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This month, skywatchers will be treated to a rare "planet parade": all five naked-eye worlds will align in their proper orbital order from the sun in our sky.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn can all be seen in a row from left to right in the southeastern predawn sky. (Mercury will be close to the horizon when the show begins on June 3, but will become more visible as the month progresses.)
According to Sky&Telescope, the five-planet party will take up 91 degrees of our sky on June 3. "Find a place with a clear view low toward the east to maximize your chances of catching Mercury," the magazine said in a press release.
You’ll also need to move quickly. "You’ll have less than half an hour between when Mercury first appears above the horizon, and when it essentially gets lost in the glare of the rising sun," Sky&Telescope wrote.
Because the planets all travel on the plane of the solar system known as the ecliptic, they will shine in a row like that. However, they will not be as close as they appear; each of these worlds is millions of miles away from the others. Still, the show is not to be missed; the last time we saw these five planets in this configuration was in 2004, according to Sky&Telescope.
The best chance to see the spectacle may be on June 24. According to the magazine, Mercury should rise about an hour before the sun. Even better, the crescent moon will pass between Venus and Mars, "serving as a proxy Earth."
However, the planets will be further apart, with a maximum range of 107 degrees between Mercury and Saturn. (Your clenched fist held at arm’s length covers about 10 degrees of sky.)
That said, if you’re clouded out or unavailable on these dates, all five worlds should be visible through much of June.
Conjunctions involving fewer worlds are very common in Earth’s sky, and we want to make sure you’re ready for the next opportunity when that happens.
Conjunctions involving fewer worlds are common in the Earth’s sky, and we want to make sure you’re ready for the next time one occurs.
If you want to see planets in the night sky, check out our guide to the best telescope deals right now. If you need equipment, check out our best astrophotography lenses to get ready for the next planet sighting.
During a high-level discussion of NASA’s goals for human space exploration, we got an early look at what a 30-day crewed mission to Mars’ surface could eventually look like.
It’s an exciting prospect that, while many years, if not decades, away, demonstrates the agency’s dedication to realizing humanity’s dream of setting foot on Mars for the first time in history.
Kurt "Spuds" Vogel, NASA’s director of space architectures, described what such a mission might entail. To make the months-long journey there, the agency envisions a habitat spacecraft powered by a hybrid rocket stage that combines chemical and electric propulsion.
Two crew members would remain in orbit,
while the other two would travel to Mars’ surface. The latter would have access to supplies sent to the surface ahead of time via a 25-ton Mars lander, which would provide surface power and mobility, as well as a pre-deployed crew ascent vehicle to get them both back into orbit later.
Vogel suggests that the two crew members could spend up to an Earth month on the desolate Martian surface by living inside a pressurized rover that would provide habitation as well as allow them to complete scientific objectives.
"Our assumption here is the crew will be deconditioned," Vogel said during the talk, "and we’ll need as much time to adapt to the partial gravity."
Gravity on Mars is only roughly a third of that on Earth.
"So we want to maximize the science so we allow them to drive around before they become conditioned enough to get in the space suits and walk and maximize that science in 30 days," he added.
In the not-too-distant future,
missions to Mars could range from 30 days on the surface, which would take just under two Earth years to complete factoring in travel times, to nearly 500 days on the surface, long-stay missions that could take 916 days to complete.
Given the enormous logistics and costs involved, Vogel and his team concluded that 30 days on the surface was far more feasible.
NASA hopes to apply what we will eventually learn from exploring the Moon’s surface to spending time on Mars’ surface.
However, before any such missions can begin, the space agency faces a mountain of work. NASA is just getting ready to launch its Artemis I mission, an unmanned trip around the Moon and back, with the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft set to launch later this year.
From there, NASA intends to establish
a more permanent presence on the Moon, the Lunar Gateway, as a stepping stone for astronauts to be transferred to the surface, and eventually develop the Transit Habitat, a conceptual spacecraft meant to house astronauts on their much, much longer journey to Mars.
In other words, it could be a long time before we get a better idea of what a crewed journey to the Martian surface might look like.
However, NASA has clearly done its homework and is now seeking input and feedback on its ambitious timeline.
Breakthrough Starshot, an international research project, recently provided an update on its plans to send a probe to Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighboring star system.
Before that, it will have to develop and test a new type of spacecraft propulsion system that uses a lightsail and a laser beam array to achieve the enormous speeds required for interstellar travel within our lifetimes, according to an Australian National University (ANU) press release.
