Astronomy

Scientists electrically culled invasive fish in a 20-year battle—but the fish fought back with rapid evolution

Many asteroids are related, but their family trees can be hard to trace

This week, we look at the process behind rockets getting licensed to launch, and everyone around the pad getting notified to stay away as T-0 approaches. (Can you say “errant boat”?) We have a saying around here: “One does not simply book a return trip from a rocket launch.” That’s because they are an intensely complex chain of events that need to go right before it’s wise to let that rocket leave the launchpad. 

Show Notes

• Launch site & licensing
• Environmental reviews
• Safety corridors
• Mission specifics
• Weather rules
• Launch windows
• Countdown design
• Abort & FTS
• After launch

Transcript

Fraser Cain: 

Astronomy Cast, Episode 764, cleared for launch. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain.

I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Sciences Institute and the director of Cosmogloss. Hey Pamela, how are you doing?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I am doing well. I am team Lava Lamp. I have joined the cadre of websites that hide behind CloudFlare and won my battle with bots thanks to a little help from a giant organization.

And now I’m here to discuss the science. We’re recording on a Wednesday, and I appreciate everyone’s patience as I slayed my personal web server demons.

Fraser Cain: 

Yes. Yeah. Another vote for me for CloudFlare.

I hide Universe Today behind CloudFlare, and they cache 98% of the content that’s on Universe Today. Now it’s all HTML documents and images, but it’s incredible how much my web server just sits unused all the time, occasionally providing a page over to CloudFlare, and then CloudFlare is doing all the heavy lifting of generating that. And in fact, we have different policies.

You’re trying to use CloudFlare to stop all of the voracious AI scrapers that are tearing apart your site. I just let them all through. So you have that control.

In your case, you’re like, no, this is bringing my entire organization to its knees. And I’m like, I don’t care. Creative Commons 4.0, fill your boots, train away.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

I would be fine if the servers didn’t keep falling over. So reconstructing the servers is in the plans, but I don’t have the time. So right now, CloudFlare.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. And when I used to be running WordPress, when I used to be running something that was PHP heavy, I had to do that same thing. Now my web server is only HTML documents and images and is incapable of running scripts.

And so it is incapable of sort of having scripts run a mock. So yeah, I don’t really care. But the point is, man, CloudFlare is a pretty great way to protect your content.

This is not an ad. They are not paying us. We are just literally both.

[Speaker 3]

They could.

Fraser Cain: 

They could. Yeah. CloudFlare, if you want to put an ad on an astronomy cast, now’s your chance.

We have a saying around here. One does not simply book a return trip from a rocket launch. That’s because they are an intensely complex chain of events that need to go right before it’s wise to let that rocket leave the launch pad.

All right, Pamela, give me your most hilarious, uh, the rocket didn’t launch when it was supposed to story and, and your trials and tribulations of having to deal with that.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Oh man. Um, so I think the most delightful was the launch of the, I think it was the LADEE mission on a Delta, Delta some number, I don’t remember the number. I was down Cape Canaveral.

I was part of one of the NASA social events as one of the talking heads and, uh, the launch was supposed to be stupid early in the morning, really early in the morning. And so they get us out to this adorable little boat dock area that NASA owns and, and it’s so early and we’re watching the sun come up. I hate mornings.

I am, as we’ve determined, three coffees and a trench coat and we’re all there and we’re all like, okay, just launch, we’re going to go back to bed. And it did not launch. And so we’re all out there and we’re like, are they going to reset?

And they reset, they did reset. And, and then manatees were discovered. And so you have all these people waiting for a rocket launch that are now obsessing, is that a crocodile?

Wait, that’s a manatee. There are more than one manatees. And then somebody figured out that if you turn on the freshwater tap, that’s meant for boats, the manatees will come over and they have these like mouths that are just adorable and horrifying simultaneously.

And so there was this like swarm of manatees all like knocking each other out of alignment to drink the fresh water from the freshwater tap. And so all of these people that have traveled, who knows how many miles and plane trips and hours in a car to see a rocket launch are now completely obsessed with the manatees drinking the water.

