the EHT was observing it,” EHT scientist Chi-Kwan Chan said in the press release.
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Images of Pōwehi captured by astronomers across the EHT were visually similar to one another, allowing scientists to compile a sharp composite image of Messier 87’s black hole. “That was not the case for Sgr A*,” the EHT team said in the press release. But despite these initial inconsistencies, the scientists were eventually able to compile an image of Sgr A*.Now, having images of such differently sized black holes provides a better look into the behavior of swirling gas around supermassive black holes, a phenomenon that’s not yet fully understood, but thought to play a key role in how galaxies, like our own, came to be. "Now we can study the differences between these two supermassive black holes to gain valuable new clues about how this important process works," EHT scientist Keiichi Asada said in the press release. 
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The Event Horizon Telescope team has captured the first image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Russian spacewalkers explore the spherical Prichal docking module, which is attached to the Nauka multipurpose laboratory module of the International Space Station. Image credit: NASA Johnson, Flickr

Daily life on the International Space Station: A Q&A with a space archaeologist

Soon after photos started arriving from the International Space Station (ISS), Justin Walsh spotted something unexpected: frosting. Tucked into a plastic bag hanging off the station wall, near a can opener and bottle of ketchup, were telltale red, yellow, and green tubes. Walsh was mystified. “What does frosting imply? Baking,” he said recently over Zoom. But baking in space is pretty much impossible. 
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He got his resolution when astronaut Kayla Barron <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/CZmgSeupMuq/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link">posted on Instagram</a> that she’d made a birthday cake for a colleague. “They did it by cutting the tops off of muffins and gluing them together with honey, then covering the whole thing with icing and frosting,” Walsh says. To Walsh, an art historian and archaeologist at Chapman University, the frosting was physical proof of something less concrete: astronauts’ bond with one another. Cooking and eating “is not only about sustenance; it's about social relations,” he says—even 250 miles above Earth. He, fellow space archaeologist Alice Gorman, and their colleagues received the frosting photo as part of the Sampling Quadrangle Assemblages Research Experiment, known as SQuARE. The ISS, which is administered by multiple space agencies, is essentially a <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-the-iss-58.html">network of modules</a> for cooking, sleeping, science research, and other uses that’s slightly larger than a six-bedroom house. Between January and March, astronauts on board took daily photos of six carefully chosen sites around their temporary home first at the same time each day, then at random times. The project was an interstellar version of the archaeological technique known as quick testing, in which archaeologists divide a new site into a grid of one-meter squares and dig “test pits” that provide a basic sense of what they might find. In SQuARE, those “pits” are one-square-meter areas marked off with tape, scattered across the American, European, and Japanese modules of the ISS in areas used for work, science experiments, cooking, and hygiene. The team will analyze the resulting photos in hopes of understanding how each area is used over time and, from there, identify opportunities to improve space habitat design. NOVA talked with Walsh about the challenges of space archaeology and why astronauts eat so many tortillas. 
Alissa Greenberg: Usually, archaeologists excavate sites because it’s the only way to learn about life in those places—all the people are long dead. But we can talk to these astronauts. Why not do that?Justin Walsh: It's true that, for the most part, archaeologists do study the distant past. Contemporary archaeology developed starting in the 1970s. The first example of it was a project called the Tucson Garbage Project by a guy named William Rathje at the University of Arizona. He got the City of Tucson sanitation department to drop off samples of neighborhood garbage on a regular basis, and he and his graduate students went through it to understand the patterns of usage of different items.What's really fascinating about it is that they then went and interviewed people from the neighborhood about their consumption habits. So first of all, he found that people were throwing out lots of meat that they weren't using. So he was able to show that people were being wasteful with this particular commodity. But then he went to talk to people about these things, and he found out some interesting facts. Such as when you ask people questions, the way sociologists and anthropologists often do, they are not necessarily really good at articulating the realities of their lives—or they don't want to. Which is also perfectly fair and understandable! I would not blame them for that. But what it shows is that what archaeology can do is provide additional insights into human practices and that those insights don't have to be about the distant past.So, you can say, “Well why don't you just talk to the crew and ask?” or “Doesn't NASA document all that stuff?” Okay, we can absolutely do that, but that doesn't always work well—especially for astronauts, who are 100% good at staying on message and will not say anything to jeopardize their next flight to space. And as for the space agency, they don't do any forensic work on what's happened on the space station before. They're in the present and the future—and the past is gone. They're not thinking about what they can learn.
