Science – Page 4

Tracking the winds that have turned Mars into a planet of dust

dust, dust devils, Mars dust storms, planetary science, Science / Kris Guyer / November 13, 2025

Where does all this dust come from? It’s thought to be the result of erosion caused by the winds. Because the Martian atmosphere is so thin, dust particles can be difficult to move, but larger particles can become more easily airborne if winds are turbulent enough, later taking smaller dust motes with them. Perseverance and previous Mars rovers have mostly witnessed wind vortices that were associated with either dust devils or convection, during which warm air rises.

CaSSIS and HRSC data showed that most dust devils occur in the northern hemisphere of Mars, mainly in the Amazonis and Elysium Planitiae, with Amazonis Planitia being a hotspot. They can be kicked up by winds on both rough and smooth terrain, but they tend to spread farther in the southern hemisphere, with some traveling across nearly that entire half of the planet. Seasonal occurrence of dust devils is highest during the southern summer, while they are almost nonexistent during the late northern fall.

Martian dust devils tend to peak between mid-morning and midafternoon, though they can occur from early morning through late afternoon. They also migrate toward the Martian north pole in the northern summer and toward the south pole during the southern summer. Southern dust devils tend to move faster than those in the northern hemisphere. Movement determined by winds can be as fast as 44 meters per second (about 98 mph), which is much faster than dust devils move on Earth.

Weathering the storm

Dust devils have also been found to accelerate extremely rapidly on the red planet. These fierce storms are associated with winds that travel along with them but do not form a vortex, known as nonvortical winds. It only takes a few seconds for these winds to accelerate to velocities high enough that they’re able to lift dust particles from the ground and transfer them to the atmosphere. It is not only dust devils that do this—the team found that even nonvortical winds lift large amounts of dust particles on their own, more than was previously thought, and create a dusty haze in the atmosphere.

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With another record broken, the world’s busiest spaceport keeps getting busier

cape canaveral, cape canaveral space force station, Commercial space, falcon 9, Kennedy Space Center, launch, Science, Space, spacex / Paul Patrick / November 12, 2025

It’s not just the number of rocket launches, but how much stuff they’re carrying into orbit.

With 29 Starlink satellites onboard, a Falcon 9 rocket streaks through the night sky over Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Monday night. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—Another Falcon 9 rocket fired off its launch pad here on Monday night, taking with it another 29 Starlink Internet satellites to orbit.

This was the 94th orbital launch from Florida’s Space Coast so far in 2025, breaking the previous record for the most satellite launches in a calendar year from the world’s busiest spaceport. Monday night’s launch came two days after a Chinese Long March 11 rocket lifted off from an oceangoing platform on the opposite side of the world, marking humanity’s 255th mission to reach orbit this year, a new annual record for global launch activity.

As of Wednesday, a handful of additional missions have pushed the global figure this year to 259, putting the world on pace for around 300 orbital launches by the end of 2025. This will more than double the global tally of 135 orbital launches in 2021.

Routine vs. complacency

Waiting in the darkness a few miles away from the launch pad, I glanced around at my surroundings before watching SpaceX’s Falcon 9 thunder into the sky. There were no throngs of space enthusiasts anxiously waiting for the rocket to light up the night. No line of photographers snapping photos. Just this reporter and two chipper retirees enjoying what a decade ago would have attracted far more attention.

Go to your local airport and you’ll probably find more people posted up at a plane-spotting park at the end of the runway. Still, a rocket launch is something special. On the same night that I watched the 94th launch of the year depart from Cape Canaveral, Orlando International Airport saw the same number of airplane departures in just three hours.

The crowds still turn out for more meaningful launches, such as a test flight of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket in Texas or Blue Origin’s attempt to launch its second New Glenn heavy-lifter here Sunday. But those are not the norm. Generations of aerospace engineers were taught that spaceflight is not routine for fear of falling into complacency, leading to failure, and in some cases, death.

Compared to air travel, the mantra remains valid. Rockets are unforgiving, with engines operating under extreme pressures, at high thrust, and unable to suck in oxygen from the atmosphere as a reactant for combustion. There are fewer redundancies in a rocket than in an airplane.

The Falcon 9’s established failure rate is less than 1 percent, well short of any safety standard for commercial air travel but good enough to be the most successful orbital-class in history. Given the Falcon 9’s track record, SpaceX seems to have found a way to overcome the temptation for complacency.

A Chinese Long March 11 rocket carrying three Shiyan 32 test satellites lifts off from waters off the coast of Haiyang in eastern China’s Shandong province on Saturday. Credit: Guo Jinqi/Xinhua via Getty Images

Following the trend

The upward trend in rocket launches hasn’t always been the case. Launch numbers were steady for most of the 2010s, following a downward trend in the 2000s, with as few as 52 orbital launches in 2005, the lowest number since the nascent era of spaceflight in 1961. There were just seven launches from here in Florida that year.

The numbers have picked up dramatically in the last five years as SpaceX has mastered reusable rocketry.

It’s important to look at not just the number of launches but also how much stuff rockets are actually putting into orbit. More than half of this year’s launches were performed using SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and the majority of those deployed Starlink satellites for SpaceX’s global Internet network. Each spacecraft is relatively small in size and weight, but SpaceX stacks up to 29 of them on a single Falcon 9 to max out the rocket’s carrying capacity.

All this mass adds up to make SpaceX’s dominance of the launch industry appear even more absolute. According to analyses by BryceTech, an engineering and space industry consulting firm, SpaceX has launched 86 percent of all the world’s payload mass over the 18 months from the beginning of 2024 through June 30 of this year.

That’s roughly 2.98 million kilograms of the approximately 3.46 million kilograms (3,281 of 3,819 tons) of satellite hardware and cargo that all the world’s rockets placed into orbit during that timeframe.

The charts below were created by Ars Technica using publicly available launch numbers and payload mass estimates from BryceTech. The first illustrates the rising launch cadence at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, located next to one another in Florida. Launches from other US-licensed spaceports, primarily Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and Rocket Lab’s base at Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand, are also on the rise.

These numbers represent rockets that reached low-Earth orbit. We didn’t include test flights of SpaceX’s Starship rocket in the chart because all of its launches to have intentionally flown on suborbital trajectories.

In the second chart, we break down the payload upmass to orbit from SpaceX, other US companies, China, Russia, and other international launch providers.

Launch rates are on a clear upward trend, while SpaceX has launched 86 percent of the world’s total payload mass to orbit since the beginning of 2024. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica/BryceTech

Will it continue?

It’s a good bet that payload upmass will continue to rise in the coming years, with heavy cargo heading to orbit to further expand SpaceX’s Starlink communications network and build out new megaconstellations from Amazon, China, and others. The US military’s Golden Dome missile defense shield will also have a ravenous appetite for rockets to get it into space.

SpaceX’s Starship megarocket could begin flying to low-Earth orbit next year, and if it does, SpaceX’s preeminence in delivering mass to orbit will remain assured. Starship’s first real payloads will likely be SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink satellites. These larger, heavier, more capable spacecraft will launch 60 at a time on Starship, further stretching SpaceX’s lead in the upmass war.

