Listen to the eerie sounds of Mars recorded by a NASA rover
In this alien world 156 million miles away in space, even the everyday whispers of wind and mechanical parts are exotic to human ears. Scientists say that's because the Martian atmosphere is about 1 percent as dense as Earth's, which alters the volume, speed, and characteristics of sound.
How to describe what Perseverance has heard at Jezero crater?
Well, it doesn't not sound like the eerie ambient noise of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, but you can listen for yourself.
Like an aspiring DJ or singer-songwriter, Perseverance has a Soundcloud account, where people can experience the latest Martian tracks. NASA shared this week some of the strange audio the rover has captured. You can find a sampling further down in this story.
SEE ALSO: A NASA Mars rover looked up at a moody sky. What it saw wasn't a star.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech illustration
When the rover touched down on Mars in 2021, it didn't just bring cameras, drills, and tubes for rock samples. It also carried two microphones — nothing special, just a couple of off-the-shelf devices anyone could buy online. The only modification NASA made was to attach little grids at the end of the mics to protect them from Martian dust.
One of the microphones, mounted on the rover's head, is known as the SuperCam and has recorded most of the audio; another is attached to the body. What they've picked up is changing the way scientists think about the Red Planet.
This is the first time humanity has ever been able to listen to the din of another world.
"We've all seen these beautiful images that we get from Mars," said Nina Lanza, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, in a NASA video, "but having sound to be able to add to those images, it makes me feel like I'm almost right there on the surface."
NASA shared Martian audio in the above post on X.
Researchers published the first study of acoustics on Mars in the journal Nature, based on Perseverance's recordings, in 2022. Apparently, the Red Planet is a much quieter place than originally thought, and not just because it's unpopulated.
It's so silent, in fact, there was a time the rover team believed the mics had stopped working. But Perseverance just wasn't getting much material from its surroundings. That's largely due to Mars' low-atmospheric pressure, though the pressure can vary with the seasons.
The team studying these sounds found that Mars' thin air, composed mostly of carbon dioxide, makes sound waves behave differently. On Earth, sound travels at roughly 767 mph. On Mars, deeper pitches move at about 537 mph, with higher ones traveling a bit faster, at 559 mph.
The thin atmosphere also causes sound to drop off quickly. A sound that could be heard from 200 feet away on Earth falls silent after 30 feet on Mars. Higher-pitched tones have an even shorter range.
The microphones mounted to Perseverance are off-the-shelf devices anyone could buy off the internet. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
"Sounds on Earth have very rich harmonics. You can hear multiple frequencies. It gets a really nice depth to the sound," said Justin Maki, a NASA scientist, in a video. "On Mars, the atmosphere attenuates a lot of those higher frequencies. So you tend to hear the lower frequencies, and it's a much more isolated sound, a little more muted than the sounds we hear on Earth."
With this data, scientists have learned that some of their earlier models for how they thought sound should move on Mars missed the mark.
"The Martian atmosphere can propagate sound a lot further than we thought it could," Lanza said.
Translation: The Red Planet can literally carry a tune.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Atlantic
32 minutes ago
- Atlantic
NASA and the End of American Ambition
In the beginning, there was the name. A prophet guided Errol Musk to bestow it on his eldest son, or so he claimed. The seer was Wernher von Braun, a German engineer and an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Though von Braun had built missiles for Hitler and used concentration-camp prisoners for manual labor, the U.S. government recruited him, and eventually brought him to a base in Alabama and tasked him with sending men into orbit, then to the moon. Von Braun had always dreamed of venturing deeper into the galaxy. Back in 1949, before he emerged as the godfather of the American space program, he spilled his fantasies onto the page, in a novel titled Project Mars. He described how a new form of government would take hold on the red planet: a technocracy capable of the biggest and boldest things. At the helm of this Martian state would sit a supreme leader, known as the Elon. Whatever the truth of this origin story, Elon Musk has seized on von Braun's prophecy as his destiny. Since the founding of SpaceX in 2002, his business decisions and political calculations have been made with a transcendent goal in mind: the moment when he carries the human species to a new homeland, a planet millions of miles away, where colonists will be insulated from the ravages of nuclear war, climate change, malevolent AI, and all the unforeseen disasters that will inevitably crush life on Earth. Far away from the old, broken planet, a libertarian utopia will flourish, under the beneficent sway of the Elon. This sense of destiny led Musk on October 5, 2024, to a Trump rally in western Pennsylvania. Wearing a gray T-shirt bearing the slogan OCCUPY MARS, Musk told the crowd that Trump 'must win to preserve democracy in America.' Thanks to their alliance, Musk briefly achieved powers that few unelected Americans have ever possessed. As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, he demolished large swaths of the federal government and began to remake the infrastructure of the state. For a few erratic months, he assumed the role of the terrestrial Elon. Five months into Trump's second term, Musk's inflated sense of his place in history clashed with the ego of his benefactor, the relationship ruptured, and each man threatened to ruin the other. Musk vowed that his spaceships would no longer carry Americans, or the supplies that sustain them, to the International Space Station. Trump threatened SpaceX's federal contracts, reportedly worth $22 billion. Weeks later, they were still bludgeoning each other. In July, Trump mused that he might deport the South African–born Musk, who in turn impishly announced that he would bankroll a new third party. Both men are likely bluffing. Musk still needs the U.S. government to fund his grand designs. And the U.S. government very much needs Elon Musk. Last year, 95 percent of the rockets launched in the United States were launched by SpaceX. NASA was a mere passenger. Musk has crowded low Earth orbit with satellites (nearly 8,000) that are becoming indispensable to the military's capacity to communicate and the government's surveillance of hostile powers. Even if Trump had pushed to dislodge Musk, he couldn't. No rival could readily replace the services his companies provide. That Musk has superseded NASA is a very American parable. A generation ago, NASA was the crown jewel of the U.S. government. It was created in 1958 to demonstrate the superiority of the American way of life, and it succeeded brilliantly. In the course of landing humans on the lunar surface, NASA became the symbol of America's competence and swagger, of how it—alone among the nations of the Earth—inhabited the future. NASA's astronauts were 20th-century cowboys, admired in corners of the world that usually abhorred Americans. The Apollo crews traveled to the heavens on behalf of 'all mankind,' a phrase that appeared both in the