Funding for the US National Science Foundation, the largest financer of scientific funding in the world, has been frozen by the DOGE operation headed by Elon Musk. Harvard University is suing the Trump administration for restoration of $2.2 billion cut from its funding after it refused to delete topics from its curriculum as directed; even if they win, it seems unlikely that they’ll get the money back or that the judge will remain long in place. Anticipated cuts to NASA’s science budget were said to be 20%, then 40%, and now 50%, which will mean the cutting of existing projects as well as termination of new ones. Nature describes this as a rumour, but most news sources treat it as definite. Environmental studies are already on the chopping block, at NASA and its sister National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The VERITAS Venus mission (Fig. 1) is to be scrubbed, years before it would be ready, but so is the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope (Fig. 2), which is near launch. Nancy Grace Roman’s lifetime work for women in science has already been removed from NASA’s websites, by executive order, and the cutting of all references to diversity or equality has reached absurd lengths with the removal of the B-29 which dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, the Enola Gay. (The remake of The Dam Busters had a similar problem with the name of Guy Gibson’s dog, but that word has become offensive nowadays, not just changed its meaning.)
In the last surviving element of space cooperation with Russia, the Soyuz MS-27 capsule brought the rest of the Expedition 73 crew to the International Space Station on April 8th (Figs. 3 & 4), joining the Crew 10 astronauts (Fig. 5), after which the Expedition 72 crew handed the station over and returned to Earth. Both Soyuz crews had two Russian cosmonauts and one US astronaut – the latter was Don Pettit, whose photos from the ISS have appeared here several times (see for example ‘Space Notes’, ON, 1st December 2024, Fig. 9).
He is NASA’s oldest serving astronaut (Fig. 6) and during his return he celebrated his 70th birthday twice, first on Moscow time and again on arrival in Houston – probably by NASA Learjet via Prestwick, if he followed the usual route.
The handover to Expedition 73 (Fig. 7) gave command of the ISS to Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the third JAXA astronaut to take command of the station (Fig. 8). As I’ve previously mentioned, JAXA’s two-part Kibo module is an important component of the ISS, used particularly for material processing research. Elon Musk continues to call for the station to be de-orbited now, a little strangely since his Dragon and Crew Dragon capsules are under contract to supply cargo and personnel to it, still more importantly since the recent problems with the Boeing Starliner. Russia has announced that before the ISS is de-orbited around 2030, it will remove its recent ‘Nauka’ module to an independent Russian station, and I still think that Europe, Canada and Japan might all think about doing the same to private US ones (see ‘Space Notes’, ON, 7th July 2024).
Meanwhile, on 24th April, China launched Shenzou-20, its latest three-man mission to its Tiangong-2 space station (Figs. 9 & 10). One more will equal the total number of Apollo spacecraft flown in the 1960s and 70s, and as the first six Apollos were unmanned, Shenzou has already beaten their record, with a more advanced capsule already in the wings.
On a less serious note, the all-woman suborbital flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft duly took place on April 14th (Fig. 11). The mission drew criticism from feminists, one headline calling it ‘A giant step back for womankind’, while others attacked the lack of scientific content and what they considered a waste of money. Interestingly, the online replies which I saw mostly said that it’s rich people’s money, and they should be allowed to do what they like with it, which is quite a turnaround from the criticisms I’ve heard of space missions, from the early 60s onwards. All of the crew talked about how deeply they’d been moved by the view of the Earth, and the need for peace and unity, even quoting William Shatner after his flight, but omitting that he hated the experience, which left him deeply depressed.
Belatedly reporters stopped calling it ‘the first all-woman flight’ and found various ways to say that it was the first without a man aboard since Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight in 1963. I might have met her, at the end of the 1980s, if proposals to bring her to the Edinburgh International Science Festival had come off. It’s to be hoped we might have got on better than my friend Jim Oberg (see ‘Shuttle Trainer, Houston, 27th July 1986′, ON, August 14th, 2022), when she came to the Johnson Space Centre, where Jim was the official expert on the Soviet programme. She had him ejected from her lecture for asking who her backups were; he described the incident in his book Red Star in Orbit (Random House, 1981 – Fig. 12), and the backups have since been named. After leaving the cosmonaut programme Tereshkova went on to a distinguished career in women’s organisations around the world, as described in her biography Valentina: The First Woman in Space (Antonella Lothian, The Pentland Press, 1993 – Fig. 13). Presumably that’s now being cut from NASA’s records, like Nancy Grace Roman’s.
