Category: 7. Science

Where Will The Blood Moon Be Visible From?

If you want to see the whole spectacle from start to finish (including the dimming of the penumbral phase), you have plenty of places to pick from. Most of Asia, a sliver of East Africa, and Western Australia will get the complete eclipse. The rest of Africa, Australia, much of Europe, and the east coast of Brazil will get at least part of the totality and the partiality.

You can check Time&Date.com for precise timings to see the eclipse at your location. 

How Is This Lunar Eclipse Record Breaking?

Thanks to the planetary alignment at the time of the eclipse, a record-breaking 7 billion people will be able to see the celestial event.  Obviously, weather permitting, but up to 60 percent of the world’s population will be able to see the full eclipse, which is truly incredible.

If we consider at least partial views of the event, then the number goes up to 87 percent. We’re sure people in the Americas will be annoyed that they were not invited to this party… let’s consider it a cosmic retaliation for the first lunar eclipse of 2025, which took place in March and was basically an American exclusive.

For the March eclipse, the lunar mission Blue Ghost was on the Moon and operational at the time. It captured the incredible event as a solar eclipse, which you can see here. 

To consider a completely different record, the longest eclipse observation, and likely the one with the least spectators, happened back in 1973, where scientists used a Concorde plane to travel across the path of totality for 74 minutes.

Excitingly, the longest eclipse of this century is still to come. It will happen on August 2, 2027, and it will last around 6 minutes and 23 seconds.

How Do Eclipses Happen?

The orbit of the Moon is slightly slanted with respect to the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. If the two were the same, we would get a lunar and solar eclipse every month. Instead, they tend to happen more rarely, every six months or so (but certain years are better) when the Moon is at a node.

A node means that the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon are aligned or in syzygy. A total lunar eclipse occurs at full Moon when the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon line up, so the Moon passes completely within the shadow. There are partial lunar eclipses, where the Moon doesn’t fully enter the shadow, and penumbral eclipses when the Moon only crosses the half-shadow.

For the Sun, there are total eclipses when the Sun is fully covered, partial, when only a bit of the Sun is obscured, and annular, when the Sun is fully covered but the Moon is at its most distant point in its orbit, so it doesn’t look big enough to block the whole solar disk.

The total lunar eclipse is also known as the blood Moon because, once in the shadow of the Earth, it turns red. The reason for this is that sunlight filters through the atmosphere of the Earth, losing the blue colors, just like the sky at sunset and sunrise. Our planet’s shadow has a bit of a crimson hue, coloring the Moon when no direct sunlight is reaching it.

For the first time, scientists have used ultrafast X-ray flashes to take a direct image of a single electron as it moved during a chemical reaction.

In the new study, published Aug. 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers accomplished this incredible feat by imaging how a valence electron — an electron in the outer shell of an atom — moved when an ammonia molecule broke apart.

In space, the one thing more important than ensuring access to food, water, and waste disposal (combined!) is the need for a steady supply of breathable air. Where the International Space Station (ISS) and other missions in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) can be resupplied regularly, missions operating in deep space will need to produce their own. There are several ways to go about this. One way is to use bioregenerative life support systems (BLSSs), which utilize photosynthetic organisms (like cyanobacteria) that take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen gas and edible algae.

Another way is to produce oxygen gas from local resources, a process known as in-situ resource utilization (ISRU). This typically involves electrolysis, a process in which electric current is used to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gas. However, this process is impractical for deep-space missions because of the amount of energy required, not to mention the fact that it does not work well in microgravity. In a recent study, an international team suggests an alternative method that relies on a process known as magnetic phase separation.

The research was led by Álvaro Romero-Calvo, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Colorado Boulder who is currently an Assistant Professor at the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, part of the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was joined by researchers from the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM) at the University of Bremen, and the University of Warwick. The paper detailing their findings was published on August 18th in Nature Chemistry.

