Science – Page 3

Should we be concerned about the loss of weather balloons?

radiosonde, Science, Weather, weather balloons / DJ Henderson / March 25, 2025

Most of the time, not a big deal. But in critical times, the losses will be felt.

A radiosonde with mailing instructions. Credit: NWS Pittsburgh

Due to staff reductions, retirements, and a federal hiring freeze, the National Weather Service has announced a series of suspensions involving weather balloon launches in recent weeks. The question is, will this significantly degrade forecasts in the United States and around the world?

On February 27, it was announced that balloon launches would be suspended entirely at Kotzebue, Alaska, due to staffing shortages. In early March, Albany, N.Y., and Gray, Maine, announced periodic disruptions in launches. Since March 7, it appears that Gray has not missed any balloon launches through Saturday. Albany, however, has missed 14 of them, all during the morning launch cycle (12z).

The kicker came on Thursday afternoon when it was announced that all balloon launches would be suspended in Omaha, Neb., and Rapid City, S.D., due to staffing shortages. Additionally, the balloon launches in Aberdeen, S.D.; Grand Junction, Colo.; Green Bay, Wis.; Gaylord, Mich.; North Platte, Neb.; and Riverton, Wyo., would be reduced to once a day from twice a day.

What are weather balloons?

In a normal time, weather balloons would be launched across the country and world twice per day, right at about 8 am ET and 8 pm ET (one hour earlier in winter), or what we call 12z and 00z. That’s Zulu time, or noon and midnight in Greenwich, England. Rather than explain the whole reasoning behind why we use Zulu time in meteorology, here’s a primer on everything you need to know. Weather balloons are launched around the world at the same time. It’s a unique collaboration and example of global cooperation in the sciences, something that has endured for many years.

These weather balloons are loaded up with hydrogen or helium, soar into the sky, up to and beyond jet stream level, getting to a height of over 100,000 feet before they pop. Attached to the weather balloon is a tool known as a radiosonde, or “sonde” for short. This is basically a weather-sensing device that measures all sorts of weather variables like temperature, dewpoint, pressure, and more. Wind speed is usually derived from this based on GPS transmitting from the sonde.

Sunday morning’s upper air launch map showing a gaping hole over the Rockies and some of the Plains. Credit: University of Wyoming

What goes up must come down, so when the balloon pops, that radiosonde falls from the sky. A parachute is attached to it, slowing its descent and ensuring no one gets plunked on the head by one. If you find a radiosonde, it should be clearly marked, and you can keep it, let the NWS know you found it, or dispose of it properly. In some instances, there may still be a way to mail it back to the NWS (postage and envelope included and prepaid).

How this data is used

In order to run a weather model, you need an accurate snapshot of what we call the initial conditions. What is the weather at time = zero? That’s your initialization point. Not coincidentally, weather models are almost always run at 12z and 00z, to time in line with retrieving the data from these weather balloons. It’s a critically important input to almost all weather modeling we use.

The data from balloon launches can be plotted on a chart called a sounding, which gives meteorologists a vertical profile of the atmosphere at a point. During severe weather season, we use these observations to understand the environment we are in, assess risks to model output, and make changes to our own forecasts. During winter, these observations are critical to knowing if a storm will produce snow, sleet, or freezing rain.

Observations from soundings are important inputs for assessing turbulence that may impact air travel, marine weather, fire weather, and air pollution. Other than some tools on some aircraft that we utilize, the data from balloon launches is the only real good verification tool we have for understanding how the upper atmosphere is behaving.

Have we lost weather balloon data before?

We typically lose out on a data point or two each day for various reasons when the balloons are launched. We’ve also been operating without a weather balloon launch in Chatham, Mass., for a few years because coastal erosion made the site too challenging and unsafe.

Tallahassee, Fla., has been pausing balloon launches for almost a year now due to a helium shortage and inability to safely switch to hydrogen gas for launching the balloons. In Denver, balloon launches have been paused since 2022 due to the helium shortage as well.

Those are three sites, though, spread out across the country. We are doubling or tripling the number of sites without launches now, many in critical areas upstream of significant weather.

Can satellites replace weather balloons?

Yes and no.

On one hand, satellites today are capable of incredible observations that can rival weather balloons at times. And they also cover the globe constantly, which is important. That being said, satellites cannot completely replace balloon launches. Why? Because the radiosonde data those balloon launches give us basically acts as a verification metric for models in a way that satellites cannot. It also helps calibrate derived satellite data to ensure that what the satellite is seeing is recorded correctly.

But in general, satellites cannot yet replace weather balloons. They merely act to improve upon what weather balloons do. A study done in the middle part of the last decade found that wind observations improved rainfall forecasts by 30 percent. The one tool at that time that made the biggest difference in improving the forecast were radiosondes. Has this changed since then? Yes, almost certainly. Our satellites have better resolution, are capable of getting more data, and send data back more frequently. So certainly, it’s improved some. But enough? That’s unclear.

An analysis done more recently on the value of dropsondes (the opposite of balloon launches; this time, the sensor is dropped from an aircraft instead of launched from the ground) in forecasting West Coast atmospheric rivers showed a marked improvement in forecasts when those targeted drops occur. Another study in 2017 showed that aircraft observations actually did a good job filling gaps in the upper air data network.

Even with aircraft observations, there were mixed studies done in the wake of the COVID-19 reduction in air travel that suggested no impact could be detected above usual forecast error noise or that there was some regional degradation in model performance.

But to be quite honest, there have not been many studies that I can find in recent years that assess how the new breed of satellites has (or has not) changed the value of upper-air observations. The NASA GEOS model keeps a record of what data sources are of most impact to model verification with respect to 24-hour forecasts. Number two on the list? Radiosondes. This could be considered probably a loose comp to the GFS model, one of the major weather models used by meteorologists globally.

The verdict

In reality, the verdict in all this is to be determined, particularly statistically. Will it make a meaningful statistical difference in model accuracy? Over time, yes, probably, but not in ways that most people will notice day to day.

However, based on 20 years of experience and a number of conversations about this with others in the field, there are some very real, very serious concerns beyond statistics. One thing is that the suspended weather balloon launches are occurring in relatively important areas for weather impacts downstream. A missed weather balloon launch in Omaha or Albany won’t impact the forecast in California. But what if a hurricane is coming? What if a severe weather event is coming? You’ll definitely see impacts to forecast quality during major, impactful events. At the very least, these launch suspensions will increase the noise-to-signal ratio with respect to forecasts.

The element with the second-highest impact on the NASA GEOS model? Radiosondes. Credit: NASA

In other words, there may be situations where you have a severe weather event expected to kickstart in one place, but the lack of knowing the precise location of an upper air disturbance in the Rockies thanks to a suspended launch from Grand Junction, Colo., will lead to those storms forming 50 miles farther east than expected. In other words, losing this data increases the risk profile for more people in terms of knowing about weather, particularly high-impact weather.

Let’s say we have a hurricane in the Gulf that is rapidly intensifying, and we are expecting it to turn north and northeast thanks to a strong upper-air disturbance coming out of the Rockies, leading to landfall on the Alabama coast. What if the lack of upper-air observations has led to that disturbance being misplaced by 75 miles. Now, instead of Alabama, the storm is heading toward New Orleans. Is this an extreme example? Honestly, I don’t think it is as extreme as you might think. We often have timing and amplitude forecast issues with upper-air disturbances during hurricane season, and the reality is that we may have to make some more frequent last-second adjustments now that we didn’t have to in recent years. As a Gulf Coast resident, this is very concerning.