But Starship’s arrival will come at the expense of the workhorse Falcon 9, which lacks the capacity to haul the next-gen Starlinks to orbit. “This year and next year I anticipate will be the highest Falcon launch rates that we will see,” said Stephanie Bednarek, SpaceX’s vice president of commercial sales, at an industry conference in July.

SpaceX is on pace for between 165 and 170 Falcon 9 launches this year, with 144 flights already in the books for 2025. Last year’s total for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy was 134 missions. SpaceX has not announced how many Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches it plans for next year.

Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, eventually enabling multiple flights per day. But that’s still a long way off, and it’s unknown how many years it might take for Starship to surpass the Falcon 9’s proven launch tempo.

A Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster lift off from Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

In any case, with Starship’s heavy-lifting capacity and upgraded next-gen satellites, SpaceX could match an entire year’s worth of new Starlink capacity with just two fully loaded Starship flights. Starship will be able to deliver 60 times more Starlink capacity to orbit than a cluster of satellites riding on a Falcon 9.

There’s no reason to believe SpaceX will be satisfied with simply keeping pace with today’s Starlink growth rate. There are emerging market opportunities in connecting satellites with smartphones, space-based computer processing and data storage, and military applications.

Other companies have medium-to-heavy rockets that are either new to the market or soon to debut. These include Blue Origin’s New Glenn, now set to make its second test flight in the coming days, with a reusable booster designed to facilitate a rapid-fire launch cadence.

Despite all of the newcomers, most satellite operators see a shortage of launch capacity on the commercial market. “The industry is likely to remain supply-constrained through the balance of the decade,” wrote Caleb Henry, director of research at the industry analysis firm Quilty Space. “That could pose a problem for some of the many large constellations on the horizon.”

United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, Rocket Lab’s Neutron, Stoke Space’s Nova, Relativity Space’s Terran R, and Firefly Aerospace and Northrop Grumman’s Eclipse are among the other rockets vying for a bite at the launch apple.

“Whether or not the market can support six medium to heavy lift launch providers from the US alone—plus Starship—is an open question, but for the remainder of the decade launch demand is likely to remain high, presenting an opportunity for one or more new players to establish themselves in the pecking order,” Henry wrote in a post on Quilty’s website.

China’s space program will need more rockets, too. That nation’s two megaconstellations, known as Guowang and Qianfan, will have thousands of satellites requiring a significant uptick on Chinese launches.

Taking all of this into account, the demand curve for access to space is sure to continue its upward trajectory. How companies meet this demand, and with how many discrete departures from Earth, isn’t quite as clear.

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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An explosion 92 million miles away just grounded Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket

blue origin, Commercial space, coronal mass ejection, escapade, launch, Mars, NASA, ng-2, Science, Solar Flare, Space, space weather, Sun / Tim Belzer / November 12, 2025

A series of eruptions from the Sun, known as coronal mass ejections, sparked dazzling auroral light shows Tuesday night. The eruptions sent a blast of material from the Sun, including charged particles with a strong localized magnetic field, toward the Earth at more than 1 million mph, or more than 500 kilometers per second.

A solar ultraviolet imager on one of NOAA’s GOES weather satellites captured this view of a coronal mass ejection from the Sun early Tuesday. Credit: NOAA

Satellites detected the most recent strong coronal mass ejection, accompanied by a bright solar flare, early Tuesday. It was expected to arrive at Earth on Wednesday.

“We’ve already had two of three anticipated coronal mass ejections arrive here at Earth,” said Shawn Dahl, a forecaster at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. The first two waves “packed quite a punch,” Dahl said, and were “profoundly stronger than we anticipated.”

The storm sparked northern lights that were visible as far south as Texas, Florida, and Mexico on Tuesday night. Another round of northern lights might be visible Wednesday night.

The storm arriving Wednesday was the “most energetic” of all the recent coronal mass ejections, Dahl said. It’s also traveling at higher speed, fast enough to cover the 92 million-mile gulf between the Sun and the Earth in less than two days. Forecasters predict a G4 level, or severe, geomagnetic storm Wednesday into Thursday, with a slight chance of a rarer extreme G5 storm, something that has only happened once in the last two decades.

The Aurora Borealis lights up the night sky over Monroe, Wisconsin, on November 11, 2025, during one of the strongest solar storms in decades. Credit: Ross Harried/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The sudden arrival of a rush of charged particles from the Sun can create disturbances in Earth’s magnetic field, affecting power grids, degrading GPS navigation signals, and disrupting radio communications. A G4 geomagnetic storm can trigger “possible widespread voltage control problems” in terrestrial electrical networks, according to NOAA, along with potential surface charging problems on satellites flying above the protective layers of the atmosphere.

It’s not easy to predict the precise impacts of a geomagnetic storm until it arrives on Earth’s doorstep. Several satellites positioned a million miles from Earth in the direction of the Sun carry sensors to detect the speed of the solar wind, its charge, and the direction of its magnetic field. This information helps forecasters know what to expect.

“These types of storms can be very variable,” Dahl said.

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Quantum computing tech keeps edging forward

Computer science, ibm, IonQ, Physics, Quantum Art, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, Science, trapped ion / Rejus Almole / November 12, 2025

More superposition, less supposition

IBM follows through on its June promises, plus more trapped ion news.

IBM has moved to large-scale manufacturing of its Quantum Loon chips. Credit: IBM

The end of the year is usually a busy time in the quantum computing arena, as companies often try to announce that they’ve reached major milestones before the year wraps up. This year has been no exception. And while not all of these announcements involve interesting new architectures like the one we looked at recently, they’re a good way to mark progress in the field, and they often involve the sort of smaller, incremental steps needed to push the field forward.

What follows is a quick look at a handful of announcements from the past few weeks that struck us as potentially interesting.

IBM follows through

IBM is one of the companies announcing a brand-new architecture this year. That’s not at all a surprise, given that the company promised to do so back in June; this week sees the company confirming that it has built the two processors it said it would earlier in the year. These include one called Loon, which is focused on the architecture that IBM will use to host error-corrected logical qubits. Loon represents two major changes for the company: a shift to nearest-neighbor connections and the addition of long-distance connections.

IBM had previously used what it termed the “heavy hex” architecture, in which alternating qubits were connected to either two or three of their neighbors, forming a set of overlapping hexagonal structures. In Loon, the company is using a square grid, with each qubit having connections to its four closest neighbors. This higher density of connections can enable more efficient use of the qubits during computations. But qubits in Loon have additional long-distance connections to other parts of the chip, which will be needed for the specific type of error correction that IBM has committed to. It’s there to allow users to test out a critical future feature.

The second processor, Nighthawk, is focused on the now. It also has the nearest-neighbor connections and a square grid structure, but it lacks the long-distance connections. Instead, the focus with Nighthawk is to get error rates down so that researchers can start testing algorithms for quantum advantage—computations where quantum computers have a clear edge over classical algorithms.

In addition, the company is launching a GitHub repository that will allow the community to deposit code and performance data for both classical and quantum algorithms, enabling rigorous evaluations of relative performance. Right now, those are broken down into three categories of algorithms that IBM expects are most likely to demonstrate a verifiable quantum advantage.

This isn’t the only follow-up to IBM’s June announcement, which also saw the company describe the algorithm it would use to identify errors in its logical qubits and the corrections needed to fix them. In late October, the company said it had confirmed that the algorithm could work in real time when run on an FPGA made in collaboration with AMD.

