On Mars, another machine just bit the dust. The marsquake-detecting, photo-snapping InSight lander has now officially completed its mission and will now spend its retirement in the same place it spent its career — sitting on a flat plain on the Martian surface, as dust slowly accumulates on its solar panels and other instruments.

We’ve known this was coming for a while. InSight’s solar panels, which generate electricity for the lander, have been getting covered with dust ever since they unfurled. The mission, officially known as the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight), was expected to run out of power this summer, but a spate of good weather bought it a few additional months of work on Mars.

But that time has run out. NASA has been monitoring the lander’s status, and as it became clear that it wasn’t going to make it, the agency’s first-person first-lander status updates got increasingly emotional. The official Twitter account for the lander told followers in October that it was “staying calm” as a dust storm darkened the skies. Its team thanked fans for sending virtual postcards and assured the millions of people who sent their names along on the rover that “we’re together here on Mars, my forever home.”

The social media team also made sure to explain why the lander didn’t pack dust removal equipment and asked people to remember that there were other machines on Mars before delivering a final gut punch in the form of one last dusty photo from the lander.

December 15th was the last time that the InSight lander communicated with Earth, NASA said in a press release. The agency will keep listening, but after the mission team was unable to contact the lander, they determined that InSight’s batteries were likely drained, leaving it functionally dead.

Its demise caps a mostly successful mission to study the interior of Mars. The lander launched in May 2018 and landed in November of the same year. It was equipped with a seismometer that detected more than 1,000 marsquakes. Most of the marsquakes were relatively small, but at least one, detected earlier this year, was the equivalent of a magnitude 5 earthquake. Scientists are using data from the shaking to get a better picture of the composition of Mars.

While the seismometer was an unqualified success, another instrument on the lander faced troubles. InSight had a “mole” that was designed to hammer itself deep into the surface. Unfortunately, the soil near the landing site wasn’t quite as soft as the team anticipated, and the mole kept popping back out.

Still, the mission was successful enough that NASA decided in April to extend the mission until the end of this year — or until the lander ran out of power, whichever came first.

“We’ve thought of InSight as our friend and colleague on Mars for the past four years, so it’s hard to say goodbye,” said Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s principal investigator, in a press release. “But it has earned its richly deserved retirement.”

At a ‘show and tell’ event on Wednesday, Elon Musk said that his brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, could implant one of its devices in someone’s head within the next six months — meaning it’s not happening this year. He also claimed that he would get the device implanted in his own head at some point in the future.

During the presentation, Musk said that the company had submitted most of the paperwork needed for a human clinical trial to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices in the United States. Previously, Musk had said that he’d hoped for human trials to begin in 2020, and then 2022. Now, that’s slipped to at least 2023.

Neuralink’s goal is to create a device that can be implanted in the brain, and use it to control a computer with brain activity. Back in 2019, Musk revealed that the company was testing its device in monkeys. In 2020, it trotted out pigs with the implants. And last year, Neuralink released a video showing a monkey playing Pong with its brain. This year, the monkeys are back. In a video demonstration, one of them helped “type” the phrase ‘welcome to show and tell’ using their implant by focusing on highlighted words and letters. Another video showed how the monkeys were trained to charge the devices by sitting under a wireless charger.

Later in the presentation, Neuralink researchers also showed off a pig on a treadmill, which they said was helping them study how to address mobility issues in people in the future.

The Neuralink devices themselves are small, with multiple flexible “threads” that can be inserted into the brain. “It’s like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch, for lack of a better analogy,” Musk said.

In about 15 minutes, 64 of these “threads” can be implanted into the brain using a robotic system, said DJ Seo, the vice president of Implant and co-founder of Neuralink, during the presentation — while using a mannequin to show how the process might work.

The reason for the robot surgeons comes down to just how tiny those threads are. “Imagine taking a hair from your head and sticking it into jello covered by saran wrap, doing that to a precise depth and precision, and doing that 64 times in a reasonable amount of time,” said Christine Odabashian, the leader of Neuralink’s hardware insertion team.

The company’s demos in 2019 and 2020 were designed as recruitment events, and this one is no different; the company admitted recruiting was its primary goal of the evening. Neuralink is currently looking to fill many different kinds of jobs as it moves from “prototype to product”, Musk said at tonight’s show and tell.

