NASA's Interplanetary Plans May Be Lurching toward Disaster

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May 11, 2023

This week, we’re worried about the future. The future of NASA’s planetary science programs, to be specific. Our top story explores how the space agency’s awesome (and awesomely ambitious) plans for multibillion-dollar future missions to Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa could backfire, with the potential for cost overruns and delays from those bigger projects cascading to negatively impact many others that are smaller and more vulnerable. Are the space agency’s sky-high aspirations at risk of cratering due to harsh budgetary realities? Read the article for the latest in this debate. But don’t forget to read our other stories, too — such as this week’s trio of pieces about the ongoing success of NASA’s JWST, the orbital observatory with a $10 billion price tag that, prior to its launch, was also pilloried for siphoning resources from other astrophysics projects. JWST’s transformative observations clearly show that heavy investments in audacious efforts can pay off handsomely; let us hope for similar dazzling outcomes from NASA’s planetary science plans. Elsewhere, we also have stories on a breakthrough in quantum topology, the strange math behind Benford’s Law, the physics of peanut butter, and more. Enjoy!

Lee Billings, Senior Editor, Space & Physics

Planetary Science NASA's Interplanetary Plans May Be Lurching toward Disaster Delays and budgetary overruns are causing many to worry that NASA’s ambitious planetary science program is at a breaking point By Shannon Hall

Quantum Physics Physicists Create Long-Sought Topological Quantum States Exotic particles called nonabelions could fix quantum computers’ error problem By Davide Castelvecchi,Nature magazine

Astronomy JWST Sees Alien Asteroid Belt around Nearby Star The first asteroid belt ever found outside the solar system is more complex than expected By Robert Lea,SPACE.com

Mathematics What Is Benford's Law? Why This Unexpected Pattern of Numbers Is Everywhere A curious mathematical phenomenon called Benford’s law governs the numbers all around us By Jack Murtagh

Extraterrestrial Life JWST's Exoplanet Images Are Just the Beginning of Astrobiology's Future Hints of life on distant worlds will come from signals pioneered by NASA’s jumbo space telescope By Briley Lewis

Astronomy Did JWST Just Find Water on a Rocky Exoplanet? Hints of water vapor on a world called GJ 486 b could just as well come from the planet’s host star By Allison Gasparini

Food Here's the Weird Physics That Makes Peanut Butter a Liquid Yes, peanut butter is a liquid (and a great example of a non-Newtonian fluid) By Ted Heindel,The Conversation US

Artificial Intelligence How AI Knows Things No One Told It Researchers are still struggling to understand how AI models trained to parrot internet text can perform advanced tasks such as running code, playing games and trying to break up a marriage By George Musser

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Volume 328, Issue 5

QUOTE OF THE DAY "We have a very ambitious planetary program. But there's a point at which it becomes overly ambitious to the extent that it's brittle. It's not resilient to any failures." Alan Stern, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and former NASA science chief, on the space agency's plans for future interplanetary missions

FROM THE ARCHIVE Welcome Anyons! Physicists Find Best Evidence Yet for Long-Sought 2D Structures The ‘quasiparticles’ defy the categories of ordinary particles and herald a potential way to build quantum computers By Davide Castelvecchi,Nature magazine | July 2020

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