Category: 7. Science

The growing number of rocket launches may pose a threat to Earth’s ozone layer. While the expanding space industry holds great promise, researchers warn that its environmental impacts are being overlooked.

With thousands of satellites now cluttering low Earth orbit, emissions from launches and back-end debris are making alarm bells ring over atmospheric well-being.

Space boom comes with a cost

A team of scientists from the University of Canterbury and ETH Zurich investigated how pollution from rocket launches and falling space junk could slow the ozone layer’s recovery.

The researchers used a chemistry-climate model developed at ETH Zurich and the Physical Meteorological Observatory in Davos (PMOD/WRC) to forecast rocket emission impacts through 2030.

Back in 2019, there were only 97 orbital launches. By 2024, that number had nearly tripled to 258 – and it’s expected to rise to over 2,000 per year by the end of the decade.

This increase is concerning because emissions in the upper atmosphere linger much longer than those released at ground level.

Without natural washout processes like rain or clouds, these pollutants can circle the globe and remain in the air for years.

The ozone layer’s fragile recovery

The model predicts that, if current growth trends continue, the global ozone layer could thin by nearly 0.3 percent by 2030. Over Antarctica, seasonal losses could reach up to four percent.

These might seem like small numbers, but context matters. The ozone layer is still recovering from the damage caused by chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), banned in 1989 by the Montreal Protocol.

Global ozone levels are still about two percent below pre-industrial levels and aren’t expected to fully recover until 2066.

According to the researchers, unregulated rocket emissions could delay this timeline by several years – or even decades.

Why the ozone layer still matters

The ozone layer may seem like a distant part of the atmosphere, but it plays a vital role in shielding life on Earth. It absorbs most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which can cause skin cancer, cataracts, and immune system damage in humans.

It also affects ecosystems, particularly marine life, by influencing the health of phytoplankton – tiny organisms that form the base of the ocean’s food chain.

Even modest declines in ozone can boost the amount of UV radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface. That is to say, any quantifiable decrease is more than a number – it’s an alarm.

Ongoing harm could bring about additional UV-related health threats, upset delicate ecosystems, and undermine the gains achieved since CFCs were banned.

Simply put, every percentage point of recovery counts, and every delay threatens human and environmental well-being.

Fuel type matters more than you think

The problem lies mainly with emissions of chlorine gas and soot. Chlorine breaks apart ozone molecules, and soot particles heat the middle atmosphere, speeding up ozone-damaging reactions.

Solid rocket motors are the main source of chlorine emissions, while most rocket types release soot.

Only rockets using cryogenic fuels – like liquid oxygen and hydrogen – are nearly ozone-neutral. But these fuels are tricky to handle, and only about 6 percent of current launches use them.

That means the vast majority of launches still contribute to ozone depletion.

Re-entry: the hidden threat

The study focused on emissions during rocket ascent, but what about the return journey? Most satellites burn up when they re-enter the atmosphere, releasing nitrogen oxides and metal particles.

Nitrogen oxides are already known to harm the ozone, while metals could form clouds or act as chemical surfaces that accelerate ozone loss.

Scientists still poorly understand these effects and often leave them out of climate models. But with satellite constellations growing rapidly, more and more debris will re-enter the atmosphere, making this an urgent area for further research.

Clean fuels offer a path

“There is a risk that the rapid rise in global rocket launches could slow the recovery of the vital ozone layer,” said Sandro Vattioni. “The problem is being underestimated – yet it could be mitigated by forward-looking, coordinated action.”

The researchers believe there’s still time to act. Better monitoring of emissions, using cleaner fuels, and encouraging the switch to cryogenic systems could help protect the ozone layer.

Setting international regulations would allow the space industry to grow sustainably.

—–

Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates. 

Check us out on EarthSnap, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls and Earth.com.

—–

Researchers have witnessed the earliest moments to date of planets beginning to form around a star beyond the sun.

This finding marks the first time a planetary system has been identified at such an early stage of formation and opens a window to the past of our own solar system.

