The ground station of the jointly developed India-Bhutan satellite has been inaugurated in Thimpu, the capital city of Bhutan. It is a ground-based facility that helps communicate with and receive information sent by the satellite. Ground stations, the major component of which is the parabolic antenna, communicate with satellites by transmitting and receiving radio waves.

"This ground station will enable Bhutan to receive data from India-Bhutan SAT, pertaining to its territory, directly from the satellite and process it in real-time," said Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).&nbsp;

The inauguration in Bhutan was carried out by Dr Somanath, chairman ISRO and secretary, Department of Space, Lyonpo Tandi Dorji, Bhutan's foreign minister, Lyonpo Karma Wangdi, Bhutan's minister of industry, commerce and employment and Sudhakar Delela, Indian ambassador to Bhutan.

BhutanSat was launched as a piggyback payload on ISRO's PSLV C54 rocket on November 26, 2022. The primary satellite payload was Indo-French ocean observation satellite EOS-6 and there were eight nanosatellites on board including BhutanSat.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/nasa-isro-imaging-satellite-arrives-in-india-from-us-launch-by-indian-gslv-rocket-569972">Read more:&nbsp;NASA-ISRO imaging satellite arrives in India from US for 2024 launch by Indian GSLV rocket</a>

The 'INS-2B' or BhutanSat is ISRO's second nanosatellite for Bhutan. It comprises two payloads&nbsp;— NanoMx and APRS-Digipeater. The NanoMx is a multispectral optical imaging payload developed by India's Space&nbsp;Applications Centre (SAC). 
 
The APRS-Digipeater payload is jointly developed by DITTBhutan and ISRO's UR Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), ISRO said.

Bhutan's Information and Communication Minister Lyonpo Karma D Wangdi witnessed the launch mission from ISRO's mission control centre in Sriharikota and said that ISRO's commendable track record in launching satellites left no doubt about the mission’s success.

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Ground station for India-Bhutan <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/satellite?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#satellite</a> inaugurated in Thimphu, <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Bhutan?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Bhutan</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/ISRO?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#ISRO</a> Chairman&amp; officials, Bhutan Ministers 
 
BhutanSat(for mapping,ham radio, txt msging) launched on PSLVC54, 26th Nov 2022. Ground stn to help communicate with sat &amp; send-receive&amp; process info <a href="https://twitter.com/isro?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@isro</a> <a href="https://t.co/5drp98KpIC">pic.twitter.com/5drp98KpIC</a>
— Sidharth.M.P (@sdhrthmp) <a href="https://twitter.com/sdhrthmp/status/1635535607375216640?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 14, 2023</a></blockquote>
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He said the mission was another key milestone for the close relationship between India and Bhutan.&nbsp;

Speaking exclusively to WION after the launch, Bhutan's Minister Lyonpo Karma D Wangdi had said the satellite could capture images of Bhutan for mapping forests, urban settlements, and landslide-prone areas and can enable amateur ham radio text messaging services. He added that eight engineers from Bhutan worked along with their counterparts from ISRO on this project.&nbsp;

"BhutanSat launch is a historic moment and a key milestone in India-Bhutan ties. This is just a beginning of collaborative efforts in using outer space and a small beginning for Bhutan's fledgling space programme," he said.&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/videos/exclusive-bhutan-minister-of-information-and-communications-lyonpo-karma-d-wangdi-speaks-to-wion-537973">WATCH |&nbsp;Exclusive: Bhutan Minister of Information and Communications Lyonpo Karma D. Wangdi speaks to WION</a>

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As part of Space diplomacy, India has been working with established spacefaring nations such as Russia, USA, France, and Japan. It is also supporting aspiring spacefaring nations at various levels.

In 2017, ISRO launched the SAARC satellite - a geostationary satellite meant for communications and meteorological purposes, specifically serving the South Asia region. The South Asia Satellite provides a role in telemedicine, tele-education, banking, and television broadcasting. 
 
&nbsp;

WATCH WION LIVE HERE:&nbsp;

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The ground station of the jointly developed India-Bhutan satellite has been inaugurated in Thimpu, the capital city of Bhutan. It is a ground-based facility that helps communicate with and receive information sent by the satellite.

