NOAA

A “cosmic carpool” is traveling to a distant space weather observation post

heliophysics, heliosphere, IMAP, NASA, NOAA, Science, solar wind, Space, space weather, Sun / Tim Belzer / September 24, 2025

“It’s like a bus. You wait for one and then three come at the same time.”

NASA’s IMAP spacecraft (top), the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory (left), and NOAA’s first operational space weather satellite (right) shared a ride to space on a Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday. Credit: SpaceX

Scientists loaded three missions worth nearly $1.6 billion on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for launch Wednesday, toward an orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, to measure the supersonic stream of charged particles emanating from the Sun.

One of the missions, from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will beam back real-time observations of the solar wind to provide advance warning of geomagnetic storms that could affect power grids, radio communications, GPS navigation, air travel, and satellite operations.

The other two missions come from NASA, with research objectives that include studying the boundary between the Solar System and interstellar space and observing the rarely seen outermost layer of our own planet’s atmosphere.

All three spacecraft were mounted to the top of a Falcon 9 rocket for liftoff at 7: 30 am EDT (11: 30 UTC) on Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket arced on a trajectory heading east from Florida’s Space Coast, shed its reusable first stage booster for a landing offshore, then fired its upper stage engine twice to propel the trio of missions into deep space.

A few minutes later, each of the spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9 to begin a multi-month journey toward their observing locations in halo orbits around the L1 Lagrange point, a gravitational balance point roughly 900,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth toward the Sun. The combined pull from the Earth and Sun at this location provides a stable region for satellites to operate in, and a good location for instruments designed for solar science.

Liftoff of IMAP and its two co-passengers on a Falcon 9 rocket. Credit: SpaceX

Seeing the big picture

The primary mission launched on Wednesday is called the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). The spin-stabilized IMAP spacecraft is shaped like a donut, with a diameter of about 8 feet (2.4 meters) and 10 science instruments looking inward toward the Sun and outward toward the edge of the heliosphere, the teardrop-shaped magnetic bubble blown outward by the solar wind.

At the edge of the heliosphere, the solar wind runs up against the interstellar medium, the gas, dust, and radiation in the space between the stars. This boundary remains a poorly understood frontier in space science, but it’s important because the heliosphere protects the Solar System from damaging galactic cosmic rays.

“IMAP is a mission of firsts,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate. “It’ll be the first spacecraft dedicated to mapping the heliosphere’s outer boundary, a key piece in the heliophysics puzzle about the Sun’s influence on our Solar System. To do this, IMAP will spin every 15 seconds to measure the invisible using a very comprehensive suite of revolutionary instruments.”

During each rotation, IMAP’s sensors will scoop up all sorts of stuff: ions traveling 1 million miles per hour in the solar wind, interstellar dust particles, and energetic neutral atoms kicked back into the Solar System from the edge of the heliosphere.

“These energetic neutral atoms act as cosmic messengers,” said David McComas, IMAP’s principal investigator from Princeton University. “They’re unaffected by magnetic fields so they can propagate all the way in from the boundaries to Earth’s orbit and be measured by IMAP.”

Tracking these energetic neutral atoms will allow scientists to map the boundary of the heliosphere and what shapes it. The Sun’s movement through the Milky Way galaxy forms a shock wave on the front side of the heliosphere, similar to the wave created by the bow of a ship moving through water.

Artist’s illustration of the IMAP spacecraft in orbit. Credit: NASA

“We ended up with this fabulous observatory that measures everything,” McComas said. “The particles coming out from the Sun are moving out in the solar wind to get to the outer heliosphere. Some fraction of them become neutralized and come right back, and we observe them a few years later as ENAs (energetic neutral atoms). So, we’re really observing the entire life cycle of this particle energization and how it interacts at the boundaries of the heliosphere.”

IMAP follows a much smaller mission, named IBEX, that carried just two instruments to begin probing the edge of the heliosphere in 2008. IBEX discovered an unexpected ribbon-like pattern of energetic neutral emissions coming from the front of the heliosphere. Scientists have developed several theories to explain the ribbon signature. One of the theories postulates that the ribbon represents a group of particles that somehow leaked from the heliosphere and bounced around interstellar space before returning to the Solar System.

