The Senate is signaling deep skepticism about NASA's ambitious plans to fetch samples of soil from the red planet, expressing concerns over the mission's cost and viability.  

Senate appropriators are offering just $300 million in funding for fiscal 2024 for the Mars mission — less than a third of the $949 million budget request from NASA.  

Appropriators also say they have deep doubts about whether NASA can complete the mission, known as Mars Sample Return (MSR).  

“The Committee has significant concerns about the technical challenges facing MSR and potential further impacts on confirmed missions, even before MSR has completed preliminary design review," the Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee wrote in an appropriations bill outlining the funding for 2024.

It further said it would rescind the $300 million allocated for the mission if the agency cannot guarantee that overall cost will not exceed $5.3 billion. NASA estimates that the mission's development costs, which were originally $4.4 billion, have soared to more than $9 billion. 

Notably, this price tag only represents the cost of developing and testing the mission's components. It does not include launch costs or operating costs for the mission's planned five-year timeframe. It also doesn’t include construction of any new sample-receiving facility that may be required to handle the rock and soil samples. 

The samples in question have been collected by NASA's newest Mars rover — Perseverance —which launched to Mars in 2020. The rover was dispatched to Mars to help find signs of life, and was tasked with scooping up samples of the Martian surface and subsurface. So far, Perseverance has collected 18 of 43 planned samples.  

The ability to collect and study samples could provide scientists with unprecedented data on Mars, helping to fill in the gaps about how the planet changed over time. They could help scientists understand whether Mars was habitable and may even contain definitive signs of life — either past or present. 

NASA has been working with the European Space Agency to develop the MSR mission. As part of this plan, NASA will build a Sample Retriever Lander that is slated to launch in 2028, although the Senate as well as some within the agency doubt this is a viable launch date. 

As NASA has been working on developing the technology needed for the mission, costs have ballooned. First estimates indicated the cost of this mission would be around $4 billion, but according to the committee's report, the space agency has already spent more than $1 billion. The subcommittee also flagged that the planned 2028 launch date is very aggressive and likely to slip, increasing cost overruns.

NASA also convened an Institutional Review Board to review the MRS mission and determine its best path of success. The board is expected to issue its findings in late August or early September.  

A periodic polling of the scientific community designed to flag important NASA missions last year estimated that MSR would cost around $5.3 billion, the limit the Senate is now setting. 

If NASA cannot guarantee it can complete the mission for this amount, the Mars program faces cancellation, and the Senate will transfer the $300 million to other missions, with the bulk of it going to the Artemis lunar program. That mission aims to return astronauts to the surface of the moon and establish a small space station in orbit around the moon.

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Scientists in the same survey said the Mars mission was highly critical, and that it was worth asking Congress for more money to complete it. They argued that the request would help to ensure that any extra funding would not be taken away from other science missions.  

But NASA faces significant headwinds in winning more funding, as congressional negotiators feel the pressure to keep overall government spending in line with a budget caps deal worked out between President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) earlier this year.  

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) described himself as a NASA supporter but acknowledged during consideration of NASA funding in the Senate Appropriations Committee last week that the cuts will lead to “significant challenges” in continuing all of the agency's programs.  

“We were able to protect the most important national priority within NASA's budget, which is to return to the moon and maintain our strategic advantage in space,” said Moran, the top Republican on the spending subpanel overseeing NASA funding.  

Costs for the Mars program have risen for a number of reasons.

There were technical flaws in the original mission concept, which involved a single lander and a small rover to retrieve the samples. There were also large errors in the technical requirements of the mission which meant that more hardware was needed, which costs more money.

Staffing issues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has also delayed multiple missions, including MSR.

This isn't the first time a mission was massively over budget or the first time a major NASA mission faced cancellation.

The James Webb Space Telescope faced its own possible cancellation in 2011, but went on to launch in 2021 despite a ballooning budget that ended up costing $10 billion. NASA's Artemis lunar program is also massively over its planned budget, and could end up costing an estimated $93 billion by the time astronauts reach the lunar surface.  

The mission, dubbed Chandrayaan-3, blasted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota in southern Andhra Pradesh state at 2:30 p.m. local time. 

Developed by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), the Chandrayaan-3 mission will consist of a lander and a rover, each of which carries a suite of scientific instruments. If all goes as planned, the duo will touchdown near the lunar south pole in late August.