act that created NASA and on the plaque left on the moon by Apollo 11. Even NASA's engineers, with their skinny ties and rolled-up sleeves, became the stuff of Hollywood legend. NASA was born at the height of liberalism's faith in government, and its demise tracks the decline of that faith. As the United States lost confidence in its ability to accomplish great things, it turned to Musk as a potential savior, and ultimately surrendered to him. This isn't an instance of crony capitalism, but a tale about well-meaning administrations, of both parties, pursuing grandiose ambitions without the vision, competence, or funding to realize them. If the highest goal of policy is efficiency, then all the money that the government has spent on SpaceX makes sense. Even the company's most vituperative detractors acknowledge its engineering genius and applaud its success in driving down launch expenses (unlike many defense contractors, SpaceX largely eats the cost of its failures). But in the course of bolstering Musk, in privatizing a public good, the government has allowed one billionaire to hold excessive sway. With the flick of a switch, he now has the power to shut down constellations of satellites, to isolate a nation, to hobble the operations of an entire army. Because of Musk's indispensability, his values have come to dominate America's aspirations in space, draining the lyricism from the old NASA mission. Space was once a realm of cooperation, beyond commercial interests and military pursuits. Now it is the site of military brinkmanship and a source of raw materials that nations hope to plunder. The humanistic pursuit of the mysteries of the universe has been replaced by an obsession with rocket power. Musk wants to use his influence to impose the improbable endeavor of Mars colonization on the nation, enriching him as it depletes its own coffers. In the vacuum left by a nation's faded ambitions, Musk's delusions of destiny have taken hold. NASA's golden age emerged from fiasco. John F. Kennedy campaigned for president promising a 'New Frontier,' but he didn't really care about satellites or astronauts. Just before he launched his campaign, he confided to one scientist over drinks in Boston that he considered rockets a waste of money. A few years later, during a conversation recorded in the White House, he flatly admitted, 'I'm not that interested in space.' But by the third month of his presidency, Kennedy was drowning in humiliation. On April 12, 1961, the Soviets hurled the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—or Gaga, as the international press adoringly called him—into orbit for 108 minutes, the first human to journey into the beyond. The New York Times hailed it as evidence of 'Soviet superiority.' The impression of American incompetence deepened five days later, when a CIA-backed army of exiles botched an invasion of Cuba, a misadventure immortalized as the Bay of Pigs. In his desperation to redirect the narrative, Kennedy abruptly became an enthusiast for the most ambitious plan sitting on NASA's shelf. On April 21, shortly after his proxy army surrendered to the Communists, Kennedy suffered a bruising press conference. In response to a question about the relative inferiority of the American space program, he riffed, 'If we can get to the moon before the Russians, then we should.' A month later, Kennedy delivered an address to a joint session of Congress that more formally launched the Apollo program. Even then, he did so harboring private doubts about the price tag, perhaps stoked by the fact that his own father considered his promise to land an astronaut on the lunar surface by 1970 an appalling act of profligacy. Joe Kennedy fumed, 'Damn it, I taught Jack better than that.' When Kennedy voiced his ambitions, he stumbled into tautology: 'We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.' He charged the American government with executing an engineering task more difficult than any other in human history, for no higher reason than to prove that it could be done. That was the animating spirit of 'New Frontier' liberalism. From the vantage of the present—when public faith in government is threadbare—it is staggering to consider the heedless investment Americans allowed Washington to make in a project with little tangible payoff, beyond the pursuit of global prestige in its zero-sum contest with the Soviet Union. At its peak, Apollo employed a workforce of about 400,000. The lunar program cost an astonishing $28 billion, somewhere north of $300 billion in today's dollars. On Kennedy's own terms, Apollo was a world-historic triumph. The legendary NASA chief James Webb and his deputies helped create a whole new philosophy for running immense organizations: systems management. NASA simultaneously micromanaged its engineers—knowing that an unwanted speck of dust could trigger catastrophe—while giving them wide latitude to innovate. Complex flowcharts helped coordinate the work of dozens of teams across academia, corporations, and government laboratories. Despite using untested technologies, NASA achieved a near-perfect safety record, marred only by the 1967 fire that killed three astronauts in their capsule as they prepared for the first crewed Apollo mission. Even then, NASA's relentless culture kept pushing toward its goal. Unlike the Soviets, who attempted to dictate public perceptions by manically managing the images of their exploits, NASA made the risky decision to allow its project to unfurl on live television. The Apollo voyages made for the most gripping viewing in the history of the medium. By one estimate, a fifth of the planet watched Neil Armstrong's moonwalk live, an especially astonishing number given the limited global reach of television in 1969. The space program then was a projection of prowess and self-confidence. 'Space was the platform from which the social revolution of the 1960s was launched,' Lyndon B. Johnson wrote in his memoir. 'If we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and to provide decent medical care for the aged.' Apollo was a model for planned social change and technocratic governance—the prototype for tomorrow. The savviest bureaucrats are hitmakers. Years before Armstrong planted the American flag on the moon, NASA had begun prepping plans for a sequel to Apollo. Only after the enchanted moment of the lunar touchdown did the agency meet with Vice President Spiro Agnew to unveil the next phase of America's future in space. On August 4, 1969, 15 days after Armstrong's giant leap, NASA pitched the Nixon administration on its vision of sending humans to Mars. To nail the presentation, NASA brought von Braun, its most celebrated engineer, to do the talking. After all, they were selling the vision he had sketched in his novel decades earlier. By 1982, NASA said, it hoped to land on Mars in two nuclear-powered planetary vehicles, each carrying six crew members. But in NASA's moment of glory, von Braun and his colleagues couldn't restrain themselves. They added items to their wish list: a lunar base, a space station, and a shuttle that would transport humans. Pandering before the ego that NASA needed most in order to realize its request, von Braun said he wanted to send Richard Nixon into orbit as part of the nation's celebration of its bicentennial, in 1976. Agnew loved it. Nixon did not. He must have despised the thought of shoveling so much money into a program so closely associated with the blessed memory of his old nemesis John Kennedy. Besides, the moment of boundless technocracy was over, doomed by deficits and a sharp swerve in the public mood. During the unending debacle of Vietnam, the public had lost faith in grand ventures dreamed up by whiz kids. Meanwhile, civil-rights