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<img alt="Mesh bags full of condiments and food items hang from a space station wall" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/iss066e130191_1.width-990_qW6eQSP.jpg"/>
<figcaption>One of the SQuARE sample locations, in a U.S. module galley area, marked by yellow tape at each corner. On the wall, mesh bags hold ketchup, Sriracha sauce, chocolate, and other food items. In the upper right corner are plastic bags holding tubes of frosting, which indicated that a kind of “space cooking” activity was happening in this location. Image courtesy of Justin Walsh
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AG: Why do you find space culture so compelling?JW: Because humans are doing things there in an environment that we are 100% not adapted for. We literally cannot survive. So, we have to come up with all these technologies that allow us to survive in that environment, living in microgravity. And on top of that, there's the other issues of confinement and isolation: the bad food, the distance from family and friends. How do they work together and live together? One of the phrases that I like is that a crewed spacecraft is “<a href="https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/12387/chapter/1">a microsociety in a miniworld</a>.” You have the transmission of culture and traditions—"this is how we do things, this is how this is laid out”— being handed down almost from generation to generation. For example, on the ISS they have dinner together every Friday. Most of the time it's in the Russian service module; sometimes it's in the American service module. Or on ISS their food is carefully designed, and there are different kinds of traditions associated. Things like there's no bread, because crumbs are bad in space. If you inhale a crumb, that could really be a problem, so instead they use tortillas for everything. Tortillas don't make crumbs.AG: Can you talk about this most recent study? What’s the goal here?JW: We've been doing this study of historic photos that document life on the space station over 21 years. We've got this body of photographs, both published photographs from Flickr and also unpublished photographs that NASA has now given us—thousands and thousands of photographs. We've been working for the last three years to develop machine learning techniques that would allow the automated tagging of people, places, and objects in the photos. But they were taken essentially randomly. They weren't taken at precise intervals. How do we even characterize what the potential problems might be with that? One way is by doing an actually systematic survey of the material culture of the space station over the short term. That's what SQuARE is.
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<img alt="Photo of 3 astronauts with numbers labeling objects and people in the scene" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/iss018e043629_9452806214_o_v3.width-990_xdqMU3n.jpg"/>
<figcaption>A NASA astronaut, a JAXA astronaut, and a Hungarian-American space tourist pose in the Russian service module Zvezda in 2008. The wall behind them is decorated with items including flags, mission patches, portraits of Soviet space heroes, and Russian Orthodox religious objects such as painted icons. Image courtesy of Justin Walsh
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In archaeology, we take soil that’s all the same type, same color, same consistency, and different from what's above it and what's below it or what's adjacent to it, as a group that reflects a particular period of time. We take all of those items as relating to one another, and therefore they are separate from and need to be interpreted differently from what’s above or below. So we're treating each photo that way, because it is a slice of time, separate from the next day or the previous day.The fact that we're doing this one picture a day for each of six squares for 60 days, 360 images that were taken systematically at precisely defined locations, will allow us to better understand what the historic photos are all about. And likewise, what's happening in the historic photos—because there's so many of them and such a variety of things going on in them—will help us to interpret what we're seeing in the systematically recorded images.
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AG: What have you found so far?JW: We thought that the two experimental areas that we selected probably were not going to show very much change over time because they're basically just racks with scientific equipment. In fact, we were asked, “Are you sure you want to use those areas? Don’t you want to see where more activity is happening?” We had to say no because archaeology is not a treasure hunt. We want to actually see the full range. How would we be able to tell the difference between low activity and high activity if we’re only looking at high-activity areas?It turns out that one of those areas is seeing hardly any change. But in one of the other areas, we actually have seen a lot of things moving around. Things are being stored there, like laptops and a video camera. It seems to be kind of a staging area for what's happening next door, a veggie experiment. So that's really interesting, because that shows that when things aren't happening in the location, it can be repurposed.Another thing we’ve been seeing in the eating area is books. In one case there's been an actual physical book on the wall, just kind of stuck there for the time being—somebody put it down. But we've also seen an iPad with an e-book that was on. So, in a leisure moment, when you're eating by yourself, maybe you read a book or a magazine.The way it works right now is that there's this kind of plate hooked to an adjustable arm. And the plate has some Velcro on the front of it, so that the back of the iPad that has Velcro on it can be stuck to it. And that's fine, maybe that's a good enough solution. But now we have evidence of a different way in which the space is being used. And in future space habitat designs you might want to accommodate it in order to make a better experience. If nobody had evidence that this is how this is being done, we wouldn't even be able to think of solutions.
