The Woman Who Sent a Spacecraft to Europa

Over at The New Yorker, you can find my coverage of the launch of Europa Clipper, NASA’s flagship to the Jovian system, and the story of one of the scientists who’s spent her career making it happen. A snippet:

Just after noon on Monday, a SpaceX rocket stood on the same launch pad that once sent men to the moon. Hurricane Milton had recently ripped across Florida, whipping up winds of a hundred miles per hour in Cape Canaveral, but now the skies were a featureless blue. From a restricted viewing area not far away, Louise Prockter, a graceful scientist with sandy hair, glanced at a countdown clock and then back at the rocket, which carried her lifework. “Surreal,” she said softly. “This just doesn’t feel real.” There were three minutes until ignition.

Read the rest here.

Update: This morning, NPR’s 1A invited me on to discuss Europa, its ocean, the Clipper mission, and the origins of life. Thank you to host Rupert Allman for the fun conversation.

Europa Clipper Imperiled

For the New York Times, I reveal details about a critical issue affecting Europa Clipper, NASA’s flagship mission to Jupiter’s ocean moon. From the story:

The equipment issue on the spacecraft could result in a lengthy delay of the mission, Europa Clipper, which NASA classifies as “flagship,” a designation for its most scientifically significant endeavors. Experts say that if the spacecraft launches in October, as scheduled, it may fall short of its scientific objective of assessing whether anything could live on Europa.

At issue is the ability of the transistors, the electric switches that are the building blocks of computer chips and other electronics, to resist the powerful radiation of the Jovian system.

You can read the rest here. And if this subject interests you, perhaps I can interest you in a book about the scientists who spent a decade convincing NASA to fly this mission.

A New Era of Moon Exploration

In my latest essay for The New Yorker, I explore why the moon is so busy these days, and what that means for life on Earth.

On February 22nd, a robotic lander named Odysseus touched down on the sun-washed highlands near the south pole of the moon. It was the first time since the Apollo 17 mission, fifty-two years ago, that an American spacecraft had landed gracefully on the lunar surface. And yet NASA hadn’t designed or built Odysseus; it was renting space onboard. Intuitive Machines, a relatively small aerospace firm based in Houston, was responsible for the lander, which launched atop a SpaceX rocket. The event was historic not just because it signalled a return to the moon but because it was the first time that a private company from any country had landed a spacecraft there. It won’t be the last: Odysseus marks the beginning of a new, relentless, and open-ended campaign of robotic and crewed lunar exploration. The program is called Artemis.

Read the rest here.

Earth's First Cookbook

My latest for the New Yorker was seven years in the making. I first covered the OSIRIS-REx mission when it launched in 2016, for the Week. The following year, I embedded with the team for the Earth gravity assist, and wrote about it for the Atlantic. In 2018, I was also with the team for the spacecraft’s arrival at the asteroid Bennu, which I covered for Scientific American. And now, for the New Yorker, the return of the sample to the Utah desert, and the opening of the capsule in Houston, Texas. It begins:

On a brisk day in February, 2004, Dante Lauretta, an assistant professor of planetary science at the University of Arizona, got a call from Michael Drake, the head of the school’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “I have Lockheed Martin in my office,” Drake said. “They want to fly a spacecraft to an asteroid and bring back a sample. Are you in?”

Read the rest here.

What the Webb Will Show Us Next

For The New Yorker, I interviewed the astrophysicist Dr. Jane Rigby, senior project scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope. Here is a snippet:

What gaps in science do the J.W.S.T.’s unique capabilities fill?

J.W.S.T. works in the infrared. It was designed to see the light from the universe that is totally invisible to Hubble, which sees primarily in the optical and ultraviolet. About the “bluest” light that J.W.S.T. can see is the shade of red wine, and then it goes redder from there.

Because of the big bang, space is expanding—not just stuff in space but the fabric of space itself. And the light that we see from distant objects has actually been stretched by the expansion of the universe as well. That causes light from those distant objects to get stretched to longer wavelengths. It gets shifted to the red, to lower energies.