The IRSO announced the successful launch in a tweet, saying the spacecraft is in a "precise orbit" and its status is "normal." It also posted pictures showing the rocket launching.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said after the launch that the mission marks a "new chapter" for India's space exploration.

"It soars high, elevating the dreams and ambitions of every Indian. This momentous achievement is a testament to our scientists' relentless dedication. I salute their spirit and ingenuity!" he said.

Following a successful soft landing on the moon's surface, the spacecraft will conduct a series of scientific experiments and collect data on the moon's composition.

To date, only the United States, the Soviet Union, and China have successfully landed spacecraft on the moon. Other countries have tried and failed, including Israel with its Beresheet moon lander, and more recently with Japanese aerospace firm iSpace.

Indian engineers have been preparing for years for the mission, which marks the country's third lunar mission. The first, which occurred in 2008, saw a spacecraft called Chandrayaan-1 orbit the moon before it deliberately crashed into the moon's surface. 

In 2019, the country attempted its first soft landing on the moon, but that ended in a crash landing, like most attempts do. At the time, Modi praised the mission's engineering team despite the failure.

Overall, India has enjoyed several successes with its space program, including the distinction of being the first Asian nation to reach Mars. In 2014, the country's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) entered into orbit around the red planet. It would continue until 2022, when the mission officially ended.  

India also set a record for most satellites launched on a single mission in 2017 as it launched 104 small satellites as part of a rideshare mission. SpaceX has since beat that number as it launched 143 satellites on a similar mission. 

India has dabbled in the space industry for more than six decades, having launched its first rockets in 1963. That rocket paled in comparison to what was launching out of the U.S. and Russia. Now that India is the world's most populous nation and the fifth largest economy, India dreams for a bigger piece of the space pie. 

The country has spent about $75 million on its Chandrayaan-3 mission, which is roughly one million more that what it spent on the MOM mission nearly 10 years ago.

On a recent visit to the U.S., Modi talked to President Biden about possible collaborations with NASA. The duo discussed India's plans to eventually launch crewed missions, with NASA potentially helping out in training new astronauts that could one day fly to the International Space Station (ISS) or further out into space.

Jared Gans contributed reporting

The images comes from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which has been observing the cosmos for one year. NASA released the image of Rho Ophiuch to mark the milestone.   

“The JWST's image of Rho Ophiuchi allows us to witness a very brief period in the stellar life cycle with new clarity,” says Klaus Pontoppidan, a JWST project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) in Baltimore. “Our own sun experienced a phase like this long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another star's story.” 

Stars are formed in the stellar nursery from the rich supply of gas and dust. The image depicts a chaotic cosmic close-up of the region like none previously seen.  

Underneath the seemingly peaceful facade, lies the origin story of stars that are similar to our own.  

Within the new image, glowing regions of hydrogen gas are shown in red, and represent the newly forming stars breaking free of the cosmic cocoon they formed in, much like a butterfly breaking free from its chrysalis.   

Although most of the stars in this region will be roughly the size of the Sun or a bit smaller, there is one massive star lurking in the lower portion of the image. The bright blue star, S1, has carved out a bit of dust in the glowing yellow material surrounding it. Also visible are protostars (stars that are in the process of forming), which are located in the darkest regions of the photo.   

NASA's Administrator, former Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), says that this image is the perfect one to represent Webb's first year of science operations.  

“In just one year, the James Webb Space Telescope has transformed humanity's view of the cosmos, peering into dust clouds and seeing the light from faraway corners of the universe for the very first time,” he said. “Every new image is a new discovery, empowering scientists around the globe to ask and answer questions they could never dream of.”  

The James Webb Space Telescope being released into space from an Ariane rocket on Saturday, Dec. 25, 2021. (NASA via AP, File)

Webb launched in December 2021, and at the time, the massive space telescope was massively delayed and over budget. Supporters of the telescope say the new images show the worth of the investment in the project.  

One year ago, NASA released the very first image taken by Webb – a deep field image, which is similar to a long-exposure photograph. These types of images help to resolve the faintest objects in the universe. As such, they are essentially a look back in time, a snapshot of what the universe looked like billions of years ago. Deep field images like this are chock full of galaxies. In fact, almost every point of light in the image is a galaxy.   

In 1995, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope took stunning deep field image that captured roughly 3,000 galaxies in various stages of evolution.  

The new image from Webb takes things to a new level.  

It focuses on a galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723, where thousands of galaxies may be observed. Thanks to the collective mass of this cluster, which acts like a gravitational lens or magnifying glass, more distant galaxies can be seen than before – some even from a time period when the universe was less than a billion years old.  