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<img alt="Two astronauts take a photo of themselves in a small mirror hanging on a cluttered wall of the space station" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/iss066e146542.width-990_gLFl5hC.jpg"/>
<figcaption>In an image of a SQuARE sample in a U.S. hygiene area, NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Kayla Barron take a self-portrait in the mirror. Image courtesy of Justin Walsh
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Another aspect of the photo study—we placed a <a href="https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ra4c3/">preprint of this on SocArXiv</a>—is we had all these images from Flickr, 8,000 of them, and helpfully NASA has captioned all of them. We were able to scrape them and peel out particular words: the names of the crew members and the locations. Just with those two pieces of data from each item, for the first time it's possible to map out where men and women are across the International Space Station by module. And if we look at nationality by module, it does seem like there are some real results. In the Russian segment, unsurprisingly, Russians make up the majority of people. And unsurprisingly, in the U.S. segment Americans make up the majority of people who are in those modules. So this indicates that in what claims to be an international space station, there are national zones. That's not something anybody has ever been able to show data for. Again, anecdotally you might have expected that to be the case. But we're able to show the reality. And this is because of the way the ISS is managed. Those are official designations. Each agency decides what happens in its own module and what their own crew do. So as a result, you end up with inefficiencies.AG: You’ve mentioned the future design of space habitats. Do you know if people doing that are watching your project? What kind of questions are they hoping you’ll answer?JW: The ISS is maybe the most expensive building project humans have ever undertaken. A staggering amount of money for one piece of architecture, and $3 billion or $4 billion on NASA alone to maintain it each year. I think that we're looking to be able to give more accurate and more precise descriptions of the functions of different areas and how that relates to what the originally designed and planned functions of those spaces are. It's really important to be able to understand whether people are using spaces the way they're intended. If they're not, how are they being used?We have at the moment four different commercial organizations that are planning, designing, building their own space stations, partly funded by NASA. And NASA and the other space agencies in ISS—except for the Russians—are currently already building a new space station that's going to go into orbit around the moon: Lunar Gateway. There are key problems that they're already focused on sorting out. But also, how do astronauts and designers create the conditions that mimic, or are as my colleague Alice says, are surrogates for, gravity? That is to say, handrails, bungee cords, Velcro, resealable bags. Where do we see Velcro building up over time? Those are areas where it might not have been foreseen, where it ended up that the crew realized that they were going to need more “gravity.” First of all, we have to identify those areas. And, second of all, then we have to understand why those areas are requiring “gravity,” because of the kinds of activities that are going on there. And then third, how do we anticipate that for future designs? Those kinds of questions, the space station companies really want to know that. Even when they have astronauts on their staff or in their executive boardroom, they still realize that there's a difference between anecdotes and data. So the really amazing thing about this is that, as (terrible pun) out of this world as this project is, it's the rare archaeological project that can actually have concrete and practical implications for the future.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Correction: Due to a punctuation error, a previous version of this article indicated that the Russian space agency was building Lunar Gateway. It is actually a project of the four non-Russian ISS space agencies.
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Archaeologists are working to understand how astronauts really use their space on the ISS—and help improve space habitats of the future.

NOVA Universe Revealed PBS LearningMedia Collection

Through a series of video clips, this collection helps students explore phenomena including the Milky Way galaxy, the search for life on other planets, the role of black holes, and evidence for the Big Bang theory.

