Artemis I mission shares spectacular view of Earth after a historic launch

 Cape Canaveral, Florida

CNN — 

The historic Artemis I mission took flight in the early hours of Wednesday morning after months of anticipation. The milestone event kicked off a journey that will send an uncrewed spacecraft around the moon, paving the way for NASA to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time in half a century.

The Orion spacecraft’s spectacular first views of Earth were shared more than nine hours into the journey, with the vehicle about 57,000 miles away from our planet on its way to the moon.

It’s the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972 that a spacecraft designed to carry humans to the moon has captured a view of Earth.

The Orion spacecraft shared its first view of Earth more than nine hours after launch Wednesday morning.

NASA

The towering, 322-foot-tall (98-meter-tall) Space Launch System, or SLS, rocket lit its engines at 1:47 a.m. ET. It emitted up to 9 million pounds (4.1 million kilograms) of thrust to haul itself off the launchpad in Florida and into the air, streaking vibrantly across the night sky.

Atop the rocket was the Orion spacecraft, a gumdrop-shaped capsule that broke away from the rocket after reaching space. Orion is designed to carry humans, but its passengers for this test mission are of the inanimate variety, including some mannequins collecting vital data to help future live crews.

The SLS rocket expended millions of pounds of fuel before parts of the rocket began breaking away, and Orion was left to soar through orbit with just one large engine. That engine then set off two powerful burns to put the spacecraft on the correct trajectory toward the moon. Then, about two hours after liftoff, the rocket engine also fell away, leaving Orion to free-fly for the remainder of its journey.

Nearly eight hours after launch, Orion experienced its outbound trajectory correction burn, a mission milestone that ensures the spacecraft stays on the right path. The burn sets Orion up for its lunar flyby and closest approach of the moon on November 21 before entering a distant retrograde orbit around the moon on November 25.

Orion will come within about 60 miles (96 kilometers) of the lunar surface during its close flyby next week.

The spacecraft is outfitted with 16 cameras inside and outside to document its trip around the moon from different perspectives. One image shared Wednesday showed Commander Moonikin Campos, one of the Artemis mannequins riding in the capsule, decked out in a survival suit.

Commander Moonikin Campos (left) can be seen sitting inside the Orion capsule.

NASA

Orion is expected to log roughly 1.3 million miles (2 million kilometers), taking a path that will lead it farther than any other spacecraft designed for human flight has traveled, according to NASA. After orbiting the moon, Orion will make its return trip, completing its journey in about 25.5 days. The capsule is then scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego on December 11, when recovery teams will be waiting nearby to haul it to safety.

Throughout the mission, NASA engineers will be keeping a close eye on the spacecraft’s performance. The team will evaluate whether Orion performs as intended and will be ready to support its first crewed mission to lunar orbit, which is currently scheduled for 2024.

This mission also marks the debut flight of the SLS rocket as the most powerful ever to reach Earth’s orbit, boasting 15% more thrust than the Saturn V rocket that powered NASA’s 20th century moon landings.

And this mission is just the first in what’s expected to be a long series of increasingly difficult Artemis missions as NASA works toward its goal of establishing a permanent outpost at the moon. Artemis II will follow a similar path as Artemis I but will have astronauts on board. Artemis III, slated for later this decade, is expected to land a woman and a person of color on the lunar surface for the first time.

A long road to liftoff

The mission team encountered a number of setbacks in the lead-up to Wednesday morning’s launch, including technical issues with the mega moon rocket and two hurricanes that have rolled through the launch site.

Fueling the SLS rocket with superchilled liquid hydrogen proved to be one main issue that forced NASA to wave off earlier takeoff attempts, but on Tuesday, the tanks were filled despite leak issues that halted fueling hours before launch.

To address that problem, NASA deployed what it calls a “red crew” — a group of personnel specially trained to make repairs while the rocket is loaded with propellant. They tightened some nuts and bolts to stop the fuel leaks.

“The rocket, it’s alive, it’s creaking, its making venting noises — it’s pretty scary. So … my heart was pumping. My nerves were going but, yeah, we showed up today. When we walked up the stairs. We were ready to rock and roll,” red crew member Trent Annis said in an interview on NASA TV after launch.