This newborn planetary system is emerging around the young star HOPS-315, which sits some 1,300 light years away from Earth. Around such young stars, astronomers often see discs of gas and dust known as protoplanetary discs, which are the birthplaces of new planets.

Using the JWST space telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile, the researchers observed signs of dust and gas coming together to form solids. These solids then bind together, growing first into planet seedlings called “planetesimals” that then grow over time into planets.

“This process has never been seen before in a protoplanetary disc—or anywhere outside our solar system,” says Edwin Bergin, coauthor of the new study and a University of Michigan professor of astronomy.

Although researchers have observed discs with young planets in them before, they’ve never witnessed the actual birth of planets. They did, however, know what they should be looking for to finally capture the first moments of a planet’s existence.

“We’ve always known that the first solid parts of planets, or planetesimals, must form further back in time, at earlier stages,” says Melissa McClure, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Now, researchers representing eight institutions from five countries have combined the powers of JWST and ALMA to take “a picture of the baby solar system,” says coauthor Merel van ‘t Hoff, who began the project as a postdoctoral researcher at UM and is now an assistant professor at Purdue University.

“This system is one of the best that we know to actually probe some of the processes that happened in our solar system,” she says of the HOPS-315 system.

In our solar system, the very first solid material to condense near Earth’s present location around the sun is found trapped within ancient meteorites. Astronomers age-date these primordial rocks to determine when the clock started on our solar system’s formation. Such meteorites are packed full of crystalline minerals that contain silicon monoxide, or SiO, and can condense at the extremely high temperatures present in young planetary discs.

Over time, these newly condensed solids bind together, sowing the seeds for planet formation as they gain both size and mass. The first kilometer-sized planetesimals in the solar system, which grew to become the Earth and Jupiter’s core, formed just after the condensation of these crystalline minerals.

In their new discovery, astronomers have found evidence of these hot minerals beginning to condense in the disc around HOPS-315. Their results show that SiO is present around the newborn star in its gaseous state as well as within crystalline minerals, suggesting it is only just beginning to solidify.

“We’re really seeing these minerals at the same location in this extrasolar system as where we see them in asteroids in the Solar System,” says coauthor Logan Francis, a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University.

Because of this, HOPS-315’s disc provides a wonderful analogue for studying our own cosmic history. It also provides astronomers with a new opportunity to study early planet formation, by standing in as a substitute for newborn solar systems across the galaxy.

The minerals were first identified using the JWST, a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. To find out where exactly the signals were coming from, the team observed the system with ALMA, an international observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the European Southern Observatory, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Source: University of Michigan

video The European Space Agency (ESA) conducted a successful parachute test for the ExoMars Mars landing rover earlier this month, even as uncertainty looms over US involvement in the project.

The parachutes, which are designed to slow the descent of the ExoMars lander, have caused more than a few headaches for the development team. In 2019, a drop of the 35m parachute from about 35km up resulted in a test failure. There were concerns that further setbacks would delay the mission, but as it turned out, the parachutes didn’t hold things up – the system was successfully qualified in 2021. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, did.

ESA suspended the mission as it rethought its plans without Roscosmos’ involvement.

In 2024, ESA and NASA inked an agreement to get the long-delayed Rosalind Franklin rover to the red planet. Then, Trump took office, and the proposed NASA budget cuts made it uncertain whether the space agency could contribute as planned. Most recently, the US Senate Committee on Appropriations offered hope, restoring “not less than $73,900,000” for the mission [PDF] – just slightly less than the cost of moving the Space Shuttle between museums.

So testing the parachutes was a welcome distraction from the wrangling over the mission’s future. The Register understands that the activity had long been planned and budgeted for outside of whatever squabbling might be happening in the US.

Youtube Video

The test dropped a dummy ExoMars descent module from an altitude of almost 30 km, and its parachutes were successfully deployed.

There are two main parachutes: a first stage that is 15m wide, and a variant of the parachute used for the successful ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The second is a 35m monster – and will be the largest parachute ever to open over Mars.