“It was found that interstellar matter, particles, and neutrals streaming in from outside the Solar System, actually… have a significant effect in how the entire heliosphere behaves,” said Shri Kanekal, IMAP’s mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

IBEX’s discoveries fueled enthusiasm among space scientists for a more sophisticated follow-up mission like IMAP. NASA selected IMAP for development in 2018, and the $782 million mission will spend at least two years conducting scientific observations. The spacecraft was built at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The ribbon remains one of IBEX’s biggest discoveries. It refers to a vast, diagonal swath of energetic neutrals, painted across the front of the heliosphere. Credit: NASA/IBEX

“Immense value”

Two years after NASA approved IMAP for development, the agency’s heliophysics division selected another mission to head for the L1 Lagrange point. This smaller spacecraft, called the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, hitched a ride to space with IMAP on Wednesday.

The $97 million Carruthers mission carries two co-aligned ultraviolet imagers designed for simultaneous observations of Earth’s exosphere, a tenuous cloud of hydrogen gas that fades into the airless void of outer space about halfway to the Moon. The hydrogen atoms in the exosphere generate a faint glow called the geocorona, which is only detectable in ultraviolet light at great distances. Images of the entire geocorona can’t be collected from a satellite in Earth orbit.

The mission is named for George Carruthers, an engineer and solar physicist who developed an ultraviolet camera placed on the Moon by the Apollo 16 astronauts in 1972. This camera captured the first view of the geocorona, a term coined by Carruthers himself.

The 531-pound (241-kilogram) Carruthers observatory was built by BAE Systems, with instruments provided by the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab.

There’s a lot for scientists to learn from the Carruthers mission, because they know little about the exosphere or geocorona.

“We actually don’t know exactly how big it is,” said Lara Waldrop, the mission’s principal investigator from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “We don’t know whether it’s spherical or oval, how much it changes over time or even the density of its constituent hydrogen atoms.”

What scientists do know is that the exosphere plays an important role in shaping how solar storms affect the Earth. The exosphere is also the path by which the Earth is (very) slowly losing atomic hydrogen from water vapor lofted high into the atmosphere. “This process is extremely slow at Earth, and I’m talking billions of years. It is certainly nothing to worry about,” Waldrop ensures.

This image illustrates the location of the Sun-Earth L1 Lagrange point, where IMAP, Carruthers, and SWFO-L1 will operate. Credit: NOAA

The final spacecraft aboard Wednesday’s launch is the world’s first operational satellite dedicated to monitoring space weather. This $692 million mission is called the Space Weather Follow On-L1, or SWFO-L1, and serves as an “early warning beacon” for the potentially devastating effects of geomagnetic storms, said Irene Parker, deputy assistant administrator for systems at NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service.

NOAA’s previous satellites peer down at Earth from low-Earth orbit or geosynchronous orbit, gathering data for numerical weather models and tracking the real-time movement of hurricanes and severe storms. Until now, NOAA has relied upon a hodgepodge of research satellites to monitor the solar wind upstream from Earth. SWFO-L1, also built by BAE Systems, is the first mission designed from the start for real-time, around-the-clock solar wind observations.

“We’ll use SWFO-L1 to buy power grid, airline, and satellite operators precious time to act before billion-dollar storms strike,” said Clinton Wallace, director of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

Once on station around the L1 Lagrange point, the satellite will be renamed SOLAR-1 before NOAA declares it operational in mid-2026. The platform hosts four instruments, one of which is a coronagraph to detect the massive eruptions from the Sun that spark geomagnetic storms. The other instruments will sample solar particles as they pass over the spacecraft about a half-hour before they reach our planet.

These instruments are akin to weather satellites that detect a hurricane’s formation over the remote ocean and hurricane hunters that take direct measurements of the storm to assess its intensity before landfall, NOAA said.

Bundling IMAP, Carruthers, and SWFO-L1 onto the same rocket saved at least tens of millions of dollars in launch costs. Normally, they would have needed three different rockets.

