NASA's Next Launch Attempt for Artemis I Will Occur September 3

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September 01, 2022

Dear Reader, This week, we're awaiting an appointment with destiny. After a scrubbed launch attempt on Monday, August 29, the first-ever flight of NASA's Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft is now slated for the afternoon of Saturday, September 3. Although uncrewed, the flight will be a crucial test for the hardware meant to take astronauts back to the moon later this decade. The stakes are high for this event, the first mission of NASA's Artemis program, with a success or a failure each having profound—and profoundly different—implications for the future of U.S. human spaceflight. We'll be watching with bated breath this Saturday when the launch window opens at 2:17 p.m. Eastern time, and hope you will be, too. Elsewhere this week, we have stories on the secrets of black holes, quantum tunneling and DNA, a new exoplanet discovery from the James Webb Space Telescope, and more. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics @LeeBillings

Space Exploration NASA's Next Launch Attempt for Artemis I Will Occur September 3 Technical glitches and questionable weather forecasts continue to delay liftoff for NASA's landmark lunar mission By Mike Wall,SPACE.com

Planetary Science Webb Telescope Finds Carbon Dioxide on a Distant Exoplanet The result offers a sneak peek at the observatory's transformative potential for studying worlds beyond the solar system By Shannon Hall,Nature magazine

Space Exploration Rocket Woes Delay Launch of NASA's Artemis I Mission A problem with one of the Space Launch System's main engines has postponed the test flight until at least September 2 By Tariq Malik,SPACE.com

Space Exploration The 'Program Is Precarious': Lori Garver on NASA's Artemis I Moonshot A former NASA deputy administrator speaks candidly about the troubled history and radical potential of the space agency's lunar return By Nadia Drake

Black Holes Black Hole Discovery Helps to Explain Quantum Nature of the Cosmos New insights from black hole research may elucidate the cosmological event horizon By Edgar Shaghoulian

Genetics Quantum Tunneling Makes DNA More Unstable The freaky physics phenomenon of quantum tunneling may mutate genes By Lars Fischer,Gary Stix

Culture Octavia E. Butler's Legacy of Time Travel Why evolutionary biology and social justice belong together, the Silicon Valley fatalism that's ruining our planet, and more By Amy Brady

Black Holes What Is the Black Hole Information Paradox? A Primer Black holes, wormholes, entanglement, Einstein, mysterious islands and new science that sees how the inside of a black hole is secretly on the outside. By Jason Drakeford,Clara Moskowitz,Jeffery DelViscio,Sunya Bhutta

FROM THE STORE Extraterrestrials and the Search for Life Do aliens exist? The enduring mystery of whether we're alone in the universe is a question that continues to drive scientific study into groundbreaking directions. This collection examines the latest thinking in the search for life, from discussing why we haven't found evidence of aliens so far to determining where and how to conduct the search to opening up the possibilities for what otherworldly life could truly look like.

QUOTE OF THE DAY "We've had hints of it before, but this is the first time it's really been a 'punch in the face' kind of detection." Jessie Christiansen, astronomer at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, on the discovery of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet's atmosphere

FROM THE ARCHIVE NASA Eyes Electric Car Tech for Future Moon Rovers Space agencies are partnering with car manufacturers to custom build new rovers—or retrofit commercial vehicles—for future missions to the moon and Mars By Maddie Bender | February 2022

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