Record lows

A few years back, we reported on a company called Oxford Ionics, which had just announced that it achieved a record-low error rate in some qubit operations using trapped ions. Most trapped-ion quantum computers move qubits by manipulating electromagnetic fields, but they perform computational operations using lasers. Oxford Ionics figured out how to perform operations using electromagnetic fields, meaning more of their processing benefited from our ability to precisely manufacture circuitry (lasers were still needed for tasks like producing a readout of the qubits). And as we noted, it could perform these computational operations extremely effectively.

But Oxford Ionics never made a major announcement that would give us a good excuse to describe its technology in more detail. The company was ultimately acquired by IonQ, a competitor in the trapped-ion space.

Now, IonQ is building on what it gained from Oxford Ionics, announcing a new, record-low error rate for two-qubit gates: greater than 99.99 percent fidelity. That could be critical for the company, as a low error rate for hardware qubits means fewer are needed to get good performance from error-corrected qubits.

But the details of the two-qubit gates are perhaps more interesting than the error rate. Two-qubit gates involve bringing both qubits involved into close proximity, which often requires moving them. That motion pumps a bit of energy into the system, raising the ions’ temperature and leaving them slightly more prone to errors. As a result, any movement of the ions is generally followed by cooling, in which lasers are used to bleed energy back out of the qubits.

This process, which involves two distinct cooling steps, is slow. So slow that as much as two-thirds of the time spent in operations involves the hardware waiting around while recently moved ions are cooled back down. The new IonQ announcement includes a description of a method for performing two-qubit gates that doesn’t require the ions to be fully cooled. This allows one of the two cooling steps to be skipped entirely. In fact, coupled with earlier work involving one-qubit gates, it raises the possibility that the entire machine could operate with its ions at a still very cold but slightly elevated temperature, avoiding all need for one of the two cooling steps.

That would shorten operation times and let researchers do more before the limit of a quantum system’s coherence is reached.

State of the art?

The last announcement comes from another trapped-ion company, Quantum Art. A couple of weeks back, it announced a collaboration with Nvidia that resulted in a more efficient compiler for operations on its hardware. On its own, this isn’t especially interesting. But it’s emblematic of a trend that’s worth noting, and it gives us an excuse to look at Quantum Art’s technology, which takes a distinct approach to boosting the efficiency of trapped-ion computation.

First, the trend: Nvidia’s interest in quantum computing. The company isn’t interested in the quantum aspects (at least not publicly); instead, it sees an opportunity to get further entrenched in high-performance computing. There are three areas where the computational capacity of GPUs can play a role here. One is small-scale modeling of quantum processors so that users can perform an initial testing of algorithms without committing to paying for access to the real thing. Another is what Quantum Art is announcing: using GPUs as part of a compiler chain to do all the computations needed to find more efficient ways of executing an algorithm on specific quantum hardware.

Finally, there’s a potential role in error correction. Error correction involves some indirect measurements of a handful of hardware qubits to determine the most likely state that a larger collection (called a logical qubit) is in. This requires modeling a quantum system in real time, which is quite difficult—hence the computational demands that Nvidia hopes to meet. Regardless of the precise role, there has been a steady flow of announcements much like Quantum Art’s: a partnership with Nvidia that will keep the company’s hardware involved if the quantum technology takes off.

In Quantum Art’s case, that technology is a bit unusual. The trapped-ion companies we’ve covered so far are all taking different routes to the same place: moving one or two ions into a location where operations can be performed and then executing one- or two-qubit gates. Quantum Art’s approach is to perform gates with much larger collections of ions. At the compiler level, it would be akin to figuring out which qubits need a specific operation performed, clustering them together, and doing it all at once. Obviously, there are potential efficiency gains here.

The challenge would normally be moving so many qubits around to create these clusters. But Quantum Art uses lasers to “pin” ions in a row so they act to isolate the ones to their right from the ones to their left. Each cluster can then be operated on separately. In between operations, the pins can be moved to new locations, creating different clusters for the next set of operations. (Quantum Art is calling each cluster of ions a “core” and presenting this as multicore quantum computing.)

At the moment, Quantum Art is behind some of its competitors in terms of qubit count and performing interesting demonstrations, and it’s not pledging to scale quite as fast. But the company’s founders are convinced that the complexity of doing so many individual operations and moving so many ions around will catch up with those competitors, while the added efficiency of multiple qubit gates will allow it to scale better.

This is just a small sampling of all the announcements from this fall, but it should give you a sense of how rapidly the field is progressing—from technology demonstrations to identifying cases where quantum hardware has a real edge and exploring ways to sustain progress beyond those first successes.

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.

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Runaway black hole mergers may have built supermassive black holes

astronomy, astrophysics, black holes, cosmology, James Webb Space Telescope, Science, supermassive black holes / Tim Belzer / November 10, 2025

The researchers used cosmological simulations to recreate the first 700 million years of cosmic history, focusing on the formation of a single dwarf galaxy. In their virtual galaxy, waves of stars were born in short, explosive bursts as cold gas clouds collapsed inside a dark matter halo. Instead of a single starburst episode followed by a steady drizzle of star formation as Garcia expected, there were two major rounds of stellar birth. Whole swarms of stars flared to life like Christmas tree lights.

“The early Universe was an incredibly crowded place,” Garcia said. “Gas clouds were denser, stars formed faster, and in those environments, it’s natural for gravity to gather stars into these tightly bound systems.”

Those clusters started out scattered around the galaxy but fell in toward the center like water swirling down a drain. Once there, they merged to create one megacluster, called a nuclear star cluster (so named because it lies at the nucleus of the galaxy). The young galactic heart shone with the light of a million suns and may have set the stage for a supermassive black hole to form.

A simulation of the formation of the super-dense star clusters.

A seemingly simple tweak was needed to make the simulation more precise than previous ones. “Most simulations simplify things to make calculations more practical, but then you sacrifice realism,” Garcia said. “We used an improved model that allowed star formation to vary depending on local conditions rather than just go at a constant rate like with previous models.”

Using the University of Maryland’s supercomputing facility Zaratan, Garcia accomplished in six months what would have taken 12 years on a MacBook.

Some clouds converted as much as 80 percent of their gas into stars—a ferocious rate compared to the 2 percent typically seen in nearby galaxies today. The clouds sparkled to life, becoming clusters of newborn stars held together by their mutual gravity and lighting a new pathway for supermassive black holes to form extremely early in the Universe.

Chicken or egg?

Most galaxies, including our own, are anchored by a nuclear star cluster nestled around a supermassive black hole. But the connection between the two has been a bit murky—did the monster black hole form and then draw stars close, or did the cluster itself give rise to the black hole?

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Here’s how orbital dynamics wizardry helped save NASA’s next Mars mission

blue origin, Commercial space, escapade, launch, Mars, NASA, new glenn, ng-2, planetary science, rocket lab, Science, solar system, Space, uc berkeley / Paul Patrick / November 9, 2025

Blue Origin is counting down to launch of its second New Glenn rocket Sunday.

The New Glenn rocket rolls to Launch Complex-36 in preparation for liftoff this weekend. Credit: Blue Origin

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The field of astrodynamics isn’t a magical discipline, but sometimes it seems trajectory analysts can pull a solution out of a hat.