A 40 trillion kilometer journey through space
Breakthrough Starshot’s ultra-lightweight spacecraft will have to travel four light-years to reach Alpha Centauri. To put it another way, our nearest neighboring star system is a mind-shattering 40,208,000,000,000 (40 trillion) km away from Earth.
As a point of reference, today’s fastest and most reliable technology for long-distance space travel is the ion thruster, which is propelling NASA’s DART mission to a nearby asteroid at speeds of 15,000 mph (24,000 km/h). However, NASA estimates that using an ion thruster would take 18,000 years, or approximately 2,700 human generations, to reach Alpha Centauri.
The Breakthrough Starshot team believes
that by using lasers on Earth, its spacecraft will be able to travel the distance to Alpha Centauri in only 20 years. If the probe spacecraft does reach its destination, it will return the first-ever images taken from another solar system, providing a never-before-seen window into distant planets that may or may not resemble Earth.
The ANU team outlined their concept in a new research paper, which is designed to make travel to Alpha Centauri a feasible proposition. The team is working on a tiny probe with a lightsail that will be powered by an Earth-based laser array. Throughout its interstellar journey, the laser array will focus millions of beams on the sail, allowing it to reach incredible speeds.
"To cover the vast distances between Alpha Centauri and our own solar system, we must think outside the box and forge a new way for interstellar space travel," Dr. Bandutunga, from the Applied Metrology Laboratories at the ANU Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics, explains.
"Once on its way, the sail will fly through the vacuum of space for 20 years before reaching its destination. During its flyby of Alpha Centauri, it will record images and scientific measurements which it will broadcast back to Earth."
Interstellar spaceflight powered by 100 million lasers
Breakthrough Starshot and the ANU team rely on the advancement of several key technologies to develop their spacecraft. Lightsails, for example, has only recently been demonstrated to be a viable mode of space travel. LightSail 2, a Carl Sagan-inspired project, successfully lifted its orbital trajectory around Earth by 3.2 kilometers in 2019 using a lightsail, or solarsail, propelled by photons from the Sun.
The main challenge, however, will be the ANU team’s cutting-edge laser array proposal, which will require precisely training millions of lasers to work in unison. "The Breakthrough Starshot program estimates the total required optical power to be about 100 GW — about 100 times the capacity of the world’s largest battery today," Dr. Ward, from the ANU Research School of Physics, says. "To achieve this, we estimate the number of lasers required to be approximately 100 million."
To keep their lasers pointing precisely at the lightsail for the duration of the journey, the ANU team proposes using a ‘guide laser’ satellite in Earth’s orbit, which will act as the conductor, making sure the entire laser array is pointing at the right coordinates. This, alongside an algorithm designed to pre-correct the light from the array, will help to account for the atmosphere distortion the rest of the Earth-bound lasers will suffer.
Breakthrough Starshot is one of Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Initiatives, a set of scientific and technological efforts aimed at finding life outside our solar system. If the lightsail prototype is successful, it might reach the planets around our closest star, Alpha Centauri, during our lifetime. The project’s success would thereby raise humans to the status of interstellar species.
New research shows that our Moon once had an atmosphere 3 to 4 billion years ago. It formed when volcanic eruptions rocked the ancient satellite, propelling gases above its surface too rapidly for them to seep into space. The surface of the Moon is peppered with impact basins filled with volcanic basalt. These basalt plains, called maria, were formed when plumes of magma from inside the Moon erupted to the surface, creating lava flows. Astronauts from the Apollo missions brought back samples from the maria to Earth, and we now know that the lava flows contained carbon monoxide and other gas components, sulfur, and even the building blocks of water.
Our Moon has no atmosphere now,
as it lacks a strong enough magnetic field and sufficient mass to hold an atmosphere around it. Unlike Earth, which has sufficient mass and magnetism to hang on to an atmosphere, any atmosphere around the Moon would quickly be stripped away by solar winds. However, the new research indicates that the Moon did briefly have an atmosphere before that happened.
The team used the samples to calculate how much gas rose and accumulated to form the transient atmosphere. They found that the volcanic activity peaked about 3.5 billion years ago, which was when the atmosphere was at its thickest. Once it formed, it persisted for around 70 million years before it was stripped away and lost in space. During the period when the Moon had an atmosphere, it was almost three times closer to Earth, and therefore would have appeared much bigger in the sky.