Snack to the future?

Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman foretold his historic voyage to the moon in 2017 after opening a fortune cookie that predicted he would travel to a “strange place.” An X post showing the spaceman holding the prescient pastry’s prophecy is taking off online.

“A visit to a strange place will bring you renewed perspective,” reads the oracular cookie’s forecast, along with the lucky numbers 47, 31, 22, 9, 19, and 35.

In the caption, Wiseman wrote that he chose to “believe the fortune” and that the so-called voyage would perhaps entail a trip to the “moon or a #JourneyToMars.

While it may have seemed like a humorous distraction at the time, the confection’s prophecy would seemingly come true less than a decade later.

On Monday, Reid and his crew — Victor Glover, Christina Koch ⁠and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen — traveled the farthest anyone has gone into space after flying a staggering 252,756 miles from Earth during their historic tour of the moon.

In doing so, they eclipsed the record of 248,655 miles set by Apollo 13 in 1970. During this latest fly-by, the intrepid Artemis squad gazed upon swaths of the moon’s far side never before seen by human eyes

Fans of the mission were awestruck over how well the fortune had foretold Reid’s future.

“Hey, you’re gonna be shocked when I say this but … this is you on the way to the moon,” shared one viewer, along with a pic of Reid and his fellow astronauts phoning home from the cosmos.

“I’m from the future, boy do I have news for you,” said another.

“That’s one fortune cookie that delivered on a cosmic scale,” added a third.

Others observed that the numbers 47 and 22 are considered lucky across many cultures.

NASA also weighed in on Reid’s “good fortune,” sharing his X post with checkmarks next to “Strange place” and “New perspective” to suggest that the prediction had come to life.

Others wished him well on his return flight.

“What a beautiful fortune to have come true,” gushed one fan. “Congrats Reid, and have safe travels back home.”

The Artemis II has since departed the moon’s gravitational pull and is currently en route back to Earth with the projected “splashdown” slated for 8:07 p.m on Friday, if everything goes according to plan.

Perhaps the most moving moment of the voyage came when, after breaking Apollo 13’s record, members of the crew asked to name one of the newly observed lunar craters after Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll.

She died of cancer in 2020, leaving behind Wiseman and two daughters.

“A number of years ago, we started this journey in our close-knit astronaut family, and we lost a loved one,” Jeremy Hansen told NASA’s mission control in Houston during a Monday call as Wiseman cried along with the mission’s other two crew members. “There’s a feature in a really neat place on the moon, and it is on the near side-far side boundary.”

“It’s a bright spot on the moon, and we would like to call that Carroll,” he added, with Houston appearing to agree to the request.

The crew also requested that another crater be named after their capsule, Integrity.

Thousands of kilometres from Earth, in an aluminum foil envelope, 2,600 Canadian seeds are on a voyage through outer space — along with the Artemis II crew.

“Looks a little bit like five aluminum ravioli stuck together, is what I’ve been telling people,” National Tree Seed Centre coordinator Darren Derbowka said.

The seeds include lodgepole pine, eastern white cedar, red maple, white birch and eastern white pine.

But they won’t be used to start a moon forest, or even for research. Instead, their purpose is much closer to home.

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“Right now, 25 per cent of Canada’s native trees are imperiled or threatened in some way. So this project is really to sort of build that awareness around the importance of seed,” Derbowka said.

The National Tree Seed Centre, located in Fredericton, has over 13,000 seed collections of more than 250 species of trees and shrubs.

Derbowka said that conservation work is becoming more important as a result of climate change — and he hopes Artemis II will bring light to the important work happening on Earth.

“There’s already one planet in this solar system that needs terraforming and we are standing on it,” he said.

The seeds aren’t the only Canadian representation on board. Astronaut and London, Ont., resident Jeremy Hansen is on his way to making history as the first Canadian to fly around the moon. And University of New Brunswick faculty and students are tracking the spacecraft, Orion, as part of a volunteer program with NASA.

“It’s contributing a little piece of Canada onto a really important space exploration mission, and so the opportunity to do that is a once-in-a-lifetime chance,” Derbowka said.

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This is how planet Earth looks to the Artemis II astronauts.