It’s just really cool that we can see almost to the end of the universe, right? We can do that because that light only travels so fast: the speed of light. We are studying galaxies whose light has been travelling for more than thirteen billion years. The universe is only about 13.8 billion years old! Those are the baby pictures of literally everything, and, in particular, of the baby galaxies that would have turned into mature galaxies like our Milky Way.

You can read the rest here.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)

Wine Enthusiast Magazine Debut

In the June/July issue of Wine Enthusiast, I write about my time at the extraordinary, not-to-be-missed Big Sur Food & Wine Festival. Here is a snippet:

We would walk that morning on private coastal land fenced off from the public. The festival is famous for finding breathtaking vistas few have ever seen, and this one especially had everyone eager to get going. “I’ve lived here my whole life and never seen it,” said one anticipant attendee.

Thirsty though we were, no one complained about the delay, which somehow made the proceedings all the more charming—a dramatic pause before the big reveal. The festival is entirely volunteer run; every dime flows right back into the community. As such, despite the opulence of the gathering, all the good wine and meals prepared by a battalion of award-winning chefs, the entire weekend feels as though its planners are just barely one step ahead of every event, Indiana Jones-charging across a collapsing stone floor. Somehow, they manage to pull it off with panache.

Read the rest here, or pick up a copy at your local bookstore or newsstand.

Image Credit: David W. Brown, made available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Presenting the Paperback Cover!

I am thrilled and honored to present the cover for the paperback edition of THE MISSION, which lands in bookstores on January 25, 2022! It is now available for pre-order at your local indie bookstore, or on Amazon.

The Mission

Two months ago, my book, THE MISSION, hit bookstores in the United States. This week, it was released in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. This book is the culmination of my life’s work. Seven years of my life went into it, and I can honestly say that every single word in its pages is literally the best I could do. And I am very proud to report that the response has been incredible. It was a book of the month for The Wall Street Journal and BBC Science Focus. In addition, here is a roundup of the big national reviews of my book that I’ve seen so far. If you find others, please let me know!

• “An enthusiastic account of an interplanetary probe to a distant moon. ... NASA continues to accomplish great feats, and more are in the offing, including this book’s subject: the 2024 launch of a multibillion-dollar spacecraft to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. ... Brown engagingly describes the cutthroat NASA political landscape. ... A delightful slice of NASA life.” — Kirkus (STARRED review)

• “Brown brings to vivid life the 17-year effort to put together a mission to Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. … Brown skillfully braids biography, science, obsession, and accounts of bureaucracy-wrangling into this mesmerizing tale of “good, bare-fisted science.” Salted with pop culture references and humor, Brown’s fascinating outing will entertain anyone curious about space exploration.” — Publishers Weekly (STARRED review)

• "Scientists believe that any extraterrestrial life in our solar system would most likely be found on Europa, a moon of Jupiter. This book chronicles the work of a tenacious team of researchers who have spent decades investigating that possibility, despite obstacles both bureaucratic (NASA’s long-standing preoccupation with Mars) and physical: Europa lies within a 'pulsing, rippling' belt of radiation and is covered by an ice shell 'kilometers thicker than any hole ever drilled on earth.'" — The New Yorker (OH MY GOD I RECEIVED A NOTICE IN THE NEW YORKER)

• “Brown is a nimble, gifted writer, downright Dickensian in his pointed descriptions and irreverent humor… Brown’s language drew me in to the world of interplanetary science and made me a part of it. The Europa Clipper mission is scheduled to launch in 2024 and, thanks to The Mission, I will be looking up, dreaming of Europa’s oceans, and those plumes, and waiting for news of what we find there.” — Air Mail

• “Brown leaves no door closed as he covers the science, logistics, personalities, and politics of this extraordinary NASA mission. His extensively researched, humorous, raucous, dramatic, and pop-culture-and science-fiction-laced immersion in planetary science will have readers hanging on every word.” — Booklist

• “This inspiring story provides a look into some of the characteristics needed to make change in a large industrial complex. Extensive notes are provided for further research. … An engaging read for all, especially for anyone curious about the details of space exploration.” — Library Journal