As @NASA_Orion begins the #Artemis I mission to the Moon, the spacecraft captured these stunning views of our home planet. pic.twitter.com/Pzk3PDt7sd

— NASA Artemis (@NASAArtemis) November 16, 2022

Other NASA personnel at the launch site’s firing room, where agency officials make crucial decisions in the hours and moments before liftoff, celebrated a victory.

“Well for once I might be speechless,” said Artemis I launch director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, the first woman to hold such a role.

“I have talked a lot about appreciating the moment that you’re in,” Blackwell-Thompson said in remarks to the engineers in the firing room. “And we have worked hard as a team. You guys have worked hard as a team to this moment. This is your moment.

lackwell-Thompson then declared it was time for tie-cutting, a NASA tradition in which launch operators snip off the ends of their business ties. Blackwell-Thompson’s was cut by shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach, and she pledged to the others in the room, “I’ll stay all night if I have to. It’ll be my pleasure to cut ties.”

Several astronauts were on-site for the launch, and NASA administrator Bill Nelson told reporters that he watched liftoff from a nearby rooftop with a few of the them.

“There were a bunch there that would like to be on that rocket,” Nelson said.

By Jackie Wattles and Ashley Strickland

Artemis I mission shares spectacular view of Earth after a historic launch

Nuclear fusion breakthrough – what is it and how does it work?

US scientists have reached a major milestone in their attempts to perfect a process which could potentially deliver almost limitless supplies of energy.

Nuclear fusion does not rely on fossil fuels or produce harmful greenhouse gases, so could also help tackle climate change.

What is nuclear fusion?

Nuclear fusion is the process which gives the Sun its energy.

Scientists from more than 50 countries have been trying to recreate it on Earth since the 1960s.

They hope it could eventually provide huge quantities of clean energy for the world.

In nuclear fusion, pairs of tiny particles called atoms are heated and forced together to make one heavier one.

It is the opposite of nuclear fission, in which heavy atoms are split apart. Nuclear power stations currently use nuclear fission to generate electricity.

Why is nuclear fusion so important?

Nuclear fission produces a lot of radioactive waste, which can be dangerous and must be stored safely - potentially for hundreds of years.

The waste produced by nuclear fusion is less radioactive and decays much more quickly.

Nuclear fusion doesn't need fossil fuels like oil or gas. It also doesn't generate greenhouse gases, which trap the Sun's heat and are responsible for climate change.

Most fusion experiments use hydrogen, which can be extracted cheaply from seawater and lithium, meaning fuel supplies could last for millions of years.

It has been described as the "holy grail" of energy production.

How does nuclear fusion work?

When two atoms of a light element such as hydrogen are heated and combine to form a single heavier element such as helium, the nuclear reaction produces massive amounts of energy which can be captured.

But getting two identical elements to combine is actually very hard.

Because they have the same positive charge they naturally repel each other.

A lot of energy is needed to overcome this resistance.

In the Sun, this happens thanks to extremely high temperatures of around ten million degrees Celsius, and significant pressure - more than 100 billion times that of the Earth's atmosphere.

On Earth, scientists have used various different techniques to attempt to recreate these conditions.

But it has proved very difficult to maintain the high temperature and pressure needed for long enough.

The US's National Ignition Facility (NIF) has announced it successfully used a 192-beam laser to turn a tiny amount of hydrogen into enough energy to power about 15 - 20 kettles.

This means that - for the first time - scientists were able to generate more power than the lasers put in to the experiment.

When will large-scale nuclear fusion be possible?

Despite a series of promising breakthroughs in the last few years, large-scale nuclear fusion is still several years away.

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

Image caption,

Nuclear fusion reactor at the JET laboratory in the UK

In February, European scientists at the UK-based JET laboratory smashed their own world record for the amount of energy produced over five seconds.

But even the successful NIF experiment in the US did not produce more energy than was needed to make the lasers work in the first place - and the research programme to get to this point has cost billions of dollars.

Although physicists have welcomed the US results - and described them as a true breakthrough moment - they point out that much more work is needed before nuclear fusion could be used to power homes or businesses.

Scientists will now focus on reproducing fusion more quickly and cheaply.

How safe is nuclear fusion?

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has called nuclear fusion "intrinsically safe."

The conditions required to start and maintain a fusion reaction are so extreme that it is impossible for it to run out of control.

"Fusion is a self-limiting process: if you cannot control the reaction, the machine switches itself off," explained the IAEA's Sehila González de Vicente.