That’s what it took to save NASA’s ESCAPADE mission from a lengthy delay, and possible cancellation, after its rocket wasn’t ready to send it toward Mars during its appointed launch window last year. ESCAPADE, short for Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, consists of two identical spacecraft setting off for the red planet as soon as Sunday with a launch aboard Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket.

“ESCAPADE is pursuing a very unusual trajectory in getting to Mars,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley. “We’re launching outside the typical Hohmann transfer windows, which occur every 25 or 26 months. We are using a very flexible mission design approach where we go into a loiter orbit around Earth in order to sort of wait until Earth and Mars are lined up correctly in November of next year to go to Mars.”

This wasn’t the original plan. When it was first designed, ESCAPADE was supposed to take a direct course from Earth to Mars, a transit that typically takes six to nine months. But ESCAPADE will now depart the Earth when Mars is more than 220 million miles away, on the opposite side of the Solar System.

The payload fairing of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, containing NASA’s two Mars-bound science probes. Credit: Blue Origin

The most recent Mars launch window was last year, and the next one doesn’t come until the end of 2026. The planets are not currently in alignment, and the proverbial stars didn’t align to get the ESCAPADE satellites and their New Glenn rocket to the launch pad until this weekend.

This is fine

But there are several reasons this is perfectly OK to NASA. The New Glenn rocket is overkill for this mission. The two-stage launcher could send many tons of cargo to Mars, but NASA is only asking it to dispatch about a ton of payload, comprising a pair of identical science probes designed to study how the planet’s upper atmosphere interacts with the solar wind.

But NASA got a good deal from Blue Origin. The space agency is paying Jeff Bezos’ space company about $20 million for the launch, less than it would for a dedicated launch on any other rocket capable of sending the ESCAPADE mission to Mars. In exchange, NASA is accepting a greater than usual chance of a launch failure. This is, after all, just the second flight of the 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket, which hasn’t yet been certified by NASA or the US Space Force.

The ESCAPADE mission, itself, was developed with a modest budget, at least by the standards of interplanetary exploration. The mission’s total cost amounts to less than $80 million, an order of magnitude lower than all of NASA’s recent Mars missions. NASA officials would not entrust the second flight of the New Glenn rocket to launch a billion-dollar spacecraft, but the risk calculation changes as costs go down.

NASA knew all of this in 2023 when it signed a launch contract with Blue Origin for the ESCAPADE mission. What officials didn’t know was that the New Glenn rocket wouldn’t be ready to fly when ESCAPADE needed to launch in late 2024. It turned out Blue Origin didn’t launch the first New Glenn test flight until January of this year. It was a success. It took another 10 months for engineers to get the second New Glenn vehicle to the launch pad.

The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft undergoing final preparations for launch. Each spacecraft is about a half-ton fully fueled. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Aiming high

That’s where the rocket sits this weekend at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. If all goes according to plan, New Glenn will take off Sunday afternoon during an 88-minute launch window opening at 2: 45 pm EST (19: 45 UTC). There is a 65 percent chance of favorable weather, according to Blue Origin.

Blue Origin’s launch team, led by launch director Megan Lewis, will oversee the countdown Sunday. The rocket will be filled with super-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants beginning about four-and-a-half hours prior to liftoff. After some final technical and weather checks, the terminal countdown sequence will commence at T-minus 4 minutes, culminating in ignition of the rocket’s seven BE-4 main engines at T-minus 5.6 seconds.

The rocket’s flight computer will assess the health of each of the powerful engines, combining to generate more than 3.8 million pounds of thrust. If all looks good, hold-down restraints will release to allow the New Glenn rocket to begin its ascent from Florida’s Space Coast.

Heading east, the rocket will surpass the speed of sound in a little over a minute. After soaring through the stratosphere, New Glenn will shut down its seven booster engines and shed its first stage a little more than 3 minutes into the flight. Twin BE-3U engines, burning liquid hydrogen, will ignite to finish the job of sending the ESCAPADE satellites toward deep space. The rocket’s trajectory will send the satellites toward a gravitationally-stable location beyond the Moon, called the L2 Lagrange point, where it will swing into a loosely-bound loiter orbit to wait for the right time to head for Mars.

Meanwhile, the New Glenn booster, itself measuring nearly 20 stories tall, will begin maneuvers to head toward Blue Origin’s recovery ship floating a few hundred miles downrange in the Atlantic Ocean. The final part of the descent will include a landing burn using three of the BE-4 engines, then downshifting to a single engine to control the booster’s touchdown on the landing platform, dubbed “Jacklyn” in honor of Bezos’ late mother.

The launch timeline for New Glenn’s second mission. Credit: Blue Origin

New Glenn’s inaugural launch at the start of this year was a success, but the booster’s descent did not go well. The rocket was unable to restart its engines, and it crashed into the sea.

“We’ve incorporated a number of changes to our propellant management system, some minor hardware changes as well, to increase our likelihood of landing that booster on this mission,” said Laura Maginnis, Blue Origin’s vice president of New Glenn mission management. “That was the primary schedule driver that kind of took us from from January to where we are today.”

Blue Origin officials are hopeful they can land the booster this time. The company’s optimism is enough for officials to have penciled in a reflight of this particular booster on the very next New Glenn launch, slated for the early months of next year. That launch is due to send Blue Origin’s first Blue Moon cargo lander to the Moon.

“Our No. 1 objective is to deliver ESCAPADE safely and successfully on its way to L2, and then eventually on to Mars,” Maginnis said in a press conference Saturday. “We also are planning and wanting to land our booster. If we don’t land the booster, that’s OK. We have several more vehicles in production. We’re excited to see how the mission plays out tomorrow.”

Tracing a kidney bean

ESCAPADE’s path through space, relative to the Earth, has the peculiar shape of a kidney bean. In the world of astrodynamics, this is called a staging or libration orbit. It’s a way to keep the spacecraft on a stable trajectory to wait for the opportunity to go to Mars late next year.

“ESCAPADE has identified that this is the way that we want to fly, so we launch from Earth onto this kidney bean-shaped orbit,” said Jeff Parker, a mission designer from the Colorado-based company Advanced Space. “So, we can launch on virtually any day. What happens is that kidney bean just grows and shrinks based on how much time you need to spend in that orbit. So, we traverse that kidney bean and at the very end there’s a final little loop-the-loop that brings us down to Earth.”

That’s when the two ESCAPADE spacecraft, known as Blue and Gold, will pass a few hundred miles above our planet. At the right moment, on November 7 and 9 of next year, the satellites will fire their engines to set off for Mars.

An illustration of ESCAPADE’s trajectory to wait for the opportunity to go to Mars. Credit: UC-Berkeley

There are some tradeoffs with this unique staging orbit. It is riskier than the original plan of sending ESCAPADE straight to Mars. The satellites will be exposed to more radiation, and will consume more of their fuel just to get to the red planet, eating into reserves originally set aside for science observations.

The satellites were built by Rocket Lab, which designed them with extra propulsion capacity in order to accommodate launches on a variety of different rockets. In the end, NASA “judged that the risk for the mission was acceptable, but it certainly is higher risk,” said Richard French, Rocket Lab’s vice president of business development and strategy.