An artist's concept of a near-Earth asteroid like 2022 EB5. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers successfully predict an asteroid impact above Iceland

On Friday, Mar. 11 at around 7:30 p.m. GMT, an astronomer spotted an asteroid hurtling toward our planet at an estimated speed of 39,600 mph. By 9:30 p.m., the asteroid, dubbed “2022 EB5,” entered Earth’s atmosphere. It disintegrated over Jan Mayen island near Iceland, its pieces most likely plunging into the Arctic Ocean, the International Meteor Organization <a href="https://www.imo.net/2022-eb5-5th-predicted-earth-impactor-asteroid-on-march-11/">reports</a>. 2022 EB5’s descent marks the fifth time astronomers successfully mapped out an asteroid’s collision course with Earth ahead of impact.
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Krisztián Sárneczky, the astronomer who first spotted 2022 EB5, was at Konkoly Observatory’s Piszkéstető Mountain Station near Budapest, Hungary when he made the observation. Soon after reporting his finding of a mysterious object hurtling toward Earth to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, fellow astronomers identified it as a near-Earth asteroid. “The sighting soon got a lot more interesting,” Chelsea Gohd <a href="https://www.space.com/asteroid-discovered-hours-before-earth-atmosphere-impact">writes for Space.com</a>. “​​Just 30 minutes after the discovery, data showed that the space rock was a mere two hours away from colliding with Earth's atmosphere.”2022 EB5 belongs to the Apollo asteroids, space rocks considered by NASA to be “potentially hazardous” because of the close approaches they make to Earth. Named for 1862 Apollo, an asteroid discovered by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth 90 years ago, it takes Apollo asteroids less than two years to orbit the Sun. Asteroid 2022 EB5, which astronomers believe was 10 feet wide prior to its descent to Earth (or as some news outlets say, “<a href="https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/36593/20220314/asteroid-half-size-giraffe-hits-iceland-2-hours-astronomers-spotted.htm">half the size of a giraffe</a>”) quickly caught headlines and the attention of social media users on <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/te89dm/asteroid_half_the_size_of_a_giraffe_strikes_earth/">platforms like Reddit</a>.
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<img alt="Asteroid headed toward Earth illustration" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Asteroid_Illustration.width-990_EDj4GHj.jpg"/>
<figcaption>NASA scientists predicted asteroid 2022 EB5's trajectory before hitting the Earth’s atmosphere on Mar. 11, 2022. The asteroid—estimated to be about 6.5 feet wide—was discovered only two hours before impact. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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Shortly after Sárneczky’s observation and report, NASA's "Near-Earth Asteroid Scout" (NEA Scout), “a miniaturized spacecraft known as a CubeSat,” <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/content/nea-scout">NASA writes</a>, began calculating 2022 EB5’s trajectory toward our planet. "As soon as Scout determined that 2022 EB5 was going to hit Earth's atmosphere," NASA's <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-system-predicts-impact-of-small-asteroid">Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reports</a>, NEA Scout alerted NASA's Center for Near Earth Objects (CNEOS) and its Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which is managing a new asteroid-deflection mission called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGwnl7K5IWc">DART</a>. After only 40 minutes, NEA Scout and its team of scientists were able to predict 2022 EB5's exact impact time and location.
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Asteroids like 2022 EB5 are not big enough to be a hazard to our planet or society, researchers believe. Though 2022 EB5 likely “started out about 10 feet wide,” Kelly Kizer Whitt writes for <a href="https://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-discovered-hours-before-earth-impact-eb5/">EarthSky,</a> 2022 EB5 sizzled during its descent to about 6.5 feet according to NASA estimates, "much smaller than the objects that the Planetary Defense Coordination Office is tasked by NASA with detecting and warning about," NASA JPL reports. In fact, tiny asteroids "impact the atmosphere quite frequently," <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-system-predicts-impact-of-small-asteroid">CNEOS Director Paul Chodas</a> told NASA JPL. But unlike 2022 EB5, “very few of these asteroids have actually been detected in space and observed extensively prior to impact," Chodas said.In fact, “this is probably a once in a lifetime experience for an ‘asteroid hunter,’” Sárneczky told Space.com.2022 EB5's fiery plummet to the Earth may have caused a brilliant, visible shooting star, astronomers believe, but no citizen observations have been reported. While the remnants of some other Earth-striking asteroids have been recovered, "all of 2022 EB5 almost certainly burned up or fell into the Arctic Ocean," Eric Mack writes for <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2022/03/13/astronomer-spotted-an-asteroid-just-hours-before-it-impacted-earth/?sh=2f30ff9558fc">Forbes</a>, so it’s unlikely humans will recover pieces of the asteroid. Still, 2022 EB5 now joins an exclusive cosmic club of asteroids—2008 TC3, 2014 AA, 2018 LA, and 2019 MO—each named for their year of impact and whose collision courses with Earth were discovered before they came in contact with our atmosphere.
