Science

Two years after a NASA spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphos, another mission to map the space rock is about to launch. The data it collects will refine Earth’s planetary defences against asteroid threats, say researchers.

In 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft collided with the asteroid Dimorphos at 6.6 kilometres per second as it orbited its parent asteroid Didymos.

The mission was an attempt to show that bodies on a collision course with our planet could be redirected, and subsequent observations from Earth showed that it had successfully changed Dimorphos’s orbit.

Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing to launch its Hera probe to get a closer look at exactly how it was affected. Hera is around the size of a small car, weighing 1081 kilograms when fully fuelled. It will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on 7 October aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and do a flyby of Mars in March next year on the way to the asteroid – but it won’t reach its final destination until October 2026.

The initial concept behind the project was for Hera to be present when DART collided with Dimorphos, but delays in funding made that impossible. Despite this, the asteroid’s change in orbit was observed from Earth, and Hera’s job now is to gather more data about Dimorphos so that scientists can better understand how future impacts could be planned to deflect bodies on a collision course with Earth.

Diego Escorial Olmos, who works on the Hera mission at ESA, says DART and Hera are the basis for a planetary defence system, although more work needs to be done to improve observation – to give as much warning of incoming threats as possible – and to improve spacecraft impactors.

“It’s simple physics,” says Olmos. “If it’s huge, you need something huge to crash into it. Then again, it’s a game of timing, and again it’s basic physics: if I discover the asteroid 100 years in advance, I can just give it a small push that will be integrating over 100 years, and by the time it passes by, it misses us.”

Hera is equipped with a wide range of sensors, including thermal and hyperspectral cameras, LIDAR and radar, which will also be used to map the asteroids.

The mission will also carry two miniature satellites, or CubeSats, called Juventas and Milani. Rather than orbiting the asteroid, these will fly in front of it, making sweeping passes at progressively smaller and riskier distances to gather data. Both are expected to eventually land on the asteroid to get a closer look, once they have done all they can at a distance.

Alan Fitzsimmons at Queen’s University Belfast, UK, says the mission will “put us on the pathway to an effective planetary defence” and start to build up a model for how impacts from spacecraft affect asteroids of different compositions. But it will also be the first in-depth study of a binary asteroid, and Dimorphos will be the smallest asteroid ever measured in detail. “We can’t avoid obtaining new science at the same time,” he says.

Chrysa Avdellidou at the University of Leicester, UK, says we will need more data if we are to develop a reliable planetary defence system – although the chances of needing it are vanishingly small.

“You can go and do any demonstration that you want with these missions, but the precise outcome is very much controlled by the materials that are involved,” she says. “So a big thing that we have to do, either from the ground or with space missions, is to survey large populations of objects and understand their materials and properties of their surface. There are many more types of asteroids.”

As plastic waste continues to build up faster than it can decompose, the need for biodegradable solutions is evident. Previously, Professor Yutaka Amao and his team at Osaka Metropolitan University’s Research Center for Artificial Photosynthesis succeeded in synthesizing fumaric acid, a raw material for biodegradable plastics from biomass-derived pyruvic acid and carbon dioxide.

However, the fumaric acid production process reported earlier has a problem with producing undesirable substances as byproducts, in addition to L-malic acid, which is required as an intermediate.

Continuing this research, the team devised a “more haste, less speed” strategy that supplements the two reactions performed by a single malate dehydrogenase decarboxylase with two different enzymes. The findings are published in the journal RSC Sustainability.

Based on this strategy, it is predicted that an efficient fumaric acid production system could be developed from bio-based pyruvate material and carbon dioxide.

As a result, the team succeeded in converting approximately 80% of the pyruvic acid into L-malic acid in five hours of incubation, compared to the previous result of approximately 46% conversion in seven hours. Furthermore, by adding fumarase to this reaction system, the efficiency of converting the pyruvic acid to fumaric acid was improved from the conventional 10% to about 16% in five hours of incubation.