And some of these galaxies have surprising qualities, such as unexpectedly large size or higher rates of star formation than researchers would have expected. 

Webb captures some of the faintest objects ever observed. Thanks to Webb's increased capabilities, scientists were also able to reduce the time it takes to make observations. For instance, this deep field image took 12.5 hours of observation time, versus the weeks of time it took Hubble to snap a similar image.   

Webb is also able to bring more distant objects into sharper focus. In its deep field image, within distant galaxies, the telescope has been able to focus on tiny, faint structures that have never been seen before. These include star clusters and diffuse features.  

This combination image provided by NASA shows the Pillars of Creation as imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, left, and by NASA's James Webb Telescope, right. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI via AP)

Webb has also provided new insight into black holes.  

One of the observatory's more recent observations include the most distant supermassive black hole. The black hole CEERS 1019, is a bit of an enigma. It weighs approximately 9 million solar masses, which is quite light for black hole standards, which typically “weigh” in at 1 billion times the mass of the Sun. For comparison, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, is about 4.6 million times the mass of the Sun. 

A typical black hole can be found at the center of a galaxy and tends to be a very bright object. The light comes from material surrounding the black hole as it falls into it. CEERS 1019 is surprisingly dark for such an old black hole – the majority of other black holes observed dating back to this time period are much brighter.  

Researchers are hoping that with Webb's help they can learn more about the enigmatic cosmic objects and help improve how they classify them and how different types of black holes evolve over time.  

According to Rebecca Larson, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, data collected by Webb is teeming with precise information about this particular black hole, and her team is hopeful that they can pinpoint how much material the black hole is consuming and how that affects its host galaxy's star formation rate.  

“The breadth of science Webb is capable of exploring really becomes clear now, when we have a full year's worth of data from various targets across the sky,” says Eric Smith, associate director for research in the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters and a Webb program scientist.  

“Webb's first year of science has not only taught us new things about our universe, but it has revealed the capabilities of the telescope to be greater than our expectations, meaning future discoveries will be even more amazing.” 

China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) deputy chief engineer Zhang Hailian shared the plans at an aerospace summit in Wuhan on Wednesday, according to state-run news agency Xinhua.

The mission is part of a larger plan that involves establishing a lunar research station on the surface of the moon.

According to Chinese officials, the mission is expected to launch before the end of 2030 and will help establish best practices for how to construct a lunar base and for conducting exploration and scientific investigations on the moon. 

The U.S. is itself pushing to build a mini space station in lunar orbit, as well as put boots back on the lunar surface — something that hasn't been done since 1972.

NASA's administrator, Bill Nelson, has previously warned that China is a country to watch, and that NASA's efforts to reach the moon in the next decade must stay on track.

According to Nelson, if the U.S. space agency is able to make it back to the lunar surface first, it can ensure that the moon is a continued peaceful outpost for everyone. 

China was a late player to the space game, having launched its first satellite in the 1970s — more than a decade behind the U.S. and Russia.

Ever since, though, the country has been rapidly advancing its technology and trying to catch up. The country even has plans for building reusable rockets to rival SpaceX's technology. 

In 2013, China became the third country to successfully put a rover on the moon, something no other country has achieved since. Its lunar rover has been busy studying the moon's far side, while the country's space program plans out its lunar future.

These new lunar plans are part of China's efforts to rapidly expand its space program, which has also landed a rover on Mars. 

China, which tends to announce astronaut crews a few days before launch, has not announced how many astronauts it plans to use for its lunar program nor identified potential recruits.

Currently, there are three Chinese astronauts, or taikonauts, on the country's space station: mission commander Jing Haipeng and rookies Zhu Yangzhu and Gui Haichao.

Two launch vehicles will send a moon surface lander and crew-toting spacecraft into lunar orbit, where they will dock with each other, according to state-run Global Times. After docking, the astronauts will enter the lander and descend to the lunar surface.

Once they land, they will work to collect samples of lunar regolith, the soil and rocks that make up the moon's surface. They are also expected to carry out other exploration tasks and scientific experiments before returning to the spacecraft in orbit.

Chinese researchers are working to not only develop the technology needed to safely land crews on the lunar surface, but also to support the various parts of the mission, such as lunar space suits and any type of exploration vehicles like a rover.