Fraser Cain: 

That’s amazing.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And, and then the Delta went up, but I had never seen a Delta go up before and was not prepared for the fact that it just kind of sits there for a hot second, completely surrounding itself in clouds. And I’m there as the talking head. I’m like, oh, no, did it just blow up?

Am I going to have to explain that it just blew up? Oh, God, I’m going to have to. This is very rapid fire going through my brain.

And then the tip of the rocket starts to come out of the clouds. I’m like, OK, we’re good. We’re good.

It was a good day. Manatees and no explaining rocket explosions. So, so that that was my story.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, mine is that I went to take my father, who is a professional photographer, to watch the penultimate launch of the space shuttle. And so we went down to Cape Canaveral and got set up to photograph and and we did all the various tours and go out and you see the shuttle and and all of that. And then it was set to launch and there was a launch delay.

And we’re like, OK. And they said, no, the launch delay is like five days. And so we had a week in Florida before we had to go back.

[Speaker 3]

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

And so we went down to Miami, had a good time down checking out Miami. And then we came back to Cape Canaveral. The day was supposed to launch.

It was scrubbed again. And so we had to fly home and not watch the space shuttle launch.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Oh, no. I had the opposite experience in January with Blue Origin. I went to Florida.

I booked two straight weeks. I have a timeshare literally so that I can cover rocket launches. It’s just easier this way.

And I was there also for podcast movement conference. And the day I arrived was the day that Firefly launched. And and so I’m like dragging my sorry self after a 5 a.m. flight all the way from Orlando to the Space Coast. And I’m like, it’s there’s no way it’s launching. Totally launched, totally launched at 2 a.m. And then I it was cold. It was like freezing temperatures, frost, cold in Florida.

And so I drive all the way back to Orlando where my hotel is. And the next day was supposed to be Blue Origin. Blue Origin had already been delayed several times at this point.

And the email I get is we think we’re go for tonight. Here’s the location. We are on the roof of this hotel.

And I’m like, it’s 20 degrees. There is no way they’re launching tonight. I am so cold.

I am so tired. I am staying put. And they did not launch.

Fraser Cain: 

Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And and then the next night, still so cold. And they’re like, we do not have a place for media tonight. And I’m like, I’m a woman traveling alone.

And you are launching in the middle of the night. And I emailed them this. And I’m like, where should I go?

And I will be safe. And they’re recommending like parks after dark. And I’m like, no, no.

Fraser Cain: 

Sounds like a good idea.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

And I’ve wandered through crocodile or alligator infested bogs.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. And it was definitely a do you trust the bear or the human kind of a concern going on? And and so I was like, I’m staying in my hotel room.

I’m going to be warm on the Internet. And of course, they ended up launching the night. They didn’t have a place for media.

And so I was in Orlando, in my hotel room, in bed, in pajamas, watching launch, talking in chat on Discord.

Fraser Cain: 

Is that the rocket I’m here to watch?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. Yeah. So I I currently Blue Origins second launch is slated for while I’m at an event, I’m going to be at Magikon in Atlanta discussing the science of Magic the Gathering cards.

So I’m kind of hoping they’re delayed and I’ll try again in November if they’re delayed. I’m evil. I shouldn’t wish delays on rockets.

I am wishing a delay on this rocket.

Fraser Cain: 

All right. So we’re going to continue this conversation in our normal astronomy cast style, but I believe we just described many of the various trials and tribulations that rockets go through to be able to actually launch. All right.

So let’s talk about the sort of what it takes to actually light this candle.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

All right. So so it all starts with someone had to get the spaceport approved and then someone had to approve the rocket for the spaceport. And what’s really cool is right now we can follow along pretty much in real time as SpaceX goes through all the paperwork to get certified to launch their starship from Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Flight Center.

So there’s two different pads that they’re looking at. One of the pads is much further along in the approval process, and they’re having to figure out everything from where are the locations that if you’re standing there, you experience 100 decibels of sound, 80 decibels of sound, 60 decibels of sound. And so that goes into the where do humans need to not be.