Rideshare missions to low-Earth orbit are becoming more common, but spacecraft departing for more distant destinations like the L1 Lagrange point are rare. Getting all three missions on the same launch required extensive planning, a stroke of luck, and fortuitous timing.

“This is the ultimate cosmic carpool,” said Joe Westlake, director of NASA’s heliophysics division. “These three missions heading out to the Sun-Earth L1 point riding along together provide immense value for the American taxpayer.”

“It’s like a bus,” Fox said. “You wait for one and then three come at the same time.”

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Trump just made it much harder to track the nation’s worst weather disasters

climate change, climate disasters, doge, extreme weather, NOAA, Policy, Science, trump administration, Weather, wildfires / Kris Guyer / May 9, 2025

The Trump administration’s steep staff cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) triggered shutdowns of several climate-related programs Thursday.

Perhaps most notably, the NOAA announced it would be shuttering the “billion-dollar weather and climate disasters” database for vague reasons. Since 1980, the database made it possible to track the growing costs of the nation’s most devastating weather events, critically pooling various sources of private data that have long been less accessible to the public.

In that time, 403 weather and climate disasters in the US triggered more than $2.945 trillion in costs, and NOAA notes that’s a conservative estimate. Considering that CNN noted the average number of disasters in the past five years jumped from nine annually to 24, shutting down the database could leave communities in the dark on costs of emerging threats. All the NOAA can likely say is to continue looking at the historic data to keep up with trends.

“In alignment with evolving priorities, statutory mandates, and staffing changes, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) will no longer be updating the Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product,” NOAA announced. “All past reports, spanning 1980-2024, and their underlying data remain authoritative, archived, and available,” NOAA said, but no data would be gathered for 2025 or any year after.

According to NCEI’s FAQ, every state has experienced at least one billion-dollar disaster since 1980, while some states, like Texas, have been hit by more than 100. The Central, South, and Southeast regions of the US are most likely to be hurt most by the data loss, as those regions “typically experience a higher frequency of billion-dollar disasters,” the FAQ said.

Trump just made it much harder to track the nation’s worst weather disasters Read More »

Trump’s 2026 budget proposal: Crippling cuts for science across the board

budget, budget proposal, doe, interior, NIH, NOAA, NSF, Science, science funding, trump administration / Rejus Almole / May 3, 2025

Budget document derides research and science-based policy as “woke,” “scams.”

On Friday, the US Office of Management and Budget sent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the Senate’s Appropriations Committee, an outline of what to expect from the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal. As expected, the budget includes widespread cuts, affecting nearly every branch of the federal government.

In keeping with the administration’s attacks on research agencies and the places research gets done, research funding will be taking an enormous hit, with the National Institutes of Health taking a 40 percent cut and the National Science Foundation losing 55 percent of its 2025 budget. But the budget goes well beyond those highlighted items, with nearly every place science gets done or funded targeted for cuts.

Perhaps even more shocking is the language used to justify the cuts, which reads more like a partisan rant than a serious budget document.

Health cuts

Having a secretary of Health and Human Services who doesn’t believe in germ theory is not likely to do good things for US health programs, and the proposed budget will only make matters worse. Kennedy’s planned MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) program would be launched with half a billion in funds, but nearly everything else would take a cut.

The CDC would lose about $3.6 billion from its current budget of $9.6 billion, primarily due to the shuttering of a number of divisions within it: the National Center for Chronic Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion, the National Center for Environmental Health, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and the Global Health Center and its division of Public Health Preparedness and Response. The duties of those offices are, according to the budget document, “duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary.”

Another big hit to HHS comes from the termination of a $4 billion program that helps low-income families cover energy costs. The OMB suggests that these costs will get lower due to expanded energy production and, anyway, the states should be paying for it. Shifting financial burdens to states is a general theme of the document, an approach that will ultimately hit the poorest states hardest, even though these had very high percentages of Trump voters.

The document also says that “This Administration is committed to combatting the scourge of deadly drugs that have ravaged American communities,” while cutting a billion dollars from substance abuse programs within HHS.