“Using two parachutes allows us to design a strong, medium-sized parachute to decelerate the probe through supersonic speeds and then a much larger, lightweight parachute for the final descent,” said John Underwood, principal engineer at Vorticity, the UK company entrusted with parachute design and test analysis.

While the parachutes will scrub off a considerable amount of velocity, retro-rockets will be fired 20 seconds before touching down in order to avoid creating a surprise crater on the surface. Nobody needs another Schiaparelli incident.

The successful test took place at the Swedish Space Corporation’s Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, northern Sweden, on 7 July.

Luca Ferracina, ESA’s system engineer for the ExoMars landing module, said, “We are running this campaign to confirm our readiness for Mars, and to verify that the parachutes are still performing as expected after the long storage.”

The move is a prudent one, and one that we fervently hope is a precursor to this mission, which one space agency insider called “snakebit,” will finally reach Mars. It would be a shame if the closest the carefully crafted ExoMars parachute system got to the red planet was almost 30km above the Arctic Circle. ®

Three of the most popular targets for astronomers of all skill levels are the Seven Sisters (the Pleiades), the Hyades and the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC), which is the central “star” in Orion’s Sword.

Now, scientists have discovered that these celestial bodies may have more in common than once thought. The star clusters may share a common origin mechanism, they say, despite the fact that the three clusters are all different ages and are located at different distances from Earth.

On March 28, Myanmar was rocked by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that claimed over 5,000 lives and caused damage even in neighboring countries.

In a study published July 10 in The Seismic Record, seismologists confirmed previous research indicating that the southern part of the large earthquake’s rupture, or fracture, took place at astounding speeds of up to between 3.1 and 3.7 miles per second (5 to 6 kilometers per second)—at supershear velocity. This likely played a role in the earthquake’s devastating impact.

When an earthquake strikes, the first seismic waves to propagate from the epicenter are P waves, fast-moving waves that compress their way through all kinds of material but do not cause a lot of damage. Then come the S waves, or shear waves, which are slower but cause highly destructive perpendicular motion. Simply put, when parts of an earthquake’s fault rupture at supershear velocity, it means that the speed of the break along a particular stretch of the rupture was faster than the speed of its S waves. In moderate earthquakes, rupture velocities are usually between 50 and 85% of S-wave velocity.

Myanmar’s earthquake occurred along the Sagaing Fault, which runs north-south through Myanmar. The fault is strike-slip, meaning two tectonic plates slide horizontally against each other. The Sagaing Fault’s strike-slip movement in March was clearly captured in potentially first-of-its-kind footage showcasing an expanse of land suddenly moving forward relative to the viewer.

The natural disaster saw around 298.3 miles (480 km) of the Sagaing Fault rupture or “slip,” which is extremely long for a strike-slip rupture of this magnitude, according to the seismologists. By studying seismic and satellite imagery, they determined that the rupture had “large slip of up to 7 m [23 feet] extending ∼85 km [52.8 miles] north of the epicenter near Mandalay, with patchy slip of 1–6 m [3.3–19.7 feet] distributed along ∼395 km [245.4 miles] to the south, with about 2 m [6.6 ft] near the capital Nay Pyi Taw.”

A seismic station near Nay Pyi Taw registered ground motion data that were “immediately convincing of supershear rupture given the time between the weak, dilational P wave first arrival and the arrival of large shear offset of the fault” at the station, UC Santa Cruz’s Thorne Lay said in a Seismological Society of America statement. An offset is the ground displacement that occurs along a fault during an earthquake. “That was unusually clear and convincing evidence for supershear rupture relative to other long strike-slip events that I have worked on.”

Lay and his colleagues suggest that the supershear velocity, as well as the rupture’s strong directivity (the piling up of S waves in the direction of the fault line as the rupture spreads) toward the south, might have caused the earthquake’s widespread damage.

While the Sagaing Fault frequently causes large earthquakes, the one in March involved a stretch of the fault between the cities of Mandalay and Nay Pyi Taw that has been quiet since 1912. “Longer histories and better understanding of fault segmentation and geometry are needed to have any guidance for future event activity, but I would not expect the central area to fail again before a long period of rebuilding strain energy,” Lay added.