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Two hours before asteroid 2022 EB5 entered Earth’s atmosphere, scientists knew exactly when and where the space rock would strike.

A artist's concept of the OSIRIS-REx Sample Return Capsule (center) being released for its return to Earth (from 2013). Image Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

OSIRIS-REx is bringing back an asteroid sample. What now?

In 2017, Beck Strauss drove the scariest 200 miles of their life: a road trip from Massachusetts to New Jersey with moon rocks in the back seat. Strauss had “never imagined in a million years” getting to work with rocks from the Moon, they say, let alone ferrying them down Interstate 95. But they ultimately navigated the highways of the Eastern Seaboard without issue. “I obeyed so many traffic laws, oh my gosh!”That road trip was an essential part of a research project that Strauss, a former NASA/<a href="https://www.nist.gov/">NIST</a> research scientist who studies the Moon’s magnetic field, was working on at Rutgers University. The so-called “lunar dynamo” may once have been as strong as Earth’s, and they hoped to examine the rocks for further evidence of that early magnetism and the possible timing of its decline. That meant that even once Strauss arrived safely in New Jersey, the challenge of protecting the rocks wasn’t complete. If the moon rocks were formed during a period of relatively strong <a href="https://www.sciencenews.org/article/moon-lunar-magnetic-field-short-time-space">lunar magnetism</a>, they should show evidence of magnetization. But how to investigate that when the rocks were already inside a much stronger magnetic field—Earth’s?
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“Magnetizable rocks work a little bit like magnetic recording media,” like a VHS or cassette tape, Strauss explains. When a ferromagnetic mineral is exposed to a magnetic field, the atoms within it, which group into similarly oriented “magnetic domains,” can gradually move to align with that force. The stronger the force, the greater the number of domains that will align. But those domains remain sensitive over time, Strauss says. If researchers aren’t careful, they can “overprint” the pattern of domains left by an older magnetic force, “like recording over something you wanted to save.” Even the magnetic field from a laptop or a phone in a passing pocket can erase the very faint record of a 4-billion-year-old lunar magnetic field.At Rutgers, Strauss carried the rocks into a room shielded with an alloy that blocks magnetic fields, much like the briefcase used to transport them. Researchers working inside the room had to take care not to expose the rocks to electronics or metallic objects like keys and jewelry. Strauss even had to avoid wearing a favorite bracelet while doing lunar magnetism research since it had nickel in it, which can carry a slight magnetic charge.Questions about how to preserve extraterrestrial samples like Strauss’ stretch back to the era of the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/back-to-the-moon/">Apollo missions</a>, when astronauts first brought back moon rocks. These days, scientists doing “astromaterials curation” work focus on storing, protecting, and sharing space specimens as carefully as possible. But the stakes of their work are about to get much higher, because after some daring missions to snatch material from asteroids, an unprecedented amount of <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/touching-the-asteroid/">space dust is headed our way</a>.