But the headline cuts come from the National Institutes of Health, the single largest source of scientific funding in the world. NIH would see its current $48 billion budget chopped by $18 billion and its 27 individual institutes consolidated down to just five. This would result in vast cutbacks to US biomedical research, which is currently acknowledged to be world-leading. Combined with planned cuts to grant overheads, it will cause most research institutions to shrink, and some less well-funded universities may be forced to close facilities.

The justification for the cuts is little more than a partisan rant: “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.” The text then implies that the broken trust is primarily the product of failing to promote the idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab, even though there’s no scientific evidence to indicate that it had.

Climate research hit

The National Science Foundation funds much of the US’s fundamental science research, like physics and astronomy. Earlier reporting that it would see a 56 percent cut to its budget was confirmed. “The Budget cuts funding for: climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science.” Funding would be maintained for AI and quantum computing. All funding for encouraging minority participation in the sciences will also be terminated. The budget was released on the same day that the NSF announced it was joining other science agencies in standardizing on paying 15 percent of its grants’ value for maintaining facilities and providing services to researchers, a cut that would further the financial damage to research institutions.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would see $1.3 billion of its $6.6 billion budget cut, with the primary target being its climate change work. In fact, the budget for NOAA’s weather satellites will be cut to prevent them from including instruments that would make “unnecessary climate measurements.” Apparently, the Administration doesn’t want anyone to be exposed to data that might challenge its narrative that climate change is a scam.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology would lose $350 million for similar reasons. “NIST has long funded awards for the development of curricula that advance a radical climate agenda,” the document suggests, before going on to say that the Institute’s Circular Economy Program, which promotes the efficient reuse of industrial materials, “pushes environmental alarmism.”

The Department of Energy is seeing a $1.1 billion hit to its science budget, “eliminating funding for Green New Scam interests and climate change-related activities.” The DOE will also take hits to policy programs focused on climate change, including $15 billion in cuts to renewable energy and carbon capture spending. Separately, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy will also take a $2.6 billion hit. Over at the Department of the Interior, the US Geological Survey would see its renewable energy programs terminated, as well.

Some of the DOE’s other cuts, however, don’t even make sense given the administration’s priorities. The newly renamed Office of Fossil Energy—something that Trump favors—will still take a $270 million hit, and nuclear energy programs will see $400 million in cuts.

This sort of lack of self-awareness shows up several times in the document. In one striking case, an interior program funding water infrastructure improvements is taking a cut that “reduces funding for programs that have nothing to do with building and maintaining water infrastructure, such as habitat restoration.” Apparently, the OMB is unaware that functioning habitats can help provide ecosystem services that can reduce the need for water infrastructure.

Similarly, over at the EPA, they’re boosting programs for clean drinking water by $36 million, while at the same time cutting loans to states for clean water projects by $2.5 billion. “The States should be responsible for funding their own water infrastructure projects,” the OMB declares. Research at the EPA also takes a hit: “The Budget puts an end to unrestrained research grants, radical environmental justice work, woke climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that influences regulations—none of which are authorized by law.”

An attack on scientific infrastructure

US science couldn’t flourish without an educational system that funnels talented individuals into graduate programs. So, naturally, funding for those is being targeted as well. This is partially a function of the administration’s intention to eliminate the Department of Education, but there also seems to be a specific focus on programs that target low-income individuals.

For example, the GEAR UP program describes itself as “designed to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education.” The OMB document describes it as “a relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate Institutions of Higher Education to engage with low-income students and increase access.” It goes on to claim that this is “not the obstacle it was for students of limited means.”

Similarly, the SEOG program funding is “awarded to an undergraduate student who demonstrates exceptional financial need.” In the OMB’s view, colleges and universities “have used [it] to fund radical leftist ideology instead of investing in students and their success.” Another cut is claimed to eliminate “Equity Assistance Centers that have indoctrinated children.” And “The Budget proposes to end Federal taxpayer dollars being weaponized to indoctrinate new teachers.”