They are working to figure out if the sucker blows up, where do you not need to be so that you survive? And and so all of these things end up going into maps. They also end up having to figure out where are all of the sonic booms going to be?

What is this going to disrupt? And the other thing they have to figure out is what is the clearance zone around your spacecraft? And now they have to figure it out both for launch and return in which boats can’t be located because if you blow up, you’ll sink them.

And boats can’t be located because the shock wave will do really bad things to anyone on board the boat. 100 decibels is bad. Do not experience 100 decibels.

And they also have to figure out where aircraft should not be attempting to fly, because aircraft versus rocket is called a missile. So so there are so many maps that have to be done. You have to figure out the the error in your navigation, which is getting to be a smaller and smaller number.

You have to figure out in order to get to all the different orbits that you want to service with your rocket. What is the span of places that are going to have to become no boat and no fly zones? And and a lot of planning that I hadn’t really thought through in terms of if you’re going into a polar orbit, your trajectory is totally different than if you’re going into an equatorial orbit.

And so you have to have different notams, which are either notices to aviation or notices to maritime people. And there is more paperwork than you can file with less than a committee of humans.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, yeah. And and so that is you choosing, as you say, getting your site chosen. That is you making sure that the rocket class that you are attempting to launch from this facility isn’t going to tear apart the fabric of reality at a fundamental level, that this rocket is is the right fit for the right launch site.

And there are a bunch of these launch sites. So you mentioned the Kennedy Space Center.

[Speaker 3]

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

But there’s Wallops. There’s Vandenberg, Vandenberg and and these. And so Wallops is a good example where they don’t.

You wouldn’t see super heavy taking off from Wallops. Too many humans. Too many humans.

Yeah, yeah, sure. Right. Maybe.

Yeah. So you’re going to see these smaller rockets depending on the on the facility and depending on what the class of the mission is and how far away it is from where they want to be able to bring their stuff. So, OK, so you’ve you’ve kind of gone through this process.

You’ve cleared the launch site. You’ve gotten approval that you’re able to launch this rocket. Then comes the actual specific mission that you’re planning, and then it’s an entirely other approval process.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. And there was one thing that we didn’t bring up, which is the turtles. All of these launch facilities that you mentioned are on the ocean.

They’re near beaches. And and so part of the process of getting launch approval is actually in in Vandenberg. SpaceX had to go out and monitor how launches affected the the nesting seabirds in the wildlife preserves nearby to make sure that launches and this is also a big sea lion issue, making sure that their launches don’t disrupt the breeding cycle of these animals.

So you have people going out and counting and watching the behavior of all of these animals along the beaches. And there’s actually been problems with when Starship blew up, it scattered pieces all over a Mexican beach where baby sea turtles were attempting to go from beach to ocean. And we’re encountering chunks of Starship that got in their way.

So so they also have to do wildlife assessments. And in reading through the the Environmental Protection Agency report on launching Starship from Cape Canaveral, they were like, it’s not going to be a bigger impact than what we’re already doing. And they have to figure all of this stuff out.

And most of these locations are wildlife preserves, because that’s a really good way to keep humans from building houses there. And you don’t want to build houses near a launch pad. Rockets make bad neighbors.

Watch the last episode of EVSN to hear about that one.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, that’s interesting that that the the place where you want to build a rocket is also the place where you want to protect nature.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Exactly, exactly. Visiting the Cape, we’ve both seen the big eagles nest that.

Fraser Cain: 

Yes. And I’ve seen that exact manatee dock. I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. Awesome.

Fraser Cain: 

Yep. So but but with back to my original question, you know, the mission. So so depending on what the what the the spacecraft is going to have solid rocket boosters, is it going to have a bigger upper stage?

It can have a kick stage. What is the satellite payload is supposed to do? These all have to be reviewed as part of the actual launch.

And there’s a state there’s every time you try to do something new, you have to go through this process again.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And the doing something new can include changing your control room, for instance. So so when you have a launch license, the launch license is as specific as we are going to be controlling communications from this room in this building. We are going to be using this explosive device to blow it up if we have to.

