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The wet dress rehearsal for NASA’s Artemis II mission ended in a scrub this week, leading the space agency to delay its first attempt to send astronauts back to the moon from this weekend to early March.
If you’ve been following Artemis launches as long as we have, you can probably guess the cause of this week’s scrub: hydrogen. The supercold liquid fuel, while clean-burning and highly efficient, is an amazing escape artist, leaking out of NASA’s gigantic Space Launch System three times during the fueling rehearsal.
Once Artemis II clears the wet dress rehearsal and simulated launch stage, NASA will conduct a flight-readiness review before committing to a launch date. The next launch window includes March 6 to 9 and March 11. If Artemis II doesn’t fly on one of those days, it will be delayed until April. The mission is meant to launch no later than April 30.
Discover more space news
—‘Textbooks will need to be updated’: Jupiter is smaller and flatter than we thought, Juno spacecraft reveals
—Asteroid 2024 YR4’s collision with the moon could create a flash visible from Earth, study finds
—Martian meteorite that fell to Earth is full of ancient water, new scans reveal |
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| Also in the news this week |
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Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can rewire human brains so profoundly that traditional therapies, such as antidepressants and trauma-focused psychotherapies, often aren’t enough. That’s why researchers are exploring a new avenue: psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, using MDMA or psilocybin, to act on the brain systems disrupted in PTSD, instead of treating the symptoms.
So far, the results are positive. But uncertainty still surrounds the long-term impacts of these drugs, as well as exactly how they act upon the brain. In this Science Spotlight, Live Science contributor Jane Palmer investigated the science behind psychedelics and their promise as a therapy for PTSD. Accompanying it is a long read into how former Navy pilot Kegan Gill used ayahuasca to lay the groundwork for mental recovery after a devastating jet crash left him with a brain injury. |
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| Something for the weekend |
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| This week’s newsletter was written by Ben Turner |
Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he’s not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.
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