I don’t want to overstate things. Weather forecasts aren’t going to dramatically degrade day to day because we’ve reduced some balloon launches across the country. They will degrade, but the general public probably won’t notice much difference 90 percent of the time. But that 10 percent of the time? It’s not that the differences will be gigantic. But the impact of those differences could very well be gigantic, put more people in harm’s way, and increase the risk profile for an awful lot of people. That’s what this does: It increases the risk profile, it will lead to reduced weather forecast skill scores, and it may lead to an event that surprises a portion of the population that isn’t used to be surprised in the 2020s. To me, that makes the value of weather balloons very, very significant, and I find these cuts to be extremely troubling.

Should further cuts in staffing lead to further suspensions in weather balloon launches, we will see this problem magnify more often and involve bigger misses. In other words, the impacts here may not be linear, and repeated increased loss of real-world observational data will lead to very significant degradation in weather model performance that may be noticed more often than described above.

This story originally appeared on The Eyewall.

The Eyewall is dedicated to covering tropical activity in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico. The site was founded in June 2023 by Matt Lanza and Eric Berger, who work together on the Houston-based forecasting site Space City Weather.

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David Blaine shows his hand in Do Not Attempt

David Blaine, Disney Plus, documentary series, magic, magicians, National Geographic, Science / 9u50fv / March 24, 2025

NatGeo docuseries follows Blaine around the world to learn the secrets of ordinary people doing remarkable feats.

Magician David Blaine smiles while running his hand through a flame. Credit: National Geographic/Dana Hayes

Over the course of his long career, magician and endurance performer David Blaine has taken on all kinds of death-defying feats: catching a bullet in his teeth, fasting for 44 days, or holding his breath for a record-breaking 17 minutes and 4 seconds, to name a few. Viewers will get to see a different side of Blaine as he travels the world to meet kindred spirits from a wide range of cultures in David Blaine Do Not Attempt, a new six-episode docuseries from National Geographic.

(Some spoilers below.)

The series was shot over three calendar years (2022-2024) in nine different countries and features Blaine interacting with, and learning from, all manner of daredevils, athletes, street performers, and magicians. In Southeast Asia, for instance, he watches practitioners of an Indonesian martial art called Debus manipulate razor blades in their mouths and eat nails. (There is no trick to this, just conditioned endurance to pain, as Blaine discovers when he attempts to eat nails: his throat was sore for days.) He braves placing scorpions on his body, breaks a bottle with his head, and sets himself on fire in Brazil while jumping off a high bridge.

One of the elements that sets this series apart from Blaine’s previous magical specials is his willingness to be filmed practicing and training to do the various featured stunts, including early failed attempts. This makes him seem more vulnerable and immensely likable—even if it made him personally uncomfortable during filming.

David Blaine and Amandeep Singh prepare to break bottles with their fists. National Geographic

“I’ve always kept that part hidden,” Blaine told Ars. “Normally I work for a few years and I develop [a stunt] until I feel pretty good about it, and then I go and do the stunt and push myself as far as possible. But in this scenario, it was so many places, so many people, so many events, so many feats, so many things to learn so fast. So it was me in a way that I never liked to show myself: awkward and uncomfortable and screaming and laughing. It’s the things that as a magician, I always hide. As a magician, I try to be very monotone and let the audience react. For this series, I was the spectator to the magic, and it was, for me, very uncomfortable. But I was watching these amazing performers—what I consider to be magicians.”

Safety first

The task of keeping Blaine and the entire crew safe in what are unquestionably dangerous situations falls to safety expert Sebastian “Bas” Pot. “I joke that my title is Glorifed Nanny,” Pot told Ars. “I specialize in taking people to very remote locations where they want to do insane things. I have three basic rules: No one dies, everyone gets paid, and we all smile and laugh every day. If I achieve those three things, my job is done.” He deliberately keeps himself out of the shot; there is only one scene in Do Not Attempt where we see Pot’s face as he’s discussing the risks of a stunt with Blaine.

Blaine has always taken on risks, but because he has historically hidden his preparation from public view, viewers might not realize how cautious he really is. “What people tend to forget about guys like David is that they’re very calculated,” said Pot. The biggest difference between working with Blaine and other clients? “Normally I’ll do everything, I will never ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself,” said Pot. “David is taking huge risks, and there’s a lot that he does that I wouldn’t do.”

Like Blaine, Pot also emphasized the importance of repetition to safety. In addition, “A huge amount of it is keeping the calm on set, listening and observing and not getting caught up in the excitement of what’s going on,” he said. While he uses some basic technology for tasks like measuring wind speed, checking for concussion, or monitoring vital signs, for the most part keeping the set safe “is very much about switching off from the technology,” he said.

Ken Stornes leaps from a platform in a Norwegian death dive. National Geographic/Dana Hayes

And when everyone else on set is watching Blaine, “I’m looking outwards, because I’ve got enough eyes on him,” said Pot. There was only one bad accident during filming, involving a skydiving crew member during the Arctic Circle episode who suffered a spinal fracture after a bad landing. The crew member recuperated and was back in the wind tunnel practicing within a month.

This is the episode where Blaine attempts a Viking “death dive” into a snow drift under the tutelage of a Norwegian man named Ken Stornes, with one key difference: Stornes jumps from much greater heights. He also participates in a sky dive. But the episode mostly focuses on Blaine’s training with free divers under the ice to prepare for a stunt in which Blaine swims from one point under Finnish ice to another, pulling himself along with a rope while holding his breath. A large part of his motivation for attempting it was his failed 2006 “Drowned Alive” seven-day stunt in front of Lincoln Center in New York. (He sustained liver and kidney damage as a result.)

“One of my favorite quotes is Churchill, when he says, ‘Success is the ability to go from one failure to the next failure with enthusiasm,'” said Blaine. “That’s what this entire series is. It’s these incredible artists and performers and conservationists and people that do these incredible feats, but it’s the thousands of hours of work, training, failure, repeat that you don’t see that makes what they do seem magical. There’s no guidebook for what they’re doing. But they’ve developed these things to the point that when I was watching them, I’m crying with joy. I can’t believe that what I’m seeing is really happening in front of my eyes. It is magical. And it’s because of the amount of repetition, work, failure, repeat that they put in behind the curtain that you don’t see.”

This time, Blaine succeeded. “It was an incredible experience with these artists that have taken this harsh environment and turned it into a wonderland,” said Blaine of his Arctic experience. “The free divers go under three and a half feet of ice, hold their breath. There’s no way out. They have to find the exit point.”

“When you stop and look, you forget that you’re in this extreme environment and suddenly it’s the most beautiful surroundings, unlike anything that I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It’s almost like being in outer space. And when you’re in that extreme and dangerous situation, there’s this camaraderie, they’re all in it together. At the same time, they’re all very alert. There’s no distractions. Nobody’s thinking about messages, phones, bills. Everybody’s right there in that moment. And you’re very aware of everything around you in a way that normally in the real world doesn’t exist.”