The ground station of the jointly developed India-Bhutan satellite has been inaugurated in Thimpu, the capital city of Bhutan. It is a ground-based facility that helps communicate with and receive information sent by the satellite. Ground stations, the major component of which is the parabolic antenna, communicate with satellites by transmitting and receiving radio waves. "This ground station will enable Bhutan to receive data from India-Bhutan SAT, pertaining to its territory, directly from the satellite and process it in real-time," said Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The inauguration in Bhutan was carried out by Dr Somanath, chairman ISRO and secretary, Department of Space, Lyonpo Tandi Dorji, Bhutan's foreign minister, Lyonpo Karma Wangdi, Bhutan's minister of industry, commerce and employment and Sudhakar Delela, Indian ambassador to Bhutan. BhutanSat was launched as a piggyback payload on ISRO's PSLV C54 rocket on November 26, 2022. The primary satellite payload was Indo-French ocean observation satellite EOS-6 and there were eight nanosatellites on board including BhutanSat. Read more: NASA-ISRO imaging satellite arrives in India from US for 2024 launch by Indian GSLV rocket The 'INS-2B' or BhutanSat is ISRO's second nanosatellite for Bhutan. It comprises two payloads — NanoMx and APRS-Digipeater. The NanoMx is a multispectral optical imaging payload developed by India's Space Applications Centre (SAC). The APRS-Digipeater payload is jointly developed by DITTBhutan and ISRO's UR Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), ISRO said. Bhutan's Information and Communication Minister Lyonpo Karma D Wangdi witnessed the launch mission from ISRO's mission control centre in Sriharikota and said that ISRO's commendable track record in launching satellites left no doubt about the mission’s success. Ground station for India-Bhutan #satellite inaugurated in Thimphu, #Bhutan by #ISRO Chairman& officials, Bhutan Ministers BhutanSat(for mapping,ham radio, txt msging) launched on PSLVC54, 26th Nov 2022. Ground stn to help communicate with sat & send-receive& process info @isro pic.twitter.com/5drp98KpIC — Sidharth.M.P (@sdhrthmp) March 14, 2023 × He said the mission was another key milestone for the close relationship between India and Bhutan. Speaking exclusively to WION after the launch, Bhutan's Minister Lyonpo Karma D Wangdi had said the satellite could capture images of Bhutan for mapping forests, urban settlements, and landslide-prone areas and can enable amateur ham radio text messaging services. He added that eight engineers from Bhutan worked along with their counterparts from ISRO on this project. "BhutanSat launch is a historic moment and a key milestone in India-Bhutan ties. This is just a beginning of collaborative efforts in using outer space and a small beginning for Bhutan's fledgling space programme," he said. WATCH | Exclusive: Bhutan Minister of Information and Communications Lyonpo Karma D. Wangdi speaks to WION × As part of Space diplomacy, India has been working with established spacefaring nations such as Russia, USA, France, and Japan. It is also supporting aspiring spacefaring nations at various levels. In 2017, ISRO launched the SAARC satellite - a geostationary satellite meant for communications and meteorological purposes, specifically serving the South Asia region. The South Asia Satellite provides a role in telemedicine, tele-education, banking, and television broadcasting. WATCH WION LIVE HERE:

ISRO officials and Bhutan government inaugurate ground station of Indo-Bhutan satellite

NASA’s Artemis missions from Moon to Mars explained

The massive Space Launch System moon rocket from NASA, which is topped with an uncrewed astronaut capsule, started an hours-long crawl to its launchpad on Tuesday night in preparation for the behemoth's first test flight this month.

The 98-metre-tall rocket is set to launch its initial journey into orbit on August 29 without any human crew. It will be an important, long-awaited demonstration mission to the moon for NASA's Artemis programme, the country's multibillion-dollar endeavour to send people back to the moon as training for trips to Mars.

Around 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT) on Tuesday, the <meta charset="utf-8" /><a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/explainer-applications-of-chinas-yuan-wang-5-in-space-and-spying-operations-507490">Space</a>&nbsp;Launch System left its assembly building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and started the six-kilometre (four-mile) journey to its launchpad. The Space Launch System has been developed over the previous ten years with the help of Boeing Co.

The rollout will take about 11 hours at less than 1 mph (1.6 kph).

The NASA Orion astronaut capsule, made by Lockheed Martin Corp., is perched atop the rocket. It is intended to split from the rocket in outer space, transport people to the moon, and then come together with another spacecraft to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface.

Without any humans inside, the Orion spacecraft will launch from the Space Launch System on August 29 for the Artemis 1 mission. It will orbit the moon for 42 days before returning to Earth for an ocean splashdown.

On September 2 and September 5, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has backup launch dates in case terrible launch weather or a minor technical issue prevents a launch on August 29.

(With inputs from agencies)

Also Watch&nbsp;|&nbsp;WION Fineprint: Why is space junk a problem?

&nbsp;<iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/wion-fineprint-why-is-space-junk-a-problem-503365/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe>

The massive Space Launch System moon rocket from NASA, which is topped with an uncrewed astronaut capsule, started an hours-long crawl to its launchpad on Tuesday night in preparation for the behemoth's first test flight this month.

The massive Space Launch System moon rocket from NASA, which is topped with an uncrewed astronaut capsule, started an hours-long crawl to its launchpad on Tuesday night in preparation for the behemoth's first test flight this month. The 98-metre-tall rocket is set to launch its initial journey into orbit on August 29 without any human crew. It will be an important, long-awaited demonstration mission to the moon for NASA's Artemis programme, the country's multibillion-dollar endeavour to send people back to the moon as training for trips to Mars. Around 10 p.m. EDT (0200 GMT) on Tuesday, the Space Launch System left its assembly building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and started the six-kilometre (four-mile) journey to its launchpad. The Space Launch System has been developed over the previous ten years with the help of Boeing Co. The rollout will take about 11 hours at less than 1 mph (1.6 kph). The NASA Orion astronaut capsule, made by Lockheed Martin Corp., is perched atop the rocket. It is intended to split from the rocket in outer space, transport people to the moon, and then come together with another spacecraft to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface. Without any humans inside, the Orion spacecraft will launch from the Space Launch System on August 29 for the Artemis 1 mission. It will orbit the moon for 42 days before returning to Earth for an ocean splashdown. On September 2 and September 5, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has backup launch dates in case terrible launch weather or a minor technical issue prevents a launch on August 29. (With inputs from agencies) Also Watch | WION Fineprint: Why is space junk a problem?