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<img alt="Black and white image of men looking at moon rocks sitting on tin foil on table" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/S71-20373_orig.width-990_4KuLOTK.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Apollo 14 crew members show moon rocks they collected to journalists in February 1971. Image Credit: NASA/JSC
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Until now, <a href="https://ares.jsc.nasa.gov/">astromaterials curation</a> has mostly focused on caring for moon rocks astronauts have ferried back to Earth and meteorites that arrive under their own steam. But meteorites have passed through Earth’s atmosphere, which alters them chemically in fundamental ways, limiting the data that can be gleaned from them. Plus, despite advances in our ability to spot and hunt down these incoming shooting stars, they still often sit exposed to the elements for months or years, growing rusty and eroded.Now a spate of asteroid missions is changing the game. In 2010 and 2020, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa and Hayabusa2 delivered to Earth capsules with tiny amounts of <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/hayabusa2-returns-asteroid-ryugu-sample/">“raw” material</a> from the asteroids Itokawa and Ryugu. And last year, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx managed to grab a fistful of rocks and dust when it <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/osiris-rex-bennu-asteroid-touchdown/">touched down briefly</a> on the asteroid Bennu. Although NASA won’t know exactly how much material is in the OSIRIS-REx capsule until it returns in September 2023, astromaterials curator Nicole Lunning says she expects an amount “at least 10 times more than” Hayabusa2 retrieved—or a minimum of 60 grams of material. (Mission principal investigator Daunte Lauretta has predicted even higher numbers, <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/NASAs-osiris-rex-probe-successfully-stows-space-rock-sample/">suggesting at a news conference</a> in 2020 that the capsule may contain “hundreds of grams of material in the sample collector head—probably over a kilogram, easily.”). That material will provide a rare opportunity for a broad range of scientists to study raw space rock unaltered by its journey through Earth’s atmosphere. Lunning is helping her lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston come up with protocols to protect these space goodies from oxygen, humidity, biological threats, and magnetism, and to keep them as undisturbed as possible. The cargo is so precious, and the protocols so elaborate, that they have been running rehearsals to get ready for the big arrival. Using parts identical to those sent to the asteroid, they’ve practiced opening a multilayer capsule Lunning compares to Russian nesting dolls, carrying dummy material. To prevent the space rocks from chemically transforming, they plan to open and, at least for awhile, store the real capsule and its contents inside a specialized “glove box.” The apparatus incorporates arm-length gloves into a sealed container, allowing users outside to hold and manipulate items inside. It will be filled with dry nitrogen, since once the already nonreactive gas has been rid of water vapor, it prevents both problems with humidity and contact with oxygen or other chemicals that could alter the sample.Lunning and her colleagues will also need to protect the valuable space rubble from any unwelcome visitors. The asteroids visited by both Hayabusa spacecraft and OSIRIS-REx are carbonaceous, meaning they are likely to contain the type of organic materials that hungry Earth microbes like to nibble. (The “organic” material like JSC scientists hope to find on Bennu isn’t necessarily associated with biology, as it often is on Earth. A substance is organic if it contains carbon linked with other elements like hydrogen, oxygen, or nitrogen. Together, they can create the long chains and complex structures needed for the chemical reactions that take place inside cells. That means that finding organics on Bennu could provide insight into how similar materials may have kickstarted the evolution of <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/asteroid-dust-ice-age/">life on Earth</a>.) To prevent any microbes from hitching a ride to an astro-buffet, researchers at JSC will cover their hair and clothes and will wash their tools in hot “ultrapure” water—water with its ions removed, which Lunning calls “surprisingly corrosive.” Then they’ll dry those tools in a nitrogen atmosphere before bagging them in Teflon.The Teflon is part of the final element of Lunning’s curation plan. “Plastics off-gas materials like formaldehyde, and that can lead to misleading data,” Lunning says. She and the team will ensure OSIRIS-REx’s treasure only comes in contact with certain nonreactive types of stainless steel, aluminum, and Teflon during their work. That way, if they find surprising molecules in their samples, they can be sure those are actually from space and not careless contamination.