Blaine admits that his attitude toward risk has changed somewhat with age. “I’m older and I have a daughter, and therefore I don’t want to do something where, oh, it went wrong and it’s the worst-case scenario,” he said. “So I have been very careful. If something seemed like the risk wasn’t worth it, I backed away. For some of these things, I would just have to watch, study, learn, take time off, come back. I wouldn’t do it unless I felt that the master who was sharing their skillset with me felt that I could pull it off. There was a trust, and I was able to listen and follow exactly. That ability to listen to directions and commit to something is a very necessary part to pulling something off like this.”

Granted, he didn’t always listen. When he deliberately attracted a swarm of bees to make a “bee beard,” he was advised to wear a white T-shirt to avoid getting stung. But black is Blaine’s signature color, and he decided to stick with it. He did indeed get stung about a dozen times but took the pain in stride. “He takes responsibility for him,” Pot (who is a beekeeper) said of that decision. “I’d tell a crew member to go change their T-shirt and they would.”

The dedication to proper preparation and training is evident throughout Do Not Attempt, but particularly in the Southeast Asia-centric episode where Blaine attempts to kiss a venomous King Cobra—what Pot considers to be the most dangerous stunt in the series. “The one person I’ve ever had die was a snake expert in Venezuela years ago, who got bitten by his own snake because he chose not to follow the safety protocols we had put in place,” said Pot.

Kissing a cobra

So there were weeks of preparation before Blaine even attempted the stunt, guided by an Indonesian Debus practitioner named Fiitz, who can read the creatures’ body language so effortlessly he seems to be dancing with the snakes. (Note: no animals were harmed over the course of filming.) The final shot (see clip below) took 10 days to film. Antivenom was naturally on hand, but while antivenom might save your life if you’re bitten by a King Cobra, “the journey you’re going to go on will be hell,” Pol said. “You can still have massive necrosis, lose a limb, it might take weeks—there’s no guarantees at all [for recovery].” And administering antivenom can induce cardiac shock if it’s not done correctly. “You don’t want some random set medic reading instructions off Google on how to give antivenom” said Pot.

David Blaine kisses a King Cobra with the expert guidance of Debus practitioner Fiitz.

Blaine’s genuine appreciation for the many performers he encounters in his journey is evident in every frame. “[The experience] changed me in a way that you can’t simply explain,” Blaine said. “It was incredible to discover these kindred spirits all around the world, people who had these amazing passions. Many of them had to go against what everybody said was possible. Many of them had to fail, repeat, embarrass themselves, risk everything, and learn. That was one of the greatest experiences: discovering this unification of all these people from all different parts of the world that I felt had that theme in common. It was nice to be there firsthand, getting a glimpse into their world or seeing what drives them.”

“The other part that was really special: I became a person that gets to watch real magic happening in front of my eyes,” Blaine continued. “When I’m up in the sky watching [a skydiver named] Inka, I’m actually crying tears of joy because it’s so compelling and so beautiful. So many of these places around the world had these amazing performers. Across the board, each place, every continent, every person, every performer has given me a gift that I’ll cherish for the rest of my life.”

David Blaine Do Not Attempt premieres tonight on National Geographic and starts streaming tomorrow on Disney+ and Hulu.

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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This launcher is about to displace the V-2 as Germany’s largest rocket

Commercial space, Europe, european space agency, germany, isar aerospace, launch, Norway, Science, Space / Mike M. / March 24, 2025

Isar Aerospace’s first Spectrum rocket will launch from Andøya Spaceport in Norway.

Seven years ago, three classmates at the Technical University of Munich believed their student engineering project might hold some promise in the private sector.

At the time, Daniel Metzler led a team of 40 students working on rocket engines and launching sounding rockets. Josef Fleischmann was on the team that won the first SpaceX Hyperloop competition. Together with another classmate, Markus Brandl, they crafted rocket parts in a campus workshop before taking the leap and establishing Isar Aerospace, named for the river running through the Bavarian capital.

Now, Isar’s big moment has arrived. The company’s orbital-class first rocket, named Spectrum, is set to lift off from a shoreline launch pad in Norway as soon as Monday.

The three-hour launch window opens at 12: 30 pm local time in Norway, or 7: 30 am EDT in the United States. “The launch date remains subject to weather, safety and range infrastructure,” Isar said in a statement.

Isar’s Spectrum rocket rolls out to its launch pad in Norway. Credit: Isar Aerospace

Isar said it received a launch license from the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority on March 14, following the final qualification test on the Spectrum rocket in February to validate its readiness for flight.

Notably, this will be the first orbital launch attempt from a launch pad in Western Europe. The French-run Guiana Space Center in South America is the primary spaceport for European rockets. Virgin Orbit staged an airborne launch attempt from an airport in the United Kingdom in 2023, and the Plesetsk Cosmodrome is located in European Russia.

No guarantees

Success is never assured on the inaugural launch of a new rocket. Isar is the first in a wave of European launch startups to arrive at this point. The company developed the Spectrum rocket with mostly private funding, although Isar received multimillion-euro investments from the European Space Agency, the German government, and the NATO Innovation Fund.

All told, Isar says it has raised more than 400 million euros, or $435 million at today’s currency exchange rate, more than any other European launch startup.

“We are approaching the most important moment of our journey so far, and I would like to thank all our team, partners, customers and investors who have been accompanying and trusting us,” said Daniel Metzler, Isar’s co-founder and CEO, in a statement.

Most privately developed rockets have failed to reach orbit on the first try. Several US launch companies that evolved in a similar mold as Isar—such as Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, and Astra—faltered on the way to orbit on their rockets’ first flights.

“With this mission, Isar Aerospace aims to collect as much data and experience as possible on its in-house-developed launch vehicle. It is the first integrated test of all systems,” said Alexandre Dalloneau, Isar’s vice president of mission and launch operations.

“The test results will feed into the iterations and development of future Spectrum vehicles, which are being built and tested in parallel,” Isar said in a statement.

Look familiar? Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket is powered by nine first-stage engines arranged in an “octaweb” configuration patterned on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Credit: Isar Aerospace/Wingmen Media

Europe has struggled to regain its footing after SpaceX took over the dominant position in the global commercial launch market, a segment led for three decades by Europe’s Ariane rocket family before SpaceX proved the reliability of the lower-cost, partially reusable Falcon 9 launcher. The continent’s new Ariane 6 rocket, funded by ESA and built by a consortium owned by multinational firms Airbus and Safran, is more expensive than the Falcon 9 and years behind schedule. It finally debuted last year.

One ton to LEO

Isar’s Spectrum rocket is not as powerful as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Arianespace’s Ariane 6. But even SpaceX had to start somewhere. Its small Falcon 1 rocket failed three times before tasting success. Spectrum is somewhat larger and more capable than Falcon 1, with performance in line with Firefly’s Alpha rocket.

The fully assembled Spectrum rocket stands about 92 feet (28 meters) tall and measures more than 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter. The expendable launcher is designed to haul payloads up to 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) into low-Earth orbit. Spectrum is powered by nine Aquila engines on its first stage, and one engine on the second stage, burning a mixture of propane and liquid oxygen propellants.