leaders railed against the diversion of major expenditures away from social programs. The sociologist Amitai Etzioni popularized a term that captured the rising sourness: moon-doggle. At a moment when Nixon was hoping to retrench, NASA proposed a program with an annual cost that would eventually rise to $10 billion, carried out over more than a decade—an expense far greater than Apollo's. Von Braun and his colleagues had badly misread the room. In the end, Nixon agreed to give NASA an annual budget of just over $3 billion, and he scythed away every component of the plan except for the space station and the space shuttle, which was a reusable system that promised to limit the costs of space travel. But a shuttle traveling where? As Apollo wrapped up its final missions—and even three of those were canceled—NASA no longer had a clear destination. Many of the leaders who carried the agency through the space race, including von Braun, began to depart for the private sector. During Apollo, government engineers had been omnipresent, stationed in the factories of its contractors; they mastered details. That changed in the shuttle era, with its constricted budgets and diminished expectations. Instead of micromanaging contractors, NASA began to defer to them, giving aerospace corporations greater sway over vessel design. In fact, it allowed them to own the underlying intellectual property for the vehicles and their component parts. Because the contractors understood the minutiae and they didn't, NASA officials grew reluctant to push for innovations, paralyzed by the fear that they might be blamed for a contractor's mistake. A bureaucratic mindset took hold, first slowly, and then more dramatically after the Challenger disaster, in 1986. Freeman Dyson, the visionary astrophysicist, drew a devastating distinction between the 'paper NASA,' largely a figment of memory and pop culture, and the 'real NASA,' the sclerotic organization that rose in its place. Those criticisms were both legitimate and somewhat unfair; in the shadow of crewed spaceflight, which garnered attention and prestige, NASA pursued advances in robotics and astrophysics, such as the Galileo mission to Jupiter. But without a human on board, those accomplishments lacked the romance of NASA's golden age. In the summer of 2001, Elon Musk sat in a Manhattan hotel room, fired up his laptop, and browsed He had just returned from a party on Long Island. On the ride home, he'd told a friend, 'I've always wanted to do something in space, but I don't think there's anything that an individual can do.' Musk was plenty rich and plenty bored. After a short stint as the CEO of the company that became PayPal, he was ousted by its board, although he remained its largest shareholder. He had bought a Czechoslovakian military jet, which he'd spent hundreds of hours flying, but that hardly held his attention. He was in search of his next thing. Musk grew up a fan of science fiction, steeped in the extraterrestrial fantasies of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. The reality of space exploration, however, wasn't a subject that he'd studied closely, until he scanned NASA's site and had a revelation. He assumed that he would read about impending missions to Mars. 'I figured it had to be soon, because we went to the moon in 1969, so we must be about to go to Mars,' he told the biographer Walter Isaacson. But no such plan existed, so he decided that it was his mission to push humanity forward. The thought made Musk something of a cliché. Space is a magnet for rich dilettantes and—more than a sports car or yacht—the ultimate expression of wealth and power. Because space travel is ingrained in our culture as the hardest human endeavor, demanding immense resources, it commands cultural respect. For Musk—who had been bullied by both his schoolmates and his father—space offered the possibility of seizing the world by the lapels and announcing his greatness. A classic revenge fantasy. Musk wasn't wrong about the diminished state of NASA. Remarking on the grim persistence of the space-shuttle program, Neil deGrasse Tyson said that NASA's flagship vessel 'boldly went where man had gone hundreds of times before'—135 times, to be precise. These missions were essential to the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, but never ventured beyond the familiar confines of low Earth orbit. Even as Russia was losing the Cold War, it was winning the final chapters of the space race, fielding a program that was better conceived and more active. Indeed, when Musk first pondered launching rockets, he went to Russia in hope of buying used ones; this entailed sitting through vodka-drenched meals with apparatchiks hoping to bilk him. In the end, he concluded that it was cheaper to make his own. In 2002, he founded SpaceX. Musk was a salesman, determined to make Washington turn its head—and sink cash into his start-up, housed in a suburban– Los Angeles warehouse, which was just beginning to cobble together its first rockets. In 2003, he trucked a seven-story rocket to D.C. and parked it outside the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. Soon enough, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency gave him several million dollars to help grow SpaceX. In 2006, NASA awarded him $278 million for the first installment of a new program called Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. He received these grants even though SpaceX hadn't successfully launched a rocket. (Musk and the company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.) For years, NASA had leaned on the same old set of big contractors: Northrop Grumman, Rockwell, Boeing. These were stodgy firms, anchors in the military-industrial complex, codependent on the government, with their own bureaucracies. Their projects tended to swell in cost and underperform. NASA officials knew these organization's failings and were desperate to reverse them. The shuttle program was scheduled for imminent retirement, but what would replace it? There was still a space station floating in low Earth orbit, with astronauts awaiting resupply. At the dawn of the 21st century, disruption was the magic word, incanted by investors and fetishized in the media. It was only a matter of time before the government began chasing the same trendy idea, betting that a new group of entrepreneurs would arrive on the scene to create companies that would shatter all the old models. In 2010, Barack Obama canceled Constellation, George W. Bush's program for returning to the moon. NASA was getting out of the business of owning spaceships and rockets—instead, it would rent ones owned by private firms. When Obama visited the Kennedy Space Center to announce this change in direction, he viewed one of Musk's Falcon 9 rockets, which was sitting on a launchpad. Photographers captured the young president and the budding billionaire strolling together, a passing of the torch to Musk. Although he isn't usually generous with sharing credit for his successes, even Musk admits that the Obama administration rescued SpaceX. Burning through cash and crashing test rockets, his company was nearing collapse. But the change in policy opened a reservoir of funds for him. At SpaceX's bleakest moment, which Musk also describes as 'the worst year of my life,' NASA awarded it a $1.6 billion contract to carry cargo to the International Space Station. In his state of relief and jubilation, Musk changed his computer password to 'ilovenasa.' Of all the emerging firms in the age of commercial spaceflight, SpaceX was the most deserving of success. Musk had an eye for engineering talent, and he preached an audacious vision, which attracted young idealists. Impatient, he questioned truisms and cut costs with unrelenting intensity, even if it meant buying a tool on eBay to align a rocket. Despite its strengths, SpaceX couldn't triumph in this new age, because the idea of commercialization was inherently flawed. There wasn't a market for rocket launches, asteroid mining, or spacesuit design. For his very expensive product, there was one customer, with a limited budget: the U.S. government. That realization ultimately prodded Musk into another line of business. In 2015, he created Starlink. His rockets would launch satellites into orbit to supply Earth with internet service, a far more lucrative business. Starlink turned SpaceX into a behemoth. Because SpaceX was constantly launching rockets—and not just for NASA—it kept gaining invaluable new data and insights, which allowed it to produce cheaper, better rockets. Because nothing is more exciting to an engineer than actually launching things, the company drained talent from its competition. Musk's goal wasn't to achieve the banal status of monopolist. 