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After the initial opening and imaging of the full OSIRIS-REx sample, Lunning and the JSC team will prepare to share the riches. NASA has agreed to reserve a certain percentage of the Bennu material for the Japanese and the Canadian space agencies, and will transport it in sealed, nitrogen-filled boxes. After that, curators will prepare a catalogue of Bennu sample types to send out to planetary scientists like Enrica Bonato, who can apply to use small amounts in their research. Bonato is helping design a lab in Berlin that will handle OSIRIS-REx material using similar protocols to those Lunning is developing. Bonato studies carbonaceous asteroids like Bennu, and until now she has been using a mix of remote sensing data and meteorite fragments in her research. These arrive via express delivery in the mail and are stored in specialized desiccator containers with silica gel beads that help control humidity. Bonato says the thrill of receiving meteorite bits in the mail hasn’t diminished. But she and her colleagues are especially excited to work for the first time with raw asteroid material that has never touched the Earth’s atmosphere—however it might arrive.Carbonaceous asteroids present an exciting prospect for study in part because they are rich in minerals containing water. That means they could be helpful in understanding how water arrived on Earth. Bennu is also immensely old; it’s estimated to have formed in the <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/bennu-top-ten">first 10 million years</a> of our solar system. Since then, it’s changed very little, meaning it can tell us a lot about how planets nearby formed and what forces and elements were present in our portion of the galaxy. “Studying meteorites and now starting to study pieces of asteroids, we can start to understand the process of the formation of our solar system,” Bonato says.She also hopes she might find evidence of some of the amino acids that are essential to the emergence of basic life forms, which would lend support to the theory that those building blocks arrived on Earth by hitchhiking on a similar rock. But she doesn’t expect to find actual life. Since Bennu has no atmosphere to protect it from sterilizing radiation, Bonato says her facility is only concerned about protecting the samples from Earth’s environment, rather than the other way around. But if humans begin bringing material back from Mars, which does have an atmosphere, that will have to be a consideration, since the red planet could potentially be home to microbes that don’t play well with our ecosystems.Still, any amino acids or other organics in the sample will be extremely fragile and vulnerable. “They’re very sensitive to any change, both water and heating processes,” she says. “Being able to look at them in this pristine material is very precious. It’s a mind-blowing step for us.”
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<img alt="Woman reaching through sealed glass box with gloves, handling moon rocks" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://staging.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/Handling_moon_rocks.width-990_iwecSJL.jpg"/>
<figcaption>Apollo Sample Processor Andrea Mosie handles moon rocks inside an airtight container at NASA's Johnson Space Center in March 2019. A group of the lunar samples that had been set aside for future research was unsealed for the first time that year, marking the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing. Image Credit: Spike Johnson for The Washington Post via Getty Images
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Even after Lunning and her colleagues have shared the riches with Bonato and other scientists worldwide, a large portion of the Bennu sample will be held at Johnson Space Center, saved for future scientists. Long-term storage of the things we bring back from space is an important part of astromaterials curation, she stresses. Just as Strauss was able to work with the Apollo moon rocks a few years ago, Lunning and her team anticipate that scientists will want to examine samples from OSIRIS-REx for decades to come. “We’ll be saving parts with that in mind,” she says. “In 10, 15, 50 years—we want to make sure there’s material available for those things,” including for research using technology that might not exist yet.Lunning’s team is also responsible for making sure researchers from different areas of space science can share the Bennu samples without issue. The key there, Strauss says, is for scientists across disciplines to talk with each other about what they need. Cutting into a moon rock with a circular saw, as a geologist might need to do, is the “kiss of death” for Strauss’ magnetism work, they point out, since the heat from friction and circular motion overwrites any magnetic record that might be present. Even glue can be weakly magnetic, meaning that if other scientists mount a thin section of rock for examination under a microscope and use the wrong adhesive, it could disrupt Strauss’ entire study.Meanwhile, Strauss and their colleagues try to make special note if their work has involved heating of any kind. Magnetic analysis often requires baking samples at a high temperature, but that can cause chemical alterations that would throw off a geologist’s calculations. “What we’re saying to other researchers is, ‘We want to be able to make sure you can continue to use these samples when we’re done with them,’” they say.Strauss points out that, although the Apollo missions brought back more than 800 pounds of moon rocks, the fields of astromaterials curation and lunar magnetism were brand new, meaning that the needs of the scientists who would later study all that rock weren’t taken into account. Strauss hopes that with the incoming trove of asteroid material, early-career scientists will be invited to participate in discussions about how to treat the samples, strategizing so the most people get the most insight over the longest time. That means being “open to collaboration with people who work on completely different experimental questions, open to input from folks with totally different priorities,” they say. “It ends up benefitting the whole scientific community.”
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The debris NASA’s asteroid-touching spacecraft collected could help us learn about the origins of our solar system. But for that to happen, scientists have to protect it from just about everything.

What will the James Webb Space Telescope do?

This telescope could revolutionize our understanding of the universe.
Here&#x27;s what to expect from the largest, most technologically advanced, and most expensive space telescope ever built.
