March 3, 2025: An upcoming space telescope will look at the universe in a whole new way. Plus, Blue Ghost lands on the moon and anime fans stumble upon a mathematical proof. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | Blue Ghost snapped this picture of its shadow on the lunar surface shortly after its successful landing. Earth is visible as a small blue dot in the dark sky. Firefly Aerospace/UPI/Alamy Live News | | | • Little interjections in conversations, like um, wow and mm-hmm aren't just ignorable distractions. Linguists think they keep the conversation going, and signal mutual understanding. | 7 min read | | | SPHEREx will create a map of the cosmos like no other. NASA/JPL-Caltech/BAE Systems | NASA is ready to launch its next space telescope: the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, or SPHEREx. The mission is targeting launch tomorrow evening and is uniquely designed, able to survey the entire sky in 102 "colors" of infrared light about every six months. Why this matters: The mission has three core science goals. First, it will make millions of observations of various ices in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, which could help astronomers understand how water and other intriguing molecules made it into our solar system. Second, the mission will tally the universe's light and analyze it over time, which could help astrophysicists understand how early galaxies developed, then evolved over time. Third, the mission will make an incredibly detailed three-dimensional map of some 450 million galaxies; by conducting a sort of celestial statistics on that data, cosmologists hope to isolate a signature of inflation just after the big bang.
What the experts say: "You don't normally have a survey like this," says Jo Dunkley, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, who is not on the mission team. "It's really unusual and really neat." —Meghan Bartels, senior news writer |  | Operating from low-Earth orbit, SPHEREx will sweep across the sky, taking about 600 exposures each day. Using a technique called spectroscopy, the observatory will image every section of the sky 102 times, each time using a different color filter that blocks all wavelengths except one. | | | If you're enjoying all the science we cover in this newsletter, dive deeper with a subscription to Scientific American. You'll have access to all our articles and will be supporting crucial science journalism. | | | • By preschool, children start associating Black people with negative traits and white people with positive traits. Research shows that white parents avoid discussing racism because they think their kids are too young for such conversations and that they need to shield them from the reality of racism. This fear is unfounded, writes Sylvia Perry, an associate professor of psychology at Northwestern University who studies racial socialization. "Studies show that, even in young children, when parents and teachers openly discuss race—explaining disparities and fairness—children develop less biased attitudes, greater empathy for people of color, and a stronger ability to recognize and challenge racism," she says. | 6 min read | | | Following the Blue Ghost touchdown this weekend, another commercial U.S. moon mission, the Athena lunar lander, is scheduled to make moonfall this coming Thursday. Meanwhile, yet another private effort, Japan's Resilience mission, is also enroute to the moon for a landing attempt targeted for some time in May. You may be wondering why there's such a busy rush for our nearest natural satellite. I certainly was, so I asked my colleague and our space and physics editor, Lee Billings: Why so many moon missions? "It's been official U.S. policy to get astronauts back to the moon for many years, across multiple presidential administrations," Billings told me. "The program of record to do that, NASA's Artemis program, is targeting its first crewed missions there later this decade. NASA has funded these U.S. commercial robotic lander missions as precursors for those notional future missions, ferrying cargo and experiments to the lunar surface at a lower cost than the space agency could achieve all by itself. Other nations are also interested in the moon, and they are either signing on to help with Artemis or pursuing ambitious missions of their own. The moon is a tempting target, and a natural 'stepping stone' for humanity to follow out further into the solar system." It seems the new race to the moon is well underway! | Welcome to a new week of scientific discovery! This newsletter is for you, so please let us know how we're doing by emailing newsletters@sciam.com. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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