NASA's massive US moon rocket emerges for debut launch

There may be a new planet in our planet's neighbourhood just four lightyears away. A third planet has been detected orbiting Proxima Centauri, our sun's nearest star neighbour, at a distance of 25 trillion miles (40.2 trillion kilometres).

The red dwarf is just one eighth the mass of the sun and has already been confirmed to have an Earth-sized planet. A second, faraway planet is also possible.

Proxima d, the latest planet to be found, completes one orbit around the star every five Earth days.&nbsp;

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/did-we-the-modern-humans-kill-off-neanderthals-a-new-finding-may-have-answers-452031" hreflang="en">Did we, the modern humans, kill off Neanderthals? A new finding may have answers</a>

It is one of the lightest exoplanets ever discovered, with a mass of about a quarter of the Earth's. The discovery was described in a study published in <a href="https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2022/02/aa42337-21/aa42337-21.html">Astronomy &amp; Astrophysics</a>.

This planet is only 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometres) from the star, which is less than one-tenth as far as Mercury is from the sun in our solar system. The closest planet to the sun, Mercury orbits it every 88 days.

Proxima b, the first planet discovered in the system, was confirmed in 2020. It orbits the star every 11 days and is about the size of Earth. It is located within the habitable zone, or the distance from a star at which liquid water, the key ingredient for life, can exist on the planet's surface.

Another planet Proxima c is too far from the star to be in a habitable zone, and the newly discovered Proxima d is too nearby to be in the habitable zone.

João Faria, a researcher at Portugal's Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences and the lead study author, says the finding indicates that our nearest stellar neighbour contains a wide variety of interesting new worlds that could be explored in the future.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/nasa-releases-pictures-of-venuss-surface-taken-by-parker-solar-probe-in-new-light-452308" hreflang="en">NASA releases pictures of Venus’s surface taken by Parker Solar Probe in new light</a>

Proxima d was discovered using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Astronomers used the observatory's telescopes and instruments to find and confirm past discoveries of planets in the Proxima Centauri system.

Scientists recently observed a weak signal from a fast orbiting object close to the star during follow-up observations.

ESPRESSO, or the highly sensitive Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations instrument on the VLT, was used to conduct more observations.

The data suggested there was a planet present, and that its gravitational pull was tugging on the star.

Watch |&nbsp;What is Geomagnetic storm, which destroyed 40 SpaceX satellites?

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According to Faria, after obtaining new observations, they were able to confirm the signal as a new planet candidate. Detecting a signal so small was an exciting challenge for him, and discovering an exoplanet so close to Earth made it even more exciting.

Proxima d's future observations could confirm that it is in fact the third planet seen orbiting this star. Researchers believe that future observations may reveal even more details about the system, or even additional planets.

There may be a new planet in our planet's neighbourhood just four lightyears away. A third planet has been detected orbiting Proxima Centauri, our sun's nearest star neighbour, at a distance of 25 trillion miles (40.

There may be a new planet in our planet's neighbourhood just four lightyears away. A third planet has been detected orbiting Proxima Centauri, our sun's nearest star neighbour, at a distance of 25 trillion miles (40.2 trillion kilometres). The red dwarf is just one eighth the mass of the sun and has already been confirmed to have an Earth-sized planet. A second, faraway planet is also possible. Proxima d, the latest planet to be found, completes one orbit around the star every five Earth days. Also read | Did we, the modern humans, kill off Neanderthals? A new finding may have answers It is one of the lightest exoplanets ever discovered, with a mass of about a quarter of the Earth's. The discovery was described in a study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics. This planet is only 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometres) from the star, which is less than one-tenth as far as Mercury is from the sun in our solar system. The closest planet to the sun, Mercury orbits it every 88 days. Proxima b, the first planet discovered in the system, was confirmed in 2020. It orbits the star every 11 days and is about the size of Earth. It is located within the habitable zone, or the distance from a star at which liquid water, the key ingredient for life, can exist on the planet's surface. Another planet Proxima c is too far from the star to be in a habitable zone, and the newly discovered Proxima d is too nearby to be in the habitable zone. João Faria, a researcher at Portugal's Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences and the lead study author, says the finding indicates that our nearest stellar neighbour contains a wide variety of interesting new worlds that could be explored in the future. Also read | NASA releases pictures of Venus’s surface taken by Parker Solar Probe in new light Proxima d was discovered using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of the European Southern Observatory in Chile. Astronomers used the observatory's telescopes and instruments to find and confirm past discoveries of planets in the Proxima Centauri system. Scientists recently observed a weak signal from a fast orbiting object close to the star during follow-up observations. ESPRESSO, or the highly sensitive Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations instrument on the VLT, was used to conduct more observations. The data suggested there was a planet present, and that its gravitational pull was tugging on the star. Watch | What is Geomagnetic storm, which destroyed 40 SpaceX satellites? According to Faria, after obtaining new observations, they were able to confirm the signal as a new planet candidate. Detecting a signal so small was an exciting challenge for him, and discovering an exoplanet so close to Earth made it even more exciting. Proxima d's future observations could confirm that it is in fact the third planet seen orbiting this star. Researchers believe that future observations may reveal even more details about the system, or even additional planets.