• Brown spent seven years interviewing these folks, and it shows in the way he vividly captures the challenges, triumphs and disappointments they have confronted, including the 20 years it took to convince NASA to sanction Europa Clipper. … Brown’s experience writing for publications such as The Atlantic, Scientific American and Smithsonian also shines through as he provides context about the vast distances involved in space travel and explains the hardcore science in layman’s terms while adding a humorous tone. He writes with descriptive prose, such as when he coins Sun’s beginning as ‘a swelling union of dust and hydrogen . . . its rapacious core inhaling everything available.’ Combining science and technology with the emotional human experience, The Mission is a fresh look at the future of space exploration.” — Bookpage

• “This book cannot answer the question of what—if anything—lurks in Europa's dark abyss, but it masterfully reveals with remarkable clarity what lies within the hearts of the men and women determined to find out.” — Scientific American

• “The Mission is fascinating. … Poetic.” — The Times

• “The Mission reads almost like a novel. Brown immersed himself in the lives of his characters and their work, coming away from his research with a richly realized story about fascinating characters." — The Houston Chronicle

• “Written in a smooth, fluid style that offers a tip of the hat to Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, this beautiful book is a gem of an introduction to our Solar System and how, over decades, human minds and robotic spacecraft have learned more about it. … Brown’s prose is refreshing and demonstrates his credentials as a superb wordsmith, handling complex issues of science, technology and politics with stylistic flair.” — BBC (5 stars out of 5)

• “This is an exceptionally absorbing and thrilling work, thanks to the narrative skills of its author and his various inspired choices. … Even when a story is exciting and gripping, you need a good narrator to translate it into writing, and this is what you get here. The spirited style of Brown balances levity and drama skillfully, and keeps the attention of the reader throughout the book without losing the thread. … The story up to here is worth being told, and The Mission does it masterfully.” — Nature Astronomy

Thank you to all of the critics who spent their columns writing about my book, and to all of the readers who traded their time and hard-earned money to take part in this journey. It means more than I can ever say. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

The Moon is Not Enough

I was very proud to write my first essay for the Wall Street Journal—the cover story for the weekend review. In it I call for NASA to drop the moon element of the Artemis program and go directly to Mars. The short, short version is this: Everything NASA would develop for the moon would have to be re-developed entirely for Mars; there is virtually no technological overlap. If we are going to start from zero anyway, why not go with the more ambitious, long-term self-sustaining target?

A snippet:

The idea of yoking the two destinations together may be politically appealing, but fiscal reality suggests that it will be one or the other, the moon or Mars. Congresses and presidents have often rewarded NASA’s astounding achievements with punishing budget cuts. The Apollo program was arguably the greatest engineering and exploration feat in human history, but the U.S. government treated its final missions as the end of a public works project; little was done to build on its success and hard-won institutional knowledge. At the height of Apollo’s development in 1966, NASA accounted for 6.6% of federal discretionary spending. Today, that figure is about 1.6%, a figure that has barely risen to accommodate the current lunar aspirations, let alone the exploration of another planetary system in our lifetimes.

Why shift gears and make Mars the priority? NASA estimates that just landing on the moon again—not building a base there—will cost $30 billion and says that lessons learned on the moon can be applied to future Mars plans. Broadly speaking, this is true, in the way that Antarctica and the Mojave are both deserts, and survival skills cultivated in one might help in the other. But the tools necessary to do anything useful in the two environments are very different and require, for the most part, very different technologies—including, crucially, an entirely different landing vehicle to navigate the Martian atmosphere.

Read the rest here.

How We Discovered Water on the Moon

She was on the phone with Paul Lucey, then her dissertation advisor at the University of Hawaii, when she began processing it and realized what she was seeing. “Oh my God,” she said. She screamed. “You’re not going to believe this! There it is. It’s so obvious!”

—From my New Yorker story of how a young, brilliant scientist discovered molecular water on the moon, and why it matters. Read it here.

