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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02654-5
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Among those following the 2024 Paralympic Games, which kick off next week in Paris, will be John McFall, a former medallist who has since begun working with with the European Space Agency (ESA).
McFall made headlines in 2022 when he became the world’s first disabled astronaut, joining ESA’s astronaut reserve team. Before this, he enjoyed international success as a sprinter — winning a bronze medal in the 2008 Paralympics — and subsequently trained as an orthopaedic surgeon.
After a motorcycle accident as a teenager, McFall had his right leg amputated, and he now wears a prosthesis. He’s been participating in ESA’s ‘Fly!’ feasibility study, a project to assess the challenges a disabled person might face in space flight.
Nature spoke to McFall about the project’s importance, and its progress so far.
Being an astronaut wasn’t on my radar originally. A colleague told me that ESA was recruiting for a new class of astronauts — uniquely, it was specifically looking to recruit someone with a physical disability. I’ve always been really adventurous and very curious about science and the way that things work.
When I saw the vacancy, I thought, “This sounds awesome!” The adventure, the challenge, the learning. And what a great opportunity, if it did ever turn into an opportunity to fly to space. One thing that really interested me was that ESA was asking if it is feasible to send someone with a disability into space on a long-duration mission. I thought, with my background and my skills, it would be awesome to help the agency answer this bold question.
McFall (left) won a bronze medal for the 100-metre sprint in the 2008 Paralympic Games in Beijing.Credit: Andrew Wong/Getty
The study explores the technical feasibility of something like going to the International Space Station (ISS) for six months. Being in space for more than 30 days has particular requirements, such as dealing with the long-term effects of microgravity on the body.
The study looked at all the phases of space flight: what it takes to get off the ground, living and working on the ISS, and then coming back to Earth. We also considered the effects of training. ESA requires astronauts to do winter survival training, sea survival training, all these sorts of things. So we looked at different aspects of training and how I might use some of the platforms and equipment.
We also looked at the requirements of spacecraft and ISS operations — for example, assessing whether I can undertake all the safety and emergency procedures in the spacecraft. We did some parabolic, zero-gravity flights to look at whether I could move around in microgravity. And we did some assessments to make sure that my prosthesis would still fit and still be comfortable irrespective of changes in the size of my stump, because of the shift of fluid that you get in microgravity.
The study so far has demonstrated that it is technically feasible for someone with a physical disability like mine to fly to space and to live and work as a fully integrated member of the ISS crew for a long mission.
This part of the study will conclude towards the end of this year. The next stage, ideally, would be to move forward and get someone with a physical disability flying.
I hope that I get the opportunity to fly in the future. That would be tremendous. And I also hope that I can sow the seed for a legacy to follow on from, to look at the feasibility to fly with a wider range of disabilities.
Among other things, the reduced-gravity flights tested how McFall’s prosthetic leg behaved during weightlessness.Credit: ESA/Novespace
My favourite bit was changing people’s preconceptions in the space industry of what people with physical disabilities are capable of. I’m proud that I’ve had that opportunity to demonstrate what we are capable of as humans. I also love the mountains in the winter, so winter survival training for me was great fun.
My least favourite part was probably sea survival training in the Baltic Sea. It was about 30 °C, and we were in full, hooded neoprene wetsuits, which was quite uncomfortable in that heat.
Elite athletes inspire so many people. Lots of people do sport and have this admiration for what it takes to compete at the elite level. From the Paralympic point of view, it’s hugely important to connect with a wider audience, to make wider society aware of what people with physical disabilities are capable of.
In the same vein, I think you can probably consider being an astronaut as a difficult, challenging job. So there is that admiration there to have someone with a physical disability in this position. ESA is boldly going out and saying: we believe this is possible. We believe we can have someone with a physical disability performing the same duties as a professional astronaut. This is a tremendously powerful way to reduce stigma around disability, increase inclusivity and have healthy debates around what roles people would expect to see people with physical disabilities taking in society.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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A decades-long survey of a nearby galaxy has detected signals consistent with ancient black holes that could explain dark matter — but the objects would have to be at least ten times more abundant to support the theory.
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The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer spacecraft approaching Earth (artist’s impression).Credit: ESA/Lightcurve Films/R. Andres
Next week, the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) probe will whip past both the Moon and Earth on its way to deep space, as part of a daring and previously untried double fly-by manoeuvre.