In addition, the federal work-study program, which subsidizes on-campus jobs for needy students, is also getting a billion-dollar cut. Again, the document says that the states can pay for it.

(The education portion also specifically cuts the funding of Howard University, which is both distinct as a federally supported Black university and also notable as being where Kamala Harris got her first degree.)

The end of US leadership

This budget is a recipe for ending the US’s leadership in science. It would do generational damage by forcing labs to shut down, with a corresponding loss of highly trained individuals and one-of-a-kind research materials. At the same time, it will throttle the educational pipeline that could eventually replace those losses. Given that the US is one of the major sources of research funding in the world, if approved, the budget will have global consequences.

To the people within the OMB who prepared the document, these are not losses. The document makes it very clear that they view many instances of scientific thought and evidence-based policy as little more than forms of ideological indoctrination, presumably because the evidence sometimes contradicts what they’d prefer to believe.

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Trump’s 2026 budget proposal: Crippling cuts for science across the board Read More »

US Antarctic Program disrupted by DOGE-induced chaos

McMurdo Research Station, National Science Foundation, NOAA, Science, syndication / Tim Belzer / March 2, 2025

Long-term impacts will affect not only research but also geopolitics.

Credit: Wolfgang Kaehler via Getty

Few agencies have been spared as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has ripped through the United States federal government. Even in Antarctica, scientists and workers are feeling the impacts—and are terrified for what’s to come.

The United States Antarctic Program (USAP) operates three permanent stations in Antarctica. These remote stations are difficult to get to and difficult to maintain; scattered across the continent, they are built on volcanic hills, polar plateaus, and icy peninsulas.

But to the US, the science has been worth it. At these stations, over a thousand people each year come to the continent to live and work. Scientists operate a number of major research projects, studying everything from climate change and rising sea levels to the cosmological makeup and origins of the universe itself. With funding cuts and layoffs looming, Antarctic scientists and experts don’t know if their research will be able to continue, how US stations will be sustained, or what all this might mean for the continent’s delicate geopolitics.

“Even brief interruptions will result in people walking away and not coming back,” says Nathan Whitehorn, an associate professor and Antarctic scientist at Michigan State University. “It could easily take decades to rebuild.”

The USAP is managed by the National Science Foundation. Last week, a number of NSF program managers staffed on Antarctic projects were fired as part of a wider purge at the agency. The program managers are critical for maintaining communication with the infrastructure and logistics arm of the NSF, and the contractors for the USAP, as well as planning deployment for scientists to the continent, keeping track of the budgets, and funding the maintenance and operations work. “I have no idea what we do without them,” says another Antarctic scientist who has spent time on the continent, who along with several others WIRED granted anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

“Without them, everything stops,” says a scientist whose NSF project manager was fired last week. “I have no idea who I am supposed to report to now or what happens to submitted proposals.”

Scientific research happens at all of the stations. At the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, scientists work on the South Pole Telescope and BICEP telescope, both of which study the cosmic background radiation and the evolution of the universe; IceCube, a cubic-kilometer detector designed to study neutrino physics and high energy emission from astrophysical sources; and the Atmospheric Research Observatory that studies climate science and is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Mass firings are also expected at the NOAA.)

“The climate science [at the South Pole Station] is super unique,” an Antarctic scientist says. “The site has so little pollution that we call it ‘the cleanest air on Earth,’ and they have been monitoring the ozone layer and CO2 content in the atmosphere for many decades.”

Other directives from the Donald Trump administration have directly affected daily life on those stations. “Gender-inclusive terms on housing documents” have been removed from Antarctic staffer forms, a source familiar with the situation at McMurdo Station tells WIRED. “It asked if you had a preference with which gender you housed with,” the source says. “That’s all been removed.”

Staffers have already pushed back. “People have been painting waste bins saying “Antarctica is for ALL” in rainbow, people’s email signatures [have] pride additions, [others] keep adding preferred pronouns to emails,” the source says.

“There’s a sense of unease on the station like people have never felt before,” they add. “The job still has to get done, even though people feel like the next shoe can drop at any moment.”