We are going to be controlling everything with this software. It goes all the way through the entire process. And every stage has to be approved, which means that when we see these new commercial space companies go from the tiny buildings of we’re a baby company, this is all we’ve got to massive.

OK, we’re doing OK. We can build a bigger building because we have more humans. They have to get recertified for each change in control room.

And SpaceX actually has has been fined for filing the paperwork, but not waiting for it to get approved and moving their control room early. It’s a complicated process that was designed to be the kind of thing that federal contractors are just used to. Military is just used to.

And it’s been an adventure to watch all of the new commercial space people be like, but what do you mean paperwork? And it’s to protect everyone on these shared facilities.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to imagine something that is both sort of important for the economy, that is also as dangerous as a rocket, which is a giant tube filled with explosives that is fire at thousands of kilometers per hour. Yeah, I wouldn’t just, you know, out away over terrain, right? Like there’s so many things that can go wrong and we have seen them go wrong.

All right. So you’ve got your launch site. You’ve got your your rocket is matched to your launch site.

You have gone through the process to approve your specific mission that you’re going to be doing.

[Speaker 3]

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

Now you set a launch date and now there’s still a range of things that will challenge and complicate your ability to launch this actual rocket.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. So so the errant boat is my favorite. I just have to say, if you’re going to have a reason to not launch, the errant boat brings me joy because there have been cases of like rogue kayaker who got too close and stopped the launch from happening.

And and the they really put a lot of effort into making sure these are safe things. And so they define both a launch window, which is both the window that gets you to space on the orbit that you want. And also the we’re going to launch within this window.

And boaters were sorry you can’t go there. Then flights were sorry you can’t go there then. And and there’s a lot of times when we have a rocket that it really doesn’t matter when you launch the orbit.

It just doesn’t care. There’s also instantaneous launches, which are really easy on everybody, because if you don’t launch that second, you don’t get to where you need to be.

Fraser Cain: 

Right. Don’t wait till tomorrow.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

But but all these other things that have launch windows that can be both because of your orbit and also because they don’t want to cut off flight for the entire day over your region.

Fraser Cain: 

And and it gets super complicated when you have these various technical challenges. There’s a fuel leak. There’s a lack of pressure in one of the lines.

And you you realize you’re going to have to to not scrub the launch. You have to push the launch back. Well, that means that all the people that are enforcing the the downrange boat closure have to then continue enforcing that.

And it can go on for hours and hours and hours and hours. And it just gets you know, after a while, you’re herding cats. People are are are moving through the area.

Crew ships need to have to go up and down. Yeah, there’s tons and tons of boats that are normally making this journey through these waters. And you’re literally closing down the waters for hours and hours and hours, trying to get all of these problems stamped out before you can actually make the launch happen.

The other big thing is weather.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So one thing I just want to add, though, is is the no boats. The no flights is something that’s impacting folks that are like not part of the aerospace industry. The other thing that happens is they have to clear out the surrounding launch pads and how many of the facilities down at the Cape along the Space Coast have to be emptied out depends on how big a rocket you’re launching.

And so they’re estimating that with Starship for the 76 launches a year, the surrounding pads that are owned by ULA, NASA and a blue origin, blue origin are going to be facing as many as 400 leave your site periods per year. Wow. Because you have to empty out.

Also, when you’re doing a test firing, the static firing tests are also dangerous, as as we found out back in June with Starship.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So so this also has commercial implications on your competitors, which is fascinating. But but weather weather does not care what company you are. It does not care if you’re private or military.

Those thunderheads are going to get you no matter what. And so they’re looking at a variety of different things that vary from rocket to rocket. And this is the cool thing.

Some rockets are just like I shall go through the clouds and nothing shall stop me. The Russians, it’s like nothing stops a Soyuz launch. They’re just going to go driving rain.

Sure. Why not? Down down at the Cape, the things that you frequently hear are top level winds.

So this is as you’re going up, you don’t want the winds to be so fast that you’re worried about what chaos they’re going to add to your trajectory. And that’s exactly what it is. These winds are a force that changes your course.