We have a new neighbour! Scientists discover a new planet near our solar system

One day, astronomers may spot an asteroid months away from a cataclysmic rendezvous with Earth. Our only chance of survival at such a late stage would be to try to use a nuclear explosive to obliterate it.

But would it work?

Unlike some melodramatic Hollywood blockbusters of the 1990s, real-life scientists are largely unconcerned by any planet-sterilizing behemoths. The orbits of almost every asteroid two-thirds of a mile across or larger have been precisely mapped out. “We know they’re not going to be a threat anytime soon,” said Megan Bruck Syal, a planetary defence researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/eight-massive-asteroids-bigger-than-pyramids-to-approach-earth-in-october-november-420486">Eight massive asteroids, bigger than pyramids, to approach Earth in October-November</a>

Instead, their focus is on relatively small asteroids, those about the size of football stadiums, notable for their abundance as well as their ability to evade asteroid-hunting observatories. “Those are the ones that we tend to worry more about because they could come out of nowhere,” Bruck Syal said.

Such a diminutive asteroid may not sound like much of a danger compared to the 6.2-mile colossus that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago with apocalyptic results. But a meteor that exploded over Siberia in 1908 was only about 200 feet across — and the blast’s shock wave levelled 800 square miles of forest. “That’s the size of the whole Washington D.C. Metro area,” said Bruck Syal.

Using high-fidelity simulations, scientists reported in a study published this month that a stealthy asteroid as long as 330 feet could be annihilated by a 1-megaton nuclear device, with 99.9% of its mass being blasted out of Earth’s way, if the asteroid is attacked at least two months before impact.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/why-nasa-is-launching-a-robotic-archaeologist-named-lucy-421079">Why NASA is launching a robotic archaeologist named Lucy</a>

Ideally, asteroids targeting our blue marble would be identified decades ahead of time. If so, the hope is that an uncrewed spacecraft could slam into them with sufficient momentum to nudge them out of Earth’s way. This strategy, known as deflection, is getting its first test next year with NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) space mission.

But an asteroid even several years away from Earth may not be suitable for deflection. At that stage, it may be too late to sufficiently alter its trajectory with a nudge. And if any deflection attempt proves overzealous, the asteroid may break up into smaller but still portly pieces that could hit Earth in multiple spots.

Using a nuclear blast to obliterate an interplanetary interloper “will always be the last resort,” said Patrick Michel, an asteroid expert at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur who was not involved in the study. But if we are short on time, it may be our only hope.

Also read |&nbsp;​​​​​​​<a href="https://www.wionews.com/science/lucy-in-the-sky-nasa-space-mission-lifts-off-will-study-jupiters-trojan-asteroids-421268">'Lucy in the sky': NASA space mission lifts off, will study Jupiter's Trojan asteroids</a>

A team led by Patrick King, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, ran 3D simulations to see whether a nuke could provide planetary salvation. Like a wannabe Marco Inaros, a villain from the science fiction series “The Expanse” who schemed to bombard Earth from space, he hurled virtual 330-foot asteroids at our planet along five different orbital paths.

Powerful 1-megaton nuclear devices were sent to greet them.

The simulations showed that when the detonation took place two months or more ahead of the projected impact date, it was sufficient to ensure that almost every asteroid fragment that survived the blast missed Earth. Any fragments that did reach Earth would probably be small enough to burn up in the atmosphere, said Bruck Syal, a study co-author.

This strategy isn’t foolproof. “If you miscalculate the energy you need to destroy it, you may make a lot of fragments,” Michel said — and some may be sizable enough to impact Earth with considerable violence.

Nobody wants to wait until the last moment to see if a nuclear Hail Mary saves the world. But one day humanity may have no choice: NASA estimates that there are 17,000 near-Earth asteroids 460 feet or larger that are yet to be found.

To reduce the odds of an asteroid ambush, scientists are being proactive. A future NASA space telescope aims to spot two-thirds of those miniature menaces. Its hopeful success will come as a relief to planetary defence officers who, perhaps more than anyone else, don’t wanna miss a thing.

One day, astronomers may spot an asteroid months away from a cataclysmic rendezvous with Earth. Our only chance of survival at such a late stage would be to try to use a nuclear explosive to obliterate it.