On its way to the Trojan asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter, on April 20th the Lucy spacecraft made its scheduled flyby of the Main Belt asteroid Donaldjohanson, prompting the media belatedly to realise that by coincidence, Johanson was the discoverer of the Lucy fossil in Olduvai Gorge, which opened up whole realms of human prehistory. The flyby was at 600 miles, so close that the video hitherto released doesn’t show the whole of it (Fig. 14). It will take at least a week for the full data to be released.
One article beforehand warned us to ‘prepare for surprises’, as happen with most first encounters. Donaldjohanson has proved to be a ‘contact binary’, two bodies joined by a smooth neck where loose material has flowed towards the centre of mass, although surface gravity must be extremely low. Similar formations have been observed at the asteroids Toutatis (Fig. 15) and Itokawa (Fig. 16), imaged by Chang’e-2 and Hyabusa-1 respectively, and at the comets Borelly (Fig. 17) and Hartley 2 (Fig. 18), by Deep Space 1 and Epoxi-Deep Impact, as well as the ‘Duck’ of Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Fig. 19).
The asteroid Eros has a similar appearance (Fig. 20), and again material has flowed downslope there, although curiously the two parts of it appear to have similar compositions and origins, unlike the two very different parts of the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, photographed by New Horizons in 2019 (Fig. 21), the smaller of which is actually disc-shaped (Fig. 22).
A number of smaller asteroids have proved to be more nearly spherical, and it looks as if they may be the products of multiple collisions, whereas slightly larger ones like Donaldjohanson (Fig. 23) may be the products of more gentle mergers, perhaps after orbiting one another like Ida and its satellite Dactyl, imaged by the Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter (Fig. 24), and asteroid Dinkinesh and its contact binary companion, photographed by Lucy on the way out (Fig. 25).
Even slightly larger solo ones may be original Solar System bodies, like Lutetia (Figs. 26 & 27), imaged by Rosetta on its way to Churyumov-Gerasimenko. But at this early stage, nobody will be very surprised if the whole scenario changes again.
The surface composition of Donaldjohanson is particularly interesting because of its location, where no asteroid has been visited before. Unlike Dinkinesh (Fig. 28), Donaldjohanson is in the outer region of the Main Asteroid Belt (Figs. 29 & 30), and is expected to be ‘carbonaceous’, rich in water and organic compounds dating from the origin of the Solar System, like some of the samples recently recovered from asteroid Bennu but clearly from elsewhere. Did they provide Earth with its oceans and precursors of life, or did they all come from the planet’s interior? The debate is about to get new input.
With a 50% cut in science funding in the offing, it feels like the early days of the Reagan administration, when he proposed to switch off the Voyager spacecraft after the Uranus flyby of 1986. But there are many more missions out there now, starting with the ageing Voyagers out in interstellar space, and New Horizons about to cross the heliopause and join them. At the other end of the Solar System we have SOHO and Discvr at the Sun-Earth L1 point, Lucy and Psyche on their way to asteroids, Juno orbiting Jupiter and Europa Clipper on its way there. I have a nasty feeling that NASA will be ordered to switch off at least one of them, to show willing. Lunar missions presumably will continue, as steps towards Trump’s ambition to put the US flag back on the Moon during his Presidency, even if he has to change the Constitution to extend it. But what about Mars missions, current and planned? What use are Curiosity, Perseverance and MAVEN, to Musk’s plans for colonisation? Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Climate Observer might be retained, but even they are getting long in the tooth, and it’s noticeable that the twin-probe ESCAPADE mission has not launched as expected. I think we can kiss goodbye to the Mars Sample Return, which is already in deep trouble due to delays and rising costs, when Musk is planning to put people on Mars much sooner. Unless NASA can come up with a plan to beat the Chinese sample return, which is expected around 2030, I don’t see that ever happening.
It’s deeply disappointing to add NASA space science to the list of astronomy and space facilities under threat, such as Herstmonceux Observatory, Stonehenge and the European Southern Observatory, all of which I’ve covered in recent months. At least the Mills Observatory in Dundee has apparently been saved, after more than 600 people turned up for last month’s alignment of the planets. Let us be grateful for small mercies.
Duncan’s recent books are available through Amazon; details are on Duncan’s website, www.duncanlunan.com.