Innehållsförteckning för October 2023 från National Geographic Magazine

IN A SERIES of articles from the mid-1960s into the early ’70s, National Geographic covered the findings, the adventures, and the significance of NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon. As Editor Gilbert M. Grosvenor wrote in our September 1973 issue, the moon was the “first port of call on man’s greatest voyage of discovery.” He also noted that the Apollo program’s value went far beyond what we were learning about space: Apollo sparked hope that we could, with a similar commitment, find “an answer to the energy crisis, the environmental crisis, and to every other major problem of humanity.” Half a century later, we’re in a new era of exploration and discovery in space while facing acute problems on our own planet. And, perhaps fittingly, we are once again setting…

A photographer documents the construction of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope—a project that spanned 12 years. JULY 10, 2014 Engineers at Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California, prepare to unfurl a test version of the five-layer sun shield, designed to keep the new observatory cool. APRIL 25, 2016 Seven years into Chris Gunn’s time photographing the construction, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) begins to take shape. In a clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, technicians remove protective covers from segments of the gold-coated primary mirror. DECEMBER 1, 2017 From a lift eight stories high, Gunn captures the JWST as it is moved out of the thermal vacuum chamber where it had undergone cryogenic testing for about a hundred days at NASA’s Johnson Space Center…

“YOU’RE HERE FOR THE LAUNCH?” Ted Ebbers asked me the night of April 19, 2023, when we met on the beach of South Padre Island, Texas. The answer was obvious: We both were killing time before the next day’s scheduled flight of the world’s most powerful rocket. A recently retired Canadian federal employee, Ebbers, 58, drove from his home in Toronto to SpaceX’s spaceport in Boca Chica to watch his first rocket launch. He made the 1,900-mile trip alone, sleeping overnight at rest stops inside his Tesla Model Y. At dawn, Ebbers and I were among the thousands who had gathered to see the first test flight of the 33-engine Super Heavy booster as it carried its Starship upper stage, built by SpaceX to deliver payload and passengers to the…

SAMANTHA CRISTOFORETTI Astronaut “Humanity’s outpost in space”—that’s what Samantha Cristoforetti calls the International Space Station. It’s her outpost, for sure. Across two missions since 2014, Cristoforetti has spent more than a year on the ISS. An astronaut with the European Space Agency and a former fighter pilot in the Italian Air Force, she broke barriers as the first European woman to conduct a space walk and the first to serve as ISS commander. Now safely back on Earth, Cristoforetti is working on an initiative called the Human Inspirator, which aims to build excitement among her fellow Europeans for future spaceflights. If her past work is any indication, she’ll likely find an audience: Her videos from space have been viewed millions of times on TikTok. MORIBA JAH Space environmentalist From his…

No one has ever seen a black hole, but in 2019, scientists presented the silhouette of one at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy more than 50 million light-years away. Vast amounts of data from a global array of observatories called the Event Horizon Telescope were processed, with computer algorithms filling the gaps. Although a scientific feat, the resulting image—a void surrounded by an orange aura—appeared blurry. Now, a team of researchers has used machine learning to produce a sharper look (at left, some of the program’s more than 30,000 simulations). Called PRIMO, this method revealed a thinner ring around the black hole—helpful in understanding how much matter its gravity is pulling in. Three more telescopes have turned their eyes on M87, says Lia Medeiros, an astrophysicist at the…

The new generation of satellites orbiting close to Earth allows for high-speed internet across the planet. But booming connectivity begets congestion: There are more than 11,000 satellites in the skies. Within this decade, that number could top 100,000. Appearing as streaks of light in telescopic photography, satellites can obscure stars and overexpose images, making it a challenge for astronomers to study the cosmos. A recent study published in Nature Astronomy found that, on average, some 3 percent of individual images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope between 2002 and 2021, including those at right, contained at least one satellite trail. While the rate is still relatively low, the study estimates that by the 2030s, up to 50 percent of Hubble’s photographs may be marred by satellite streaks.…

IF YOU SEE ANY photographs of the James Webb Space Telescope being built, it’s a good bet that Chris Gunn made them. In 2009 NASA selected Gunn as the full-time scientific and technical photographer to embed with the engineering team at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He spent 12 years documenting the observatory’s construction, from the arrival of the first “chassis” to its launch into space. Did Gunn capture every nut, bolt, and mirror? “In a generic sense, yes, but I’m sure there are some nuts and bolts that I didn’t photograph,” he replies with a chuckle. “For me, the magic comes when the big pieces start to get assembled and you can start to call it a telescope,” he says. “When some of the more exotic…

Though it was fantasy just a few decades ago, space-based solar power may soon be reality—and a renewable energy breakthrough: accessible anytime, unlike ground-based solar panels limited by darkness, and available anywhere on Earth, even if infrastructure is lacking. How would it work? Enormous space-based structures would support photovoltaic panels that collect sunlight and convert it into radio signals for transmission to Earth. This type of space mission is “one of the most complex engineering problems that we have in front of us,” says Mamatha Maheshwarappa, a payload systems lead at the UK Space Agency, which is helping fund project research and development. The mission also will be pricey, projected to cost tens of billions of dollars. And at Caltech, researchers recently reported significant progress with their Space Solar Power…