The upside of the tradeoff is it will demonstrate an “exciting and flexible way to get to Mars,” Lillis said. “In the future, if we’d like to send hundreds of spacecraft to Mars at once, it will be difficult to do that from just the launch pads we have on Earth within that month [of the interplanetary launch window]. We could potentially queue up spacecraft using the approach that ESCAPADE is pioneering.”

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10,000 generations of hominins used the same stone tools to weather a changing world

Archaeology, australopithecus, hominins, oldowan, paleoarchaeology, Science, stone tools / Rejus Almole / November 8, 2025

“This site reveals an extraordinary story of cultural continuity,” said Braun in a recent press release.

When the going gets tough, the tough make tools

Nomorotukunan’s layers of stone tools span the transition from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene, during which Earth’s climate turned gradually cooler and drier after a 2 to 3 million-year warm spell. Pollen and other microscopic traces of plants in the sediment at Nomorotukunan tell the tale: the lakeshore marsh gradually dried up, giving way to arid grassland dotted with shrubs. On a shorter timescale, hominins at Nomorotukunan faced wildfires (based on microcharcoal in the sediments), droughts, and rivers drying up or changing course.

“As vegetation shifted, the toolmaking remained steady,” said National University of Kenya archaeologist Rahab N. Kinyanjui in a recent press release. “This is resilience.”

Making sharp stone tools may have helped generations of hominins survive their changing, drying world. In the warm, humid Pliocene, finding food would have been relatively easy, but as conditions got tougher, hominins probably had to scavenge or dig for their meals. At least one animal bone at Nomorotukunan bears cut marks where long-ago hominins carved up the carcass for meat—something our lineage isn’t really equipped to do with its bare hands and teeth. Tools also would have enabled early hominins to dig up and cut tubers or roots.

It’s fair to assume that sharpened wood sticks probably also played a role in that particular work, but wood doesn’t tend to last as long as stone in the archaeological record, so we can’t say for sure. What is certain are the stone tools and cut bones, which hint at what Utrecht University archaeologist Dan Rolier, a coauthor of the paper, calls “one of our oldest habits: using technology to steady ourselves against change.”

A tale as old as time

Nomorotukunan may hint that Oldowan technology is even older than the earliest tools archaeologists have unearthed so far. The oldest tools unearthed from the deepest layer at Nomorotukunan are the work of skilled flint-knappers who understood where to strike a stone, and at exactly which angle, to flake off the right shape. They also clearly knew how to select the right stones for the job (fine-grained chalcedony for the win, in this case). In other words, these tools weren’t the work of a bunch of hominins who were just figuring out, for the first time, how to bang the rocks together.

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Rocket Report: Canada invests in sovereign launch; India flexes rocket muscles

ariane 6, Arianespace, blue origin, Canada, Commercial space, launch, NASA, relativity space, rocket report, Science, Space, spacex, starship / Mike M. / November 8, 2025

Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket gave an environmental monitoring satellite a perfect ride to space.

Rahul Goel, the CEO of Canadian launch startup NordSpace, poses with a suborbital demo rocket and members of his team in Toronto earlier this year. Credit: Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Welcome to Edition 8.18 of the Rocket Report! NASA is getting a heck of a deal from Blue Origin for launching the agency’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars. Blue Origin is charging NASA about $20 million for the launch on the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. A dedicated ride on any other rocket capable of the job would undoubtedly cost more.

But there are trade-offs. First, there’s the question of risk. The New Glenn rocket is only making its second flight, and it hasn’t been certified by NASA or the US Space Force. Second, the schedule for ESCAPADE’s launch has been at the whim of Blue Origin, which has delayed the mission several times due to issues developing New Glenn. NASA’s interplanetary missions typically have a fixed launch period, and the agency pays providers like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance a premium to ensure the launch happens when it needs to happen.

New Glenn is ready, the satellites are ready, and Blue Origin has set a launch date for Sunday, November 9. The mission will depart Earth outside of the usual interplanetary launch window, so orbital dynamics wizards came up with a unique trajectory that will get the satellites to Mars in 2027.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Canadian government backs launcher development. The federal budget released by the Liberal Party-led government of Canada this week includes a raft of new defense initiatives, including 182.6 million Canadian dollars ($129.4 million) for sovereign space launch capability, SpaceQ reports. The new funding is meant to “establish a sovereign space launch capability” with funds available this fiscal year and spent over three years. How the money will be spent and on what has yet to be released. As anticipated, Canada will have a new Defense Investment Agency (DIA) to oversee defense procurement. Overall, the government outlined 81.8 billion Canadian dollars ($58 billion) over five years for the Canadian Armed Forces. The Department of National Defense will manage the government’s cash infusion for sovereign launch capability.

Kick-starting an industry … Canada joins a growing list of nations pursuing homegrown launchers as many governments see access to space as key to national security and an opportunity for economic growth. International governments don’t want to be beholden to a small number of foreign launch providers from established space powers. That’s why startups in Germany, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Australia are making a play in the launch arena, often with government support. A handful of Canadian startups, such as Maritime Launch Services, Reaction Dynamics, and NordSpace, are working on commercial satellite launchers. The Canadian government’s announcement came days after MDA Space, the largest established space company in Canada, announced its own multimillion-dollar investment in Maritime Launch Services.

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Money alone won’t solve Europe’s space access woes. Increasing tensions with Russia have prompted defense spending boosts throughout Europe that will benefit fledgling smallsat launcher companies across the continent. But Europe is still years away from meeting its own space access needs, Space News reports. Space News spoke with industry analysts from two European consulting firms. They concluded that a lack of experience, not a deficit of money, is holding European launch startups back. None of the new crop of European rocket companies have completed a successful orbital flight.

Swimming in cash … The German company Isar Aerospace has raised approximately $600 million, the most funding of any of the European launch startups. Isar is also the only one of the bunch to make an orbital launch attempt. Its Spectrum rocket failed less than 30 seconds after liftoff last March, and a second launch is expected next year. Isar has attracted more investment than Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, and Astra collectively raised on the private market before each of them successfully launched a rocket into orbit. In addition to Isar, several other European companies have raised more than $100 million on the road to developing a small satellite launcher. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Successful ICBM test from Vandenberg. Air Force Global Strike Command tested an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile in the predawn hours of Wednesday, Air and Space Forces Magazine reports. The test, the latest in a series of launches that have been carried out at regular intervals for decades, came as Russian President Vladimir Putin has touted the development of two new nuclear weapons and President Donald Trump has suggested in recent days that the US might resume nuclear testing. The ICBM launched from an underground silo at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and traveled some 4,200 miles to a test range in the Pacific Ocean after receiving launch orders from an airborne nuclear command-and-control plane.

Rehearsing for the unthinkable … The test, known as Glory Trip 254 (GT 254), provided a “comprehensive assessment” of the Minuteman III’s readiness to launch at a moment’s notice, according to the Air Force. “The data collected during the test is invaluable in ensuring the continued reliability and accuracy of the ICBM weapon system,” said Lt. Col. Karrie Wray, commander of the 576th Flight Test Squadron. For Minuteman III tests, the Air Force pulls its missiles from the fleet of some 400 operational ICBMs. This week’s test used one from F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming, and the missile was equipped with a single unarmed reentry vehicle that carried telemetry instrumentation instead of a warhead, service officials said. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

One crew launches, another may be stranded. Three astronauts launched to China’s Tiangong space station on October 31 and arrived at the outpost a few hours later, extending the station’s four-year streak of continuous crew operations. The Shenzhou 21 crew spacecraft lifted off on a Chinese Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan space center in the Gobi Desert. Shenzhou 21 is supposed to replace a three-man crew that has been on the Tiangong station since April, but China’s Manned Space Agency announced Tuesday the outgoing crew’s return craft may have been damaged by space junk, Ars reports.