'The lens of getting to Mars has motivated every SpaceX decision,' Musk told Isaacson. When he created Starlink, he did so because it would supply him with the capital to build rockets powerful enough to carry humanity to Mars. Musk, who describes himself as a 'cultural Christian,' is not an especially religious person. But his imagination is fixed on the end of days—the possibility of an 'extinction event'—because his childhood experiences push his adult anxieties in the direction of the catastrophic. In South Africa, he came of age amid the decaying of the apartheid state, which had once promised to safeguard his racial caste. His family, like his society, was fracturing. When he was 8, his parents divorced. He now recalls his father as a monstrous figure. 'Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,' Musk once told Rolling Stone. (Errol Musk told Rolling Stone that 'he has never intentionally threatened or hurt anyone,' and later said that his son's comments were about their political differences at the time.) Given this turbulence—and the paucity of reliable authority in his early life—it's hardly surprising that Musk would fear the worst. He found refuge from the world's harsh realities in the pages of sci-fi novels. But visions of apocalypse are the genre's elemental motif, and the fiction he devoured often magnified his dread. Musk sought out works that offered both cause for despair and a vision of transcendence. Those Asimov novels featured hyperrational heroes, many of them engineers, who saved humanity by building space colonies where civilization could begin anew. Musk borrowed his self-conception from these protagonists. From an early age, the colonization of Mars became Musk's idée fixe. At various points, he has described his companies as contributing to that overarching mission. Tesla's Cybertrucks are vehicles that could be adapted to traverse the Martian terrain; its solar panels, a potential energy source for a future colony. He has even reportedly claimed that his social-media platform, X, could serve as an experiment in decentralized governance—testing how a Martian outpost might use consensus as the basis for lawmaking, because he envisions a minimalist government on the red planet. At SpaceX, Musk's employees have begun sketching the contours of life on Mars. One team is designing housing and communal spaces; Musk has already named the first Martian city Terminus, after a planetary colony in Asimov's novels. Other teams are developing spacesuits tailored to the planet's harsh environment and exploring the feasibility of human reproduction there. (When The New York Times reported on these teams, Musk denied their existence.) No engineering challenge in human history rivals the audacity of making Mars a place humans can call home. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president and chief operating officer, calls it a 'fixer-upper' planet, a hilarious understatement. Mars's atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide and laced with nitrogen, among other elements and a smattering of toxins. Temperatures can plunge to –225 degrees Fahrenheit. My colleague Ross Andersen once memorably described what would happen to a human body on Mars: 'If you were to stroll onto its surface without a spacesuit, your eyes and skin would peel away like sheets of burning paper, and your blood would turn to steam, killing you within 30 seconds.' Even with a suit, protection would be tenuous: Cosmic radiation would seep through, and Martian dust storms—filled with abrasive, electrically charged particles—could bypass seams and seals. These impossible conditions are compounded by Mars's distance from Earth. Launches are feasible only about once every 26 months, when the planets' orbits align to minimize travel time and fuel requirements. Even then, it takes roughly eight months for a spacecraft to reach Mars, making it exceedingly difficult to resupply a colony or rescue its inhabitants. When challenged about these mortal dangers, Musk is disarmingly relaxed, and has said that he himself would make the journey. 'People will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States,' he told Isaacson. 'But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world.' To warm the planet, he proposes detonating nuclear bombs over Mars's poles, which he claims could induce a greenhouse effect—an idea he relishes, perhaps as a troll. SpaceX once sold T-shirts bearing the slogan Nuke Mars. According to a top scientist at the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, it would take more than 10,000 nuclear-tipped missiles to carry out Musk's plan. Even Wernher von Braun's fictional doppelgänger, Dr. Strangelove, might have winced at such breezy talk of thermonuclear explosions. President Kennedy was also willing to take absurd risks in pursuit of cosmic ambition, invoking the Cold War imperative to 'bear any burden.' But he did so to demonstrate national greatness. Musk is seeking to spend trillions—and risk human lives—to demonstrate his own. Because his reality emerges from fiction, Musk is untethered from any sense of earthly constraints. His sense of his own role in the plot emerges from his desire to leap into myth. Musk's fixation on Mars also functions as a kind of ancestor worship, echoing a family mythology of flight from decline. In 1950, his grandfather Joshua Haldeman left Canada for South Africa in search of a freer society—one he believed could withstand the collapse of Western civilization. Haldeman's doomsday rhetoric railed against Jewish bankers and 'hordes of Coloured people,' whom he claimed were being manipulated to destroy 'White Christian Civilization.' In the rise of apartheid, he saw not repression but redemption, a last stand for the values he held sacred. Read: Elon Musk's anti-Semitic, apartheid-loving grandfather Like his grandfather, Musk is obsessed with staving off civilizational collapse. He does not voice his fears in openly racist terms—instead framing them in the language of freedom and survival—but he is fixated on the notion of a gene pool with diminishing intelligence. 