The Year in Space and Physics
The Year in Space and Physics
On telescopes, moon rockets, Starships and Starlinks, and the lost dreams of particle physicists
As I wrote in last year’s review, the fields of space and physics often take on a repetitive quantity. The large trends indeed - those of space tourism, of telescopes and human exploration; of dreams of new particles and of new physics - appear roughly the same as they did when I was writing a year ago.
Yet on closer inspection, the progress made over the last twelve months is clear. The James Webb, which launched on Christmas Day 2021, has delighted the world with its crystal-clear images of the heavens. Artemis I - the long delayed first flight of NASA’s return to the Moon - has been a roaring success. China’s space station - then just one module - is now complete, hosting advanced laboratories and crews of astronauts.
However, the last year has also seen several announcements that, on closer inspection, have proven to be illusionary. Dreams of new physics, perhaps revealed through the intricate details of muons and electrons, have faded away. Fantastic claims - wormholes and ancient galaxies chief among them - seem to be the order of the day, no matter how weak the truth behind them is.
That is disappointing; and reflects badly on both the journalists writing the headlines and the scientists feeding them the stories. Here, at The Quantum Cat, I have tried to do things differently. Science writing, I believe, should stick to the facts and avoid straying too far into the realm of speculation. Extraordinary claims, as Carl Sagan once said, require extraordinary evidence. In 2023, as well as 2022, that is a standard The Quantum Cat will always follow.
The James Webb Space Telescope
The highlight of the year in space and physics, beyond any doubt, has been the spectacular performance of the James Webb Space Telescope. When it launched, on Christmas Day 2021, that success looked far from certain. The telescope needed hundreds of steps to bring it fully online, and all of these would take place far beyond the possibility of manual repair. Had anything gone wrong, the telescope could have been left crippled and useless.
In the end, however, the unfurling of its massive mirror - one of the most complex operations ever attempted in space - passed without fault. After subsequent alignments and calibrations, astronomers were left staggered by its capacities. In almost every way, the final commissioning report stated, the telescope is outperforming its targets.
It should thus survive for a decade longer than planned: allowing measurements to continue well into the 2030s. Astronomers have already used it to peer deeper into the universe, and thus further back in time, than ever before. Its eye has revealed galaxies and nebulae in unprecedented detail; making the beautiful images from Hubble look blurred and dull in comparison.
Its work, despite an initial flurry of excited reports, is only just beginning. The James Webb will fuel the work of astronomers for years to come: allowing them to explore distant planets, to probe the birth of the galaxies and to examine the cosmos in closer detail than ever before. The Webb, unquestionably, has proven a triumph of both engineering and science.
Artemis, Asteroids and Mars
Few things have been more repetitive than writing about NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System. Getting it to the launch pad took far longer than NASA hoped. Several rounds of testing passed before engineers were satisfied it was ready to launch. Even then, the rocket missed several opportunities for lift off, as engineers struggled through leaking pipes, dodgy sensors and a series of hurricanes.
Expectations for the mission - dubbed Artemis I - were low. Many pundits, indeed, called the rocket a white elephant, and said the moon program itself was doomed to failure. The prospect of the rocket exploding, or simply never taking off, seemed ever present. So when the Space Launch System did at last take off in November, the moment was almost as surprising as it was awe-inspiring.
The flight of Artemis I - which carried the uncrewed Orion capsule far beyond the Moon - now paves the way for a human return to the Moon. That, in the form of Artemis II, will likely come in 2024, and see Orion once again fly around the Moon. A landing - which requires several more components to be ready - seems plausible before the end of the decade, though certainly not in 2025, whatever NASA continues to claim.
NASA also saw a successful conclusion to its DART mission: a bold attempt to shift the orbit of an asteroid. When DART smashed into Dimorphos, a moon of the larger asteroid Didymos, the impact was large enough to be seen from Earth. It, analysis later confirmed, pushed Dimorphos onto a new orbit; increasing the speed at which it orbits Didymos.
The news from Mars, however, was less triumphant. Though NASA’s Perseverance rover continues to send back streams of data from the surface, NASA lost touch with the InSight lander. This craft, which landed on Mars in 2018, shut down after dust and sand covered its solar panels, thus draining its batteries.
StarShip, Starlink and Private Space Stations
When writing about space it is hard, of course, to ignore the impact of SpaceX. The company has grown to dominate the US space industry. The past year has been no exception to this trend: SpaceX has launched the Falcon 9 rocket dozens of times, putting thousands of satellites into orbit. Yet it has also been conspicuous in what hasn’t happened: a launch of Starship.
A year ago, launch of this gigantic new spacecraft was expected within months, as soon as the rocket could clear regulatory approval. Yet now, even with regulators satisfied, SpaceX continues to delay the launch date. That, for a company that seems comfortable moving fast and breaking things, is a striking departure from routine.
Still, a launch of Starship seems likely sometime in 2023. Whether it will reach orbit - or even space - is rather less assured. Even if it does, SpaceX will need to spend months, perhaps even years, testing and perfecting the rocket before it is ready for more serious work.
That may spell some trouble for Starlink: SpaceX’s constellation of internet satellites. In his tweets, Elon Musk has said the project is still far from profitable. Starship, he implies, is key to changing that. In principle the rocket could slash the price of launching satellites, though whether that will really be enough to turn Starlink into a gold mine is far from certain.
Other companies, meanwhile, have been moving ahead with plans to build private space stations around the Earth. While the International Space Station has been cleared to operate until 2030, NASA has no plans to build a successor. That role will be taken by companies like Northrup Grumman, Blue Origin and Axiom Space, all of which are now looking at building stations of their own.
A Crisis in Physics?
Last year’s headlines in physics were all too predictable. Scientists, they variously said, have disproved the Big Bang theory, spotted new signs of dark matter, and uncovered new forces of nature. The truth, as always, is that they haven’t really done any of these things.
Despite decades of searching, physicists have found no hard sign of dark matter particles, or of the even more elusive dark energy. They haven’t found many new particles either - at least, not the kind that would inspire a revolutionary breakthrough. Even worse, they don’t seem to have much idea of how they might find them.
A year ago, two experiments inspired hope that this might change. One, at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, spotted an unexpected difference in the way electrons and muons behave. Another, at Fermilab in the United States, saw a slight deviation in the magnetic properties of muons.
Unfortunately, more evidence has ruled out the first of these. Experiments run during the past year found no sign of the imbalance earlier data had shown. It was, probably, down to random fluctuations taking place as the collider smashes particles together.
Even if the data from Fermilab holds up - more results will be released in April next year - it is unlikely to lead to a real breakthrough any time soon. Particle physics, in truth, is stuck in something of a rut. In the absence of experimental clues to the way forward, researchers are instead speculating: dreaming up ideas like string theory and inventing hordes of hypothetical particles. That, almost certainly, will not change in 2023.