That unease extends to their own job security. “There are some people currently at the South Pole that are worried about losing their jobs any day now,” a source with familiarity of the situation tells WIRED. Workers present at the station aren’t able to physically leave until October, and a midseason firing, or loss of funding, would present a unique set of challenges.

Sources are also bracing for at least a 50 percent reduction in the NSF’s budget due to DOGE cuts. These cuts are sending Antarctic scientists with assistants and graduate students scrambling. “We didn’t know if we could pay graduate students,” says one scientist. While research is conducted on the continent, scientists bring their findings back to the US to process and analyze. A lot of the funding also operates the science itself: For one project that requires electricity to run detectors, the scientist “was paranoid we would not be able to literally pay bills for an experiment starved for data.” That hasn’t come to fruition yet, but as funding cycles restart in the coming weeks and months, scientists are on tenterhooks.

Sources tell WIRED that Germany, Canada, Spain, and China have already started taking advantage of that uncertainty by recruiting US scientists focused on Antarctica.

“Foreign countries are actively recruiting my colleagues, and some have already left,” says one Antarctic scientist. “My students are looking at jobs overseas now … people have been coming [to the US] to do science my whole life. Now people are going the other way.”

“Now is a great time to see if anyone wants to jump ship,” another Antarctic scientist says. “I do worry about a brain drain of tenured academics, or students who are shunted out.”

“The damage caused by gutting the [Antarctic] science budget like this is going to last generations,” says another.

Throughout DOGE’s cuts to the federal government, representatives have said that if something needs to be brought back, it could be. In some cases, reversals have already happened: The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired staffers working on preventing the spread of bird flu and is trying to rehire them.

But in Antarctica, a reversal won’t necessarily work. “One of the really scary things about this is that if the Antarctic program budget is cut, then they’ll very quickly get to the point where they can’t even keep the station open, much less science projects going,” an Antarctic scientist tells WIRED. “If the South Pole [station] is shut down, it’s basically nearly impossible to bring it back up. Everything will freeze and get buried in snow. And some other country will likely immediately take over.

Others share this fear of a station takeover. “Even if science funding is cut back, there is an urgent need for the US to invest in icebreakers and polar airlift capability otherwise at some point the US-managed South Pole station might not be serviceable,” says Klaus Dodds, an Antarctic expert and professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London.

Experts are concerned that countries like Russia and China—who have already been eagle-eyed on continental influence—will quickly jostle to fill the power vacuum. “Presumably it would be humiliating for anyone who wishes to promote ‘America First’ to witness China offer to take over the occupation and management of the base at the heart of Antarctica. China is a very determined polar power,” says Dodds.

The political outcome of the US pulling back from its Antarctic research and presence could be dire, sources tell WIRED.

Antarctica isn’t owned by any one country. Instead it’s governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, which protects Antarctica and the scientific research taking place on the continent, and forbids mining and nuclear activity. Some countries, including China and Russia, have indicated that they would be interested in rule changes to the Treaty system, particularly around resource extraction and fishing restrictions. The US, traditionally, has played a key role in championing the treaty: “Many of the leading polar scientists and social scientists are either US citizens and/or have been enriched by contact with US-led programs,” says Dodds.

That leadership role could change quickly. The US also participates in a number of international collaborations involving major Antarctic scientific projects. A US pullback, Whitehorn says, “makes it very hard to regard the US as a reliable partner, so I think there will be a lot less interest in accepting US leadership in such things … The uncertainty will drive people away and sacrifice the leadership the US already has.”

“If the NSF can’t function, or we don’t fund it, projects with long lead times can just die,” another scientist says. “I’m sure international partners would be happy to partner elsewhere. This is what it means to lose US competitiveness.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

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From 900 miles away, the US government recorded audio of the Titan sub implosion

implosion, NOAA, Science, submersible, Titan / Paul Patrick / February 12, 2025

An image showing the audio file of the Titan implosion. — The waveform of the recording.