One day, astronomers may spot an asteroid months away from a cataclysmic rendezvous with Earth. Our only chance of survival at such a late stage would be to try to use a nuclear explosive to obliterate it. But would it work? Unlike some melodramatic Hollywood blockbusters of the 1990s, real-life scientists are largely unconcerned by any planet-sterilizing behemoths. The orbits of almost every asteroid two-thirds of a mile across or larger have been precisely mapped out. “We know they’re not going to be a threat anytime soon,” said Megan Bruck Syal, a planetary defence researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Also read | Eight massive asteroids, bigger than pyramids, to approach Earth in October-November Instead, their focus is on relatively small asteroids, those about the size of football stadiums, notable for their abundance as well as their ability to evade asteroid-hunting observatories. “Those are the ones that we tend to worry more about because they could come out of nowhere,” Bruck Syal said. Such a diminutive asteroid may not sound like much of a danger compared to the 6.2-mile colossus that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago with apocalyptic results. But a meteor that exploded over Siberia in 1908 was only about 200 feet across — and the blast’s shock wave levelled 800 square miles of forest. “That’s the size of the whole Washington D.C. Metro area,” said Bruck Syal. Using high-fidelity simulations, scientists reported in a study published this month that a stealthy asteroid as long as 330 feet could be annihilated by a 1-megaton nuclear device, with 99.9% of its mass being blasted out of Earth’s way, if the asteroid is attacked at least two months before impact. Also read | Why NASA is launching a robotic archaeologist named Lucy Ideally, asteroids targeting our blue marble would be identified decades ahead of time. If so, the hope is that an uncrewed spacecraft could slam into them with sufficient momentum to nudge them out of Earth’s way. This strategy, known as deflection, is getting its first test next year with NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) space mission. But an asteroid even several years away from Earth may not be suitable for deflection. At that stage, it may be too late to sufficiently alter its trajectory with a nudge. And if any deflection attempt proves overzealous, the asteroid may break up into smaller but still portly pieces that could hit Earth in multiple spots. Using a nuclear blast to obliterate an interplanetary interloper “will always be the last resort,” said Patrick Michel, an asteroid expert at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur who was not involved in the study. But if we are short on time, it may be our only hope. Also read | 'Lucy in the sky': NASA space mission lifts off, will study Jupiter's Trojan asteroids A team led by Patrick King, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, ran 3D simulations to see whether a nuke could provide planetary salvation. Like a wannabe Marco Inaros, a villain from the science fiction series “The Expanse” who schemed to bombard Earth from space, he hurled virtual 330-foot asteroids at our planet along five different orbital paths. Powerful 1-megaton nuclear devices were sent to greet them. The simulations showed that when the detonation took place two months or more ahead of the projected impact date, it was sufficient to ensure that almost every asteroid fragment that survived the blast missed Earth. Any fragments that did reach Earth would probably be small enough to burn up in the atmosphere, said Bruck Syal, a study co-author. This strategy isn’t foolproof. “If you miscalculate the energy you need to destroy it, you may make a lot of fragments,” Michel said — and some may be sizable enough to impact Earth with considerable violence. Nobody wants to wait until the last moment to see if a nuclear Hail Mary saves the world. But one day humanity may have no choice: NASA estimates that there are 17,000 near-Earth asteroids 460 feet or larger that are yet to be found. To reduce the odds of an asteroid ambush, scientists are being proactive. A future NASA space telescope aims to spot two-thirds of those miniature menaces. Its hopeful success will come as a relief to planetary defence officers who, perhaps more than anyone else, don’t wanna miss a thing.

How a nuclear bomb could save Earth from a stealthy asteroid

One moonless night a little more than a decade ago, Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant, animal vision experts from Lund University in Sweden, made a surprise discovery in South Africa.

The researchers had been watching nocturnal dung beetles, miniature Sisyphuses of the savanna, as they tumbled giant balls of dung. The beetles seemed to be able to roll remarkably straight, even though they had no clear landmarks to reference.

“We thought maybe they were using our cameras, maybe someone had lit a fire somewhere,” Dacke said. “We were really confused.” Then they realized the beetles were guided by the 100,000 light-years-long streak of the Milky Way.

We humans are famous for this sort of thing. The stars beckoned our species to cross seas and kindled the sciences that later let us putter up toward them in rockets. From culture to culture, the Milky Way served as backdrop and inspiration for stories about rivers, trees, gods, serpents and, of course, exploration.

But we were not the only ones looking.

Researchers like Dacke suspect that a wide swath of the animal world might sometimes navigate by starlight — and might be lost as our city lights drown out ever more of it. Her team’s newest study, published Thursday, found that dung beetles became confused under light-swamped skies. The result adds to a small and scattered body of research, conducted over decades, on what the night sky might mean to the other earthlings who can sense it.

These experiments raise the same few, difficult questions: Can animals see the stars? Can animals use them? And what happens when they lose them?

Aquatic Astronomers

In the 1780s, astronomers William and Caroline Herschel scoured the skies for nebulae, finding some that resembled spiral seashells. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble, at the helm of an enormous telescope, discovered that the Milky Way, Andromeda and Herschel spirals were galactic islands in a vast cosmic sea.