The event was mostly a technical presentation of the device, showcasing how the system was built, challenges the team has faced, how the tech has improved so far, and what developments are coming next. Researchers at the company said they were developing treatments that could either help improve or restore vision, or restore movement in people with paralysis. On the tech side, the company has ambitions to make sure that the device itself can be upgraded easily.

“I’m pretty sure you would not want an iPhone 1 in your head if an iPhone 14 was available,” Musk said.

NASA’s massive Space Launch System (SLS) is almost ready for liftoff after facing multiple setbacks, including two scrubbed launch attempts and two hurricane-caused delays. This highly anticipated rocket launch has been over a decade in the making and marks NASA’s return to crewed missions to the Moon. This mission is called Artemis I, and while there won’t be any astronauts on board during this launch, it will serve as a test for the future goal of putting the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon.

During its first launch, the SLS will catapult NASA’s Orion capsule into space, where it will embark on a voyage around the Moon that is expected to last until December 11th, when it will splash back down into the ocean. On November 4th, NASA rolled the rocket back out to launch pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida — a four-mile journey that took nearly nine hours.

Now that the rocket has reached its launch pad and successfully weathered its latest storm, here’s how and when you can watch it lift off into space.

When is NASA’s Artemis I launch?

NASA plans on launching the SLS rocket on Wednesday, November 16th, 2022. It will have a two-hour launch window starting at 1:04AM ET. This means the rocket could take off anytime between 1:04AM ET and 3:04AM ET if there are no delays.

How do I watch the Artemis I launch live?

If you can’t make it to the launch in person, NASA is livestreaming it from its website, YouTube channel, and NASA app.

There will be a few other ways to follow along on the mission as well. NASA will have a specialized website called the Artemis Real-time Orbit Website (AROW) that will let people track the mission as it happens. You can also get some updates and watch a livestream of the launch from Alexa-enabled devices. Amazon will be flying a version of Alexa on board the mission.

Will the Artemis 1 launch be visible where I live?

If you’re in Florida or parts of Georgia, you may be able to see the launch if weather conditions are good. People from Savannah to Miami will have just over a minute to spot the rocket as it launches into the night sky.

Update November 15th, 11:08AM ET: Updated to reflect NASA’s new launch time.

When a spacecraft slammed into an asteroid last month, it pushed it closer to its companion and sped up its orbit by about 32 minutes. It’s a huge milestone for the field of planetary defense; it establishes that it may be possible for humans to significantly change the path of a potentially hazardous asteroid — especially if we have warning that one is on the way.

When the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission sent a spacecraft crashing into its surface on September 26th, telescopes on Earth and in space were watching the action. Now, initial data from those observatories have shown that DART achieved its goal. Before the impact, the asteroid Dimorphos took about 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit its much larger companion asteroid, Didymos. The same trip now takes 11 hours and 23 minutes.

Shaving half an hour off of an asteroid’s orbit is a massive win for the mission, which would have categorized even a 73-second change as a success. Researchers think that one of the reasons for the big change in orbit is that the impact displaced tons of material, creating a dramatic-looking plume of debris in the process. This “recoil” gave the impact an extra boost, NASA said. 

There’s still a lot about the impact that will take scientists time to figure out. They’ll be pouring over many more observations to answer questions like: Is there a new shape to the orbit? Is Dimorphos wobbling? How much debris came off the asteroid when we slammed into it at 14,000 miles per hour?

Once they have that information, the modeling will get even more intense; they’ll take the information from the observatories and run it through physics simulations again and again until they have a pretty good idea of what happened. That way, when the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft arrives at the asteroid system in a few years, researchers will have a pretty good idea of what it will find.

“All of this information plays into our understanding of what really happened in the experiment. How effectively did the kinetic impact change the motion of the asteroid? How efficiently was momentum transferred? It’s too soon to say; there’s a lot of moving parts in this calculation,” said Tom Statler, DART program scientist at NASA, during a press conference.

That’s all key information for any future mission to redirect an asteroid heading toward our planet — the basic tenant of planetary defense. Dimorphos and Didymos didn’t pose any threat to Earth, but researchers are on the lookout for other asteroids and near-Earth objects that might be hazardous.