The European Space Agency (ESA) mission is one year into its elaborate eight-year journey and will eventually visit three of Jupiter’s moons. The craft will harness the gravity of Earth, the Moon and Venus to reach Jupiter using as little fuel as possible.
On 19 and 20 August, the mission will fly past the Moon and Earth in rapid succession, performing the first-ever double gravity-assist manoeuvre. JUICE will first reach the Moon, harness the lunar gravity to brake and change course and then swing around Earth a day later, further altering its speed and direction. There is no plan to readjust its trajectory between the fly-bys.
Source: ESA
The Moon is usually treated as a perturbation to factor into account when spacecraft slingshot around Earth, but harnessing its pull can save propellant. The lunar gravity-assist technique, combined with the timing of JUICE’s launch in April last year, will save enough fuel to allow the probe to orbit Jupiter’s moon Ganymede at just 200 kilometres in 2035, at the end of the mission. “That’s great news in terms of the science,” JUICE mission analyst Arnaud Boutonnet, at the ESA European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, told reporters at a press conference last Friday.
Jupiter mission will be first to orbit moon of another planet
The double gravity-assist move is risky, because each fly-by will amplify any errors in the craft’s trajectory. “It’s like passing through a very narrow corridor, very, very quickly: pushing the accelerator to the maximum when the margin at the side of the road is just millimetres,” said the mission’s spacecraft-operations manager, Ignacio Tanco at ESOC, in a statement. But performing the manoeuvre close to home will be an opportunity to test whether JUICE’s scientific instruments are working as planned, in an environment that researchers know well, said Claire Vallat, operations scientist for the mission at ESA in Madrid, at the briefing. “This is a unique opportunity to study those instruments.”
The spacecraft’s circuitous route is by design. The Earth–Moon fly-by will slow down JUICE and deflect its course on a shortcut towards Venus. JUICE will gain energy as it swings around Venus, and two further gravity assists from Earth — in 2026 and 2029 — will eventually sling the craft out towards Jupiter.
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Download the Nature Podcast 7 August 2024
In this episode:
A study reveals that, unexpectedly, plants display a greater diversity of traits in drier environments. Trait diversity is a measure of an organism’s performance in an environment and can include things like the size of a plant or its photosynthetic rate. Although there are good data on this kind of diversity in temperate regions, an assessment of drylands has been lacking. The new study fills this knowledge gap and finds that, counter to a prevailing expectation that fewer traits would be displayed, at a certain level of aridity, trait diversity doubles. The team behind the work hope that it can help us better protect biodiversity as the planet warms and areas become drier.
Research Article: Gross et al.
Butterflies and moths use static charge to pick up pollen, and quantum physics rules out black holes made of light.
Research Highlight: Charged-up butterflies draw pollen through the air
Research Highlight: Black holes made from light? Impossible, say physicists
An assessment of coral skeletons has shown that the past decade has been the warmest for the Great Barrier Reef for 400 years. By looking at the chemical composition of particularly old specimens of coral in the reef, researchers were able to create a record of temperatures going back to 1618. In addition to showing recent record-breaking temperatures, they also developed a model that suggests that such temperatures are very unlikely to occur without human-induced climate change. Altogether, the study suggests that the reef is in dire straits and much of the worlds’ coral could be lost.
Research Article: Henley et al.
News and Views: Coral giants sound the alarm for the Great Barrier Reef
Nature News: Great Barrier Reef’s temperature soars to 400-year high
Most researchers are familiar with the refrain ‘Publish or Perish’ — the idea that publications are the core currency of a scientist’s career — but now that can be played out for laughs in a new board game. Created as a way to help researchers “bond over shared trauma”, the game features many mishaps familiar to academics, scrambles for funding and scathing comments, all while players must compete to get the most citations on their publications. Reporter Max Kozlov set out to avoid perishing and published his way to a story about the game for the Nature Podcast.
Nature News: ‘Publish or Perish’ is now a card game — not just an academic’s life
Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.
Never miss an episode. Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music or your favourite podcast app. An RSS feed for the Nature Podcast is available too.
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Nature, Published online: 06 August 2024; doi:10.1038/d41586-024-02443-0
Pupil and teacher characteristics underpinning successful physics classes, and the astronomical appeal of planetarium light shows, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive.