(image credit: addy1969)

The New Yorker

This story for The New Yorker was almost a year in the making. In it, I offer an insider account of of the fabled mission development teams at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Team X and the A-Team, and tell the story of the 2019 Planetary Science Summer Seminar, the NASA “bootcamp” for planetary scientists who wish to learn how to plan missions to other worlds. A snippet:

… Two years later, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, an astronautical engineer named Randii Wessen stood before a wall-sized whiteboard in a room called Left Field. Facing him were eighteen researchers—planetary scientists, astrophysicists, engineers—most in their mid-twenties, all graduate students or postdocs. Bald, bearded, and trim at sixty-one, Wessen worked on the Voyager and Cassini space probes. He is now the lead study architect of J.P.L.’s so-called A-Team—a group in charge of early space-mission concept planning at the lab’s Innovation Foundry. (The team is named both for the discipline of mission architecture and for the nineteen-eighties TV show about a crack team of do-gooding mercenaries.) No two of the hundreds of thousands of identified objects in the solar system are exactly alike; each must be explored according to its own characteristics. Successful missions, therefore, emerge from the spot where the proved and the fantastic intersect. The best way to explore Io, Jupiter’s volcanic moon, could be an orbiter, but it could also be a lava boat. Often, these so-crazy-they-might-work solutions begin on Wessen’s whiteboards.

Read the rest here.

Antarctica, Publishing, and a Few Stories of Other Worlds

Since last I wrote, I joined an expedition to Antarctica for the ICECAP 2019 field season, have published a few things in various outlets, and finished the major edits for my Europa book, now titled THE MISSION. (Its release date has been pushed to January 26, 2021 because of [waves hands at everything].) So it’s been a pretty busy time, and the next few months promise more excitement yet.

For The New York Times, I wrote this story about a small group from NASA that I happened to bump into while in Antarctica. Just to preface this, the ICECAP team, about whom I am writing my next book, spent the field season at Casey Station, a tiny outpost on the east coast of the continent. It is run by the Australian Antarctic Division, and the odds of me bumping into anyone I know are… well to call it astronomical would be understating just how unlikely it would be. You don’t just fly to Antarctica. It’s hard to get permission to go there, dangerous to travel there, and there are scores of stations across the continent (which is bigger than North American) that are well suited for NASA’s purposes, including… I don’t know… American ones!

So one night I’m in the galley with Jamin Greenbaum, my friend and a big part of the Antarctica book to come, and in walks a guy from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the Europa mission is being built. (To be clear, my next book has nothing to do with space or Europa or any of that.) Who else is there? The great Kevin Hand, one of the world’s foremost Europa scholars.

I can’t even escape that moon while living in the last wilderness on Earth. So the story that I ended up writing was a target of opportunity. The NASA team happened to be there testing an underwater rover they had built, and I joined them for one of its tests. The New York Times piece is the result of that little adventure.

This Robot’s Journey to an Icy Alien Moon Starts Beneath Antarctica
(The New York Times)

CASEY STATION, Antarctica — Near a nice, big hole in the ice and beneath the stone gray, midday Antarctic summer skies, six Adélie penguins stared at six men toiling with tools. The chasm in the ice might have been an inviting entry to the krill-rich waters below. None of the members of the tuxedoed recon party dove into the hole, a square about six feet across. The risk of leopard seals was just too great.

But had they leapt in, the penguins would have discovered not a seal, but a robot.

NASA’s Next Low-Cost Planetary Science Missions Will Visit Venus or the Outer Solar System
(Scientific American)

NASA is set to handle some unfinished business across the solar system, as evidenced by four possible missions it announced yesterday. They are the finalists in the space agency’s Discovery Program competition, a Shark Tank–like face-off in which labs and universities have proposed small, focused spacecraft to explore disparate worlds. More than a dozen ideas, each designed to cost less than $500 million, were submitted to NASA for consideration. Of the four now remaining, only two or perhaps just one will be chosen next year for eventual flight.