And in the mid-2000s, Nick, a researcher of sorts in Cologne, Germany, swam to his own telescope and plopped into an underwater chair. Then he stuck his head in a tube and, if he saw a star, pressed a paddle. He was rewarded with fish.

Nick, a harbor seal, entered the annals of astronomical history when Guido Dehnhardt, a marine biologist now at the University of Rostock, was studying how marine mammals orient themselves. If seals could discern stars, Dehnhardt and his colleague Björn Mauck hypothesized, that might help explain how the animals are able to complete long swims across otherwise featureless seas.

To test a seal’s astronomical skills, Mauck devised what must be two of scientific history’s most wide-eyed, wonder-infused experiments.

First, the team constructed their seal-o-scope — a tube with no lens, through which Nick was given a tour of the night sky. He consistently pressed his paddle when bright points like Venus, Sirius and Polaris came into view; he could not see as many faint stars as humans can, the researchers determined, but plenty of possible celestial landmarks were still available to him.

Next, Mauck built something even bigger. This time two seals were invited to participate, Nick and his even cleverer brother, Malte.

When ushered back into the pool at a Cologne zoo, the seals entered a dome measuring 15 feet across, its rim resting on a floating ring. The insides of this bespoke aqua-planetarium were lit up with 6,000 simulated stars. “They were immediately swimming across the planetarium and looking at stars like, ‘Oh, what’s that?’” Dehnhardt said. “You got the impression that they really recognized what this is.”

First, the researchers used a laser pointer to direct the seals to where the rim of the dome met the water nearest to Sirius, the Dog Star. If a seal swam over and touched that precise part of the dome with its snout, it received some fish. Then the pointer was aimed directly at Sirius. Again the seal’s task was to swim toward the star and touch the point on the rim directly beneath it.

Then, the researchers dispensed with the laser pointer. No matter which way the star-projector was oriented, both seals could eventually swim in the direction of Sirius. That showed, the researchers argued in a 2008 paper, that seals traversing the open sea had the capacity to use lodestars to guide their travels.

It had taken Nick, the more seasoned astronomer, 11 sessions to reliably touch the wall right under Sirius. But Malte did it the very first time they left him alone in the planetarium. “Malte was an absolutely brilliant seal,” Dehnhardt said.

Coming of Age Under Polaris

While seals might steer by the stars, some birds definitely do, as more than a half-century of experiments inspired by Stephen T. Emlen have demonstrated.

In the early 1960s, Emlen, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan and now an emeritus professor at Cornell, began carrying indigo buntings into a planetarium in the evenings. “I was nocturnal myself,” he said recently.

Indigo buntings migrate at night, flying as far as 2,000 miles. Before they start out, they hop in the direction they plan to go, making their intent apparent to a navigation researcher. Emlen showed that if indigo buntings were exposed to the stars, the birds hopped in a manner indicating that they knew which way was north.

Human observers know that at night, the stars trace circles in the sky as Earth spins on its axis. Those circles shrink for more northern stars — and the northernmost, Polaris, does not seem to circle at all. Once you have learned that, you need only to remember a constellation in the vicinity of north — the Big Dipper works well — to get oriented.

Emlen wondered whether buntings employed a similar trick. If he covered up Polaris in the planetarium, could they still find north? Indeed they could, he discovered. What if he blotted out just the Big Dipper or just Cassiopeia? Now the birds’ performance varied. And if he erased all the northernmost constellations together? The birds were lost.

Later, Emlen enlisted young indigo buntings that had just left their nests. Over the summer, he tweaked the planetarium projector so that the sky rotated around Betelgeuse, the red giant star at Orion’s shoulder, rather than Polaris.

Sure enough, come autumn, the buntings indicated with their hops that they thought Betelgeuse guided the way north. This suggested that the bird’s stargazing skills were learned, not derived from some star map encoded in their genes, Emlen and his colleagues argued. In the glittering dark, each young bunting had apparently spent some time looking up, studying, as the stars traced circles in the night sky.

Lost on a Starless Night

Around the time Nick and Malte learned to spot Sirius, Dacke and Warrant had their eureka moment in South Africa with dung beetles.

After a dung beetle arrives on a dung pile, it painstakingly cobbles together a snowball of dung larger than itself. Then it climbs up onto the ball and spins around, scanning, as if deciphering the celestial scene.

Through a dung beetle’s compound eyes, stars appear as blobs, not as points of light. But those same eyes are more sensitive than ours to dim objects like the dappled patterns of the Milky Way.

After its spinning scan, a beetle rolls its ball in a straight line away from the dung pile for a few minutes, on a random heading. (This seems to minimize the likelihood that two beetles will meet, which often results in a fight.) Dacke found that the beetles seem to keep themselves rolling straight by confirming that the intragalactic scene they were heading toward still matched the earlier reference image.

But a funny thing happened as Dacke’s team kept studying this behavior: They had an increasingly difficult time locating the Milky Way in the sky. “I ended up spending one night cycling off into the forest,” said James Foster, who joined the project as a graduate student and is now a postdoc in zoology at the University of Würzburg in Germany.

