This week's science news was a little less earthy and a lot more spacey than usual, starting off with a couple of SpaceX news developments.
First, we had news of a trio of new privately-funded SpaceX missions in the works, including the first crewed flight of Starship. Meanwhile, we learned that it isn't a SpaceX booster that's set to hit the Moon, but that doesn't make it better in the least bit.
We also got word of the largest radio galaxy ever found, and its size is genuinely mind-boggling (and also provides some fodder for the debate over how we classify galaxies).
We also heard from NASA astronomers about some new ways they plan to use the new James Webb Space Telescope, including taking a better look at interstellar visitors as they pass through our solar system.
Finally, we ended the week celebrating the NASA Mars Perseverance rover's one-year "landiversary," and dug into some of the celebratory NASA livestreams to look back on its first year on the Mars ground.
So, if you've been looking for space news this week, you've come to the right place.
Perseverance Celebrates First Year on Mars
It's been a whole year since NASA's Mars Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater at 3:55PM EST on February 18, 2021, and NASA is celebrating with a livestream to review its year of trials, tribulations, and accomplishments.
Perseverance is on Mars looking for signs of ancient life in a large crater that is believed to have once been an ancient lakebed back when Mars had liquid water on its surface a little over three billion years ago.
So far, it hasn't turned up any ancient Martian fossils, but it has only really just started its work in the Jezero Crater. The first few weeks and months after landing was spent performing diagnostics, calibrating its equipment, and ensuring all its systems were in good working order.
There was also the matter of deploying the Mars Ingenuity helicopter, as well. Still, Percy, as the rover is affectionately called by space geeks, has managed to carry out a good bit of analysis in its first year on Mars, and we're hoping for a lot more to come as it enters its second year of service.
Billionaire Can't Get Enough Of Space Apparently
Earlier in the week, we learned that billionaire Jared Issacman – who funded and lead last year's Inspiration4 mission, the first-ever orbital mission with an entirely civilian crew – is planning three more missions with SpaceX , including the first-ever crewed SpaceX Starship mission.
Dubbed "Project Polaris", the three missions will start with a record-breaking orbital flight that aims to orbit the Earth at a higher altitude than ever attempted before, and will also include the first-ever civilian spacewalk by at least two of the crew members.
We don't know much about the second planned mission, but the third is expected to be the crewed Starship flight. Isaacman is providing the funding for the three missions contracted with SpaceX, and he will command at least the first of the three missions.
The first flight is planned for later this year, with the final mission planned for sometime in 2023.
Rocket Set To Hit Moon Isn't SpaceX's Junk
In a couple of weeks, a large piece of space debris is going to hit the far side of the Moon, and for years, the debris was thought to be a spent second stage segment of a SpaceX Dragon rocket from 2015.
We've now learned that the debris is actually a spent rocket segment from a Chinese National Space Agency Long March-3 rocket, part of the October 2014 Chang'e 5-T1 lunar mission.
While that might sound like SpaceX is off the hook for littering the Moon with space junk, its space junk is still up there somewhere, and the fact that we're losing track of which junk belongs to whom is a real problem.
The accumulation of space debris is posing a genuine threat to future space operations, so the sooner we stop dumping trash in low Earth orbit and cleaning up what we've already put up there, the better off we'll all be.
Monster Radio Galaxy the largest ever discovered
Galaxies are massive by their very nature, but some galaxies are bigger than others, and newly discovered radio galaxy Alcyoneus is so big it nearly breaks your brain just trying to think about it.
Radio galaxies are special types of elliptical galaxies with especially active galactic nucleii – that is, central supermassive black holes (SMB) that are gobbling up material.
Not all of that material is devoured, however, and a small fraction of it gets shot out from the SMB's magnetic poles at a significant percentage of the speed of light.
These relativistic jets, as they're called, can travel for hundreds of thousands of light-years and form enormous radio-loud lobes of charged particles around the "host" galaxy.
The lobes of Alcyoneus though stretch five megaparsecs from the end of one lobe to the end of the other, covering a distance on 16.3 million light-years, forming the largest structure on record that was produced by a single galaxy.
Webb Will Help Spot the Next ‘Oumuamua
As we get ready for the James Webb Space Telescope to release its first images in the next couple of months, NASA's already planning for new ways to use its new $10 billion space telescope.
One critical task is to hone in on interstellar "targets of opportunity" that pass through our solar system .
After the 2017 discovery of 1I/‘Oumuamua, the first object we've spotted in our solar system of interstellar origin, we spotted an interstellar comet, 2I/Borisov in 2018, but both were so far from us that it was hard to gather data on either of them. Astronomers hope that Webb can change that going forward.
"The supreme sensitivity and power of Webb now present us with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the chemical composition of these interstellar objects and find out so much more about their nature: where they come from, how they were made, and what they can tell us about the conditions present in their home systems," said Martin Cordiner, the principal investigator for the Webb Target of Opportunity program at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Only time will tell and it's hard to predict when the next target of opportunity will present itself, but there's every reason to hope that we'll be ready when the time comes.
Netflix adds Euphoria and White Lotus star to You season 4
Euphoria and The White Lotus star Lukas Gage has joined the cast of You season 4 on Netflix.
