NASA's newly launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to extend its lifespan and double its exciting potential for discovery thanks to an efficient use of fuel on its way to its final orbit.

"As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations," said Jamie Dunn, the center director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement.

The space telescope, which launched from Cape Canaveral on Aug. 30 on a mission to measure dark energy and search for exoplanets, is headed to the L2 Lagrange point. There, it will join the likes of the James Webb Space Telescope on the opposite side of Earth to the sun. Its primary mission will last five years, and scientists were hoping for an additional five years if funding allowed.. Now, however, that potential extended mission could go on for a lot longer — and it's all thanks to the spacecraft coming in less massive than the original design had projected.

At the beginning of Roman's design process, the fuel capacity was chosen to permit a maximum mass of 21,605 pounds (9,800 kilograms), yet the finished spacecraft came in lighter at 17,760 pounds (8,065 kilograms). And because it was lighter, there was a surplus of available mass that could be used for more fuel.

"A spacecraft's mass changes throughout the design and build process, so we base the propellant on a set maximum value so we won't come up short," Alison Rao, who leads Roman's propulsion systems at NASA Goddard, said in the statement. "We track the propellant needed based on actual mass throughout integration and testing as well, to make sure we have wiggle room. Since Roman's [mass] was lower than we budgeted for, we were able to fill the propellant tanks to their capacity rather than only filling them as much as we needed to for the 10-year requirement."

The extra fuel loaded onto the telescope before launch meant it had enough for at least a 14-year mission. Then, within a day of launching, the space telescope had to fire its engine for three minutes to push it onto a trajectory to take it to L2. This engine burn was more precise and hence more efficient than anyone could have hoped for, sending Roman on its way to L2 with 99% accuracy. In doing so, it used only 40 pounds (18 kilograms) of fuel, which is less than 10% of the 441 pounds (200 kilograms) of fuel that had been budgeted for the maneuver. This is thought to have bought Roman an additional four years of life, bringing the tally to 18 years.

Then there's the added bonus. The precision with which the Aug. 31 engine burn was conducted means that the second course correction, required to take Roman into its orbit at L2 in early December, will also now require much less fuel. This will add yet another four years to Roman's operational lifetime, so long as nothing goes wrong with the telescope. Once in orbit at L2, only minor burns once every 28 days are needed for station keeping — a negligible amount of fuel.

In total, this observatory could be probing the final frontier and making incredible discoveries for at least the next 22 years, taking it up to 2048 at minimum. For the next two or three decades, we're going to be hearing a lot about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Astronauts could travel back to Earth from Mars using rocket fuel converted directly from the carbon dioxide in the Red Planet's atmosphere, using a technique known as electrochemical reduction, a recent study reports.

It's an old method involving electrolysis, which is the application of an electrical current to drive a chemical reaction, but the new trick produces methane pure enough to be used as liquid propellant. (A number of rocket engines these days burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane — including the Raptors that power Starship, the rocket SpaceX is developing to help humanity get to Mars.)

"The work we're doing is basically taking CO2 and using electricity to convert it into carbon-containing fuels and chemicals," said Carter Racine in a statement. Racine is a Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University and a member of the study team, which was led by University of Mississippi chemical engineer Ahmed Badreldin.

"You can't bring up everything you need [on Mars] from Earth, because every additional kilogram adds enormous cost and complexity to launch and escape Earth's gravity," added Badreldin. "So the question becomes, How do we make the fuels and chemicals needed for space exploration from the resources already available at the destination?"

One answer is electrochemical reduction, which takes place in an electrolyzer, with electrons flowing from the negatively charged anode to the positively charged cathode. Water at the anode is oxidized, meaning it loses an electron, which is transferred to the carbon dioxide at the cathode, where one of its atoms gains an electron and becomes what chemists refer to as "reduced" (meaning its oxidation state is lowered). It can then react with the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that have split from the oxidized water molecules.

The anode contains a catalyst, and the choice of material for the catalyst dictates what carbon-based compounds are produced when the reduced carbon reacts with the hydrogen and oxygen. For example, a gold catalyst leads to the production of carbon monoxide (CO), while copper produces more complex compounds including alcohols, ethanol and methane (CH4).

What makes the work of Badreldin's team stand apart from previous experiments is that they have developed a nanometer-scale copper catalyst doped in nitrogen that is able to produce nearly pure methane.

Electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide has been used to produce methane before, in applications on Earth. The problem is, those methods have produced a lot of byproducts alongside methane. On Earth we have complex equipment that separates the methane from the other unwanted compounds, but astronauts are not going to be able to take such unwieldy devices to Mars when every kilogram counts. That's a problem, because for methane to be used as a liquid propellant in rocket fuel it needs to be pure.

However, the specific copper catalyst used by Badreldin's team is able to preferentially produce methane over other compounds, thereby creating it pure without having to refine it. And there's plenty of carbon dioxide available on Mars to use: While Mars' atmosphere is thin, it is nonetheless composed of 96% carbon dioxide.