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02505-3
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The first rocks from the far side of the Moon have just landed safely on Earth and scientists can’t wait to study them.
China’s Chang’e-6 re-entry capsule, containing up to two kilograms of materials scooped and drilled from the Moon’s most ancient basin, touched down in the grasslands of Siziwang Banner in the Chinese northern autonomous region Inner Mongolia at 2.07 p.m. Beijing time on Tuesday, according to the China National Space Administration (CNSA).
“The samples are going to be different from all previous rocks collected by the US, Soviet Union and China,” which came from the Moon’s near side, says Yang Wei, a geochemist at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing. “We have very high expectations for them,” Yang says.
Chang’e-6 launched on 3 May and arrived at the Moon five days later, where it stayed in lunar orbit to prepare for landing. On 2 June, it touched down at a preselected site inside the South Pole–Aitken (SPA) basin, which is covered in dark-coloured cooled lava rocks known as basalt, and conducted intense sampling using a drill and a robotic arm for two days. The precious cargo then lifted off from the Moon, docked with the re-entry capsule in lunar orbit and headed towards Earth.
At about 1:20 p.m. Beijing time on Tuesday, the landing procedure kicked off. The capsule skipped off the atmosphere to reduce its speed, before diving down at 11.2 kilometres a second. A parachute was deployed to assist with the decent. A recovery team located the capsule shortly after it landed. Once they have processed the capsule on site, it will be transported to Beijing, where it will be opened and the samples removed for scientific analysis and storage, says CNSA.
Patrick Pinet, a lunar geologist at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP) in Toulouse, France, watched the mission unfold in real time from a control room in Beijing. “I’ve seen an incredible technical efficiency and professional mastering of all these very complex steps along the way,” he says.
The Chang’e-6 probe on the lunar surface.Credit: Xinhua/Shutterstock
“China’s ability to carry out highly complex missions at lunar distance is robust,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The technologies to control a spacecraft and communicate with it, to manoeuvre in lunar orbit, land, take off and rendezvous “will be important to have well in control for a human lunar mission in the near future”, he says.
Earlier this month, more than 200 scientists from Chinese universities and research institutes met in Beijing to discuss the scientific questions they hope to address by analysing the Chang’e-6 samples. Participants voted for three problems they considered the most important. The top question to explore is why the Moon’s two faces are so different, followed by what the composition of deeper lunar structures is and when the SPA basin formed.
International researchers are hoping to work on Chang’e-6 samples, too. Qing-zhu Yin, a geochemist at the University of California, Davis, wants to use them to work out the timing of the initiation and termination of the lunar magma ocean in the aftermath of the giant impact that formed the Moon.
Chang’e-6 carried four international instruments to the lunar orbit or surface. Among them was the European Space Agency’s Negative Ions at the Lunar Surface (NILS) detector and a French instrument called the Detection of Outgassing RadoN (DORN).
NILS detected negative ions on the Moon for the first time. Studying these particles will help scientists to understand the lunar surface environment and design robotic and crewed missions in the future. “A lot more work is needed before we could talk about the species and quantities of the ions,” says NILS project manager Neil Melville, who is based in The Hague, the Netherlands.
Pierre-Yves Meslin, a principal investigator of DORN at IRAP, says his team recorded 19 hours of good-quality data during the surface operations. “We are now working on the calibration and analysis of the scientific data, but we can already tell that the performance of the instrument has been met,” he says. “The Chinese and French members of the DORN team had very successful teamwork, and we received great support from the China National Space Administration and the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center, among others. We really felt part of the mission.”
China is now developing its Chang’e-7 and Chang’e-8 missions, which are more complex and are scheduled to launch in 2026 and 2028, respectively. They will hunt for water ice near the lunar south pole and conduct other surveys and experiments. Water ice can be used to make oxygen and rocket fuels, and local supplies will be crucial for establishing a long-term human presence on the Moon.
The three missions are part of China’s larger lunar programme to establish a Moon base by the mid-2030s, says Namrata Goswami, a space-policy researcher at Arizona State University in Phoenix. “The ability of China to execute their space missions on time means it will realistically establish the first ever permanent presence on the Moon,” she says.