“In the conventional fumaric acid production system, only pure carbon dioxide gas could be used, but this research has revealed the possibility of using low-concentration carbon dioxide gas emitted from thermal power plants and steel mills,” stated Professor Amao.

“In addition, we have also started to develop a system for producing fumaric acid using light energy as an application of artificial photosynthesis technology.”

Every second, more than 3,000 stars are born in the visible universe. Many are surrounded by what astronomers call a protoplanetary disk—a swirling “pancake” of hot gas and dust from which planets form. The exact processes that give rise to stars and planetary systems, however, are still poorly understood.

A team of astronomers led by University of Arizona researchers has used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to obtain some of the most detailed insights into the forces that shape protoplanetary disks. The observations offer glimpses into what our solar system may have looked like 4.6 billion years ago.

Specifically, the team was able to trace so-called disk winds in unprecedented detail. These winds are streams of gas blowing from the planet-forming disk out into space. Powered largely by magnetic fields, these winds can travel tens of miles in just one second.

The researchers’ findings, published in Nature Astronomy, help astronomers better understand how young planetary systems form and evolve.

According to the paper’s lead author, Ilaria Pascucci, a professor at the U of A’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, one of the most important processes at work in a protoplanetary disk is the star eating matter from its surrounding disk, which is known as accretion.

“How a star accretes mass has a big influence on how the surrounding disk evolves over time, including the way planets form later on,” Pascucci said. “The specific ways in which this happens have not been understood, but we think that winds driven by magnetic fields across most of the disk surface could play a very important role.”

Young stars grow by pulling in gas from the disk that’s swirling around them, but in order for that to happen, gas must first shed some of its inertia. Otherwise, the gas would consistently orbit the star and never fall onto it. Astrophysicists call this process “losing angular momentum,” but how exactly that happens has proved elusive.

To better understand how angular momentum works in a protoplanetary disk, it helps to picture a figure skater on the ice: Tucking her arms alongside her body will make her spin faster, while stretching them out will slow down her rotation. Because her mass doesn’t change, the angular momentum remains the same.

For accretion to occur, gas across the disk has to shed angular momentum, but astrophysicists have a hard time agreeing on how exactly this happens. In recent years, disk winds have emerged as important players funneling away some gas from the disk surface—and with it, angular momentum—which allows the leftover gas to move inward and ultimately fall onto the star.

Because there are other processes at work that shape protoplanetary disks, it is critical to be able to distinguish between the different phenomena, according to the paper’s second author, Tracy Beck at NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute.

While material at the inner edge of the disk is pushed out by the star’s magnetic field in what is known as X-wind, the outer parts of the disk are eroded by intense starlight, resulting in so-called thermal winds, which blow at much slower velocities.

“To distinguish between the magnetic field-driven wind, the thermal wind and X-wind, we really needed the high sensitivity and resolution of JWST (the James Webb Space Telescope),” Beck said.

Unlike the narrowly focused X-wind, the winds observed in the present study originate from a broader region that would include the inner, rocky planets of our solar system—roughly between Earth and Mars. These winds also extend farther above the disk than thermal winds, reaching distances hundreds of times the distance between Earth and the sun.

“Our observations strongly suggest that we have obtained the first images of the winds that can remove angular momentum and solve the longstanding problem of how stars and planetary systems form,” Pascucci said.

For their study, the researchers selected four protoplanetary disk systems, all of which appear edge-on when viewed from Earth.

“Their orientation allowed the dust and gas in the disk to act as a mask, blocking some of the bright central star’s light, which otherwise would have overwhelmed the winds,” said Naman Bajaj, a graduate student at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who contributed to the study.

By tuning JWST’s detectors to distinct molecules in certain states of transition, the team was able to trace various layers of the winds. The observations revealed an intricate, three-dimensional structure of a central jet, nested inside a cone-shaped envelope of winds originating at progressively larger disk distances, similar to the layered structure of an onion.