From SOSUS to wind farms

Back in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, this kind of sonic technology was deeply important to the military, which used the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) to track things like Soviet submarine movements. (Think of Hunt for Red October spy games here.) Using underwater beamforming and triangulation, the system could identify submarines many hundreds or even thousands of miles away. The SOSUS mission was declassified in 1991.

Today, high-tech sonic buoys, gliders, tags, and towed arrays are also used widely in non-military research. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in particular, runs a major system of oceanic sound acquisition devices that do everything from tracking animal migration patterns to identifying right whale calving season to monitoring offshore wind turbines and their effects on marine life.

But NOAA also uses its network of devices to monitor non-animal noise—including earthquakes, boats, and oil-drilling seismic surveys.

A photo of the Titan's remains on the sea floor. — What’s left of the Titan, scattered across the ocean floor.

In June 2023, these devices picked up an audible anomaly located at the general time and place of the Titan implosion. The recording was turned over to the investigation board and has now been cleared for public release.

The Titan is still the object of both investigations and lawsuits; critics have long argued that the submersible was not completely safe due to its building technique (carbon fiber versus the traditional titanium) and its wireless and touchscreen-based control systems (including a Logitech game controller).

“At some point, safety just is pure waste,” Rush once told a journalist. Unfortunately, it can be hard to know exactly where that point is. But it is now possible to hear what it sounds like when you’re on the wrong side of it—and far below the surface of the ocean.

From 900 miles away, the US government recorded audio of the Titan sub implosion Read More »

NOAA says ‘extreme’ Solar storm will persist through the weekend

aurora, NOAA, Science, solar storm, Space / Mike M. / May 11, 2024

Bright lights —

So far disruptions from the geomagnetic storm appear to be manageable.

Eric Berger – May 11, 2024 1: 44 pm UTC

Enlarge / Pink lights appear in the sky above College Station, Texas.

ZoeAnn Bailey

After a night of stunning auroras across much of the United States and Europe on Friday, a severe geomagnetic storm is likely to continue through at least Sunday, forecasters said.

The Space Weather Prediction Center at the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Prediction Center observed that ‘Extreme’ G5 conditions were ongoing as of Saturday morning due to heightened Solar activity.

“The threat of additional strong flares and CMEs (coronal mass ejections) will remain until the large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster rotates out of view over the next several days,” the agency posted in an update on the social media site X on Saturday morning.

Good and bad effects

For many observers on Friday night the heightened Solar activity was welcomed. Large areas of the United States, Europe, and other locations unaccustomed to displays of the aurora borealis saw vivid lights as energetically charged particles from the Solar storm passed through the Earth’s atmosphere. Brilliantly pink skies were observed as far south as Texas. Given the forecast for ongoing Solar activity, another night of extended northern lights is possible again on Saturday.

There were also some harmful effects. According to NOAA, there have been some irregularities in power grid transmissions, and degraded satellite communications and GPS services. Users of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet constellation have reported slower download speeds. Early on Saturday morning, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the company’s Starlink satellites were “under a lot of pressure, but holding up so far.”

This is the most intense Solar storm recorded in more than two decades. The last G5 event—the most extreme category of such storms—occurred in October 2003 when there were electricity issues reported in Sweden and South Africa.

Should this storm intensify over the next day or two, scientists say the major risks include more widespread power blackouts, disabled satellites, and long-term damage of GPS networks.

Cause of these storms

Such storms are triggered when the Sun ejects a significant amount of its magnetic field and plasma into the Solar wind. The underlying causes of these coronal mass ejections, deeper in the Sun, are not fully understood. But it is hoped that data collected by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and other observations will help scientists better understand and predict such phenomena.

When these coronal mass ejections reach Earth’s magnetic field they change it, and can introduce significant currents into electricity lines and transformers, leading to damages or outages.

The most intense geomagnetic storm occurred in 1859, during the so-called Carrington Event. This produced auroral lights around the world, and caused fires in multiple telegraph stations—at the time there were 125,000 miles of telegraph lines in the world.

According to one research paper on the Carrington Event, “At its height, the aurora was described as a blood or deep crimson red that was so bright that one ‘could read a newspaper by’.”