And can your rocket stay on the course? It needs to be in the face of these high level winds. The other thing you have to worry about is lightning.

They have lightning rods around all of the launch pads. But those don’t help when you’re flying through the atmosphere. And the rockets should be fine against lightning.

But no one wants to find out. Then there’s also visibility issues. They need to be able to see what’s going on at a certain degree.

And exactly which combination of where does the ceiling of the clouds need to be? What does the wind need to be? How far away does the lightning need to be?

Is on a per spaceport, per launch vehicle kind of basis.

Fraser Cain: 

And it’s even sort of per phase. So like right now, SpaceX is trying to test out Starship and they’re trying to find out, you know, what are the limitations of the super heavy booster? What kind of angles can they bring it back at?

How many engines can they lose and still be able to make a safe capture and so on and so forth? And and also they want to be able to watch the entire launch and see every single stage go off. Watch as as the adapter breaks off between super heavy and Starship.

Watch as Starship lights its engines. Watch as, you know, as it’s interacting and see what’s happening with the with the atmosphere. And so if you do have like a lot of fog or a low cloud deck, things like that, then you lose sight of your rocket and it makes it a lot harder.

And so for them, it’s worth it to delay the launch, push back the launch, get those clear skies, get the wind conditions that are within the range that they need to be able to to clear that for launch.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And they’re using drones which which have their own flight conditions. And the other thing that I think we need to remember is part of the you have to approve everything is as soon as SpaceX started doing the amazing videos with their Falcon nine that allowed you to see the entire process from onboard cameras. Everyone was like, NASA needs to add onboard cameras.

And then was like, why isn’t NASA adding onboard cameras? Because that requires updating your launch license.

Fraser Cain: 

Right.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And so there’s paperwork even for doing things like adding a camera to your rocket and changing how it’s configured. And that has to be space hardened. And and and so it takes time for ideas to propagate when you have an existing rocket that already has its launch licenses.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. Yeah. So now we’ve got, you know, we’ve worked through the the weather conditions, the launch conditions.

And there are going to be various technical issues that might come up with the rocket itself. But all of that has been cleared. And so as we sort of say everything is is go for launch and we start to reach sort of near the end of the of the countdown.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

We often see this pause.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

Where they, you know, they put in a go pause. Well, they like they’re like a planned hold.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. Yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

And so what’s going on there? Why are they doing this right at the end before they launch?

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

So countdown clocks are designed as something that gives you a checklist of this happens at this point, this happens at this point, this happens at this point. And there’s different philosophies on how you design your countdown. And it’s fun to see how this works out differently, especially where like I, you and I grew up watching the space shuttle that had a whole variety of planned holds in its countdown.

And those planned holds were people did things that they thought would probably take five to 10 minutes or maybe 20 minutes. So they’d go into a planned hold and say, we expect this planned hold to last. And they’d say how long they expected it to last.

But it didn’t necessarily last that long. So the planned hold allows them to have flex in their countdown for launches that have a window versus an instantaneous launch. And they often run checklists.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. And you can see it like if you got humans that are climbing aboard your spaceship and doing human things, then there’s a support. Then you’re still following the larger timeline of your countdown.

But one of those things is getting all of your astronauts to climb inside the space shuttle and and hook up all their umbilicals and and make sure everything is right. And and you think it’s going to take you X amount of time, but it actually takes you Y amount of time. And so that will push it.

But with the satellite launches and stuff, these planned holds can be very quick. Like sometimes just a few seconds, 30 seconds or something they’ve got to do. They’ve got to make sure it has to be done at that moment.

And you’ll see that that planned hold.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And human versus satellite. You have two things that that become suddenly very different. First of all, the loading of the humans and the closing of the door and the ceiling of the door that can’t be done ahead of time.

That has to be done that day. You’re not locking the humans in five days in advance, like with the satellite.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah, just stay in there and launch there for a while. Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

But but the other issue is with with humans, you have all of the abort locations. So abort to here, abort to there. In case of issue, we saw this, I want to say eight years ago where they had to do an abort of a Soyuz and then they had to go figure out where in the forest the Soyuz went.