Few details … Chinese officials said the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft will remain at the station while engineers investigate the potential damage. As of Thursday, China has not set a new landing date or declared whether the spacecraft is safe to return to Earth at all. “The Shenzhou 20 manned spacecraft is suspected of being impacted by small space debris,” Chinese officials wrote on social media. “Impact analysis and risk assessment are underway. To ensure the safety and health of the astronauts and the complete success of the mission, it has been decided that the Shenzhou 20 return mission, originally scheduled for November 5, will be postponed.” In the event Shenzhou 20 is unsafe to return, China could launch a rescue craft—Shenzhou 22—already on standby at the Jiuquan space center.

Falcon 9 rideshare boosts Vast ambitions. A pathfinder mission for Vast’s privately owned space station launched into orbit Sunday and promptly extended its solar panel, kicking off a shakedown cruise to prove the company’s designs can meet the demands of spaceflight, Ars reports. Vast’s Haven Demo mission lifted off just after midnight Sunday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit. Haven Demo was one of 18 satellites sharing a ride on SpaceX’s Bandwagon 4 mission, launching alongside a South Korean spy satellite and a small testbed for Starcloud, a startup working with Nvidia to build an orbital data center.

Subscale testing … After release from the Falcon 9, the half-ton Haven Demo spacecraft stabilized itself and extended its power-generating solar array. The satellite captured 4K video of the solar array deployment, and Vast shared the beauty shot on social media. “Haven Demo’s mission success has turned us into a proven spacecraft company,” Vast’s CEO, Max Haot, posted on X. “The next step will be to become an actual commercial space station company next year. Something no one has achieved yet.” Vast plans to launch its first human-rated habitat, named Haven-1, into low-Earth orbit in 2026. Haven Demo lacks crew accommodations but carries several systems that are “architecturally similar” to Haven-1, according to Vast. For example, Haven-1 will have 12 solar arrays, each identical to the single array on Haven Demo. The pathfinder mission uses a subset of Haven-1’s propulsion system, but with identical thrusters, valves, and tanks.

Lights out at Vostochny. One of Russia’s most important projects over the last 15 years has been the construction of the Vostochny spaceport as the country seeks to fly its rockets from native soil and modernize its launch operations. Progress has been slow as corruption clouded Vostochny’s development. Now, the primary contractor building the spaceport, the Kazan Open Stock Company (PSO Kazan), has failed to pay its bills, Ars reports. The story, first reported by the Moscow Times, says that the energy company supplying Vostochny cut off electricity to areas of the spaceport still under construction after PSO Kazan racked up $627,000 in unpaid energy charges. The electricity company did so, it said, “to protect the interests of the region’s energy system.”

A dark reputation … Officials at the government-owned spaceport said PSO Kazan would repay its debt by the end of November, but the local energy company said it intends to file a lawsuit against KSO Kazan to declare the entity bankrupt. The two operational launch pads at Vostochny are apparently not affected by the power cuts. Vostochny has been a fiasco from the start. After construction began in 2011, the project was beset by hunger strikes, claims of unpaid workers, and the theft of $126 million. Additionally, a man driving a diamond-encrusted Mercedes was arrested after embezzling $75,000. Five years ago, there was another purge of top officials after another round of corruption.

Ariane 6 delivers for Europe again. European launch services provider Arianespace has successfully launched the Sentinel 1D Earth observation satellite aboard an Ariane 62 rocket for the European Commission, European Spaceflight reports. Launched in its two-booster configuration, the Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Center in South America on Tuesday. Approximately 34 minutes after liftoff, the satellite was deployed from the rocket’s upper stage into a Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 693 kilometers (430 miles). Sentinel 1D is the newest spacecraft to join Europe’s Copernicus program, the world’s most expansive network of environmental monitoring satellites. The new satellite will extend Europe’s record of global around-the-clock radar imaging, revealing information about environmental disasters, polar ice cover, and the use of water resources.

Doubling cadence … This was the fourth flight of Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket, and its third operational launch. Arianespace plans one more Ariane 62 launch to close out the year with a pair of Galileo navigation satellites. The company aims to double its Ariane 6 launch cadence in 2026, with between six and eight missions planned, according to David Cavaillès, Arianespace’s CEO. The European launch provider will open its 2026 manifest with the first flight of the more powerful four-booster variant of the rocket. If the company does manage eight Ariane 6 flights in 2026, it will already be close to reaching the stated maximum launch cadence of between nine and 10 flights per year.

India sets its own record for payload mass. The Indian Space Research Organization on Sunday successfully launched the Indian Navy’s advanced communication satellite GSAT-7R, or CMS-03, on an LVM3 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, The Hindu reports. The indigenously designed and developed satellite, weighing approximately 4.4 metric tons (9,700 pounds), is the heaviest satellite ever launched by an Indian rocket and marks a major milestone in strengthening the Navy’s space-based communications and maritime domain awareness.

Going heavy … The launch Sunday was India’s fourth of 2025, a decline from the country’s high-water mark of eight orbital launches in a year in 2023. The failure in May of India’s most-flown rocket, the PSLV, has contributed to this year’s slower launch cadence. India’s larger rockets, the GSLV and LVM3, have been more active while officials grounded the PSLV for an investigation into the launch failure. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin preps for second flight of New Glenn. The road to the second flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lifting New Glenn rocket got a lot clearer this week. The company confirmed it is targeting Sunday, November 9, for the launch of New Glenn from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This follows a successful test-firing of the rocket’s seven BE-4 main engines last week, Ars reports. Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, said the engines operated at full power for 22 seconds, generating nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust on the launch pad.

Fully integrated … With the launch date approaching, engineers worked this week to attach the rocket’s payload shroud containing two NASA satellites set to embark on a journey to Mars. Now that the rocket is fully integrated, ground crews will roll it back to Blue Origin’s Launch Complex-36 (LC-36) for final countdown preps. The launch window on Sunday opens at 2: 45 pm EST (19: 45 UTC). Blue Origin is counting on recovering the New Glenn first stage on the next flight after missing the landing on the rocket’s inaugural mission in January. Officials plan to reuse this booster on the third New Glenn launch early next year, slated to propel Blue Origin’s first unpiloted Blue Moon lander toward the Moon.

Next three launches

Nov. 8: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-51 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 08: 30 UTC

Nov. 8: Long March 11H| Unknown Payload | Haiyang Spaceport, China Coastal Waters | 21: 00 UTC

Nov. 9: New Glenn | ESCAPADE | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 19: 45 UTC

Rocket Report: Canada invests in sovereign launch; India flexes rocket muscles Read More »

James Watson, who helped unravel DNA’s double-helix, has died

DNA, Double Helix, health, James Watson, Science / Tim Belzer / November 7, 2025

James Dewey Watson, who helped reveal DNA’s double-helix structure, kicked off the Human Genome Project, and became infamous for his racist, sexist, and otherwise offensive statements, has died. He was 97.