'If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that's probably bad,' he told the biographer Ashlee Vance. His rhetoric is provocative, but slippery enough to avoid outright extremism. Over years of statements, social-media posts, and interviews, however, a pattern has emerged: Musk sees Mars not merely as a lifeboat but as a laboratory—an opportunity to reengineer humanity. On a new planet, far from Earth's chaos and constraint, he imagines a society remade in his own image. This belief is rooted in a kind of technological social Darwinism, the idea that evolution can be steered, or even upgraded, by engineering. It's how he describes an animating premise of Neuralink, the company he co-founded that is developing brain-computer interfaces that aim to merge human cognition with machines and effectively create a species of cyborgs. The same spirit infuses Musk's obsession with procreation, and he's doing his part. He now has at least 14 children, by The Wall Street Journal 's count, with four biological mothers. In his worldview, apocalypse and salvation converge: Either we become a race of engineered brilliance, or we vanish, and Mars is the greatest opportunity for remaking humanity. In a sense, it follows a classic pattern of migration. The bold depart in search of opportunity, while those who remain face extinction. Survival becomes a test of worth. Those who stay behind will, by their inaction, mark themselves as unfit for the future. Once settlers arrive on Mars, Musk has suggested that life forms—possibly including humans—might be bioengineered to survive the planet's harsh environment. In one interview, he noted that humanity has long shaped organisms 'by sort of selective breeding.' Humans, he intimated, could be bred like cows. He's reportedly prepared to supply his own genetic material to the effort. Sources told the Times that Musk has offered to donate his sperm to help seed a Martian colony (which Musk later denied). Using a concept borrowed from Asimov's fiction, Musk says that Martian colonists will serve as 'the light of consciousness.' They are humanity's last hope, the counterweight to a dark age that could follow Earth's destruction. But what's dark is his vision of abandoning Earth and investing the species' faith in a self-selected elite, one that mirrors Musk's own values, and perhaps even his traits. The idea is megalomaniacal, and is the antithesis of the old NASA ideal: for all mankind. In the earliest hours of a spring morning, I drove across a Florida causeway, through a nature reserve filled with alligators and wild boars, to hallowed ground: Launch Complex 39A, once a stage for NASA's majesty. More than half a century ago, Apollo 11 began its ascent to the moon here. During the space race, it was perhaps the most exciting place on the planet, poised between glory and disaster: 11 Apollo missions lifted off from here, followed by 82 space-shuttle launches. NASA framed 39A for the television era: an enormous American flag fluttering at one end of the horizon, a giant digital countdown clock at the other. Even now, a weathered CBS News sign hangs on a small cinder-block building with a perfect view of the site—the same spot where Walter Cronkite once narrated liftoffs in his authoritative baritone. By 2013, the launchpad had become an expensive, unused relic, but because of its presence on the National Register of Historic Places, it couldn't be torn down. Musk coveted the site, as did his longtime competitor, Jeff Bezos. But at the time, Bezos didn't have a rocket capable of flying from 39A. SpaceX won the rights to lease the launchpad for the next 20 years. The old theater of American dreams now belonged to Musk. I arrived at 39A to watch the launch of Falcon 9—SpaceX's workhorse rocket, the height of a 20-story building—which would help deliver cargo to the International Space Station, circling in low Earth orbit. There's no alternative to the Falcon 9, and there's no rival to SpaceX. For the time being, the company is the only domestic entity, public or private, with the capacity to deliver crew and cargo to the space station. Lyndon Johnson once said that 'control of space means control of the world.' In his day, space was a way to project national strength to a global audience through displays of technical superiority. Today, it has become a domain of warfare, alongside land, sea, and air. Modern combat operations rely on space-based systems that guide munitions, coordinate communications, and spy on adversaries. Without dominance in orbit, terrestrial forces would be deaf, blind, and largely immobile. In 2019, then, the Pentagon created the Space Force as the sixth branch of the military. If space is power, then Musk's role is badly understated. It's no longer accurate to call him merely the world's richest earthling. The United States is now dependent on him in its quest to command space. Through its Starshield division, SpaceX provides space-based communication for the U.S. armed forces; its satellites can reportedly track hypersonic and ballistic missiles and extend the government's surveillance reach to nearly every corner of the globe. In April, the Space Force awarded SpaceX a majority of its contracts for a batch of national-security missions over the coming years. Some of this work involves agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office, placing it within the penumbra of classification. The true extent of the government's reliance on SpaceX is largely obscured, rarely scrutinized, and only loosely regulated. Yet the dependency is undeniable. If Musk were to withhold support—out of principle, pique, or profit motive—the government could find itself stranded. None of SpaceX's competitors yet possesses the capability to replace it. (A Space Force spokesperson said that it relies on 'a number of industry partners,' including SpaceX, and continues to seek 'to broaden the diversity of potential vendors,' adding that the Department of Defense 'exercises rigorous oversight' of its contracts. The spokesperson also denied claims that SpaceX's satellites track missiles.) The war in Ukraine has offered a chilling glimpse of the risks posed by Musk's role as interstellar gatekeeper. In the early days of the invasion, SpaceX rushed to supply Ukraine with Starlink terminals, helping to replace communications systems debilitated by Russian cyberattacks and advancing troops. It was a noble gesture and a strategic boon. Ukrainian forces, empowered by the new technology, coordinated scrappy, asymmetrical tactics that blunted Russian advances. But Musk's commitment soon wavered. In September 2022, SpaceX denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink coverage to Crimea, effectively blocking a planned strike on Russian naval forces in Sevastopol. (Starting that fall, Musk began speaking with Vladimir Putin at length, according to the Journal, troubling the U.S. intelligence community.) In the months that followed, the company imposed new geographic limits on Starlink's use, restricting its application in areas where Ukraine might otherwise target Russia's vulnerabilities. Musk framed the move as an act of prudent restraint that would help avert World War III. But it also exposed an unsettling reality: Ukraine's battlefield operations were subject to the discretion of a single person. 