As exciting as these early results from the DART mission are, knowing how to move an asteroid is only part of any future efforts to defend our planet from space rocks. The much larger issue is knowing what hazards are out there — and knowing about them as soon as possible.

“This is a four percent change in the orbital period of Dimorphos around Didymos — and it just gave it a small nudge,” said Nancy Chabot, DART coordination lead at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

A similar “small nudge” to a potentially hazardous asteroid might be enough to keep it out of Earth’s path, but the timing would be vital. “If you wanted to do this in the future, it could potentially work. But you’d want to do it years in advance. Warning time is really key here,” Chabot said.

“The single most important factor that we need to know is which ones out there are potentially dangerous, and when might they be potentially dangerous,” said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. NASA is working on the Near-Earth Object Surveyor Mission, which would specifically look for these kinds of hazards. The mission, which has faced funding difficulties in the latest congressional budget cycles, is considered a top priority of the planetary science community.

A NASA spacecraft slammed into the surface of a distant asteroid at 7:14PM ET on Monday night, the climax of the agency’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART).

An hour before impact, the target asteroid, Dimorphos, wasn’t even visible in the images from the spacecraft. In some of the early images sent back to Earth, even Dimorphos’ larger companion Didymos, looked like a single speck against a sea of black. The DART spacecraft was moving at 14,000 miles per hour, and details quickly came into view. Viewers on Earth saw the rough surface of Didymos zip by as the spacecraft cruised autonomously towards Dimorphos. Boulders filled the screen just before it went bright red, indicating a loss of signal — DART had reached its final destination.

In the mission operations room, there was wonderment as the images came in. “This asteroid was coming into the field of view for the first time, we really had no idea what to expect. We didn’t really know the shape of the asteroid, but we knew where we’re going to hit.” said Elena Adams, DART Mission Systems Engineer. “So I think all of us were kind of holding our breath. I’m kind of surprised none of us passed out actually, for a second there.“

Telescopes around the world (and a few in space!) are now turning their attention to the scene of the collision. They’ll be watching to see how much the impact changed the movement of Dimorphos. The crash is part of the first practical planetary defense experiment — a trial to see if humanity might one day be able to redirect the path of an asteroid headed toward our planet.

“We’re embarking on a new era of humankind, an era in which we potentially have the capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous hazardous asteroid impact. What an amazing thing. We’ve never had that capability before.“ said Lori Glaze, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, soon after the impact.

To be clear, neither Dimorphos nor Didymos, pose any danger to Earth. No known asteroids pose a significant and immediate threat to our planet. But NASA is playing a long game. Someday in the future, if an asteroid is spotted on a dangerous path, the agency wants us to have options that could let us avert catastrophe.

The option that DART is testing is one of the most direct; if we slam something into an asteroid, will it change how that asteroid moves? Because Dimorphos’ orbit takes it between another asteroid (Didymos) and Earth, researchers will soon have an answer to that question.

Dimorphos is relatively small, so scientists couldn’t actually see the asteroid until just before the collision. But telescopes can see Didymos dimming every time that Dimorphos crosses between it and Earth. This lets researchers know how fast the asteroid is moving. They expect to see Dimorphos’ orbit speed up after the collision, but how closely the asteroid’s behavior will match the computer models remains to be seen.

It will likely take a few months to get a full answer of how much the DART mission changed Dimorphos’ orbit, but some images and data will likely start coming out in the next few days and weeks from sources all around the solar system.

Before impact, the DART spacecraft released a smaller satellite, the Italian-built LICIACube. This tiny spacecraft followed DART on its way to its doom, taking pictures of the immediate aftermath, which will be sent back to researchers on Earth. Telescopes on seven continents will also focus on the asteroid system, as will the Lucy spacecraft, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Hubble space telescope. Then, in 2024, the European Space Agency will send another spacecraft to survey Dimorphos, and get a close-up look at the asteroid and whatever rubble remains of the spacecraft itself.

But in the meantime, the last images from the spacecraft offer a wealth of tantalizing details for researchers, including Carolyn Ernst, a scientist working on DART’s imaging system, DRACO. At a press conference after the impact, she extolled the surprising shapes of the asteroid pair, and the boulders, smooth spots and craters of Didymos, visible for only a brief time.

“These guys, their job is done.” Ernst said, referring to her engineering colleagues, “But ours is just beginning,”