“It’s an interesting mix,” says Margaret Kivelson, chair of the Space Studies Board at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. “They are well thought-out missions—and to fascinating objects.” Under consideration are spacecraft that would travel to the Jovian moon Io, the most active volcanic body in the solar system; Venus, considered Earth’s “evil twin” because its environmental conditions are hellish, despite the planet being nearly identical to our own in size, mass and composition; and Triton, a moon of Neptune thought to harbor a subsurface ocean.

Searching for the Key to Life’s Beginnings
(Smithsonian)

Before 1976, when Viking 1 and 2 became the first spacecraft to successfully land and operate on the surface of Mars, the global imagination longed desperately for a red planet that harbored life. The Viking landers were designed to test for microbes, but the real hope, held by even the most jaded planetary scientists, was that NASA’s spacecraft would discover complex life on Mars—something that scurried, or maybe a scraggly shrub. Mars, after all, was our last, best hope after astronomers (and the Mariner 2 spacecraft) forever vanquished the notion of dinosaurs stamping across humid, Venusian bogs. It was Mars or bust; Mercury was just too close to the sun, and beyond the asteroid belt, it was believed, lay a no microbe’s land of gas giants and frozen moons.

The exploration of the solar system since Viking has represented a world-by-world grasping for something—anything—that might suggest life as we know it (or life as we don’t). Today the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa are what the swamps of Venus and canals of Mars were for the twentieth century: perhaps the best option for annihilating human loneliness. NASA’s next outer planets flagship mission, Europa Clipper, will attempt to determine the icy moon’s habitability. Some future lander or swimmer will have to find the life if it’s there. The habitable zone of the solar system now includes, potentially, every planet in the solar system. Enceladus and Titan, circling Saturn, are good candidates, as is Triton around Neptune. Like water, life might be everywhere.

Moons of Earth and Saturn

The New York Times has kept me busy of late. In the special section commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, I had two pieces: one on the future of the American astronaut corps, and another on the haunting restoration of the Apollo Mission Control at NASA Johnson Space Center. Another piece I am particularly proud of is the announcement of a mission to Titan, the mysterious moon of Saturn, and the only place in our solar system other than Earth with standing liquid seas.

Image credit: The New York Times

NASA Announces New Dragonfly Drone Mission to Explore Titan
(The New York Times)

Because of the nature of its atmosphere, Titan is a very Earthlike place. Chemically, it is much like our world’s primordial past. The surface pressure of Titan is one-and-a-half times the surface pressure of Earth, and the same sorts of interactions between air, land and sea take place. Titan thus has familiar geology. Methane on Titan plays the role that water plays here. Its methane cycle is analogous to Earth’s water cycle. It has methane clouds, methane rain and methane lakes and seas on the surface.

“There’s going to be a tremendous change in the fabric of how we see Titan as a world,” said Dr. Ralph Lorenz of Applied Physics Laboratory, the Dragonfly project scientist in an April interview. He predicted that features of Titan will be, “recognizable, but different in flavor from what you see on Earth and Mars.”

That might include the things that wiggle. Complex organic molecules fall from its atmosphere onto the surface of Titan, gather over long periods of time and can be processed further. If cryovolcanoes erupt on Titan’s surface, as data from the Cassini spacecraft suggests, the organic material can mix with liquid water. Sunlight, at the same time, drives the moon’s photochemistry, introducing energy to a system primed for life.

NASA Reopens Apollo Mission Control Room That Once Landed Men on Moon
(The New York Times)

Apollo mission control had been abandoned in 1992, with all operations moved to a modernized mission control center elsewhere in the building. Center employees, friends, family — and anyone, really, who had access to Building 30 — could walk in, take a seat, take a lunch break and take pictures.

While they were there, they might take a button from one of the computer consoles. Or a switch or a dial, anything small — a personal memento from an ancient American achievement. The furniture fabric and carpet underfoot grew threadbare. The room was dark; none of the equipment had power. Wires hung where rotary phones had once sat. The giant overhead screens in front of the room were damaged, and the room smelled of mildew. Yellow duct tape held carpet together in places.