'My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army,' he posted on X. 'Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.' Musk's preeminence marks a profound shift in the history of American political economy. During the Cold War, the military-industrial complex was driven by corporations that operated as handmaidens to the state. They had outsize influence, but remained largely bureaucratic, gray-flannel institutions—cogs in a sprawling, profitable machine. Musk is different. Years of hagiographic media coverage and his immense social-media reach birthed legions of fanboys and nurtured a cult of personality. His achievements command awe. In the damp Florida night, I stood on a sandbank and trained my eyes on Launch Complex 39A as the countdown clock ticked toward zero. And then, without the benefit of Cronkite's narration, I watched the Falcon 9 violently part the darkness, with a payload bound for the space station. A few minutes later, a light appeared in the sky: The reusable rocket was returning home. Majestic and imperious, it cast a warm glow over the palm trees. For a moment this spring, Musk's grand ambitions seemed like they might buckle. In Washington, it had long been assumed that Musk and Trump would turn on each other. When it finally happened, the spark, fittingly, was NASA. Musk had pushed to install his friend Jared Isaacman as head of the agency—a move that stank of cronyism. In 2021, Isaacman, a tech entrepreneur, had paid SpaceX millions to chase a childhood dream of flying to space. That deal soon led to a friendship, and eventually, his company owning a stake in SpaceX itself. Read: MAGA goes to Mars When Trump soured on Musk, he struck where it hurt most. Annoyed after learning of Isaacman's past donations to Democratic campaigns, the president withdrew the nomination on May 31. Musk received the move as one in a string of betrayals and erupted online, warning that the Jeffrey Epstein files would implicate Trump and that the president's spending bill was a 'disgusting abomination.' The clash soon shifted to space. Musk threatened to decommission the spacecraft resupplying the International Space Station; Trump blustered that he would order a review of SpaceX's government contracts. Yet for all the rancor, there is no sign that SpaceX has actually suffered. Trump and Musk have dismembered the federal bureaucracy, but its old tendencies are still prevailing; the apparatus clings to the vendors that have delivered results. Even as Trump raged, Washington's dependence on Musk was growing. In June, a Space Force commander said that SpaceX will play a crucial part in the MILNET program, a new constellation of 480-plus satellites. Reportedly, the Pentagon will pay for it; the intelligence community will oversee it; Musk will run it. In its proposed 2026 budget, the Trump administration moved to bankroll Musk's deeper ambitions, albeit with a fraction of the gargantuan sum required. Trump has proposed spending $1 billion to accelerate a mission to Mars and fund the design of spacesuits, landing systems, and other technologies that would make a voyage feasible. The money spent on human space exploration will be pried from NASA's other programs, even as the agency's total budget is set to shrink by nearly 25 percent and its workforce by one-third. To fulfill Musk's cosmic destiny, the administration is gutting NASA's broader scientific mission—the thing that NASA does best. (When asked about this shift, a NASA spokesperson described 'leading the way in human exploration of our solar system' as the agency's 'core mission,' and added that it is 'contributing to a competitive market that will increase commercial innovation.') Human spaceflight has floundered for decades, haunted by its inability to replicate its greatest achievements and whipsawed by changing presidential priorities. And the importance of astronauts to the enterprise of exploration, which was always questionable, has further diminished as the quality of robots has improved. At the same time, and without attracting the same kind of fanfare, NASA continues to display extraordinary acumen in science; its research initiatives are arguably the most profound ventures in all of government. They address the greatest mysteries in the universe: How did life begin? Are we alone in the cosmos? The government—so often viewed as a soul-sapping bureaucracy—has helped supply answers to these most spiritual of questions. In the late 1980s and early '90s, the Cosmic Background Explorer provided empirical support for the Big Bang theory. In 2020, after the OSIRIS-REx probe reached the asteroid Bennu, it collected a sample from a type of primordial projectile thought to have delivered life's building blocks to early Earth. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA helped determine the age of the universe, affirmed the existence of dark energy, and extended humanity's gaze into distant galaxies and black holes. By capturing light from galaxies as they existed more than 13 billion years ago, one of NASA's telescopes has effectively peered into the universe's distant past. For all of Musk's mockery of NASA's supposed lack of ambition, the agency had already mounted a daring campaign to explore Mars—albeit with robots, not settlers. Over the decades, it sent a fleet of rovers (Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Perseverance) to wander the plains of the red planet, drilling into rock and searching for ancient traces of water and life. NASA's lenses point inward as well as outward. Its satellites have documented the melting of the polar ice caps and the destruction of forests, alerting humanity to the planet's precarity. Unlike the technological spin-offs NASA often touts to Congress to justify its existence, these discoveries aren't fleeting breakthroughs in applied engineering. They are the path to humanity's self-knowledge—discoveries that private firms will never pursue, because their value can't be monetized. Put differently, Trump's budget is a cultural document. It reflects a shift in public values. Not so long ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan shaped how Americans thought about space. He did so through elegant books and his television series, Cosmos, which reached an estimated 500 million viewers worldwide. At its core, his project was to extol the virtues of the scientific method, which requires and promotes skepticism and humility—a way of thinking that could help society resist the lure of authoritarianism. He exuded wonder, a value he hoped to cultivate in Americans, and harkened back to the humanism of the Enlightenment, which was unfussy about the boundaries between philosophy and science. Every time I see Musk, I think of Sagan—because Musk is his opposite. He is a creature not of science but of engineering. He owes his fortune to the brute force of his rockets, and the awe they inspire. There's nothing humble about his manner. Rather than celebrate the fragile, improvised nature of human existence, Musk seeks to optimize or overwrite it—in the name of evolution, in pursuit of profit, in the vainglorious fulfillment of his adolescent fantasies. Where Sagan envisioned cooperation, Musk embodies the triumph of the individual. Where Sagan cautioned against the unintended consequences of technology, Musk charges headlong into the next disruption. That rush will eventually sweep away many of the old strictures confining him. For more than 50 years, the U.S. government has mulled missions to Mars and never mustered the political will to fund one. Elon Musk is doing just that. SpaceX is planning to launch its first uncrewed mission to Mars—neither funded nor formally sanctioned by NASA—in late 2026, timed for planetary alignment. Musk himself pegs the odds of hitting that 2026 window at 50–50. His history of theatrics and unmet deadlines suggests that those odds may be overstated. But this is more than bluster. He is building the most powerful rocket in human history, testing it at a relentless pace, and forcing it toward viability through sheer will. However speculative his timelines, they point to a plausible destination: the day when Musk escapes the gravitational pull of the U.S. government. The story of Elon Musk can be told using the genre of fiction that he reveres most. In an act of hubris, NASA gave life to a creature called SpaceX, believing it could help achieve humanity's loftiest ambitions. But, as in all great parables about technology, the creation eclipsed the creator. What was meant to be a partner became a force of domination. The master lost control. And so begins a new part of the tale: a dystopian chapter written in the language of liberation.