Gage, who played a key role in the first season of Euphoria as Tyler, will take on the role of Adam, a potential nemesis to series lead Joe Goldberg in You’s fourth season.
Deadline reports that the new character is the youngest son of a wealthy business tycoon who is famous for failing to meet the standards of his successful, venerable family.
A more comprehensive description of Adam, as provided by Netflix (via Deadline), reads as follows: “An entrepreneur and a gambler, Adam is a warm and funny party host and fast friend. But underneath, [he] is hiding a trove of secrets and papering over problems with heavy self-medication.
“Determined to prove himself, Adam’s taking big, risky swings, living by the truism that a good businessman does absolutely anything he can get away with. Does he love his wealthy, titled girlfriend, or is he using her? There’s no doubt he’s manipulating his friends; the only question is how far he’d go…”
By the sounds of it, then, Adam is a lot like several other characters in the hit Netflix show . No release date has been set as yet for You season 4, though given how recently season 3 dropped on the streamer (October 2021), we anticipate a late 2022 arrival at the earliest.
A psychological thriller series based on the books by Caroline Kepnes, You follows the exploits of Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), a charming but obsessive serial killer who goes to extreme measures to control women he becomes dangerously infatuated with.
Without wishing to give away spoilers, season 4 of the Netflix show will take proceedings to Paris for the first time. Speaking of how the switch-up might affect the behaviour of You’s lead character, showrunner Sera Gamble told EW : “I think Joe is great when he's in an environment that's not natural to him, that's foreign to him. So literally foreign could be very cool.”
Perhaps, then, we’ll see a different (and slightly less murderous) side to Joe in future episodes? In any case, Lukas Gage’s Adam will surely add yet more drama to You’s inevitably tumultuous fourth season.
Apple Music's classical app could bring the sounds of the orchestra to your AirPods
Apple could be on the verge of launching a classical music streaming app , after lines of code in the Apple Music beta for Android revealed a potential name: Apple Classical.
The lines of code were discovered by 9to5Mac , which says that they reveal the ability to open a compatible track directly in the optimized service that will specifically cater for classical music - unlike Apple Music , which covers a broad range of genres.
As 9to5Mac says, the code hints at possible future features, but that "Google may not ever ship these features, and our interpretation of what they are may be imperfect".
As such, a beta version of an app isn't always a guarantee that it will be released, but we already knew that Apple was planning to launch a standalone app for classical music. In 2021, the tech giant bough classical music streaming app Primephonic , and said that it plans to offer Apple Music subscribers Primephonic playlists and exclusive audio content.
According to a press release from the tech giant, classical music fans with Apple music will get "the best features from Primephonic", including the ability to search by composer and repertoire, and more detailed classical music metadata.
We might not have too long to wait to find out whether these lines of code really do correspond to Apple's classical music app. It's rumored that the next Apple event will take place on March 8 , when it will show off the iPhone SE 3 , the iPad Air 5 , and perhaps even a new Mac. Apple is yet to confirm this rumor, but Bloomberg cited "people with knowledge of the matter" in its report on the event.
It's also possible that we'll see the AirPods Pro 2 at the next Apple event - though this is less likely, as all the rumors we've heard are pointing to a late 2022 release date for the company's next noise-cancelling earbuds.
Analysis: Why does Apple need a classical music app?
There's a huge amount of classical music available to stream on Apple Music already, so you may be wondering why the company would bother creating an entire standalone service for one music genre.
Searching for classical music on a streaming service is a little more complicated than other genres of music. Works can be recorded by hundreds of different orchestras or musicians, making it difficult to find the exact recording you want - and if Apple Classical does make it easier to search by composer, repertoire, and other bits of metadata, the user experience will be hugely improved.
There's also the fact that older classical works are categorized in a different way to other genres. The repertoires of many composers is catalogued via the opus numbering system, which allows individual compositions to be identified - however, this system is far from universal, with lots of composers only using it for some of their work. Some, like Massenet, used 'Opus 12B' instead of 'Opus 13' due to superstitions around the number 13, while many 20th century composers have ignored the system altogether.
Then you have individual composers who were so prolific that they were given their own cataloguing system. Mozart's compositions are ordered according to the Köchel catalogue, with each work given its own K-number.
The lack of a universal way to search for classical music presents an issue for streaming services that want to make music discovery as simple as possible for its users - and the long titles that result from using the Opus system don't exactly lend themselves to mobile streaming. For example, this is what you see if you want to play an album of Mozart's Haffner and Jupiter symphonies:
That's a lot of numbers to navigate - and that could be incredibly off-putting to a classical music novice dipping their toes into the genre for the first time.
That's not to say that the entire experience of classical music search on Apple Music is bad. On the contrary, the Classical section of the app is well-curated, with playlists from different eras, artists, and instruments, with options to listening in Spatial Audio for a super-immersive experience.
Apple can do better though, and its purchase of Primephonic will help its music streaming service cater to a wider audience. So far, Apple has revamped its radio services with Apple One , appeased audiophiles with support for lossless audio , launched a cheaper voice-only service for Siri users, and offered an alternative service to those looking to leave Spotify .
Apple Classical is just the next step in Apple Music's quest for sonic domination - and if it's comprehensive enough to make such a wide and complicated genre accessible, it could just eclipse Spotify and become the best music streaming service on the planet.