“You knew it wasn’t right — you just knew,” said Sandra Tetley, the historic preservation officer at the Johnson Space Center. “But it was not a priority. We are an organization that’s moving toward the future, so there is not a budget to do things like this.”

The project began in earnest six years ago. The anniversary loomed, and that was the catalyst to fix up mission control, and to do it right. “We wanted to meet a high standard to restore it, and we were able to meet this 50th anniversary,” Ms. Tetley said.

As New Space Race Beckons, Astronauts Face Identity Crisis
(The New York Times)

Christopher Ferguson trains from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. A recent day for him was typical: five hours in a launch simulation with the mission operations team. He trained alongside Sunita Williams, herself a two-time space flier and veteran of the space station.

Halfway through the session, the two swapped roles, preparing for situations that might arise on an actual mission. The balance of the day was spent planning timeline management when inserting a crew into a rocket, so that when the hatch closes, all the right things are on the inside, and all the right things are on the outside.

The difference between Mr. Ferguson and Ms. Williams is that Mr. Ferguson does not work for NASA. He works for Boeing and will fly on the first crewed mission of Starliner. Boeing and SpaceX are part of Commercial Crew, a NASA-supported program that has tasked American companies with building spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts to the space station. NASA has relied on Russia’s space program for launching astronauts since the last shuttle returned to Earth in 2011.

A Roundup of Recent Work

It’s been a busy few weeks. Here are a few recent pieces I have had written, and snippets of each.

Neptune’s Moon Triton Is Destination of Proposed NASA Mission
(The New York Times)

Visits to the outer solar system are usually conducted as NASA flagship missions that cost billions of dollars, like the recently concluded Cassini mission to Saturn or the Europa Clipper spacecraft set for launch in the 2020s.

While these projects have produced significant achievements, smaller, less pricey missions also might advance planetary science. On Mars, for instance, no single spacecraft did everything, but in aggregate and over time, the robots sent there revealed the planet’s watery past and set the stage for future astronauts.

That’s why the scientists behind Trident proposal, which will be formally presented to NASA later this month, are seeking support under the agency’s highly competitive Discovery program, for missions that are supposed to cost less than $500 million.

Europa Mission Gets New Instrument to Look for Signs of Habitability
(Scientific American)

NASA is changing one of the key scientific instruments on Europa Clipper, its next major mission to the outer planets of the solar system, and has brought in a scientific luminary to lead it, project leaders announced today. Clipper is set to orbit Jupiter and study Europa, the icy Jovian moon, across multiple flybys. Earlier this month, NASA headquarters terminated the mission’s ICEMAG magnetometer instrument, citing overruns in its estimated budget. The move left the spacecraft without an essential tool to study Europa’s interior ocean, where astrobiologists hope extraterrestrial organisms might be found.

Margaret Kivelson, a professor emerita at the University of California, Los Angeles, will lead the effort to develop a simplified magnetometer to replace ICEMAG. The instrument will measure Europa’s magnetic field and gather data on the ocean’s depth and salinity. Kivelson previously led the magnetometer team on the spacecraft Galileo, which orbited Jupiter in the 1990s. She is credited with discovering the ocean beneath Europa’s ice shell.

How NASA’s Opportunity Rover Made Mars Part of Earth
(Smithsonian)

MER came in the aftermath of failed mission proposals by Ray Arvidson, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis; Larry Soderblom of the U.S. Geological Survey; and Steve Squyres, a professor at Cornell University. Each of the three had been beaten by David Paige of University of California, Los Angeles, whose ill-fated Mars Polar Lander was selected for flight by NASA.

“During an [American Geophysical Union] meeting, I stopped Steve in the hall,” says Arvidson. “I said, ‘I’m a pretty sore loser. How about you?’ And that was the start.” Arvidson, Squyres and Soderblom merged their various teams and set about writing a joint proposal to get a rover on the Martian surface.

NASA Considers a Rover Mission to Go Cave Diving on the Moon
(Smithsonian)

Once it reaches the bottom of the pit, Kerber says, Axel would explore the cavern floor, providing humanity’s first close look at the subterranean realms of the moon. The rover would carry six times as much tether as it needs, so however far the bottom of the cavern is, Axel should be able to descend deeply enough to discover what waits below.