There are no customer satellites aboard the first Spectrum test flight. The rocket will climb into a polar orbit from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, but Isar hasn’t published a launch timeline or the exact parameters of the target orbit.

While modest in size next to Europe’s Ariane launcher family, Isar’s Spectrum is the largest German rocket since the V-2, the World War II weapon of terror launched by Nazi Germany against targets in Great Britain, Belgium, and other places. In the 80 years since the war, German industry developed a handful of small sounding rockets and manufactured upper stages for Ariane rockets.

But German governments have long shunned spending on launchers at levels commensurate with the nation’s place as a top contributor to ESA. France took the lead in the continent’s postwar rocket industry, providing the lion’s share of funding for Ariane and taking responsibility for building engines and booster stages.

Now, 80 years to the week since the last V-2 launch of World War II, Germany again has a homegrown liquid-fueled rocket on the launch pad. This time, it’s for a much different purpose.

As a first step, Isar and other companies in Europe are vying to inject competition with Arianespace into the European launch market. This will begin with small government-funded satellites that otherwise would have likely launched on rideshare flights by SpaceX or Arianespace.

In 2022, the German space agency (known as DLR) announced the selection of research and demo payloads slated to fly on Spectrum’s second launch. The Norwegian Space Agency revealed a contract earlier this month for Isar to launch a pair of satellites for the country’s Arctic Ocean Surveillance program.

Within the next few days, ESA is expected to release an “invitation to tender” for European industry to submit proposals for the European Launcher Challenge. This summer, ESA will select winners from Europe’s crop of launch startups to demonstrate that their rockets can deliver the agency’s scientific satellites to orbit. This is the first time ESA has experimented with a fully commercial business model, with launch service contracts to private companies. Isar is a leading contender to win the launcher challenge, alongside other European companies like Rocket Factory Augsburg, HyImpulse, MaiaSpace, and others.

Previously, ESA has provided billions of euros to Europe’s big incumbent rocket companies for development of new generations of Ariane rockets. Now, ESA wants to follow the path of NASA, which has used fixed-price service contracts to foster commercial cargo and crew transportation to the International Space Station, and most recently, privately owned landers on the Moon.

“Whatever the outcome, Isar Aerospace’s upcoming Spectrum launch will be historic: the first commercial orbital launch from mainland Europe,” Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s director general, posted on X. “The support and co-funding the European Space Agency has given Isar Aerospace and other launch service provider startups is paying off for increased autonomy in Europe. Wishing Isar Aerospace a great launch day with fair weather and most importantly, that the data they receive from the liftoff will speed next iterations of their rockets.”

Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s acting director of space transportation, called this moment a “paradigm shift” for Europe’s launcher strategy.

“In the last 40 years, we have had these ESA-developed launchers that we have been relying on,” Tolker-Nielsen told Ars in an interview. “So we started with Ariane 1 up to Ariane 6. Vega C came onboard. And it’s been working like that for the last 40 years. Now, we are moving into in the ’30s, and the next decades, to have privately developed launchers.”

Isar Aerospace’s first Spectrum rocket will lift off from the remote Andøya Spaceport in Norway, a gorgeous location that might be the world’s most picturesque launch site. Nestled on the western coast of an island inside the Arctic Circle, Andøya offers an open path over the Norwegian Sea for rockets to fly north, where they can place satellites into polar orbit.

The spaceport is operated by Andøya Space, a company 90 percent owned by the Norwegian government through the Ministry for Trade, Industry, and Fisheries. Until now, Andøya Spaceport has been used for launches of suborbital sounding rockets.

The geography of Norway permits northerly launches from Andøya Spaceport. Credit: Andøya Space

No better time than now

Isar’s first launch comes amid an abrupt turn in European strategic policy as the continent’s leaders struggle with how to respond to moves by President Donald Trump in his first two months in office. In recent weeks, the Trump administration put European leaders on their heels with sudden policy reversals and unpredictable statements on Ukraine, NATO, and the US government’s long-term backstopping of European security.

Friedrich Merz, set to become Germany’s next chancellor, said last month that Europe should strive to “achieve independence” from the United States. “It is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

Last week, Merz shepherded a bill through German parliament to amend the country’s constitution, allowing for a significant increase in German defense spending. The incoming chancellor said the change is “nothing less than the first major step towards a new European defense community.”

The erosion of Europe’s trust in the Trump administration prompted rumors that the US government could trigger a “kill switch” to turn off combat capabilities of F-35 fighter jets sold to US allies. This would have previously seemed like a far-fetched conspiracy theory, but some European officials felt compelled to make statements denying the kill switch reports. Still, the recent turbulence in trans-Atlantic relations has some US allies rethinking their plans to buy more US-made fighter jets and weapons systems.

“Reliable and predictable orders should go to European manufacturers whenever possible,” Merz said.

Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice chancellor and economics minister, tours Isar Aerospace in Ottobrunn, Germany, in 2023. Credit: Marijan Murat/picture alliance via Getty Images

This uncertainty extends to space, where it is most apparent in the launch industry. SpaceX, founded and led by Trump ally Elon Musk, dominates the global commercial launch business. European governments have repeatedly turned to SpaceX to launch multiple defense and scientific satellites over the last several years, while Europe encountered delays with its homegrown Ariane 6 and Vega rockets.

Until 2022, Europe and Russia jointly operated Soyuz rockets from the Guiana Space Center in South America to deploy government and commercial payloads to orbit. The partnership ended with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Europe’s flagship Ariane 5 rocket retired in 2023, a year before its replacement—the Ariane 6—debuted on its first test flight from the Guiana Space Center. The first operational flight of the Ariane 6 delivered a French military spy satellite to orbit March 6. The smaller Vega C rocket successfully launched in December, two years after officials grounded the vehicle due to an in-flight failure.

ESA funded development of the Ariane 6 and Vega C in partnership with ArianeGroup, a joint venture between Airbus and Safran, and the Italian defense contractor Avio.

For the moment, Europe’s launcher program is back on track to provide autonomous access to space, a capability European officials consider a strategic imperative. Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for research and higher education, said after the Ariane 6 flight earlier this month that the launch was “proof” of European space sovereignty.

“The return of Donald Trump to the White House, with Elon Musk at his side, already has significant consequences on our research partnerships, on our commercial partnerships,” Baptiste said in his remarkably pointed prepared remarks. “If we want to maintain our independence, ensure our security, and preserve our sovereignty, we must equip ourselves with the means for strategic autonomy, and space is an essential part of this.”

The problem? Ariane 6 and Vega C are costly, lack a path to reusability, and aren’t geared to match SpaceX’s blistering launch cadence. If Europe wants autonomous access to space, European taxpayers will have to pay a premium. Isar’s Spectrum also isn’t reusable, but European officials hope competition from new startups will produce fresh launch options, and perhaps stimulate an inspired response from Europe’s entrenched launch companies.

“In today’s geopolitical climate, our first test flight is about much more than a rocket launch: Space is one of the most critical platforms for our security, resilience, and technological advancement,” Metzler said. “In the next days, Isar Aerospace will lay the foundations to regain much needed independent and competitive access to space from Europe.”

Tolker-Nielsen, in charge of ESA’s space transportation division, said this is the first of many steps for Europe to develop a thriving commercial launch sector.