See a high-resolution satellite view of Earth in the video above.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The Webb Space Telescope is marking one year of cosmic photographs with one of its best yet: the dramatic close-up of dozens of stars at the moment of birth.

NASA unveiled the latest snapshot Wednesday, revealing 50 baby stars in a cloud complex 390 light-years away. The region is relatively quiet yet full of illuminated gases, jets of hydrogen and even cocoons of dust with the delicate beginnings of even more stars.

All of the young stars appear to be no bigger than our sun. Scientists said the breathtaking shot provides the best clarity yet of this brief phase of a star’s life.

"Our own sun experienced a phase like this, long ago, and now we have the technology to see the beginning of another’s star’s story,” Klaus Pontoppidan, who served as project scientist, said in a statement.

This cloud complex, known as Rho Ophiuchi, is the closest star-forming region to Earth. With no stars in the foreground of the photo, NASA noted, the details stand out all the more. Some of the stars display shadows indicating possible planets in the making, according to NASA.

Webb — the largest and most powerful astronomical observatory ever launched into space — has been churning out cosmic beauty shots for the past year. The first pictures from the $10 billion infrared telescope were unveiled last July, six months after its liftoff from French Guiana.

It’s considered the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting Earth for 33 years. A joint NASA-European Space Agency effort, Webb scans the universe from a more distant perch, 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away.

The booster, designated B1058 by SpaceX, made its debut in May 2020, carrying two NASA astronauts — Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley — into space. Riding in a Crew Dragon capsule, the duo would spend a few months on the International Space Station as part of a demonstration mission for NASA's commercial crew program. 

This particular booster stands out from the rest in SpaceX's stable not only for its record-setting flight but also because it is the only booster to be emblazoned with NASA's red worm logo on its fuselage. 

Following its historic first flight, the booster went on to loft 14 more missions before it took to the skies Sunday night, July 9. Those missions included launches of South Korea's Anasis-2 military communications satellite, a space station cargo resupply mission, two Transporter ride-share missions and 10 batches of Starlink satellites. 

With those launches, it joined another booster — B1060 — as the fleet's co-leader, with each booster having flown 15 times. However, with Sunday's flight, B1058 broke the tie. 

When SpaceX debuted its souped-up, ultra-reusable Falcon 9 rocket in 2017, company CEO Elon Musk boasted that the booster would be capable of flying at least 10 times before refurbishment and at least 100 times before being retired. He also predicted that the same booster would launch, land and fly again within a 24-hour period. 

While that final milestone hasn't happened, SpaceX has surpassed the original 10 flight milestone — but not without refurbishments in between flights.

However, as the company has experimented with reusability, the time between flights has been dramatically reduced. And SpaceX has used that time to streamline the inspection and refurbishment process. 

In a press event last year, company officials said that once the boosters achieved a regular cadence of 10 flights, they were in great shape, so the engineering team started to qualify the boosters for 15 flights. As multiple boosters have reached that milestone, the company is looking to expand the reusability process even further. 

Musk said that he wishes to make spaceflight a lot like air travel — where all you have to do is refuel the rocket in between flights, as is the current process with airplanes. While we are not quite there yet, SpaceX's reusability efforts have put the rocket manufacturer at the forefront of the industry. 

In 2022, SpaceX flew a record 61 missions, most of which were on previously flown rockets.

The company is expected to significantly increase that cadence this year, with more than 40 launches already under its belt for 2023. The key to that is reusability. 

The company's reusability efforts has enabled SpaceX to become a global launch leader, and inspired other providers to think about reusable options. Rocket Lab, another up-and-coming launch provider, has expanded its efforts to reuse its first stage boosters as well.

That's because, according to Musk, the first stage is the most expensive portion of the rocket. And by reusing them, a company can cut down on costs, which ultimately makes spaceflight more accessible as those cost saving can be passed on to customers.

Will SpaceX achieve its long-time goal of flying the same rocket twice in a 24-hour period? Maybe, but it's more likely to reach 20 flights of a booster first.

(NewsNation) — Nearly a decade ago, a meteor traveling faster than 95% of nearby stars crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb says there's a possibility it wasn't a space rock at all.

Loeb just returned from an excursion to the Pacific Ocean, the aim of which was to recover pieces of that meteor. He says those fragments could be the remains of a "technological gadget" from another solar system.

The 50 tiny spherules, or molten droplets, are believed to be made up of steel-titanium alloy that is stronger than the iron found in other meteors. That, along with the meteor's speed, has Loeb and other researchers sure of one thing: It's not from this solar system.