What will the James Webb Space Telescope do?Published: January 4, 2022Narrator: After decades of work, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, is about to start its million-mile journey. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, opened up new windows on the universe, but scientists expect that JWST will reveal even more—revolutionizing our understanding of the cosmos—and perhaps bringing us closer to answering the age-old question: are we alone?Nestor Espinoza: The whole launch date is going to be filled with emotion. It’s an engineering marvel that we, as humans, have never done this before.Knicole Colon: I feel very nervous but excited and just ready to go, you know?Amber Straughn: There&#x27;s so much riding on this telescope. It&#x27;s been decades of work that&#x27;s gone into it.Louis Strolger: It&#x27;s taken us a long time to get here. But man, we&#x27;re so excited. We&#x27;re so ready for this to go. This will be a transformative facility and it will show us so many things that we just haven&#x27;t seen.Narrator: JWST is the most powerful space telescope ever constructed. With a mirror almost three times wider than Hubble’s, it’ll be able to see objects 10—or even 100—times fainter.Antonella Nota: This is the biggest telescope that has been built in space, and because of the complexity of the design, this is no doubt the most complex machine and it is magnificent.Narrator: JWST’s mirror is 21 feet wide and made up of 18 different sections that fold up tightly for launch, like origami, and will need to unfold perfectly once in space.Lee Feinberg: We&#x27;re not just talking about having to develop lightweight mirrors but we need 18 of them. They all have to match each other. Such that they can be aligned to a degree of accuracy that&#x27;s, you know, about a ten thousandth of a human hair.Narrator: While humans see the world through visible light, there are many wavelengths invisible to the human eye—such as X-rays, microwaves, and infrared.Sensing infrared light, which can be detected in the form of heat, JWST will be able to peer through dense clouds of space dust that block visible light, so it can reveal previously hidden secrets of the universe like early galaxies over 13.5 billion years old and the formation of stars and planets.And because JWST is an incredibly sensitive infrared telescope, its scientific instruments and detectors need to be kept at extremely cold temperatures to suppress infrared background &quot;noise&quot; and function properly.To help JWST keep its cool, scientists built a sunshield about the size of a tennis court—nearly 70 feet across when deployed.Amber Straughn: Radiation from the sun travels through space. You know, it doesn&#x27;t care about the fact that the telescope is far away. And so we have to keep the mirrors and the instruments in constant shade, and that&#x27;s what the sunshield is for.Narrator: About five days after launch, they’ll start to expand the sunshield. Once that’s complete—about 10 days after launch—they’ll start to unfold the mirror.It will take 30 days and a million miles for JWST to reach its destination. Then, it’ll start the 6-month cool-down and calibration process. If all goes according to plan, JWST will commence its scientific operations in June 2022.And scientists are excited to see what it finds out about the early universe and the first galaxies.Louis Strolger: We&#x27;re going to see so many points of light from different distances. And that is in itself going to be a revealing moment in how rich the universe truly is and how much is actually going on out there.Antonella Nota: With Hubble, we pushed the boundaries to a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. JWST will look past that and we&#x27;ll be able to cover the very, very early phases: when the first star appeared, when the first galaxies are assembled and the universe that we see today is shaped.Narrator: It should also reveal the evolution of stars and planets. JWST’s infrared instruments will be able to peer through the kinds of dense dust clouds where star and planet formation begins.Nestor Espinoza: If we can understand how other planetary systems out there form, and where they formed it&#x27;s going to be totally revolutionary. We can track its history. So this has profound implications to understanding how our Solar System came to be.Narrator: And sense the atmospheres of exoplanets.Knicole Colon: With JWST, the infrared light allows us to see water vapor in the atmospheres of exoplanets, first of all, but also we can see things like methane and carbon dioxide. And depending on the type of planet that we&#x27;re looking at, we can actually measure how much of these molecules are in the atmosphere. And that composition can tell us whether there&#x27;s any indications of the elements of life that could be possible on these exoplanet atmospheres.Matt Mountain: I think we&#x27;ll be surprised how strange and different those planetary systems are. Will we even recognize life? We don&#x27;t know.I think that the whole point of going to all the trouble of building a telescope as big as JWST is because it provides us with a brand new way to look at the universe. And every time humanity has looked at the universe in a new way, it has been as transformative as it has been surprising.

This telescope could revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

Topic: Space & Flight

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