And and so you have to do the check of not just the weather at the launch facility, but the weather at all of your abort to locations. So you have two different things that get added in with human beings. OK, I’m done.

Move on to the next topic. Sorry.

Fraser Cain: 

No problem. So now, you know, we get down to zero. The it’s we go for launch.

They start the the rocket begins. But there’s still one phase that may stop this rocket from continuing on to orbit. And that is if something catastrophically bad happens to the rocket and not like it tears itself apart, but there’s something wrong and they need to still abort the launch.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. So luckily, we don’t see this too often, but there’s been some amazing examples from new commercial spaces. They’re developing new rockets.

So I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen a rocket just start to clear the launch pad and then fails. My favorite failure was and this happened not in the final few seconds. There was a rocket recently that decided to just like fling its satellite fairings.

So sitting on the launch pad and suddenly you have naked satellite. It was glorious.

Fraser Cain: 

It was still take off.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

No, no. They’re like, oh, no, we can’t. We no longer have fairings.

Fraser Cain: 

But I mean, no, we know that rocket is going to make it without fairings. Yeah.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Just the idea that your rocket suddenly goes spring. No more fairings on the launch pad. It yeah, I love it.

We’ve we’ve seen launches where it goes up and it turns around and you detonate it before it can destroy your launch pad.

Fraser Cain: 

And that’s the key is that detonation, that there needs to be a way to explode your rocket if it’s doing something catastrophic. It’s going in exactly the wrong direction. If it veers left and heads toward a city, you need to be able to detonate that rocket and stop it from going any further.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Yeah. And and I go check out some of the videos there. There are rapid unplanned disassembly videos. There is lithographic breaking videos.

New Commercial Space is providing us modern 4K video of things that last happened in the 60s, and I am here for the innovation and occasional mistakes.

Fraser Cain: 

Yeah. Yeah. So that is the sort of chain of events you have to get through.

And it’s kind of amazing how many of these little steps, and I’m sure someone who actually works in the rocket industry is like, you have no idea how many of these little things we have to deal with step by step by step. This is gigantic chain of events where it can go wrong at every step of the way. And yet, incredibly, rockets launch and they go to space and it works.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

And it would be a completely different conversation to talk about everything that goes into docking. We saw earlier this week, Cygnus rocket, Cygnus Extra Large, that was designed to be able to boost the International Space Station had a rocket issue. And I haven’t checked to see if that’s been fixed yet, but they had to abort their docking with the International Space Station because weren’t going to be in the right place at the right time.

And this is a new capsule that they’re working with.

Fraser Cain: 

All right. Well, maybe that’s a future episode. Thanks, Pamela.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

Thank you, Fraser. And I’m going to record names after the fact. Go join us on Patreon.

We are adding all sorts of new things. I am still figuring this out, which is why we are not recording the names right now. And Fraser and I are moving everything we do one step at a time into this happy place that doesn’t have AI recommending what we do and create.

And check out if you’re listening to this podcast and you want to hear more about what I just said. We had a magnificent rant on the live recording on YouTube about all the things YouTube is doing to us. So, yeah.

Fraser Cain: 

Thanks, everyone. And we will see you next week.

Dr. Pamela Gay: 

See you next week. Bye-bye.

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe), the agency’s Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Follow On–Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1) spacecraft lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:30 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2025. The missions will each focus on different effects of the solar wind — the continuous stream of particles emitted by the Sun — and space weather — the changing conditions in space driven by the Sun — from their origins at the Sun to their farthest reaches billions of miles away at the edge of our solar system.

Carla Brodley, founding executive director of the Center for Inclusive Computing at Northeastern University, explains how to make computer science education more accessible to everyone

Mixing nanoparticles into some common plastics made them harder to break and possibly easier to process, pointing towards a way to make better materials or packaging

Mixing nanoparticles into some common plastics made them harder to break and possibly easier to process, pointing towards a way to make better materials or packaging

The constant temperature and low humidity of a cave network in Saudi Arabia turned cheetahs, some of which died thousands of years ago, into mummies