His death was confirmed to The New York Times by his son Duncan, who said Watson died on Thursday in a hospice in East Northport, New York, on Long Island. He had previously been hospitalized with an infection. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory also confirmed his passing.

Watson was born in Chicago in 1928 and attained scientific fame in 1953 at 25 years old for solving the molecular structure of DNA—the genetic blueprints for life—with his colleague Francis Crick at England’s Cavendish laboratory. Their discovery heavily relied on the work of chemist and crystallographer Rosalind Franklin at King’s College in London, whose X-ray images of DNA provided critical clues to the molecule’s twisted-ladderlike architecture. One image in particular from Franklin’s lab, Photo 51, made Watson and Crick’s discovery possible. But, she was not fully credited for her contribution. The image was given to Watson and Crick without Franklin’s knowledge or consent by Maurice Wilkins, a biophysicist and colleague of Franklin.

Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for the discovery of DNA’s structure. By that time, Franklin had died (she died in 1958 at the age of 37 from ovarian cancer), and Nobels are not given posthumously. But Watson and Crick’s treatment of Franklin and her research has generated lasting scorn within the scientific community. Throughout his career and in his memoir, Watson disparaged Franklin’s intelligence and appearance.

James Watson, who helped unravel DNA’s double-helix, has died Read More »

The government shutdown is starting to have cosmic consequences

blue origin, Commercial space, Federal Aviation Administration, launch, Science, Space, spacex, starlink / Rejus Almole / November 7, 2025

The federal government shutdown, now in its 38th day, prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a temporary emergency order Thursday prohibiting commercial rocket launches from occurring during “peak hours” of air traffic.

The FAA also directed commercial airlines to reduce domestic flights from 40 “high impact airports” across the country in a phased approach beginning Friday. The agency said the order from the FAA’s administrator, Bryan Bedford, is aimed at addressing “safety risks and delays presented by air traffic controller staffing constraints caused by the continued lapse in appropriations.”

The government considers air traffic controllers essential workers, so they remain on the job without pay until Congress passes a federal budget and President Donald Trump signs it into law. The shutdown’s effects, which affected federal workers most severely at first, are now rippling across the broader economy.

Sharing the airspace

Vehicles traveling to and from space share the skies with aircraft, requiring close coordination with air traffic controllers to clear airspace for rocket launches and reentries. The FAA said its order restricting commercial air traffic, launches, and reentries is intended to “ensure the safety of aircraft and the efficiency of the [National Airspace System].”

In a statement explaining the order, the FAA said the air traffic control system is “stressed” due to the shutdown.

“With continued delays and unpredictable staffing shortages, which are driving fatigue, risk is further increasing, and the FAA is concerned with the system’s ability to maintain the current volume of operations,” the regulator said. “Accordingly, the FAA has determined additional mitigation is necessary.”

Beginning Monday, the FAA said commercial space launches will only be permitted between 10 pm and 6 am local time, when the national airspace is most calm. The order restricts commercial reentries to the same overnight timeframe. The FAA licenses all commercial launches and reentries.

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Next-generation black hole imaging may help us understand gravity better

astrophysics, black hole, event horizon, Event Horizon Telescope, gravity, Physics, relativity, Science / Paul Patrick / November 6, 2025

Right now, we probably don’t have the ability to detect these small changes in phenomena. However, that may change, as a next-generation version of the Event Horizon Telescope is being considered, along with a space-based telescope that would operate on similar principles. So the team (four researchers based in Shanghai and CERN) decided to repeat an analysis they did shortly before the Event Horizon Telescope went operational, and consider whether the next-gen hardware might be able to pick up features of the environment around the black hole that might discriminate among different theorized versions of gravity.

Theorists have been busy, and there are a lot of potential replacements for general relativity out there. So, rather than working their way through the list, they used a model of gravity (the parametric Konoplya–Rezzolla–Zhidenko metric) that allows that isn’t specific to any given hypothesis. Instead, it allows some of its parameters to be changed, thus allowing the team to vary the behavior of gravity within some limits. To get a sense of the sort of differences that might be present, the researchers swapped two different parameters between zero and one, giving them four different options. Those results were compared to the Kerr metric, which is the standard general relativity version of the event horizon.

Small but clear differences

Using those five versions of gravity, they model the three-dimensional environment near the event horizon using hydrodynamic simulations, including infalling matter, the magnetic fields it produces, and the jets of matter that those magnetic fields power.

The results resemble the sorts of images that the Event Horizon Telescope produced. These include a bright ring with substantial asymmetry, where one side is significantly brighter due to the rotation of the black hole. And, while the differences are subtle between all the variations of gravity, they’re there. One extreme version produced the smallest but brightest ring; another had a reduced contrast between the bright and dim side of the ring. There were also differences between the width of the jets produced in these models.

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New quantum hardware puts the mechanics in quantum mechanics

Computer science, Helios, Physics, quantinuum, quantum computing, quantum mechanics, Science, trapped ion / Rejus Almole / November 5, 2025

As a test case, the machine was used to test a model of superconductivity.

Quantum computers based on ions or atoms have one major advantage: The hardware itself isn’t manufactured, so there’s no device-to-device variability. Every atom is the same and should perform similarly every time. And since the qubits themselves can be moved around, it’s theoretically possible to entangle any atom or ion with any other in the system, allowing for a lot of flexibility in how algorithms and error correction are performed.

This combination of consistent, high-fidelity performance with all-to-all connectivity has led many key demonstrations of quantum computing to be done on trapped-ion hardware. Unfortunately, the hardware has been held back a bit by relatively low qubit counts—a few dozen compared to the hundred or more seen in other technologies. But on Wednesday, a company called Quantinuum announced a new version of its trapped-ion hardware that significantly boosts the qubit count and uses some interesting technology to manage their operation.

Trapped-ion computing

Both neutral atom and trapped-ion computers store their qubits in the spin of the nucleus. That spin is somewhat shielded from the environment by the cloud of electrons around the nucleus, giving these qubits a relatively long coherence time. While neutral atoms are held in place by a network of lasers, trapped ions are manipulated via electromagnetic control based on the ion’s charge. This means that key components of the hardware can be built using standard electronic manufacturing, although lasers are still needed for manipulations and readout.

While the electronics are static—they stay wherever they were manufactured—they can be used to move the ions around. That means that as long as the trackways the atoms can move on enable it, any two ions can be brought into close proximity and entangled. This all-to-all connectivity can enable more efficient implementation of algorithms performed directly on the hardware qubits or the use of error-correction codes that require a complicated geometry of connections. That’s one reason why Microsoft used a Quantinuum machine to demonstrate error-correction code based on a tesseract.

But arranging the trackways so that any two qubits can be next to each other can become increasingly complicated. Moving ions around is a relatively slow process, so retrieving two ions from the far ends of a chip too often can cause a system to start pushing up against the coherence time of the qubits. In the long term, Quantinuum plans to build chips with a square grid reminiscent of the street layout of many cities. But doing so will require a mastery of controlling the flow of ions through four-way intersections.