“This launch is a milestone, which is very important,” he said. “It’s the first conclusion of all this work, so I will be looking carefully on that. I cross my fingers that it goes well.”

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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We probably inherited our joints from… a fish

Biology, developmental biology, evolution, joints, paleontology, Science, synovial joints / Mike M. / March 23, 2025

What do we have in common with fish, besides being vertebrates? The types of joints we (and most vertebrates) share most likely originated from the same common ancestor. But it’s not a feature that we share with all vertebrates.

Humans, other land vertebrates, and jawed fish have synovial joints. The lubricated cavity within these joints makes them more mobile and stable because it allows for bones or cartilage to slide against each other without friction, which facilitates movement.

The origin of these joints was uncertain. Now, biologist Neelima Sharma of the University of Chicago and her colleagues have taken a look at which fish form this type of joint. Synovial joints are known to be present in jawed but not jawless fish. This left the question of whether they are just a feature of bony skeletons in general or if they are also found in fish with cartilaginous skeletons, such as sharks and skates (there are no land animals with cartilaginous skeletons).

As Sharma and her team found, cartilaginous fish with jaws, such as the skate embryos they studied, do develop these joints, while jawless fish, such as lampreys and hagfish, lack them.

So what could this mean? If jawed fish have synovial joints in common with all jawed vertebrates, including us, it must have evolved in our shared ancestor.

Something fishy in our past

While the common ancestor of vertebrates with synovial joints is still a mystery, the oldest specimen with evidence of these joints is Bothriolepis canadensis, a fish that lived about 387 to 360 million years ago during the Middle to Late Devonian period.

When using CT scanning to study a Bothriolepis fossil, Sharma observed a joint cavity between the shoulder and pectoral fin. Whether the cavity was filled with synovial fluid or cartilage is impossible to tell, but either way, she thinks it appears to have functioned like a synovial joint would. Fossils of early jawless fish, in contrast, lack any signs of synovial joints.

We probably inherited our joints from… a fish Read More »

How the language of job postings can attract rule-bending narcissists

hiring, narcississm, psychology, Science, Social science, syndication / Beth Washington / March 23, 2025

Why it matters

Companies write job postings carefully in hopes of attracting the ideal candidate. However, they may unknowingly attract and select narcissistic candidates whose goals and ethics might not align with a company’s values or long-term success. Research shows that narcissistic employees are more likely to behave unethically, potentially leading to legal consequences.

While narcissistic traits can lead to negative outcomes, we aren’t saying that companies should avoid attracting narcissistic applicants altogether. Consider a company hiring a salesperson. A firm can benefit from a salesperson who is persuasive, who “thinks outside the box,” and who is “results-oriented.” In contrast, a company hiring an accountant or compliance officer would likely benefit from someone who “thinks methodically” and “communicates in a straightforward and accurate manner.”

Bending the rules is of particular concern in accounting. A significant amount of research examines how accounting managers sometimes bend rules or massage the numbers to achieve earnings targets. This “earnings management” can misrepresent the company’s true financial position.

In fact, my co-author Nick Seybert is currently working on a paper whose data suggests rule-bender language in accounting job postings predicts rule-bending in financial reporting.

Our current findings shed light on the importance of carefully crafting job posting language. Recruiting professionals may instinctively use rule-bender language to try to attract someone who seems like a good fit. If companies are concerned about hiring narcissists, they may want to clearly communicate their ethical values and needs while crafting a job posting, or avoid rule-bender language entirely.

What still isn’t known

While we find that professional recruiters are using language that attracts narcissists, it is unclear whether this is intentional.

Additionally, we are unsure what really drives rule-bending in a company. Rule-bending could happen due to attracting and hiring more narcissistic candidates, or it could be because of a company’s culture—or a combination of both.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Jonathan Gay is Assistant Professor of Accountancy at the University of Mississippi.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Measles arrives in Kansas, spreads quickly in undervaccinated counties

health, Infectious disease, kansas, measles, MMR, outbreak, Science, texas, unvaccinated, vaccinated, virus / DJ Henderson / March 22, 2025

On Thursday, the county on the northern border of Stevens, Grant County, also reported three confirmed cases, which were also linked to the first case in Stevens. Grant County is in a much better position to handle the outbreak than its neighbors; its one school district, Ulysses, reported 100 percent vaccination coverage for kindergartners in the 2023–2024 school year.

Outbreak risk

So far, details about the fast-rising cases are scant. The Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) has not published another press release about the cases since March 13. Ars Technica reached out to KDHE for more information but did not hear back before this story’s publication.

The outlet KWCH 12 News out of Wichita published a story Thursday, when there were just six cases reported in just Grant and Stevens Counties, saying that all six were in unvaccinated people and that no one had been hospitalized. On Friday, KWCH updated the story to note that the case count had increased to 10 and that the health department now considers the situation an outbreak.

Measles is an extremely infectious virus that can linger in airspace and on surfaces for up to two hours after an infected person has been in an area. Among unvaccinated people exposed to the virus, 90 percent will become infected.

Vaccination rates have slipped nationwide, creating pockets that have lost herd immunity and are vulnerable to fast-spreading, difficult-to-stop outbreaks. In the past, strong vaccination rates prevented such spread, and in 2000, the virus was declared eliminated, meaning there was no continuous spread of the virus over a 12-month period. Experts now fear that the US will lose its elimination status, meaning measles will once again be considered endemic to the country.

So far this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has documented 378 measles cases as of Thursday, March 20. That figure is already out of date.

On Friday, the Texas health department reported 309 cases in its ongoing outbreak. Forty people have been hospitalized, and one unvaccinated child with no underlying medical conditions has died. The outbreak has spilled over to New Mexico and Oklahoma. In New Mexico, officials reported Friday that the case count has risen to 42 cases, with two hospitalizations and one death in an unvaccinated adult. In Oklahoma, the case count stands at four.

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“Infantile amnesia” occurs despite babies showing memory activity

Biology, infantile amnesia, memory, neurobiology, Science / Mike M. / March 22, 2025

For many of us, memories of our childhood have become a bit hazy, if not vanishing entirely. But nobody really remembers much before the age of 4, because nearly all humans experience what’s termed “infantile amnesia,” in which memories that might have formed before that age seemingly vanish as we move through adolescence. And it’s not just us; the phenomenon appears to occur in a number of our fellow mammals.

The simplest explanation for this would be that the systems that form long-term memories are simply immature and don’t start working effectively until children hit the age of 4. But a recent animal experiment suggests that the situation in mice is more complex: the memories are there, they’re just not normally accessible, although they can be re-activated. Now, a study that put human infants in an MRI tube suggests that memory activity starts by the age of 1, suggesting that the results in mice may apply to us.

Less than total recall

Mice are one of the species that we know experience infantile amnesia. And, thanks to over a century of research on mice, we have some sophisticated genetic tools that allow us to explore what’s actually involved in the apparent absence of the animals’ earliest memories.

A paper that came out last year describes a series of experiments that start by having very young mice learn to associate seeing a light come on with receiving a mild shock. If nothing else is done with those mice, that association will apparently be forgotten later in life due to infantile amnesia.