That is a common experience; roughly 4 in 5 Americans, 2 in 3 Europeans, and 1 in 3 people in the world reside somewhere too bright at night for the Milky Way to be visible, a 2016 study showed, and the fraction of our planet that is illuminated at night grows larger every year.

Dacke and Foster resolved to test whether washed-out skies might also matter to their study subjects. In their latest experiments, published Thursday in Current Biology, they shined spotlights on the beetles and brought them to the roof of the Wits University biology building in central Johannesburg.

They found two effects, neither of them good. When a beetle’s sky was dominated by a single glaring light, it could still go straight — but instead of rolling off in a random direction, it made a beeline for the beacon. More confusing were the featureless, light-swamped skies you might expect in suburbs; the beetles just went in circles.

Other species may be similarly affected. The stars have always been more or less constant while landmarks erode and the planet’s magnetic field shifts. But now, rather abruptly, they are fading out. “What we’ve seen on a much smaller scale with the dung beetles could have huge impacts on birds and seals and migratory moths,” Foster said.

With their studies concluded, science’s pioneering animal astronomers have gone on to different fates. A few of the South African dung beetles now live in the lab in Lund, where the researchers sometimes study them under a fully simulated sky.

Emlen kept the Betelgeuse-beguiled indigo buntings in his lab through the winter and released them in the spring. Hopefully, he said, they recalibrated to the true north before beginning their first migration.

And Nick the seal is still an active contributor to fields like acoustics, hydrodynamics and optics, although Malte died a few years ago. Nick now lives in a sprawling harbor lab that opens to the Baltic Sea; at night, he and the other seals in the enclosure can see fantastic skies overhead, Dehnhardt said.

“But whether they use it,” he said, “I don’t know.” 
&nbsp;

One moonless night a little more than a decade ago, Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant, animal vision experts from Lund University in Sweden, made a surprise discovery in South Africa.