An important new finding, according to the researchers, was the consistent detection of a pronounced central hole inside the cones, formed by molecular winds in each of the four disks.

Next, Pascucci’s team hopes to expand these observations to more protoplanetary disks, to get a better sense of how common the observed disk wind structures are in the universe and how they evolve over time.

“We believe they could be common, but with four objects, it’s a bit difficult to say,” Pascucci said. “We want to get a larger sample with James Webb, and then also see if we can detect changes in these winds as stars assemble and planets form.”

A team from the Institute for Molecular Recognition and Technological Development (IDM) at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) and the University of Oxford have developed new software that, among many other applications, facilitates the design of molecular boxes for drug encapsulation.

Called CageCavityCalc (C3), this software explicitly allows for the automated calculation and visualization of the cavity size of molecular boxes used in biological applications and which are used, for example, for the administration of anticancer drugs. The work is published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.

“The CageCavityCalc software uses a novel algorithm that allows the calculation of the cavity size of molecular boxes and properties such as hydrophobicity and electrostatic potential, which provides key information to optimize the design of the molecular box that houses the drugs for their subsequent release into the organism in the most efficient way possible,” explains Vicente Martí-Centelles.

Molecular boxes are also used in other applications such as sensors and molecular recognition, catalysis, etc. The fundamental key to their optimal functioning lies in their internal cavity so that they can encapsulate host molecules and modulate their properties.

“However, nowadays, designing boxes with specific properties is challenging, and software development to help predict the properties is essential. And our work responds to this challenge,” says Martí-Centelles.

According to the IDM researcher, to date, the calculation of molecular properties and cavities requires the use of “command-line” based software and parameter adjustments by the user.

CageCavityCalc, on the other hand, has a graphical interface that allows non-specialists to use the tool without the need for computer programming skills. In addition, the cavity calculation is fully automated, which avoids the need for parameter adjustments to perform the calculation.

“The main advantages of the CageCavityCalc software are its efficiency, simplicity of use, and the fact that it is free and open source. It streamlines cavity calculations, thus facilitating the development of new functional molecular boxes with the right properties for their different applications.

“In short, it greatly simplifies the design of these boxes while optimizing their operation,” concludes Martí-Centelles.

You could be forgiven for thinking that this dramatic image is a still from a forthcoming science fiction epic, but it is actually the work of photographer Andrew McConnell, part of his in-depth series Some Worlds Have Two Suns – and it is very much of this planet.

McConnell began documenting the movements of Russian Soyuz rockets in 2015. Every three months, a spacecraft takes off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, a spaceport in Kazakhstan, carrying three astronauts and cosmonauts on a 6-hour journey to the International Space Station. At roughly the same time, three space travellers come back to Earth, landing in the remote grasslands to Kazakhstan’s north-east.

This remarkable photograph from 2017 shows Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin in front of the just-landed Soyuz MS spacecraft (US astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer are still inside the vehicle).

McConnell says that “often at these landings, the helicopters would arrive first with all the engineers and support crew”, making it challenging to photograph freely. With this shot, he was able to “get into position before the helicopters came and kicked up the sandstorm”, and knew immediately it was a “special image… unlike any other landing I had seen”. It felt, he says, “otherworldly”.

Opening with Kulash Akhmetova’s poem Prayer – “I saw sandstorms – they wiped out the steppe settlement / I saw rockets – like visions, they hovered above me,” she writes, in part of it – Some Worlds Have Two Suns is out on 4 October.

Parts of Antarctica are turning green faster than expected, with researchers warning that climate change could lead to a devastating influx of invasive species.

“The scale of the greening trend we found shocked us,” says Tom Roland at the University of Exeter, UK. “The rate of change we’re seeing in terms of increasing vegetation cover is astounding and, worryingly, accelerating.”

Antarctica is warming twice as fast as the global average, according to recent research.…

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