But in this case, the researchers could do something. Neural activity normally results in the activation of a set of genes. In these mice, the researchers engineered it so one of the genes that gets activated encodes a protein that can modify DNA. When this protein is made, it results in permanent changes to a second gene that was inserted in the animal’s DNA. Once activated through this process, the gene leads to the production of a light-activated ion channel.

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Hints grow stronger that dark energy changes over time

cosmology, dark energy, Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, Lambda CDM, Physics, Science, the standard model / DJ Henderson / March 20, 2025

In its earliest days, the Universe was a hot, dense soup of subatomic particles, including hydrogen and helium nuclei, aka baryons. Tiny fluctuations created a rippling pattern through that early ionized plasma, which froze into a three-dimensional place as the Universe expanded and cooled. Those ripples, or bubbles, are known as baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO). It’s possible to use BAOs as a kind of cosmic ruler to investigate the effects of dark energy over the history of the Universe.

DESI is a state-of-the-art instrument and can capture light from up to 5,000 celestial objects simultaneously. — DESI is a state-of-the-art instrument that can capture light from up to 5,000 celestial objects simultaneously.

That’s what DESI was designed to do: take precise measurements of the apparent size of these bubbles (both near and far) by determining the distances to galaxies and quasars over 11 billion years. That data can then be sliced into chunks to determine how fast the Universe was expanding at each point of time in the past, the better to model how dark energy was affecting that expansion.

An upward trend

Last year’s results were based on analysis of a full year’s worth of data taken from seven different slices of cosmic time and include 450,000 quasars, the largest ever collected, with a record-setting precision of the most distant epoch (between 8 to 11 billion years back) of 0.82 percent. While there was basic agreement with the Lamba CDM model, when those first-year results were combined with data from other studies (involving the cosmic microwave background radiation and Type Ia supernovae), some subtle differences cropped up.

Essentially, those differences suggested that the dark energy might be getting weaker. In terms of confidence, the results amounted to a 2.6-sigma level for the DESI’s data combined with CMB datasets. When adding the supernovae data, those numbers grew to 2.5-sigma, 3.5-sigma, or 3.9-sigma levels, depending on which particular supernova dataset was used.

It’s important to combine the DESI data with other independent measurements because “we want consistency,” said DESI co-spokesperson Will Percival of the University of Waterloo. “All of the different experiments should give us the same answer to how much matter there is in the Universe at present day, how fast the Universe is expanding. It’s no good if all the experiments agree with the Lambda-CDM model, but then give you different parameters. That just doesn’t work. Just saying it’s consistent to the Lambda-CDM, that’s not enough in itself. It has to be consistent with Lambda-CDM and give you the same parameters for the basic properties of that model.”

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Brains of parrots, unlike songbirds, use human-like vocal control

Biology, brain, brain implants, language, neurobiology, Science, vocal control / 9u50fv / March 20, 2025

Due to past work, we’ve already identified the brain structure that controls the activity of the key vocal organ, the syrinx, located in the bird’s throat. The new study, done by Zetian Yang and Michael Long of New York University, managed to place fine electrodes into this area of the brain in both species and track the activity of neurons there while the birds were awake and going about normal activities. This allowed them to associate neural activity with any vocalizations made by the birds. For the budgerigars, they had an average of over 1,000 calls from each of the four birds carrying the implanted electrodes.

For the zebra finch, neural activity during song production showed a pattern that was based on timing; the same neurons tended to be most active at the same point in the song. You can think of this as a bit like a player piano central organizing principle, timing when different notes should be played. “Different configurations [of neurons] are active at different moments, representing an evolving population ‘barcode,’” as Yang and Long describe this pattern.

That is not at all what was seen with the budgerigars. Here, instead, they saw patterns where the same populations of neurons tended to be active when the bird was producing a similar sound. They broke the warbles down into parts that they characterized on a scale that ranged from harmonic to noisy. They found that the groups of neurons tended to be more active whenever the warble was harmonic, and different groups tended to spike when it got noisy. Those observations led them to identify a third population, which was active whenever the budgerigars produced a low-frequency sound.

In addition, Yang and Long analyzed the pitch of the vocalizations. Only about half of the neurons in the relevant region of the brain were linked to pitch. However, the half that was linked had small groups of neurons that fired during the production of a relatively narrow range of pitches. They could use the activity of as few as five individual neurons and accurately predict the pitch of the vocalizations at the time.

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Even the worst mass extinction had its oases

Biology, Ecology, end-permian, Great Dying, mass extinction, paleontology, refugee, Science / Kelly Newman / March 18, 2025

Some earlier plants might not have made it through the extinction since rock layers from the onset of the End-Permian Mass Extinction showed a decrease in pollen and spores, as well as fewer plant species. Other species were scarce because they had not been as well-preserved as others; the team did not automatically assume the scarcity of a plant that did not fossilize meant it had gone extinct.

While there were plant species that ended up being victims of the Great Dying, analysis of species through spore and pollen told the team that only about 21 percent of them succumbed to extinction.

Life will not be contained

The fossils also revealed the presence of plant species known to grow near lakes, which meant an environment that most likely provided drinking water for land-dwelling animals. Fossilized spores farther from what were once the banks of an ancient lake or the edge of a lakeplain suggest it was surrounded by a forest of gymnospermous trees, such as conifers or ginkgo, and ferns.

Because the researchers found so many spores from plant species known to grow in humid climates, they think the regional climate before the extinction was either humid or sub-humid, with plenty of rain. It was a lush environment that would see dry periods during the mass extinction event, but not be completely devastated.

Despite some species of plants vanishing, those that were found to have survived during and after the extinction mostly belonged to conifers and pteridosperms (now-extinct plants similar to ferns), which showed “a remarkable ability to adapt to drought,” as Liu and his team said in the same study.

The drought turned out to be only temporary. Younger rock layers were found to contain a greater abundance of pollen and spores from species that grew during the extinction event. The types of plants represented suggest a climate that had returned to subhumid and was more habitable.

Fossils of animals found at the site support its role as a haven for life. From the herbivorous Lystrosaurus (not a dinosaur), which looked something like a walrus with legs and a shovel face, to the carnivorous chroniosuchians that resembled giant lizards and fed on insects and small amphibians, the refugium in what is now Xinjiang kept life going.

Both flora and fauna would soon spread across terrestrial environments once again. Life on land flourished only 75,000 years after the End-Permian Mass Extinction, so life really does find a way.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.ads5614

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People in this career are better at seeing through optical illusions

optical illusion, Science, syndication / Kelly Newman / March 18, 2025

A hint came from our previous work comparing mathematical and social scientists’ judgements of illusions (we work in universities, so we sometimes study our colleagues). Social scientists, such as psychologists, see illusions more strongly.

Researchers like us have to take many factors into account. Perhaps this makes us more sensitive to context even in the way we see things. But also, it could be that your visual style affects what you choose to study. One of us (Martin) went to university to study physics, but left with a psychology degree. As it happens, his illusion perception is much stronger than normal.

Training your illusion skills

Despite all these individual differences, researchers have always thought that you have no choice over whether you see the illusion. Our recent research challenges this idea.

Radiologists need to be able to rapidly spot important information in medical scans. Doing this often means they have to ignore surrounding detail.