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NASA scientist on 2023 temperatures: “We’re frankly astonished”

2023, Berkeley Earth, climate change, global warming, NASA, NOAA, Science / Rejus Almole / January 12, 2024

Extremely unusual —

NASA, NOAA, and Berkeley Earth have released their takes on 2023’s record heat.

John Timmer – Jan 12, 2024 6: 33 pm UTC

A global projection map with warm areas shown in read, and color ones in blue. There is almost no blue. — Enlarge / Warming in 2023 was widespread.

Earlier this week, the European Union’s Earth science team came out with its analysis of 2023’s global temperatures, finding it was the warmest year on record to date. In an era of global warming, that’s not especially surprising. What was unusual was how 2023 set its record—every month from June on coming in far above any equivalent month in the past—and the size of the gap between 2023 and any previous year on record.

The Copernicus dataset used for that analysis isn’t the only one of the sort, and on Friday, Berkeley Earth, NASA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration all released equivalent reports. And all of them largely agree with the EU’s: 2023 was a record, and an unusual one at that. So unusual that NASA’s chief climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt, introduced his look at 2023 by saying, “We’re frankly astonished.”

Despite the overlaps with the earlier analysis, each of the three new ones adds some details that flesh out what made last year so unusual.

Each of the three analyses uses slightly different methods to do things like fill in areas of the globe where records are sparse, and uses a different baseline. Berkeley Earth was the only team to do a comparison with pre-industrial temperatures, using a baseline of the 1850–1900 temperatures. Its analysis suggests that this is the first year to finish over 1.5° C above preindustrial temperatures.

Most countries have committed to an attempt to keep temperatures from consistently coming in above that point. So, at one year, we’re far from consistently failing our goals. But there’s every reason to expect that we’re going to see several more years exceeding this point before the decade is out. And that clearly means we have a very short timeframe before we get carbon emissions to drop, or we’ll commit to facing a difficult struggle to get temperatures back under this threshold by the end of the century.

Berkeley Earth also noted that the warming was extremely widespread. It estimates that nearly a third of the Earth’s population lived in a region that set a local heat record. And 77 nations saw 2023 set a national record.

Enlarge / Lots of factors converged on warming in 2023.

The Berkeley team also had a nice graph laying out the influences of different factors on recent warming. Greenhouse gases are obviously the strongest and most consistent factor, but there are weaker short-term influences as well, such as the El Niño/La Niña oscillation and the solar cycle. Berkeley Earth and EU’s Copernicus also noted that an international agreement caused sulfur emissions from shipping to drop by about 85 percent in 2020, which would reduce the amount of sunlight scattered back out into space. Finally, like the EU team, they note the Hunga Tonga eruption.

An El Niño unlike any other

A shift from La Niño to El Niño conditions in the late spring is highlighted by everyone looking at this year, as El Niños tend to drive global temperatures upward. While it has the potential to develop into a strong El Niño in 2024, at the moment, it’s pretty mild. So why are we seeing record temperatures?

We’re not entirely sure. “The El Niño we’ve seen is not an exceptional one,” said NASA’s Schmidt. So, he reasoned, “Either this El Niño is different from all of them… or there are other factors going on.” But he was at a bit of a loss to identify the factors. He said that typically, there are a limited number of stories that you keep choosing from in order to explain a given year’s behavior. But, for 2023, none of them really fit.

Enlarge / Something very ominous happened to the North Atlantic last year.

Berkeley Earth had a great example of it in its graph of North Atlantic sea surface temperatures, which have been rising slowly for decades, until 2023 saw record temperatures with a freakishly large gap compared to anything previously on record. There’s nothing especially obvious to explain that.

Lurking in the background of all of this is climate scientist James Hansen’s argument that we’re about to enter a new regime of global warming, where temperatures increase at a much faster pace than they have until now. Most climate scientists don’t see compelling evidence for that yet. And, with El Niño conditions likely to prevail for much of 2024, we can expect a very hot year again, regardless of changing trends. So, it may take several more years to determine if 2023 was a one-off freak or a sign of new trends.

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