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Five ARCA detectors on board a ship, ready for deployment.Credit: KM3NeT Collaboration
An observatory still under construction at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea has spotted what could be the most energetic neutrino ever detected. Such ultra-high-energy neutrinos — tiny subatomic particles that travel at nearly the speed of light — have been known to exist for only a decade or so, and are thought to be messengers from some of the Universe’s most cataclysmic events, such as growth spurts of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies.
Neutrino physicist João Coelho stunned researchers at the Neutrino 2024 conference in Milan, Italy, on 18 June, when he revealed the discovery only at the very end of his talk.
The most unusual portrait of the Milky Way yet: mapping the Galaxy with neutrinos
The neutrino detection was “a fantastic event”, says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He added that the observation highlights the potential of the Astroparticle Research with Cosmics in the Abyss (ARCA) observatory — a forest of detectors on ‘strings’ attached to the 3,500-metre-deep sea floor southeast of the Italian island of Sicily.
The neutrino “really stands out, very far away from anything else”, said Coelho, who is at the AstroParticle and Cosmology Laboratory in Paris. He did not disclose the precise direction from which the particle had come, nor when the observation occurred: doing so could have tipped off competitors about the possible origin of the neutrino, researchers at the conference told Nature. Coelho instead promised that these details would be revealed in a paper further down the line. “It would be really interesting to see where in the sky the neutrino originated,” says Nepomuk Otte, a physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
ARCA is the larger component of a neutrino observatory called the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT), which also includes an array off Toulon, France. The collaboration includes European countries together with Morocco, South Africa, Australia, Georgia, China and the United Arab Emirates.
ARCA has been collecting data since the mid-2010s, and currently consists of 28 strings, which the team hopes to expand to a total of 230 by 2028. Each string is 800 metres long, and beaded with 18 detector units — plexiglass spheres about half a metre wide, containing light detectors that can each sense just a handful of photons.
The majority of the light that ARCA detects is the result of highly energetic cosmic-ray particles, which produce showers of electrically charged subatomic particles when they hit Earth’s atmosphere. These particle showers can travel in water for kilometres and leave behind faint flashes of light, which ARCA is designed to spot.
Single subatomic particle illuminates mysterious origins of cosmic rays
The observatory can also detect light from other kinds of particle, including neutrinos. It does not ‘see’ neutrinos directly. Instead, when a neutrino hits a molecule — of air, water or underlying rock — it can create a highly energetic charged particle called a muon, which produces a shower of other charged particles as it moves through the detector. Neutrinos can travel through Earth, so the particle showers that they produce can come from any direction, whereas those resulting from cosmic rays tend to come from the atmosphere. So, when ARCA detects a shower from above, it can be difficult to determine the source, but showers that are horizontal or upwards-moving are most likely to be neutrinos, says Elisa Resconi, a neutrino physicist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.
But for the highest-energy neutrinos — those carrying half a petaelectronvolt (0.5×1015 eV) or more — the Earth acts as a barrier, says Resconi. That leaves a strip of sky around the horizon where the Earth-skimming particles can be detected and easily distinguished from cosmic rays. “We have this narrow region in which we can see very clean signatures of these neutrinos,” says Resconi, who is part of the collaboration that discovered ultra-high-energy neutrinos around a decade ago; that group used the much larger IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a detector similar to ARCA that is embedded in Antarctic ice.
In his talk, Coelho said that more than one-third of ARCA’s sensors had recorded flashes consistent with a muon crossing the observatory horizontally, produced by a neutrino that arrived from around one degree below the horizon. The particle probably had an energy of many tens of petaelectronvolts, he added — which would make it the most energetic ever detected.
At least four more observatories that can detect the highest-energy neutrinos are under construction or have been proposed, according to Naoko Kurahashi Neilson, a neutrino researcher at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who outlined some of the plans in a separate talk. Resconi says that she and her collaborators have been conducting successful tests for a future neutrino observatory off Vancouver Island, Canada. And Otte is leading another proposed project — with a prototype now being tested in Utah — that would search for Earth-skimming neutrinos by monitoring the atmosphere just above the horizon for flashes of light.
Until recently, only IceCube had the capability of seeing these extreme particles — which makes the detection by the much smaller ARCA all the more sensational. “It’s like winning the big lottery,” says Halzen, who is IceCube’s principal investigator.
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-01703-3