“The bottom of the pit is total exploration. We have enough time to just see what the heck is down there. We are thinking a monolith,” Kerber jokes, “or a big door covered in hieroglyphics.”

Margaret Kivelson Figured It Out

Last week, I had a piece in the New York Times about space physicist Margaret Kivelson, who led the Galileo team that discovered Europa’s subsurface, saltwater ocean. A snippet:

LOS ANGELES — The data were like nothing Margaret Kivelson and her team of physicists ever expected.

It was December 1996, and the spacecraft Galileo had just flown by Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. The readings beamed back to Earth suggested a magnetic field emanating from the moon. Europa should not have had a magnetic field, yet there it was — and not even pointed in the right direction.

“This is unexpected,” she recalled saying as the weird data rolled in. “And that’s wonderful.”

It would be the most significant of a series of surprises from the Jovian moons. For Dr. Kivelson’s team, the mission should not have been this exciting.

She and her colleagues had devised the magnetometer returning the anomalous data. The instrument’s job was to measure Jupiter’s massive magnetic field and any variations caused by its moons. Those findings were likely to interest space physicists, but few others. Dr. Kivelson’s instrument was never supposed to change the course of space exploration.

And then it did. Dr. Kivelson and her team would soon prove that they had discovered the first subsurface, saltwater ocean on an alien world.

You can read the rest here.

Credit: Image provided by Margaret Kivelson

The Odyssey of OSIRIS-REx

Earlier this year, I covered the rocket launch of OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft that will visit an asteroid, study it, collect a sample, and return to Earth. My account of the launch has been published by The Week. I really do think it's the best thing I've ever written and I hope you enjoy. Here is a little snippet:

The tail of flame is about as long as the rocket itself, but it is not orange. It's not even fire, really, as you understand fire to be. It is white. It hurts the eyes. It's like staring at a concentrated burst of manufactured sun. It's not the flamethrower's discharge, but that of the welding torch. It is blinding. It doesn't billow. It's all business, this white welding torch. So pure and focused and controlled.

The smoke is produced by ignited liquid oxygen and liquid kerosene. It is the color of cigarette smoke, and at ignition it shrouds the launch complex bottom to top, pad to candlestick-like lightning rods. The rocket rises above. The smoke follows the rocket up. It's a skywriter, this thing, drawing smoothly some great, fine arc to heaven. The higher it gets, the whiter the smoke, purer, purer, purer, until at last it seems humankind has surpassed the cloud itself as an object of stainless wonder against a curtain of blue.

You can read the whole story here.

NASA's Spaceship Factory

Last week I visited NASA Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans to view the newly-built Orion pressure vessel. I found the whole thing to be a deeply moving experience, and a glimpse of the kind of future we all want desperately for our grandchildren, and for the human species. I am very proud of this essay that came out of the event. It's published at Mental Floss, and I hope it finds a good audience. A little sample:

Michoud looks like a place where things are built. Spacecraft, yes, and rockets—the biggest ever imagined—but things all the same. With only slight changes, it could be a place where cars are manufactured, or supercomputers, or valves, or motors. Michoud is like the world's greatest high school metal shop, only instead of turning wrenches to automatic transmissions, the men and women here apply tools to spacecraft. Sheets of metal roll in the front door, and spaceships and rockets roll out the back.

The facility is located on the outskirts of New Orleans, amidst vast footprints of vacant land. Across the street from Michoud is a Folgers Coffee plant, leaving the air outside redolent with the soft bitterness of a newly opened bag of ground coffee. That itself is striking—the mix of coffee, concrete, cars, and cranes. This is where science fiction is realized, and it's all so normal. The workers here are some of the smartest people in the world doing some of the most challenging and important work in the world, but they seem like true workers in the grandest human sense of the word, the kinds of men and women otherwise seen with sleeves rolled up on wartime propaganda posters. Together we can do it! Keep 'em firing!

Read the rest here.