The lower level of radioative waste produced by the process compared with nuclear fission is also much easier to handle and store.

Could nuclear fusion help tackle global warming?

Nuclear fusion does not rely on fossil fuels like oil or gas, and produces none of the greenhouse gases which drive global warming.

Unlike solar or wind energy it is not dependent on beneficial weather conditions.

It uses two relatively abundant materials found on Earth: lithium and hydrogen.

Widescale use of nuclear fusion could help countries meet their targets to produce "net zero" emissions by 2050.

However, it will be many years before recent experimental successes can be meaningfully scaled up.

By Esme Stallard

BBC News Climate and Science

Nuclear fusion is what gives the Sun its energy

Nuclear fusion breakthrough – what is it and how does it work?

Scientists announce fusion energy breakthrough, possible game-changer for climate

 WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists announced Tuesday that they have for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it — a major breakthrough in the decades-long quest to harness the process that powers the sun.

Watch the announcement in the player above.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved the result, which is called net energy gain, the Energy Department said. Net energy gain has been an elusive goal because fusion happens at such high temperatures and pressures that it is incredibly difficult to control.

The breakthrough will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and other officials said.

“Ignition allows us to replicate for the first time certain conditions that are found only in the stars and the sun,” Granholm told a news conference in Washington. “This milestone moves us one significant step closer to the possibility of zero-carbon abundant fusion energy powering our society.”

Fusion ignition is “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century,″ Granholm said, adding that the breakthrough “will go down in the history books.″

Appearing with Granholm, White House science adviser Arati Prabhakar called the fusion ignition “a tremendous example of what perseverance really can achieve” and “an engineering marvel beyond belief.

roponents of fusion hope that it could one day offer nearly limitless, carbon-free energy and displace fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. Producing energy that powers homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away. But researchers said the announcement marked a significant advance nonetheless.

“It’s almost like it’s a starting gun going off,” said professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leader in fusion research. “We should be pushing towards making fusion energy systems available to tackle climate change and energy security.”

Kim Budil, director of the Livermore Lab, said there are “very significant hurdles” to commercial use of fusion technology, but advances in recent years mean the technology is likely to be widely used in “a few decades” rather than 50 or 60 years as previously expected.

Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. Unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste.

President Joe Biden called the breakthrough a good example of the need to continue to invest in research and development. “Look what’s going on from the Department of Energy on the nuclear front. There’s a lot of good news on the horizon,” he said at the White House.

Billions of dollars and decades of work have gone into fusion research that has produced exhilarating results — for fractions of a second. Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility, the division of Lawrence Livermore where the success took place, used 192 lasers and temperatures multiple times hotter than the center of the sun to create an extremely brief fusion reaction.

The lasers focus an enormous amount of heat on a small metal can. The result is a superheated plasma environment where fusion may occur.

Riccardo Betti, a professor at the University of Rochester and expert in laser fusion, said there’s a long road ahead before the net energy gain leads to sustainable electricity.

He likened the breakthrough to when humans first learned that refining oil into gasoline and igniting it could produce an explosion.

“You still don’t have the engine, and you still don’t have the tires,” Betti said. “You can’t say that you have a car.”

The net energy gain achievement applied to the fusion reaction itself, not the total amount of power it took to operate the lasers and run the project. For fusion to be viable, it will need to produce significantly more power and for longer.

It is incredibly difficult to control the physics of stars. Whyte said the fuel has to be hotter than the center of the sun. The fuel does not want to stay hot — it wants to leak out and get cold. Containing it is a challenge, he said.

The achievement of net energy gain isn’t a huge surprise from the California lab because of the progress it had already made, according to Jeremy Chittenden, a professor at Imperial College in London specializing in plasma physics.

But, he said, “that doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a significant milestone.”

One approach to fusion turns hydrogen into plasma, an electrically charged gas, which is then controlled by humongous magnets. This method is being explored in France in a collaboration among 35 countries called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, as well as by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a private company.

Last year the teams working on those projects on two continents announced significant advancements in the vital magnets needed for their work.

Mathew Daly reported from Washington. Maddie Burakoff reported from New York, Michael Phillis from St. Louis and Jennifer McDermott from Providence, R.I.

Scientists announce fusion energy breakthrough, possible game-changer for climate