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Hello readers!

Welcome back to Launchpad, and happy New Year! As I mentioned in last month’s wrap-up of 2023, space flight in 2024 is going to be all about moons – there are a lot of missions to Earth’s moon, Europa Clipper is heading to Jupiter’s moon Europa and there’s even a mission to observe the asteroid moon Dimorphos. So I thought for the first Launchpad of the year, I’d put aside my long-running feud with our moon and talk a bit about why it’s important and why we’re ramping up our lunar exploration now.

What's happening up there

Credit: NASA/SwRI/MSSS

Extreme close-up of Jupiter’s moon Io captured by Juno spacecraft

NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew past Io on 30 December and took one of our best pictures yet of this moon of Jupiter. Read more

Radio bursts from space are exhibiting a strange ‘sad trombone’ effect

Astronomers have spotted a set of 35 mysterious flashes of radio waves from space that seem to show a strange phenomenon of decreasing frequency that has never been seen before. Read more

The stargazing events to watch out for in 2024

From a solar eclipse in April to a meteor shower in May, it’s time to plan your cosmic calendar for the year. Read more

Blast from the past

In the beginning, Earth floated alone in its perpetual journey around and around the sun. It continued like that for around 100 million years after the birth of the solar system, before its promenade was interrupted by a Mars-sized object called Theia. This doomed interloper slammed into Earth with extraordinary force, vaporising a large portion of the planet and leaving a huge cloud of debris. Slowly, from the debris of two worlds, the moon formed.

Fast forward about 4.5 billion years, and things in the solar system are much less chaotic. The moon’s nearly non-existent atmosphere and lack of geologic activity means that it has stayed pretty much the same for a large portion of those years, slowly acquiring craters as smaller objects have fallen onto it.

The moon’s history is one of the biggest reasons it’s so important to explore it now. On Earth, the mixture of tectonic and biological activity, along with flowing water, has erased a great deal of the evidence of how the solar system evolved, like a childhood video that was accidentally reused to record a TV movie. But the moon still holds a record of our solar system’s youth. And because Earth and the moon are so close together, that means it has a record of our planet’s environment in its youth, as well.

Credit: NASA

To me, that’s a convincing argument for sending lots of robots to the moon to explore, which is what NASA and many other space agencies are doing in 2024 – some of the many upcoming missions will investigate and attempt to mine ice on the moon, work on how to deal with the sticky lunar dust and demonstrate a variety of new types of rover. But you may notice that those examples seem to be aimed more at preparing for human exploration than at learning the moon’s history.

That’s where I become a bit unsure – given how much more difficult it is to send humans to the moon than robots, is it really worth it? Popular arguments for crewed missions to the moon include the fact that humans are faster and more agile at doing science than robots are, more observant and better able to improvise. There’s also little doubt that seeing a person on the moon again would be incredible and inspire people. Even I, with all my general cynicism, would surely be in tears about the great things humanity can accomplish (and a bit jealous of the moon walker). It may even simply be human nature to venture as far as we can. I’ll leave judgments about the value of human space exploration up to you, but regardless: huge teams are working very hard on it, and people will be walking on the moon soon.

Much of what we know about the moon now comes from the limited samples brought back to Earth by the Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 70s, so there’s no doubt that sending humans back again and returning samples will give us a wealth of information about Earth’s nearest neighbour and the early solar system more generally. There are practical pluses too – if we want to send humans to Mars or even further afield, we need to test all the new technologies necessary for those journeys, and the moon is inarguably the best place to do a lot of that testing. And if space agencies can establish a permanent human presence there, the study of the moon and of how to live in space could proceed much faster, and lunar science and industry could start to become relatively routine.

The breathtaking advances in artificial intelligence and a growing urgency to find climate change solutions are set to dominate headlines in 2024. Stay ahead with New Scientist for just $1.50 a week and let us guide you through the coming year. 

Picture of the month

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

I had a few different contenders for picture of the month, but this one won out because, well, just look at it. This picture of Uranus from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the planet, its rings and 14 of its moons – those are the blue dots, many of them clustered just outside the rings. We can only see Uranus like this because it orbits the sun tilted over on its side, allowing us to not only catch views of the rings face-on but also examine the planet’s north polar cloud cap, which changes with the seasons. The seasons on Uranus are particularly extreme because of its tilt, so observing seasonal shifts there in the coming years should provide some fascinating insights.

From the inbox

Shirley wrote: “How would Earth change if it captured a second moon? For argument's sake let's say a moon about the same size as the one we already have? Obviously huge disruption in the few centuries after it arrives, but what then?”

First off, I love this question – readers, please send me more wild hypotheticals, they are my favourite. Second, well, if we captured another moon, it would probably be pretty bad. As you said, for the first little while, as the new moon settled into a regular orbit, the tides would go absolutely haywire, earthquakes would abound and dormant volcanoes would begin to erupt again. There would certainly be mass extinctions, although some species would probably survive. I imagine at least some humans would make it through with the help of technological adaptations.

After the new moon’s capture, a lot would depend on its eventual orbit and how its location relates to that of the original moon. That would affect how extreme the tides stay, how those tides impact the moons themselves (strong enough and we’ll end up with a volcanic moon like Io) and of course the appearance of the night sky. But regardless, double-mooned nights would be a fair amount brighter than they are now. I don’t know enough to say how that would mess with our circadian rhythms, but it certainly couldn’t be good for nocturnal animals and those that navigate by moonlight. Predators might have it easy, but prey animals would have to get better at hiding. And of course, the extra brightness would mean that we wouldn’t be able to see very many stars.

The long read

Credit: Ken Chen

The last supernova to go off in the Milky Way was in 1604, so we're long overdue for another one. Particle physicists are especially excited about this prospect, as supernovae emit ghostly, shape-shifting particles called neutrinos, which don't fit with our best model of the particles and forces of nature. In fact, they're so excited that they've been constructing several multi-billion dollar neutrino experiments in the hope of pinning down these mysterious particles – and potentially uncovering what dark matter is too. But only if they can build their detectors in time. Read more

Thank you for reading! If you have any comments, questions or wild hypotheticals about space, let me know by emailing me at launchpad@newscientist.com and I’ll try to answer them in an upcoming newsletter.

And remember… Earth actually does sometimes have more than one moon! But these bonus moons, which are really just captured asteroids, are small and generally transient – they spend a while orbiting Earth before being disturbed and drifting away.

Leah Crane

Reporter, New Scientist

Email me at launchpad@newscientist.com to get in touch
Follow me at @downhereonearth

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