Digital Trends
5 hours ago
- Digital Trends
Remember Ingenuity? NASA's proposed Skyfall mission takes it further in stunning video
NASA's incredible Ingenuity helicopter spent nearly three flying across the surface of Mars, becoming the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on a planet other than Earth. After suffering damage to one of its blades in early 2024, Ingenuity was grounded for good, and now rests on the martian surface as a testament to technological innovation and the triumph of autonomous flight on another planet. In an exciting development, the plucky helicopter has now inspired Skyfall, a mission concept recently unveiled by Virginia-based AeroVironment (AV) and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who worked together to develop the Ingenuity aircraft. As you can see in the video at the top of this page, the Skyfall mission is designed to deploy not one but six helicopters on Mars, each of which would fly off to explore various locations selected by NASA as potential landing spots for the first crewed mission to the red planet, which could take place in the 2030s. The gathered data could also help scientists learn more about Mars, contributing to the expanding database of information collected by other Mars vehicles such as the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers. The video shows the dramatic Skyfall Maneuver, described by AV as 'an innovative entry, descent, and landing technique whereby the six rotorcraft deploy from their entry capsule during its descent through the martian atmosphere.' With the helicopters flying down to the Mars surface under their own power, the Skyfall system would do away with the need for a landing platform, which is one of the most expensive parts of any Mars mission and also carries huge risk. Just like Ingenuity, each helicopter would be capable of operating autonomously, and beam high-resolution imagery back to Earth for analysis, allowing mission planners to select the best possible landing location for the first human mission. 'Skyfall offers a revolutionary new approach to Mars exploration that is faster and more affordable than anything that's come before it,' said William Pomerantz, head of space ventures at AV. 'Thanks to a true partnership between industry and government, we're expanding the unprecedented success of Ingenuity.' Pomerantz added that with six helicopters, 'Skyfall offers a low-cost solution that multiplies the range we would cover, the data we would collect, and the scientific research we would conduct, making humanity's first footprints on Mars meaningfully closer.' With NASA's first human missions in mind and the need to identify an ideal landing area, AV is already working with NASA's JPL in the hope of getting the green light for the mission before working toward a potential 2028 launch.
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Yahoo
The asteroid that will spare Earth might hit the moon instead. What happens if it does?
The asteroid known as 2024 YR4 is out of sight yet still very much on scientists' minds. The building-sized object, which initially appeared to be on a potential collision course with Earth, is currently zooming beyond the reach of telescopes on its orbit around the sun. But as scientists wait for it to reappear, its revised trajectory is now drawing attention to another possible target: the moon. Discovered at the end of 2024, the space rock looked at first as if it might hit our planet by December 22, 2032. The chance of that impact changed with every new observation, peaking at 3.1% in February — odds that made it the riskiest asteroid ever observed. Ground- and space-based telescope observations were crucial in helping astronomers narrow in on 2024 YR4's size and orbit. With more precise measurements, researchers were ultimately able to rule out an Earth impact. The latest observations of the asteroid in early June, before YR4 disappeared from view, have improved astronomers' knowledge of where it will be in seven years by almost 20%, according to NASA. That data shows that even with Earth avoiding direct impact, YR4 could still pose a threat in late 2032 by slamming into the moon. The impact would be a once-in-a-lifetime event for humanity to witness — but it could also send fine-grained lunar material hurtling toward our planet. While Earth wouldn't face any significant physical danger should the asteroid strike the moon, there is a chance that any astronauts or infrastructure on the lunar surface at that time could be at risk — as could satellites orbiting our planet that we depend on to keep vital aspects of life, including navigation and communications, running smoothly. Any missions in low-Earth orbit could also be in the pathway of the debris, though the International Space Station is scheduled to be deorbited before any potential impact. Initially, YR4 was seen as a case study in why scientists do the crucial work of planetary defense, discovering and tracking asteroids to determine which ones have a chance of colliding with Earth. Now, astronomers say this one asteroid could redefine the range of risks the field addresses, expanding the purview of the work to include monitoring asteroids that might be headed for the moon as well. 'We're starting to realize that maybe we need to extend that shield a little bit further,' said Dr. Paul Wiegert, a professor of astronomy and physics at the Western University in London, Ontario. 'We now have things worth protecting that are a bit further away from Earth, so our vision is hopefully expanding a little bit to encompass that.' In the meantime, researchers are assessing just how much chaos a potential YR4 lunar impact could create — and whether anything can be done to mitigate it. 'City killer' on the moon The threatening hunk of rock appears as just a speck of light through even the strongest astronomical tools. In reality, YR4 is likely about 60 meters (about 200 feet) in diameter, according to observations in March by the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful space-based observatory in operation. 'Size equals energy,' said Julien de Wit, associate professor of planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who observed YR4 with Webb. 'Knowing YR4's size helped us understand how big of an explosion it could be.' Astronomers believe they have found most of the near-Earth asteroids the field would classify as 'planet killers' — space rocks that are 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) across or larger and could be civilization-ending, said Dr. Andy Rivkin, planetary astronomer from the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. The planet killer that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of dinosaurs was estimated to be roughly 6 miles (about 10 kilometers) in diameter. Smaller asteroids such as YR4, which was colloquially dubbed a 'city killer' after its discovery, could cause regional devastation if they collide with our planet. About 40% of near-Earth space rocks larger than 140 meters (460 feet) but smaller than a kilometer — capable of more widespread destruction — have been identified, according to NASA. But astronomers have never really had a chance to watch a collision of that size occur on the moon in real time, Wiegert said. The latest glimpses of YR4 on June 3 before it passed out of view revealed a 4.3% chance of a YR4 lunar impact — small but decent enough odds for scientists to consider how such a scenario might play out. A striking meteor shower — and a risk Initial calculations suggest the impact has the largest chance of occurring on the near side of the moon — the side we can see from Earth. 'YR4 is so faint and small we were able to measure its position with JWST longer than we were able to do it from the ground,' said Rivkin, who has been leading the Webb study of YR4. 'And that lets us calculate a much more precise orbit for it, so we now have a much better idea of where it will be and won't be.' The collision could create a bright flash that would be visible with the naked eye for several seconds, according to Wiegert, lead author of a recent paper submitted to the American Astronomical Society journals analyzing the potential lunar impact. The collision could create an impact crater on the moon estimated at 1 kilometer wide (0.6 miles wide), Wiegert said — about the size of Meteor Crater in Arizona, Rivkin added. It would be the largest impact on the moon in 5,000 years and could release up to 100 million kilograms (220 million pounds) of lunar rocks and dust, according to the modeling in Wiegert's study. Even pieces of debris that are just tens of centimeters in size could present a hazard for any astronauts who may be present on the moon, or any structures they have built for research and habitation, Wiegert said. The moon has no atmosphere, so the debris from the event could be widespread on the lunar surface, he added. On average, the moon is 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away from Earth, according to NASA. Particles the size of large sand grains, ranging from 0.1 to 10 millimeters in size, of lunar material could reach Earth between a few days and a few months after the asteroid strike because they'll be traveling incredibly fast, creating an intense, eye-catching meteor shower, Wiegert said. 