And that’s what Quantinuum is doing in part with its new chip, named Helios. It has a single intersection that couples two ion-storage areas, enabling operations as ions slosh from one end of the chip to the other. And it comes with significantly more qubits than its earlier hardware, moving from 56 to 96 qubits without sacrificing performance. “We’ve kept and actually even improved the two qubit gate fidelity,” Quantinuum VP Jenni Strabley told Ars. “So we’re not seeing any degradation in the two-qubit gate fidelity as we go to larger and larger sizes.”

Doing the loop

The image below is taken using the fluorescence of the atoms in the hardware itself. As you can see, the layout is dominated by two features: A loop at the left and two legs extending to the right. They’re connected by a four-way intersection. The Quantinuum staff described this intersection as being central to the computer’s operation.

A black background on which a series of small blue dots trace out a circle and two parallel lines connected by an x-shaped junction. — The actual ions trace out the physical layout of the Helios system, featuring a storage ring and two legs that contain dedicated operation sites. Credit: Quantinuum

The system works by rotating the ions around the loop. As an ion reaches the intersection, the system chooses whether to kick it into one of the legs and, if so, which leg. “We spin that ring almost like a hard drive, really, and whenever the ion that we want to gate gets close to the junction, there’s a decision that happens: Either that ion goes [into the legs], or it kind of makes a little turn and goes back into the ring,” said David Hayes, Quantinuum’s director of Computational Design and Theory. “And you can make that decision with just a few electrodes that are right at that X there.”

Each leg has a region where operations can take place, so this system can ensure that the right qubits are present together in the operation zones for things like two-qubit gates. Once the operations are complete, the qubits can be moved into the leg storage regions, and new qubits can be shuffled in. When the legs fill up, the qubits can be sent back to the loop, and the process is restarted.

“You get less traffic jams if all the traffic is running one way going through the gate zones,” Hayes told Ars. “If you had to move them past each other, you would have to do kind of physical swaps, and you want to avoid that.”

Obviously, issuing all the commands to control the hardware will be quite challenging for anything but the simplest operations. That puts an increasing emphasis on the compilers that add a significant layer of abstraction between what you want a quantum computer to do and the actual hardware commands needed to implement it. Quantinuum has developed its own compiler to take user-generated code and produce something that the control system can convert into the sequence of commands needed.

The control system now incorporates a real-time engine that can read data from Helios and update the commands it issues based on the state of the qubits. Quantinuum has this portion of the system running on GPUs rather than requiring customized hardware.

Quantinuum’s SDK for users is called Guppy and is based on Python, which has been modified to allow users to describe what they’d like the system to do. Helios is being accompanied by a new version of Guppy that includes some traditional programming tools like FOR loops and IF-based conditionals. These will be critical for the sorts of things we want to do as we move toward error-corrected qubits. This includes testing for errors, fixing them if they’re present, or repeatedly attempting initialization until it succeeds without error.

Hayes said the new version is also moving toward error correction. Thanks to Guppy’s ability to dynamically reassign qubits, Helios will be able to operate as a machine with 94 qubits while detecting errors on any of them. Alternatively, the 96 hardware qubits can be configured as a single unit that hosts 48 error-corrected qubits. “It’s actually a concatenated code,” Hayes told Ars. “You take two error detection codes and weave them together… it’s a single code block, but it has 48 logical cubits housed inside of it.” (Hayes said it’s a distance-four code, meaning it can fix up to two errors that occur simultaneously.)

Tackling superconductivity

While Quantinuum hardware has always had low error rates relative to most of its competitors, there was only so much you could do with 56 qubits. With 96 now at their disposal, researchers at the company decided to build a quantum implementation of a model (called the Fermi-Hubbard model) that’s meant to help study the electron pairing that takes place during the transition to superconductivity.

“There are definitely terms that the model doesn’t capture,” Quantinuum’s Henrik Dreyer acknowledged. “They neglect their electrorepulsion that [the electrons] still have—I mean, they’re still negatively charged; they are still repelling. There are definitely terms that the model doesn’t capture. On the other hand, I should say that this Fermi-Hubbard model—it has many of the features that a superconductor has.”

Superconductivity occurs when electrons join to form what are called Cooper pairs, overcoming their normal repulsion. And the model can tell that apart from normal conductivity in the same material.

“You ask the question ‘What’s the chance that one of the charged particles spontaneously disappears because of quantum fluctuations and goes over here?’” Dreyer said, describing what happens when simulating a conductor. “What people do in superconductivity is they take this concept, but instead of asking what’s the chance of a single-charge particle to tunnel over there spontaneously, they’re asking what is the chance of a pair to tunnel spontaneously?”

Even in its simplified form, however, it’s still a model of a quantum system, with all the computational complexity that comes with that. So the Quantinuum team modeled a few systems that classical computers struggle with. One was simply looking at a larger grid of atoms than most classical simulations have done; another expanded the grid in an additional dimension, modeling layers of a material. Perhaps the most complicated simulation involved what happens when a laser pulse of the right wavelength hits a superconductor at room temperature, an event that briefly induces a superconducting state.

And the system produced results, even without error correction. “It’s maybe a technical point, but I think it’s very important technical point, which is [that] the circuits that we ran, they all had errors,” Dreyer told Ars. “Maybe on the average of three or so errors, and for some reason, that is not very fully understood for this application, it doesn’t matter. You still get almost the perfect result in some of these cases.”

That said, he also indicated that having higher-fidelity hardware would help the team do a better job of putting the system in a ground state or running the simulation for longer. But those will have to wait for future hardware.

What’s next

If you look at Quantinuum’s roadmap for that future hardware, Helios would appear to be the last of its kind. It and earlier versions of the processors have loops and large straight stretches; everything in the future features a grid of squares. But both Strabley and Hayes said that Helios has several key transitional features. “Those ions are moving through that junction many, many times over the course of a circuit,” Strabley told Ars. “And so it’s really enabled us to work on the reliability of the junction, and that will translate into the large-scale systems.”

Image of a product roadmap, with years from 2020 to 2029 noted across the top. There are five processors arrayed from left to right, each with increasingly complex geometry. — Helios sits at the pivot between the simple geometries of earlier Quantinuum processors and the grids of future designs. Credit: Quantinuum

The collection of squares seen in future processors will also allow the same sorts of operations to be done with the loop-and-legs of Helios. Some squares can serve as the equivalent of a loop in terms of storage and sorting, while some of the straight lines nearby can be used for operations.

“What will be common to both of them is kind of the general concept that you can have a storage and sorting region and then gating regions on the side and they’re separated from one another,” Hayes said. “It’s not public yet, but that’s the direction we’re heading: a storage region where you can do really fast sorting in these 2D grids, and then gating regions that have parallelizable logical operations.”

In the meantime, we’re likely to see improvements made to Helios—ideas that didn’t quite make today’s release. “There’s always one more improvement that people want to make, and I’m the person that says, ‘No, we’re going to go now. Put this on the market, and people are going to go use it,’” Strabley said. “So there is a long list of things that we’re going to add to improve the performance. So expect that over the course of Helios, the performance is going to get better and better and better.”

That performance is likely to be used for the sort of initial work done on superconductivity or the algorithm recently described by Google, which is at or a bit beyond what classical computers can manage and may start providing some useful insights. But it will still be a generation or two before we start seeing quantum computing fulfill some of its promise.

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