Mockup of the Oxygen Generation System Rack. Credit: NASA

As noted, the current method for producing oxygen in space is through electrolysis, where electrodes immersed in an electrolyte solution (like salt) split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. Aboard the ISS, this is done by the Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA), which spins water in a centrifuge to separate oxygen and hydrogen gas bubbles from the liquid. In microgravity, however, gas bubbles do not float upwards, and those produced in the centrifuge tend to remain suspended and stick to the electrodes. To extract them, a complex fluid management system is used that is heavy, complex, and occupies a lot of space.

This makes such a system impractical since it would be very difficult to take on long-duration crewed missions. This was the conclusion reached by a team from NASA’s Ames Research Center who evaluated the OGA for crewed missions to Mars. Per the report, the team recommended that the OGA “for Mars should have lower mass, better reliability and maintainability, greater safety, radiation hardening, and capability for quiescent operation. NASA’s methodical, disciplined systems engineering process should be used to develop the appropriate system.”

To address this problem, the team proposed an alternative solution that uses magnetism, which could make future life support systems lighter, simpler, and more sustainable. As Romero-Calvo said in a Georgia Tech news release:

One may think that extracting gas bubbles from liquids in space is as simple as opening a can of soda here on Earth. However, the lack of buoyancy makes the extraction process incredibly difficult, undermining the design and operation of oxygen production systems. In this paper, we demonstrate that two largely unexplored magnetic interactions – diamagnetism and magnetohydrodynamics – provide an exciting pathway to solve this problem and develop alternative oxygen production architectures.

The team created their system using off-the-shelf permanent magnets, which they tested at the ZARM Drop Tower in Bremen – a 146 m (~480 ft) high tower that simulates microgravity. The team also developed a passive phase separation system that collects the bubbles from the electrodes at designated spots. From this, they were able to demonstrate that magnetic fields can enable the separation of gas bubbles from electrodes in a microgravity environment without the need for heavy, complex equipment. The experiments further confirmed that magnetic forces can improve gas bubble detachment and enhance the efficiency of the electrochemical cells by up to 240%.

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A key part of this breakthrough is the two complementary approaches the team developed to collect oxygen bubbles from the electrode. The first takes advantage of how water responds to magnets in microgravity by guiding gas bubbles toward collection points, while the second employs magnetohydrodynamic forces. These forces arise naturally from the interaction between magnetic fields and electric currents generated by electrolysis, creating a spinning motion in the liquid that separates gas bubbles from water through convective effects.

This process achieves the same phase separation as mechanical centrifuges, like the one used aboard the ISS, but it uses magnetic forces instead of mechanical rotation. “We were able to prove that we do not need centrifuges or any mechanical moving parts for separating the produced hydrogen and oxygen from the liquid electrolyte,” said co-author Katerina Brinkert, an Honorary Professor at the University of Warwick and the Director of ZARM. “We do not even need additional power. Instead, it is a completely passive, low-maintenance system.”

“Our team was able to prove that magnetic forces can feasibly control electrochemical bubbly flows in microgravity, departing from the state-of-the-art in low-gravity fluid mechanics and enabling future human spaceflight architectures,” Romero-Calvo added. The team’s work is the result of four years of joint research based on Romero-Calvo’s original idea, calculations, and numerical simulations. To validate the theory, Prof. Brinkert’s team at Warwick and ZARM developed the necessary experiments and devices to test the proposed method in microgravity conditions. As Dr. Shaumica Saravanabavan, a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Warwick, said:

During my trips to ZARM, we confirmed the magnetic buoyancy effect for phase separation in (photo-)electrolysis cells in multiple Drop Tower experiments, using electrode materials we in part fabricated at Warwick. I’m proud to have contributed to advancing sustainable energy technologies beyond Earth applications.

This research presents opportunities for developing simpler, more cost-effective, and more sustainable life support systems for deep-space missions. In the near future, the team hopes to further validate their method by launching it to orbit, where the system can operate in microgravity for extended periods.

Further Reading: University of Warwick, Nature Chemistry