'There's absolutely no danger to anyone on the surface,' Wiegert said. 'We're not expecting large boulders or anything larger than maybe a sugar cube, and our atmosphere will protect us very nicely from that. But they're traveling faster than a speeding bullet, so if they were to hit a satellite, that could cause some damage.' Not all lunar debris that reaches the Earth is so small, and it depends on the angle and type of impact to the moon, according to Washington University in St. Louis. Space rocks slamming into the lunar surface over millions of years have resulted in various sizes of lunar meteorites found on Earth. Preparing for impact Hundreds to thousands of impacts from millimeter-size debris could affect Earth's satellite fleet, meaning satellites could experience up to 10 years' equivalent of meteor debris exposure in a few days, Wiegert said. Humankind depends on vital space infrastructure, said Dan Oltrogge, chief scientist at COMSPOC, a space situational awareness software company that develops solutions for handling hazards such as space debris. 'Space touches almost every aspect of our lives today, ranging from commerce, communications, travel, industry, education, and social media, so a loss of access to and effective use of space presents a serious risk to humanity,' Oltrogge said. The event is unlikely to trigger a Kessler Syndrome scenario in which debris from broken satellites would collide with others to create a domino effect or fall to Earth. Instead, it might be more akin to when a piece of gravel strikes a car windshield at high speed, meaning solar panels or other delicate satellite parts might be damaged, but the satellite will remain in one piece, Wiegert said. While a temporary loss of communication and navigation from satellites would create widespread difficulties on Earth, Wiegert said he believes the potential impact is something for satellite operators, rather than the public, to worry about. Protecting Earth and the moon Scientists and astronomers around the world are thinking about the possible scenarios since they could not rule out a lunar impact before YR4 disappeared from view, Wiegert said. 'We realize that an impact to the moon could be consequential, so what would we do?' de Wit said. A potential planetary defense plan might be clearer if the asteroid were headed straight for Earth. Rivkin helped test one approach in September 2022 as the principal investigator of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, which intentionally slammed a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022. Dimorphos is a moonlet asteroid that orbits a larger parent asteroid known as Didymos. Neither poses a threat to Earth, but the double-asteroid system was a perfect target to test deflection technology because Dimorphos' size is comparable to asteroids that could harm our planet in the event of an impact. The DART mission crashed a spacecraft into the asteroid at 13,645 miles per hour (6 kilometers per second) to find out whether such a kinetic impact would be enough to change the motion of a celestial object in space. It worked. Since the day of the collision, data from ground-based telescopes has revealed that the DART spacecraft did alter Dimorphos' orbital period — or how long it takes to make a single revolution around Didymos — by about 32 or 33 minutes. And scientists have continued to observe additional changes to the pair, including how the direct hit likely deformed Dimorphos due to the asteroid's composition. Similarly, if YR4 strikes the moon and doesn't result in damaging effects for satellites, it could create a tremendous opportunity for researchers to learn how the lunar surface responds to impacts, Wiegert said. But whether it would make sense to send a DART-like mission to knock YR4 off a collision course with the moon remains to be seen. It will depend on future risk assessments by planetary defense groups when the asteroid comes back into view around 2028, de Wit said. Though defense plans for a potential moon impact still aren't clear, YR4's journey underscores the importance — and the challenges — of tracking objects that are often impossible to see. Hidden threats YR4 was detected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS telescope, in Río Hurtado, Chile, two days after the asteroid had already made its closest pass by Earth, hidden by the bright glare of the sun as it approached our planet. The same thing occurred when an asteroid measuring roughly 20 meters (about 65 feet) across hit the atmosphere and exploded above Chelyabinsk, Russia, on February 15, 2013, damaging thousands of buildings, according to the European Space Agency. While no one died, about 1,500 people were injured when the windows in homes and businesses blew out due to the shock wave. Trying to observe asteroids is challenging for many reasons, Rivkin said. Asteroids are incredibly faint and hard to see because rather than emitting their own light, they only reflect sunlight. And because of their relatively tiny size, interpreting observations is not a clear-cut process like looking through a telescope at a planet such as Mars or Jupiter. 'For asteroids, we only see them as a point of light, and so by measuring how bright they are and measuring their temperature, basically we can get a size based on how big do they have to be in order to be this bright,' Rivkin said. For decades, astronomers have had to search for faint asteroids by night, which means missing any that may be on a path coming from the direction of the sun — creating the world's biggest blind spot for ground-based telescopes that can't block out our star's luminosity. But upcoming telescopes — including NASA's NEO Surveyor expected to launch by the end of 2027 and the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Object Mission in the InfraRed, or NEOMIR satellite, set for liftoff in the early 2030s — could shrink that blind spot, helping researchers detect asteroids much closer to the sun. 'NEOMIR would have detected asteroid 2024 YR4 about a month earlier than ground-based telescopes did,' said Richard Moissl, head of ESA's Planetary Defence Office, in a statement. 'This would have given astronomers more time to study the asteroid's trajectory and allowed them to much sooner rule out any chance of Earth impact in 2032.' NASA and other space agencies are constantly on the lookout for potentially hazardous asteroids, defined as such based on their distance from Earth and ability to cause significant damage should an impact occur. Asteroids that can't get any closer to our planet than one-twentieth of Earth's distance from the sun are not considered to be potentially hazardous asteroids, according to NASA. When the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, located in the Andes in Chile, released its first stunning images of the cosmos in June, researchers revealed the discovery of more than 2,100 previously unknown asteroids after seven nights of those newly detected space rocks, seven were near-Earth objects. A near-Earth object is an asteroid or comet on an orbit that brings it within 120 million miles (about 190 million kilometers) of the sun, which means it has the potential to pass near Earth, according to NASA. None of the new ones detected by Rubin were determined to pose a threat to our planet. Rubin will act as a great asteroid hunter, de Wit said, while telescopes such as Webb could be a tracker that follow up on Rubin's discoveries. A proposal by Rivkin and de Wit to use Webb to observe YR4 in the spring of 2026 has just been approved. Webb is the only telescope with a chance of glimpsing the asteroid before 2028. 'This newly approved program will buy decision makers two extra years to prepare — though most likely to relax, as there is an 80% chance of ruling out impact — while providing key experience-based lessons for handling future potential impactors to be discovered by Vera Rubin,' de Wit said. And because of the twists and turns of YR4's tale thus far, asteroids that have potential to affect the moon could become objects of even more intense study in the future. 'If this really is a thing that we only have to worry about every 5,000 years or something, then maybe that's less pressing,' Rivkin said. 'But even just asking what would we do if we did see something that was going to hit the moon is at least something that we can now start thinking about.' Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