A spherule, or a molten droplet, recovered from the floor of the Pacific Ocean is shown. (Courtesy Avi Loeb)

"It's the first time that humans are holding in their hands material from a big object that came from interstellar space," Loeb said Wednesday on "CUOMO" while showing a vial containing one of the spherules.

Loeb and his team recovered the molten droplets in the ocean off the coast of Papua New Guinea, where they determined the meteor, IM1, crashed in 2014. The Defense Department confirmed to NASA in 2022 that the velocity of the meteor does "indicate an interstellar trajectory."

Setting out to find fragments of the object, Loeb's team in June dredged the ocean floor with a magnet sled that picked up mostly volcanic ash.

About a week into the expedition, the researchers found the "metallic marbles," as Loeb described them, buried inside the ash. The spherules are less than a millimeter in size.

"We found them concentrated along the path of the meteor, and moreover, the composition may be completely different from solar system objects," Loeb said. "We are planning to use electron microscopes to also image them and examine what kind of isotopes they contain, like radioactive isotopes."

Loeb leads Harvard University's Galileo Project, established to search for signs of UFOs and other interstellar objects. The latest expedition to the Pacific Ocean cost $1.5 million and resulted in a discovery that "opens a new frontier in astronomy," Loeb said in a a Medium blog post.

The samples will undergo further testing at Harvard to determine exactly what they are made of.

"Either it's a rock that was made in an environment very different than the solar system because the material strength was tougher than all space rocks, including iron meteorites," Loeb said. "But it's also possible that it was some kind of an technological gadget. Just think of (NASA's) Voyager (spacecraft) in a billion years colliding with an exoplanet and burning up in the atmosphere of that planet — it would appear as a meteor."

Loeb's discovery comes on the heels of a whistleblower's claim that the U.S. government is shielding information about a UFO retrieval program. Congress is investigating the matter, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said the whistleblower, former intelligence officer David Grusch, is not the only person to have made such claims.

Now that he's found the tiny fragments, Loeb is hoping he might retrieve a craft himself, if there's any large debris from the meteor impact.

"If there is any big relic, we know where it should be located," Loeb said. "We are thinking about the next expedition, where we will scan the ocean floor with sonar and potentially find the core of this object, and then it will be easy to tell whether it's a rock or a technological gadget."

Two Italian air force colonels and an aerospace engineer from the National Research Council of Italy will fly to the edge of space Thursday, if all goes as planned. The flight, called Galactic 01, is the first commercial spaceflight for Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space company. 

The trio will join one of Virgin Galactic's astronaut instructors and two pilots, who will take them to 50 miles above the Earth. The launch is set for 11 a.m. ET.

Branson founded Virgin Galactic in 2004 as a space tourism company, aiming to ferry wealthy passengers to the edge of space and back. Thursday's flight comes two years after Branson and the first passengers flew on the spaceplane. 

Commercial service was to begin shortly thereafter but was delayed when the company was grounded for deviating from its assigned airspace on that first mission. Following an investigation, the company was allowed to continue preparations for commercial flight. It completed one additional crewed flight in May before this latest mission. 

Virgin Galactic has said it has a backlog of nearly 800 customers waiting for their ride to space, and if all goes well on this mission, the next one could take place as soon as August. 

To get to space, passengers board a space plane called Unity, which is attached to a larger plane called the WhiteKnightTwo. The carrier plane takes off from the company's facilities in New Mexico and, once it reaches a certain altitude, the Unity spaceplane drops and will ignite its rocket motor that will enable its pilots to reach the edge of space. 

The entire flight should take about 90 minutes, with the crew experiencing just a few minutes of weightlessness while enjoying stunning views of the blackness of space. During that time, the crew will conduct several science experiments before the craft heads back to Earth, where it will land like a glider back in New Mexico.

They reported Wednesday that they were able to “hear” what are called low-frequency gravitational waves — changes in the fabric of the universe that are created by huge objects moving around and colliding in space.

“It’s really the first time that we have evidence of just this large-scale motion of everything in the universe,” said Maura McLaughlin, co-director of NANOGrav, the research collaboration that published the results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Einstein predicted that when really heavy objects move through spacetime — the fabric of our universe — they create ripples that spread through that fabric. Scientists sometimes liken these ripples to the background music of the universe.