While it is impossible to predict earthquakes with any kind of precision, earthquake early-warning (EEW) systems provide last-minute but still crucial warnings of incoming seismic events by sending out electronic alerts that travel faster than seismic waves. While many seismic regions don’t have the necessary infrastructure for such systems, the smartphone-based Android Earthquake Alerts (AEA) system has recently proved to be as efficient as traditional seismic networks.

An experimental technique rescued a camera aboard the agency’s Juno spacecraft, offering lessons that will benefit other space systems that experience high radiation.

The mission team of NASA’s Jupiter-orbiting Juno spacecraft executed a deep-space move in December 2023 to repair its JunoCam imager to capture photos of the Jovian moon Io. Results from the long-distance save were presented during a technical session on July 16 at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Nuclear & Space Radiation Effects Conference in Nashville.

JunoCam is a color, visible-light camera. The optical unit for the camera is located outside a titanium-walled radiation vault, which protects sensitive electronic components for many of Juno’s engineering and science instruments.

This is a challenging location because Juno’s travels carry it through the most intense planetary radiation fields in the solar system. While mission designers were confident JunoCam could operate through the first eight orbits of Jupiter, no one knew how long the instrument would last after that.

Throughout Juno’s first 34 orbits (its prime mission), JunoCam operated normally, returning images the team routinely incorporated into the mission’s science papers. Then, during its 47th orbit, the imager began showing hints of radiation damage. By orbit 56, nearly all the images were corrupted.

While the team knew the issue may be tied to radiation, pinpointing what, specifically, was damaged within JunoCam was difficult from hundreds of millions of miles away. Clues pointed to a damaged voltage regulator that is vital to JunoCam’s power supply. With few options for recovery, the team turned to a process called annealing, where a material is heated for a specified period before slowly cooling. Although the process is not well understood, the idea is that the heating can reduce defects in the material.

“We knew annealing can sometimes alter a material like silicon at a microscopic level but didn’t know if this would fix the damage,” said JunoCam imaging engineer Jacob Schaffner of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, which designed and developed JunoCam and is part of the team that operates it. “We commanded JunoCam’s one heater to raise the camera’s temperature to 77 degrees Fahrenheit — much warmer than typical for JunoCam — and waited with bated breath to see the results.”

Soon after the annealing process finished, JunoCam began cranking out crisp images for the next several orbits. But Juno was flying deeper and deeper into the heart of Jupiter’s radiation fields with each pass. By orbit 55, the imagery had again begun showing problems. 

“After orbit 55, our images were full of streaks and noise,” said JunoCam instrument lead Michael Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems. “We tried different schemes for processing the images to improve the quality, but nothing worked. With the close encounter of Io bearing down on us in a few weeks, it was Hail Mary time: The only thing left we hadn’t tried was to crank JunoCam’s heater all the way up and see if more extreme annealing would save us.”

Test images sent back to Earth during the annealing showed little improvement the first week. Then, with the close approach of Io only days away, the images began to improve dramatically. By the time Juno came within 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the volcanic moon’s surface on Dec. 30, 2023, the images were almost as good as the day the camera launched, capturing detailed views of Io’s north polar region that revealed mountain blocks covered in sulfur dioxide frosts rising sharply from the plains and previously uncharted volcanos with extensive flow fields of lava.

To date, the solar-powered spacecraft has orbited Jupiter 74 times. Recently, the image noise returned during Juno’s 74th orbit.

Since first experimenting with JunoCam, the Juno team has applied derivations of this annealing technique on several Juno instruments and engineering subsystems.

“Juno is teaching us how to create and maintain spacecraft tolerant to radiation, providing insights that will benefit satellites in orbit around Earth,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “I expect the lessons learned from Juno will be applicable to both defense and commercial satellites as well as other NASA missions.”

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft. Various other institutions around the U.S. provided several of the other scientific instruments on Juno.

More information about Juno is at:

https://www.nasa.gov/juno

DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov

Deb Schmid
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio
210-522-2254
dschmid@swri.org

2025-091