Radiologists train extensively, so does this make them better at seeing through illusions? We found it does. We studied 44 radiologists, compared to over 100 psychology and medical students.

Below is one of our images. The orange circle on the left is 6% smaller than the one on the right. Most people in the study saw it as larger.

The orange circle on the left is actually smaller Credit: Radoslaw Wincza

Here is another image. Most non-radiologists still saw the left one as bigger. Yet, it is 10% smaller. Most radiologists got this one right.

Does the left orange circle look bigger or smaller to you? Credit: Radoslaw Wincza

It was not until the difference was nearly 18%, as shown in the image below, that most non-radiologists saw through the illusion.

Most people get this one right. Credit: Radoslaw Wincza, The Conversation

Radiologists are not entirely immune to the illusion, but are much less susceptible. We also looked at radiologists just beginning training. Their illusion perception was no better than normal. It seems radiologists’ superior perception is a result of their extensive training.

According to current theories of expertise, this shouldn’t happen. Becoming an expert in chess, for example, makes you better at chess but not anything else. But our findings suggest that becoming an expert in medical image analysis also makes you better at seeing through some optical illusions.

There is plenty left to find out. Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is that training on optical illusions can improve radiologists’ skills at their own work.

So, how can you learn to see through illusions? Simple. Just five years of medical school, then seven more of radiology training and this skill can be yours too.

Martin Doherty, Associate Professor in Psychology, University of East Anglia and Radoslaw Wincza, Lecturer in Behavioural Sciences, University of Central Lancashire. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Here’s the secret to how Firefly was able to nail its first lunar landing

artemis, clps, Commercial space, Features, Firefly Aerospace, human landing system, moon, NASA, Science, Space / Beth Washington / March 18, 2025

Darkness fell over Mare Crisium, ending a daily dose of dazzling images from the Moon.

Firefly’s X-band communications antenna (left) is marked with the logos of NASA, Firefly Aerospace, and the US flag. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost science station accomplished a lot on the Moon in the last two weeks. Among other things, its instruments drilled into the Moon’s surface, tested an extraterrestrial vacuum cleaner, and showed that future missions could use GPS navigation signals to navigate on the lunar surface.

These are all important achievements, gathering data that could shed light on the Moon’s formation and evolution, demonstrating new ways of collecting samples on other planets, and revealing the remarkable reach of the US military’s GPS satellite network.

But the pièce de résistance for Firefly’s first Moon mission might be the daily dose of imagery that streamed down from the Blue Ghost spacecraft. A suite of cameras recorded the cloud of dust created as the lander’s engine plume blew away the uppermost layer of lunar soil as it touched down March 2 in Mare Crisium, or the Sea of Crises. This location is in a flat basin situated on the upper right quadrant of the side of the Moon always facing the Earth.

Other images from Firefly’s lander showed the craft shooting tethered electrodes out onto the lunar surface, like a baseball outfielder trying to throw out a runner at home plate. Firefly’s cameras also showed the lander’s drill as it began to probe several meters into the Moon’s crust.

The first Blue Ghost mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program established in 2018 to partner with US companies for cargo transportation to the Moon. Firefly is one of 13 companies eligible to compete for CLPS missions, precursors to future astronaut landings on the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program.

Now, Firefly finds itself at the top of the pack of firms seeking to gain a foothold at the Moon.

Blue Ghost landed just after sunrise at Mare Crisium, an event shown in the blow video captured with four cameras mounted on the lander to observe how its engine plume interacted with loose soil on the lunar surface. The information will be useful as NASA plans to land astronauts on the Moon in the coming years.

“Although the data is still preliminary, the 3,000-plus images we captured appear to contain exactly the type of information we were hoping for in order to better understand plume-surface interaction and learn how to accurately model the phenomenon based on the number, size, thrust and configuration of the engines,” said Rob Maddock, project manager for NASA’s SCALPSS experiment.

One of the vehicle’s payloads, named Lunar PlanetVac, dropped from the bottom of the lander and released a blast of gas to blow fine-grained lunar soil into a collection chamber for sieving. Provided by a company named Honeybee Robotics, this device could be used as a cheaper alternative to other sample collection methods, such as robotic arms, on future planetary science missions.

Just over 4 days on the Moon’s surface and #BlueGhost is checking off several science milestones! 8 out of 10 @NASA payloads, including LPV, EDS, NGLR, RAC, RadPC, LuGRE, LISTER, and SCALPSS, have already met their mission objectives with more to come. Lunar PlanetVac for example… pic.twitter.com/i7pOg70qYi

— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) March 6, 2025

After two weeks of pioneering work, the Blue Ghost lander fell into darkness Sunday when the Sun sank below the horizon, robbing it of solar power and plunging temperatures below minus 200° Fahrenheit (148°Celcius). The spacecraft’s internal electronics likely won’t survive the two-week-long lunar night.

A precoded message from Blue Ghost marked the moment Sunday afternoon, signaling a transition to “monument mode.”

“Goodnight friends,” Blue Ghost radioed Firefly’s mission control center in Central Texas. “After exchanging our final bits of data, I will hold vigil in this spot in Mare Crisium to watch humanity’s continued journey to the stars. Here, I will outlast your mightiest rivers, your tallest mountains, and perhaps even your species as we know it.”

Blue Ghost’s legacy is now secure as the first fully successful commercial lunar lander. Its two-week mission was perhaps just as remarkable for what didn’t happen as it was for what did. The spacecraft encountered no significant problems on its transit to the Moon, its final descent, or during surface operations.

One of the few surprises of the mission was that the lander got hotter a little sooner than engineers predicted. At lunar noon, when the Sun is highest in the sky, temperatures can soar to 250° F (121° C).

“We started noticing that the lander was getting hotter than we expected, and we couldn’t really figure out why, because it was a little early for lunar noon,” Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s spacecraft program director, told Ars. “So we went back and started evaluating and realized that the crater that we landed next to was actually reflecting a really significant amount of heat. So we went back and we updated our thermal models, incorporated that crater into it, and it matched the environment we were seeing.”

Early Friday morning, the Blue Ghost spacecraft captured the first high-definition views of a total solar eclipse from the Moon. At the same time that skywatchers on Earth were looking up to see the Moon turn an eerie blood red, Firefly’s cameras were looking back at us as the Sun, Earth, and Moon moved into alignment and darkness fell at Mare Crisium.

Diamond ring

The eclipse was a bonus for Firefly. It just happened to occur during the spacecraft’s two-week mission at the Moon, the timing of which was dependent on numerous factors, ranging from the readiness of the Blue Ghost lander to weather conditions at its launch site in Florida.

“We weren’t actually planning to have an eclipse until a few months prior to our launch, when we started evaluating and realizing that an eclipse was happening right before lunar sunset,” Allensworth said. “So luckily, that gave us some time to work some procedures and basically set up what we wanted to take images of, what cameras we wanted to run.”

The extra work paid off. Firefly released an image Friday showing a glint of sunlight reaching around the curvature of the Earth, some 250,000 miles (402,000 kilometers) away. This phenomenon is known as the “diamond ring” and is a subject of pursuit for many eclipse chasers, who travel to far-flung locations for a few minutes of totality.

