A look at 2023’s discoveries in space exploration

Geoff Bennett:

2023 saw incredibly detailed images from the most advanced telescope in space. It was also the 25th year of a global partnership sending astronauts to orbit the Earth.

Digital video producer Casey Kuhn delves into the major space news from the last year with her own "NewsHour" space junky.

Casey Kuhn:

This year brought incredible discoveries, as humanity ventured further into space than ever before.

To talk about what this year looked like for space exploration and what's to come in the year ahead, I'm joined by "PBS NewsHour" science correspondent Miles O'Brien.

Miles, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited that we get to talk about the space news from 2023 and what's to come. I have a lot of questions for you, but we also asked our viewers to send in some questions, and I will be posing those to you as well.

First off, in this year of amazing discoveries, what were some of the standouts in 2023?

Miles O’Brien:

Well, Casey, maybe if we listen very quietly, we might be able to hear number one, which is, drumroll please, the hum of the universe, the hum of the universe.

The NANOGrav Observatory was able to pick up these waves detected by studying rapidly spinning dead stars, giant ripples in space-time and maybe, maybe might get us a little closer to the elusive hunt for dark matter, which is one of those things that just we know is out there, but we haven't been able to find it.

The James Webb Space Telescope, wow, there are so many observations, so many amazing images. Fundamentally, James Webb is rewriting the astronomy textbooks right now, and it's changing a lot of theories about how the universe was formed, how it expanded, and why we're sitting here talking to each other, for that matter.

OSIRIS-REx, love that mission. Hope you had a chance to follow it. It went off to the asteroid Bennu, which, by the way, is — Bennu's a potential threat to Earth in a couple of decades, if we don't watch it carefully. It will come pretty close.

OSIRIS-REx, that was part of its mission to understand what Bennu is made of, so, if we did have to deflect it, we would know exactly what to do.

Casey Kuhn:

The James Webb Telescope revealed some stunning images of the universe.

What were some of those highlights that we saw from the James Webb Telescope?

Miles O’Brien:

Yes, it just goes on and on. It's an amazing instrument, after all the delays and expense and everything.

And it's seeing these stellar nurseries, which we have never seen before, the youngest stars, how they form, high resolutions of all kinds of images, including the smallest brown dwarf ever captured on any image seen by human beings. It has captured stunning images of supernova in the near-infrared light. It's looked at our own solar system, at Uranus, and it found a large polar cap on that planet.

There's so many discoveries, it's hard to keep up with them. And every time — it seems that, every time it points its gaze in any direction, it changes the way we think about the universe. And so they're just getting started. They only launched in 2021. I'm really looking forward to where this is all headed.

Casey Kuhn:

As I said, we did ask our viewers what questions they would like to ask you, and we got dozens of them.

And Mike from Oregon wants to know: "How does SpaceX launch so often?" And what does that mean?

Miles O’Brien:

NASA, in its history, has never built its own rockets. It always had a contractor involved.

What's different about SpaceX is the way that contract is negotiated. SpaceX retains a lot of autonomy, its own intellectual property, and sells its services back to NASA. It's not like a prescriptive kind of defense-style contract, as NASA did for so many years.

And what that did is, that really unleashed — well, it just gave SpaceX a tremendous amount of freedom to not only provide services for NASA, which, of course, kept the lights on as they were doing business, but also allowed them to take those same rockets, that same intellectual property, and sell them to commercial players.

Couple that with that — the Silicon Valley ethos, which, of course, Elon Musk brings to the table there, that kind of go fast and break things, test and test and retest, and, if it blows up, just test again, as we have seen repeatedly, has put them at a launch tempo which NASA, frankly, could never come near to.

Casey Kuhn:

Anant from Irving, Texas, wants to know whether these many space launches are actually a contributor to climate change and pollution.

Miles O’Brien:

They are.

Right now, you would put it as kind of a rounding error number. And we're talking about — of course, liquid hydrogen is one of the fuels that's in play here, but that does create water crystals at high altitudes, and that has a climate impact.

Water is a greenhouse-affected chemical, of course. There's other fuels involved. There's hydrazine-based fuels. Some of those create black soot, that kind of thing, and do have an impact as well, and, of course, CO2.

Right now, up until recently, the number of launches has made that kind of somewhat insignificant piece of the puzzle. And when you consider the fact that some of these launches are designed to put satellites up there to help us understand climate change, it's probably worth it at the bottom of the ledger.

But now that we get to 100-plus launches and beyond, it's time, I think, for the space community to start getting serious and start thinking about more sustainable ways of doing this. It's not going to be an electric ride to space, but there's got to be some ways for smart people to come up with less greenhouse gas-, I should say, intensive ways to get to space.

Casey Kuhn:

Mars in 2024?

(Laughter)

Miles O’Brien:

Not Mars, but that will be — that will be great, wouldn't it, if we — I hope to live to see it.

You're young enough. You will see it, for sure.

Casey Kuhn:

Miles O'Brien, thank you so much for joining me.

Miles O’Brien:

Such a pleasure, Casey.