In 2015, scientists used an experiment called LIGO to detect gravitational waves for the first time and showed Einstein was right. But so far, those methods have only been able to catch waves at high frequencies, explained NANOGrav member Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale University.

Those quick “chirps” come from specific moments when relatively small black holes and dead stars crash into each other, Mingarelli said.

In the latest research, scientists were searching for waves at much lower frequencies. These slow ripples can take years or even decades to cycle up and down, and probably come from some of the biggest objects in our universe: supermassive black holes billions of times the mass of our sun.

Galaxies across the universe are constantly colliding and merging together. As this happens, scientists believe the enormous black holes at the centers of these galaxies also come together and get locked into a dance before they finally collapse into each other, explained Szabolcs Marka, an astrophysicist at Columbia University who was not involved with the research.

The black holes send off gravitational waves as they circle around in these pairings, known as binaries.

“Supermassive black hole binaries, slowly and calmly orbiting each other, are the tenors and bass of the cosmic opera,” Marka said.

No instruments on Earth could capture the ripples from these giants. So “we had to build a detector that was roughly the size of the galaxy,” said NANOGrav researcher Michael Lam of the SETI Institute.

The results released this week included 15 years of data from NANOGrav, which has been using telescopes across North America to search for the waves. Other teams of gravitational wave hunters around the world also published studies, including in Europe, India, China and Australia.

The scientists pointed telescopes at dead stars called pulsars, which send out flashes of radio waves as they spin around in space like lighthouses.

These bursts are so regular that scientists know exactly when the radio waves are supposed to arrive on our planet — “like a perfectly regular clock ticking away far out in space,” said NANOGrav member Sarah Vigeland, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. But as gravitational waves warp the fabric of spacetime, they actually change the distance between Earth and these pulsars, throwing off that steady beat.

By analyzing tiny changes in the ticking rate across different pulsars — with some pulses coming slightly early and others coming late — scientists could tell that gravitational waves were passing through.

The NANOGrav team monitored 68 pulsars across the sky using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico and the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Other teams found similar evidence from dozens of other pulsars, monitored with telescopes across the globe.

So far, this method hasn’t been able to trace where exactly these low-frequency waves are coming from, said Marc Kamionkowski, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the research.

Instead, it’s revealing the constant hum that is all around us — like when you’re standing in the middle of a party, “you’ll hear all of these people talking, but you won’t hear anything in particular,” Kamionkowski said.

The background noise they found is “louder” than some scientists expected, Mingarelli said. This could mean that there are more, or bigger, black hole mergers happening out in space than we thought — or point to other sources of gravitational waves that could challenge our understanding of the universe.

Researchers hope that continuing to study this kind of gravitational waves can help us learn more about the biggest objects in our universe. It could open new doors to “cosmic archaeology” that can track the history of black holes and galaxies merging all around us, Marka said.

“We’re starting to open up this new window on the universe,” Vigeland said.

___

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On Sunday, Kelly Haston, Ross Brockwell, Nathan Jones and Anca Selariu entered a mock Martian base at the U.S. space agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they will spend the next 12 months living like a crew of astronauts would on a deep space mission. 

As the first of three planned Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) missions, the participants will be remotely observed by scientists as part of an effort to plan for future human missions on the real Martian surface. The crew will not leave their 1,700-square-foot habitat, called "Mars Dune Alpha," until July 7, 2024.

CHAPEA is just one of many analog astronaut missions — each with varying timescales — that the agency uses to help plan for deep space missions. Mission 1 is a bit unique as this will be the first time crews are isolated for 378 days, only able to leave their habitat during planned Mars-walks that take place in an adjoining enclosure called the "Sandbox."

The CHAPEA missions will add valuable data on how 12 different people interact and live together over an extended period in isolation. To be selected as part of the crew, the analog astronauts had to have a degree in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics discipline, as well as professional experience in their respective fields or military training — much like traditional NASA astronauts. They also had to pass the same physical and psychological testing as astronaut candidates.

Each crew member has an integral role to play: Haston, a research scientist, is the mission commander; Brockwell, a structural engineer, is flight engineer; Jones, an emergency medicine physician, is the medical officer; and Selariu, a microbiologist in the U.S. Navy, is the science officer.

Officials said this mission will focus on resource restriction and how the crew adjusts to challenges and scenarios that an actual crew on a Mars mission would face. This includes spaceflight food systems, time delayed communications and more. 

Crew members may also encounter some unexpected problems over the course of their mission to see how they might react, although what exactly those issues will be, officials haven't said.