WALLOPS ISLAND, VA ROCKETS BOUND FOR THE SPACE STATION Watching 139-foot-tall Antares rockets rise from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (yes, MARS) to bring cargo to the International Space Station has become a periodic bonus of beach vacations here. This spaceport is near quaint Chincoteague Island, known for its national seashore, local saltwater taffy, and island-hopping wild horses. ‘WE SAW THE ROCKET BEGINNING TO LIFT. THE NOISE SEEMED TO REVERBERATE THROUGH MY WHOLE BODY. BUT THE CHEERS WERE SO LOUD, IT COULD BARELY BE HEARD.’—TED EBBERS, SPACE-LAUNCH TOURIST LAUNCH SITES THAT SELL TICKETS CAN RUN OUT, SO PLAN A BACKUP. Research and scout alternative viewing locations before launch day; be sure they’re open to the public, and arrive early with all the water, sunscreen, and snacks you’ll need. 100K VISITORS That’s…

WHEN THE UNIVERSE WAS YOUNG, more than 13 and a half billion years ago, no stars shone in the abyss. Astronomers call this era the dark ages, a time when the cosmos was filled with hydrogen and helium gas, the raw material for all the worlds to come. A mysterious substance known as dark matter existed too, its gravity pulling the gas into an elaborate web. As things expanded and cooled, some of the dark matter consolidated in immense orbs, driving the gas to their cores. The rising gravitational pressure within these halos, as astronomers named them, forced hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium, igniting the primordial universe’s first stars. I watched the spark of cosmic dawn, through 3D glasses. Sitting in front of a projector at the Kavli Institute…

AS I THUMB THE THROTTLE on my snowmobile, it skitters and glides across a sea of snow and ice. In the dusky twilight, the landscape is painted in shades of ethereal blue. I’m heading back to town after spending the day crisscrossing a frozen fjord, one of many in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, a cluster of mountainous islands in the high Arctic where auroras often dance overhead and narwhals, belugas, and walruses patrol the seas. It’s March, and the sun finally returned to the sky here about a month ago. I’m with a half dozen scientists who are hunting peculiar landforms called pingos—or, more specifically, the microbes that live within them. Anchored in permafrost, these domes range in size from mounds to small hills and seasonally expand and contract as water…

Carsten Peter “It’s not like I’m actively looking for danger,” Peter says. “I want to show people the wonders of nature.” This is why he descends into ice shafts, enters acid waterfalls, and chases tornadoes (for which he earned a World Press Photo Award). An Explorer since 1998, the German photographer, filmmaker, and adventurer specializes in extreme environments. For the November 2022 issue of National Geographic, Peter captured the violent volcanic eruption in Spain’s Canary Islands. This issue features his images of otherworldly settings on Earth. Page 112 Kenny Broad An environmental anthropologist and University of Miami professor, Broad has visited every continent during his scientific and filmmaking forays. For a 1995 magazine story, he braved one of the world’s deepest caves, in Oaxaca, Mexico. He’s been an Explorer since…

NASA’s newest spacecraft is designed to carry humans not only to the moon but farther into space than ever before. The multi-mission Artemis project’s first journey, in 2022, saw the uncrewed Artemis I craft venture thousands of miles beyond the moon and successfully return to Earth. Next up: Artemis II could launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center as soon as fall 2024 with four astronauts on board. They’ll be propelled into flight by an evolvable, super heavy-lift Space Launch System for a 10-day mission around the far side of the moon. The aim: to put systems and astronauts through their paces to prepare for future missions, pushing the boundaries of deep-space exploration to the moon and beyond.…

The reddish bar running through galaxy NGC 1300 (at left) funnels gas to the center, triggering rapid star formation. The Hubble Space Telescope made this detailed image of the nearby barred spiral galaxy, showing what such a galaxy looks like today. Webb has found much earlier ones, including those below. “We did not expect barred galaxies to be present at such early epochs,” says astronomer Shardha Jogee, whose team was led by graduate student Yuchen Guo. All ages below in years after the big bang:…

The first realistic depiction of the moon is believed to be in Jan van Eyck’s painting, “The Crucifixion,” below. Completed by 1441, it shows Earth’s nearest neighbor in a gibbous phase, punctuated by lunar seas. We’ve been refining our understanding of the moon ever since. But mysteries remain. Many craters at the poles are shrouded in permanent darkness, barely explored—until now. ShadowCam, 200 times more sensitive than previous cameras, has been mounted to a satellite for almost a year, photographing inside these craters. Most mornings, Arizona State University professor Mark Robinson, lead scientist for the NASA-funded camera, gets a cup of coffee, sits at his computer, and pores over the 25 or so photographs that came in that day, seeing clearly for the first time what lies in the moon’s…

Eclipses are all about timing. In advance of 2012’s annular solar eclipse, when the moon obscures most of the sun, Pinski drove to New Mexico for a better view. She found a local park, framed her camera on the horizon, and waited. As the celestial event progressed, a man walked into her shot and placed himself perfectly. Pinski got chills as she snapped, capturing the moment before it was gone. You can catch an annular eclipse on October 14 and a total eclipse on April 8, 2024, in parts of the United States. WHO A Colorado-based photographer who focuses on landscapes and architecture WHERE Albuquerque, New Mexico WHAT Canon EOS 7D camera with a telephoto lens set at 1200mm National Geographic has more than 444 million Instagram followers. Join them…