For the last month, NASA's interim administrator, Sean Duffy, has been giving interviews and speeches around the world, offering a singular message: "We are going to beat the Chinese to the Moon." This is certainly what the president who appointed Duffy to the NASA post wants to hear. Unfortunately, there is a very good chance that Duffy's sentiment is false.
The chilling warning comes as a new culture of fear and silence has descended on NASA after Trump officials instituted dramatic staff reductions, along with alleged unilateral budget cuts and the gagging of an important program that allows people to air safety and performance issues without fear of reprisals, according to the report released by Democrats on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
Following countless delays plaguing its efforts to return the first astronauts to the lunar surface in over half a century, NASA could finally be bucking the trend. NASA officials revealed today that the agency's Artemis 2 mission, which will see a crew of four astronauts travel around the Moon and back, could launch as soon as February 5, roughly two months earlier than previously anticipated.
You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand why NASA implemented this policy: In July, dual Chinese/American citizen Chenguang Gong admitted to a lengthy industrial espionage campaign that saw him download information on sensors used by aircraft to confuse infrared-seeking missiles, plus data on radiation-hardened cameras that the US placed in orbit to give an early warning of incoming rockets and hypersonic vehicles. China has also recruited spies at the US Navy.
Back in 1957, something spectacular happened that would change the world forever: the first human-created satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched into space. Orbiting our planet in low-Earth orbit, its unique signatures could be seen across the world. Unlike the stars, planets, or meteors that illuminated the night sky, this artificial satellite would glow with the reflected light of the Sun, streaking across the skies overhead whenever it passed within a couple of hundred kilometers of an observer's location.
"There were claims of a tail, but since 3I/ATLAS is accelerating and its current size is not much larger than the angular resolution of Earth-based telescopes, it is not easy to avoid fictitious elongation of the image as a result of the object's motion."
NASA employees are preparing plans to terminate two critical satellite missions monitoring greenhouse gases, which provide valuable data to various sectors, including agriculture and science.
"Finding a temperate planet in such a compact system makes this discovery particularly exciting. It highlights the remarkable diversity of exoplanetary systems and strengthens the case for studying potentially habitable worlds around low-mass stars."
The twin spacecraft are part of the NASA-funded TRACERS mission, which will spend at least a year measuring plasma conditions in narrow regions of Earth's magnetic field known as polar cusps.