A “diamond ring” appears around the edge of the Earth, a quarter-million miles from Firefly’s science station on the lunar surface. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

The Blue Ghost spacecraft, named for a species of firefly, took eclipse chasing to new heights. Not only did it see the Earth block the Sun from an unexplored location on the Moon, but the lander fell into shadow for 2 hours and 16 minutes, about 18 times longer than the longest possible total solar eclipse on the Earth.

The eclipse presented challenges for Firefly’s engineers monitoring the mission from Texas. Temperatures at the spacecraft’s airless landing site plummeted as darkness took hold, creating what Allensworth called a “pseudo lunar night.”

“We were seeing those temperatures rapidly start dropping,” Allensworth said Friday. “So it was kind of an interesting game of to play with the hardware to keep everything in its temperature bounds but also still powered on and capturing data.”

Shaping up

Using navigation cameras and autonomous guidance algorithms, the spacecraft detected potential hazards at its original landing site and diverted to a safer location more than 230 feet (70 meters) away, according to Allensworth.

Finally happy with the terrain below, Blue Ghost’s computer sent the command for landing, powered by eight thrusters pulsing in rapid succession to control the craft’s descent rate. The landing was gentler than engineers anticipated, coming down at less than 2.2 mph (1 meter per second).

According to preliminary data, Blue Ghost settled in a location just outside of its 330-foot (100-meter) target landing ellipse, probably due to the last-minute divert maneuvers ordered by the vehicle’s hazard avoidance system.

“It looks like we’re slightly out of it, but it’s really OK,” Allensworth said. “NASA has told us, more than anything, that they want us to make sure we land softly… They seem comfortable where we’re at.”

Firefly originally intended to develop a spacecraft based on the design of Israel’s Beresheet lander, which was the first private mission to attempt a landing on the Moon in 2019. The spacecraft crashed, and Firefly opted to go with a new design more responsive to NASA’s requirements.

“Managing the center of gravity and the mass of the lander is most significant, and that informs a lot of how it physically takes shape,” Allensworth said. “So we did want to keep certain things in mind about that, and that really is what led to the lander being wider, shorter, broader. We have these bigger foot pads on there. All of those things were very intentional to help make the lander as stable and predictable as possible.”

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, seen here inside the company’s spacecraft manufacturing facility in Cedar Park, Texas. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

These design choices must happen early in a spacecraft’s development. Landing on the Moon comes with numerous complications, including an often-uneven surface and the lack of an atmosphere, rendering parachutes useless. A lander targeting the Moon must navigate itself to a safe landing site without input from the ground.

The Odysseus, or Nova-C, lander built by Intuitive Machines snapped one of its legs and fell over on its side after arriving on the Moon last year. The altimeter on Odysseus failed, causing it to come down with too much horizontal velocity. The lander returned some scientific data from the Moon and qualified as a partial success. The spacecraft couldn’t recharge its batteries after landing on its side, and Odysseus shut down a few days after landing.

The second mission by Intuitive Machines reached the Moon on March 6, but it suffered the same fate. After tipping over, the Athena lander succumbed to low power within hours, preventing it from accomplishing its science mission for NASA.

The landers designed by Intuitive Machines are tall and skinny, towering more than 14 feet (4.3 meters) tall with a width of about 5.2 feet (1.6 meters). The Blue Ghost vehicle is short and squatty in shape—about 6.6 feet tall and 11.5 feet wide (2-by-3.5 meters). Firefly’s approach requires fewer landing legs than Intuitive Machines—four instead of six.

Steve Altemus, co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Machines, defended the design of his company’s lander in a press briefing after the second lunar landing tip-over earlier this month. The Nova-C lander isn’t too top-heavy for a safe landing because most of its cargo attaches to the bottom of the spacecraft, and for now, Altemus said Intuitive Machines is not considering a redesign.

Intuitive Machines stacked its two fuel and oxidizer tanks on top of each other, resulting in a taller vehicle. The Nova-C vehicle uses super-cold methane and liquid oxygen propellants, enabling a fast journey to the Moon over just a few days. The four propellant tanks on Blue Ghost are arranged in a diagonal configuration, with two containing hydrazine fuel and two holding an oxidizer called nitrogen tetroxide. Firefly’s Blue Ghost took about six weeks to travel from launch until landing.

The design trade-off means Firefly’s lander is heavier, with four tanks instead of two, according to Will Coogan, Blue Ghost’s chief engineer at Firefly. By going with a stockier lander design, Firefly needed to install four tanks because the spacecraft’s fuel and oxidizer have different densities. If Firefly went with just two tanks side-by-side, the spacecraft’s center of mass would change continually as it burns propellant during the final descent to the Moon, creating an unnecessary problem for the lander’s guidance, navigation, and control system to overcome.

“You want to avoid that,” Coogan told Ars before Blue Ghost’s launch. “What you can do is you can either get four tanks and have fuel and oxidizer at diagonal angles, and then you’re always centered, or you can stay with two tanks, and you can stack them.”

A camera on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander captured a view of its shadow after touching down on the Moon just after sunrise on March 2. Earth looms over the horizon. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

The four landing legs on the Blue Ghost vehicle have shock-absorbing feet, with bowl-shaped pads able to bend if the lander comes down on a rock or a slope.

“If we did come in a little bit faster, we needed the legs to be able to take that, so we tested the legs really significantly on the ground,” Allensworth said. “We basically loaded them up on a makeshift weight bench at different angles and slammed it into the ground, slammed it into concrete, slammed it into regular simulant rocks, boulders, at different angles to really characterize what the legs could do.

“It’s actually really funny, because one of the edge cases that we didn’t test is if we came down very lightly, with almost no acceleration,” she said. “And that was the case that the lander landed in. I was joking with our structural engineer that he wasted all his time.”

Proof positive

Firefly delivered 10 NASA-sponsored science and technology demonstration experiments to the lunar surface, operating under contract with NASA’s CLPS program. CLPS builds on the commercial, service-based business model of NASA’s commercial cargo and crew program for transportation to the International Space Station.

NASA officials knew this approach was risky. The last landing on the Moon by a US spacecraft was the last Apollo mission in 1972, and most of the companies involved in CLPS are less than 20 years old, with little experience in deep space missions.

A Pittsburgh company named Astrobotic failed to reach the Moon on its first attempt in January 2024. The next month, Houston-based Intuitive Machines landed its Nova-C spacecraft on the lunar surface, but it tipped over after one of its legs snapped at the moment of touchdown.

Firefly, based in Cedar Park, Texas, was the third company to try a landing. Originally established as a rocket developer, Firefly signed up to be a CLPS provider and won a $101 million contract with NASA in 2021 to transport a government-funded science package to the Moon. NASA’s instruments aboard the Blue Ghost lander cost about $44 million.

The successful landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost earlier this month buoyed NASA’s expectations for CLPS. “Overall, it’s been a fabulous, wonderful proof positive that the CLPS model does work,” said Brad Bailey, assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

NASA has seven more CLPS missions on contract. The next could launch as soon as August when Blue Origin plans to send its first Blue Moon lander to the Moon. NASA has booked two more Blue Ghost missions with Firefly and two more landing attempts with Intuitive Machines, plus one more flight by Astrobotic and one lander from Draper Laboratory.

Here’s the secret to how Firefly was able to nail its first lunar landing Read More »