One moonless night a little more than a decade ago, Marie Dacke and Eric Warrant, animal vision experts from Lund University in Sweden, made a surprise discovery in South Africa. The researchers had been watching nocturnal dung beetles, miniature Sisyphuses of the savanna, as they tumbled giant balls of dung. The beetles seemed to be able to roll remarkably straight, even though they had no clear landmarks to reference. “We thought maybe they were using our cameras, maybe someone had lit a fire somewhere,” Dacke said. “We were really confused.” Then they realized the beetles were guided by the 100,000 light-years-long streak of the Milky Way. We humans are famous for this sort of thing. The stars beckoned our species to cross seas and kindled the sciences that later let us putter up toward them in rockets. From culture to culture, the Milky Way served as backdrop and inspiration for stories about rivers, trees, gods, serpents and, of course, exploration. But we were not the only ones looking. Researchers like Dacke suspect that a wide swath of the animal world might sometimes navigate by starlight — and might be lost as our city lights drown out ever more of it. Her team’s newest study, published Thursday, found that dung beetles became confused under light-swamped skies. The result adds to a small and scattered body of research, conducted over decades, on what the night sky might mean to the other earthlings who can sense it. These experiments raise the same few, difficult questions: Can animals see the stars? Can animals use them? And what happens when they lose them? Aquatic Astronomers In the 1780s, astronomers William and Caroline Herschel scoured the skies for nebulae, finding some that resembled spiral seashells. In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble, at the helm of an enormous telescope, discovered that the Milky Way, Andromeda and Herschel spirals were galactic islands in a vast cosmic sea. And in the mid-2000s, Nick, a researcher of sorts in Cologne, Germany, swam to his own telescope and plopped into an underwater chair. Then he stuck his head in a tube and, if he saw a star, pressed a paddle. He was rewarded with fish. Nick, a harbor seal, entered the annals of astronomical history when Guido Dehnhardt, a marine biologist now at the University of Rostock, was studying how marine mammals orient themselves. If seals could discern stars, Dehnhardt and his colleague Björn Mauck hypothesized, that might help explain how the animals are able to complete long swims across otherwise featureless seas. To test a seal’s astronomical skills, Mauck devised what must be two of scientific history’s most wide-eyed, wonder-infused experiments. First, the team constructed their seal-o-scope — a tube with no lens, through which Nick was given a tour of the night sky. He consistently pressed his paddle when bright points like Venus, Sirius and Polaris came into view; he could not see as many faint stars as humans can, the researchers determined, but plenty of possible celestial landmarks were still available to him. Next, Mauck built something even bigger. This time two seals were invited to participate, Nick and his even cleverer brother, Malte. When ushered back into the pool at a Cologne zoo, the seals entered a dome measuring 15 feet across, its rim resting on a floating ring. The insides of this bespoke aqua-planetarium were lit up with 6,000 simulated stars. “They were immediately swimming across the planetarium and looking at stars like, ‘Oh, what’s that?’” Dehnhardt said. “You got the impression that they really recognized what this is.” First, the researchers used a laser pointer to direct the seals to where the rim of the dome met the water nearest to Sirius, the Dog Star. If a seal swam over and touched that precise part of the dome with its snout, it received some fish. Then the pointer was aimed directly at Sirius. Again the seal’s task was to swim toward the star and touch the point on the rim directly beneath it. Then, the researchers dispensed with the laser pointer. No matter which way the star-projector was oriented, both seals could eventually swim in the direction of Sirius. That showed, the researchers argued in a 2008 paper, that seals traversing the open sea had the capacity to use lodestars to guide their travels. It had taken Nick, the more seasoned astronomer, 11 sessions to reliably touch the wall right under Sirius. But Malte did it the very first time they left him alone in the planetarium. “Malte was an absolutely brilliant seal,” Dehnhardt said. Coming of Age Under Polaris While seals might steer by the stars, some birds definitely do, as more than a half-century of experiments inspired by Stephen T. Emlen have demonstrated. In the early 1960s, Emlen, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan and now an emeritus professor at Cornell, began carrying indigo buntings into a planetarium in the evenings. “I was nocturnal myself,” he said recently. Indigo buntings migrate at night, flying as far as 2,000 miles. Before they start out, they hop in the direction they plan to go, making their intent apparent to a navigation researcher. Emlen showed that if indigo buntings were exposed to the stars, the birds hopped in a manner indicating that they knew which way was north. Human observers know that at night, the stars trace circles in the sky as Earth spins on its axis. Those circles shrink for more northern stars — and the northernmost, Polaris, does not seem to circle at all. Once you have learned that, you need only to remember a constellation in the vicinity of north — the Big Dipper works well — to get oriented. Emlen wondered whether buntings employed a similar trick. If he covered up Polaris in the planetarium, could they still find north? Indeed they could, he discovered. What if he blotted out just the Big Dipper or just Cassiopeia? Now the birds’ performance varied. And if he erased all the northernmost constellations together? The birds were lost. Later, Emlen enlisted young indigo buntings that had just left their nests. Over the summer, he tweaked the planetarium projector so that the sky rotated around Betelgeuse, the red giant star at Orion’s shoulder, rather than Polaris. Sure enough, come autumn, the buntings indicated with their hops that they thought Betelgeuse guided the way north. This suggested that the bird’s stargazing skills were learned, not derived from some star map encoded in their genes, Emlen and his colleagues argued. In the glittering dark, each young bunting had apparently spent some time looking up, studying, as the stars traced circles in the night sky. Lost on a Starless Night Around the time Nick and Malte learned to spot Sirius, Dacke and Warrant had their eureka moment in South Africa with dung beetles. After a dung beetle arrives on a dung pile, it painstakingly cobbles together a snowball of dung larger than itself. Then it climbs up onto the ball and spins around, scanning, as if deciphering the celestial scene. Through a dung beetle’s compound eyes, stars appear as blobs, not as points of light. But those same eyes are more sensitive than ours to dim objects like the dappled patterns of the Milky Way. After its spinning scan, a beetle rolls its ball in a straight line away from the dung pile for a few minutes, on a random heading. (This seems to minimize the likelihood that two beetles will meet, which often results in a fight.) Dacke found that the beetles seem to keep themselves rolling straight by confirming that the intragalactic scene they were heading toward still matched the earlier reference image. But a funny thing happened as Dacke’s team kept studying this behavior: They had an increasingly difficult time locating the Milky Way in the sky. “I ended up spending one night cycling off into the forest,” said James Foster, who joined the project as a graduate student and is now a postdoc in zoology at the University of Würzburg in Germany. That is a common experience; roughly 4 in 5 Americans, 2 in 3 Europeans, and 1 in 3 people in the world reside somewhere too bright at night for the Milky Way to be visible, a 2016 study showed, and the fraction of our planet that is illuminated at night grows larger every year. Dacke and Foster resolved to test whether washed-out skies might also matter to their study subjects. In their latest experiments, published Thursday in Current Biology, they shined spotlights on the beetles and brought them to the roof of the Wits University biology building in central Johannesburg. They found two effects, neither of them good. When a beetle’s sky was dominated by a single glaring light, it could still go straight — but instead of rolling off in a random direction, it made a beeline for the beacon. More confusing were the featureless, light-swamped skies you might expect in suburbs; the beetles just went in circles. Other species may be similarly affected. The stars have always been more or less constant while landmarks erode and the planet’s magnetic field shifts. But now, rather abruptly, they are fading out. “What we’ve seen on a much smaller scale with the dung beetles could have huge impacts on birds and seals and migratory moths,” Foster said. With their studies concluded, science’s pioneering animal astronomers have gone on to different fates. A few of the South African dung beetles now live in the lab in Lund, where the researchers sometimes study them under a fully simulated sky. Emlen kept the Betelgeuse-beguiled indigo buntings in his lab through the winter and released them in the spring. Hopefully, he said, they recalibrated to the true north before beginning their first migration. And Nick the seal is still an active contributor to fields like acoustics, hydrodynamics and optics, although Malte died a few years ago. Nick now lives in a sprawling harbor lab that opens to the Baltic Sea; at night, he and the other seals in the enclosure can see fantastic skies overhead, Dehnhardt said. “But whether they use it,” he said, “I don’t know.”

What animals see in the stars, and what they stand to lose