Even if astronauts never go to Mars, the usefulness of this technique on Earth is clear. Rather than drilling for this natural gas, we can create methane from the carbon dioxide already in our atmosphere.

"We want to do that because right now many of these carbon-based products ultimately come from virgin fossil resources," said Racine. "If we can make them using captured CO2 and renewable electricity, it could reduce reliance on virgin fossil carbon and help close the carbon cycle."

Consequently, electrochemical reduction has also been suggested for use on Earth as a carbon sequestration technique, drawing carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere where it acts as an unwanted greenhouse gas.

The problem with that is, converting carbon dioxide into methane to be burned as a fuel simply releases that carbon dioxide straight back into the atmosphere in a net-zero cycle. Ideally, we want to lock that carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere for a long period of time, but Badreldin doesn't think the technology is ready yet.

"What we are ultimately interested in is seeing whether we can move beyond simply recycling CO2 and toward pathways that are net-negative," he said. "That means using CO2 as a carbon source while converting it into products where the carbon is stored or used long enough that it is not immediately released back into the atmosphere."

It should be noted that the best way to alleviate climate change is to cease burning all fossil fuels, including methane. However, using methane created from electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction in a net-zero process rather than drilling for it could help during the transition from fossil fuels to renewable resources.

The study reporting this research was published in April in the journal ACS Catalysis.

The Hubble and James Webb space telescopes have teamed up to target some of the smallest, most distant objects in the solar system, discovering that the history of these tiny objects is more puzzling than we'd realized.

The two orbiting observatories collectively discovered 27 new Trans-Neptunian Objects, or TNOs, all less than 25 miles (40 kilometers) across, with the smallest being only 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter. As their name suggests, TNOs orbit the sun from far beyond Neptune. Some of them were born out there, at the dawn of the solar system, as small planetesimals unable to take the extra step to form planets.

Models of how these TNOs formed predicted that they should have been peppered with impacts that mixed up their surface material so that their composition, and therefore color, would be different than larger TNOs. Yet new observations, led by two PhD candidates, Anastasia Morgan of Northern Arizona University and Marielle Eduardo of the University of Victoria found the opposite – the little TNOs still look as pristine as the day they formed.

"You could imagine a scenario where getting knocked around and fragmented would change the surface composition, and then you would see a different surface color for tiny TNOs compared to their larger siblings," said Morgan, who led the color and composition analysis, in a statement. "So it's really fascinating to see that the smallest objects are somehow 'remembering' and preserving the history of how they were made."

TNOs native to the Kuiper Belt move in near-circular orbits around the sun and are level with the ecliptic plane, the imaginary flat 'disc' on which the planets and other objects orbit our star. They are said to be dynamically 'cold' because they haven't really budged since they formed.

Other TNOs, however, formed between the seventh and eighth planets, Uranus and Neptune, but before they could be assimilated into those worlds while those planets were growing, they were ejected by gravitational resonances into the region far beyond Neptune, collectively forming a 'Scattered Disk' of objects on highly elongated orbits significantly inclined to the plane of the solar system. Such TNOs are referred to as being dynamically 'hot'.

Yet even the 'hot' TNOs seem to have resisted any changes to their surface composition.

"These dynamically hot TNOs retain a signature of where they were born, even though they've been orbitally scrambled since then," said David Trilling of Northern Arizona University.

This leads to one of two surprising possibilities. Either there are far fewer impacts taking place far from the sun than astronomers thought, which doesn't match with what we think we know about the population density of objects out there, or the impacts and collisions do take place but for some reason do not tear up the surface of the small TNOs as much as we might expect.

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST's) infrared vision, Marielle Eduardo was able to figure out the size distribution of the TNOs. When we look in visible light, how bright a TNO appears depends in part on how reflective its surface is, a property referred to as albedo. A larger body with a composition that isn't very reflective might appear fainter at the same distance as a smaller object covered in shiny ice.

However, at infrared wavelengths the brightness of an object is dependent mostly on its size, allowing accurate determinations of the diameters of the 27 TNOs. Surprisingly, there seem to be fewer of the very small TNOs than what models of their formation predict.

"It's very interesting that the process of planetesimal formation ends up producing the same distribution of sizes for both cold and hot populations, despite forming in different regions of the early solar system," said Eduardo. "The process seems to be insensitive to [planet-forming] disk conditions, producing similar planetesimal sizes whether the disk is hot or cold, and dense or fluffy."

These observations push Hubble's and JWST's abilities to the limit. The TNOs are incredibly faint, shining between magnitudes 24.1 and 29.3, described as being equivalent to seeing a swarm of fireflies on the moon from Earth. As such, it is the deepest survey yet into the relatively unknown realm beyond Neptune, just as you'd expect from these two powerful space telescopes getting together.

The research was published in The Astronomical Journal as two separate papers on Sept. 8, one on color and composition, the other on the size distribution of the TNOs.