The crew travelling on board the Artemis II rocket have sent through the first images of Earth as it looks from their POV.

The surreal snaps were taken by the NASA astronaut and Artemis Commander Reid Wiseman, who is one of the four-strong team on their way to the moon.

It shows Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window after it completed the translunar injection burn, which took the rocket out of Earth’s orbit.

Eagle-eyed viewers can spot two auroras on the top right and bottom left, with a zodiacal light glimmering on the background as the Earth eclipses the Sun.

A second image shows the view from one of the Orion’s four windows.

NASA said: ‘We see our home planet as a whole, lit up in spectacular blues and browns. A green aurora even lights up the atmosphere. That’s us, together, watching as our astronauts make their journey to the Moon.’

Read here how long it will take for the astronauts to reach the moon.

These are the first two images shared to the world aboard the historic Moon mission.

Wiseman is heading to the moon and back with Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen.

The crew are inching closer towards the moon inside the spacecraft, which has been described as cosy after taking off from Florida on April 1.

They will be carrying out all their daily duties inside the 330-cubic-foot capsule – roughly the size of a minivan.

It will be their home for 10 days until it plunges back on Earth and into the Pacific Ocean.

The astronauts have all gone through special cosmic toilet training to deal with the pesky lack of gravity.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

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NASA astronomers struck it lucky after the Hubble Space Telescope observed a comet in the act of disintegrating completely by chance.

The event was one that scientists believed they were unlikely to witness in real time.

And it was even more extraordinary as researchers had intended to observe a different comet, but were forced to change plans due to technical constraints.

The findings were published on Wednesday in the journal Icarus.

‘Sometimes the best science happens by accident,’ John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama, said.

‘This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target – and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances.”

The object, known as Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), can be seen progressively breaking apart in a sequence of images taken between November 8 and 10 last year.

Initially appearing as four bright objects, the largest fragment then splits further, with pieces drifting away from one another.

Noonan, a co-investigator on the study, said he did not realise the significance immediately.

‘While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one,’ he said. ‘So we knew this was something really, really special.’

Scientists have long attempted to capture such an event using Hubble, but the unpredictability of comet break-ups has made this difficult.

‘The irony is now we’re just studying a regular comet and it crumbles in front of our eyes,’ said principal investigator Dennis Bodewits, also of Auburn University.

‘Comets are leftovers of the era of solar system formation, so they’re made of “old stuff”—the primordial materials that made our solar system.

‘But they are not pristine – they’ve been heated; they’ve been irradiated by the Sun and by cosmic rays.

‘So, when looking at a comet’s composition, the question we always have is, “Is this a primitive property or is this due to evolution?’”

‘By cracking open a comet, you can see the ancient material that has not been processed.’

Hubble observed the comet splitting into at least four pieces, each surrounded by a glowing cloud of gas and dust known as a coma. While ground-based telescopes saw only faint bright patches, Hubble’s high resolution allowed scientists to distinguish individual fragments clearly.

The observations were made shortly after the comet passed its closest point to the Sun – known as perihelion – when heating and stress are at their greatest. Scientists believe the comet began breaking up about eight days before Hubble captured the images.

However, the team has identified a puzzling delay between the break-up and the brightening detected from Earth.

One theory is that a layer of dust must first form over newly exposed ice before being blown away. Another possibility is that heat builds up beneath the surface before ejecting material into space.

‘Never before has Hubble caught a fragmenting comet this close to when it actually fell apart. Most of the time, it’s a few weeks to a month later. And in this case, we were able to see it just days after,’ said Noonan.

‘This is telling us something very important about the physics of what’s happening at the comet’s surface. We may be seeing the timescale it takes to form a substantial dust layer that can then be ejected by the gas.’

Early observations suggest the comet is chemically unusual, with significantly lower levels of carbon than typically seen. Further analysis using Hubble’s instruments is expected to reveal more about its composition and, potentially, the origins of the solar system.

Now reduced to a cluster of fragments about 250 million miles from Earth, the comet is travelling through the constellation Pisces and is expected to leave the solar system permanently.

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Scientists are considering a rather novel way to get a better look at 3I/ATLAS – a solar slingshot.

In the months since the interstellar trespasser was spotted, scientists clashed over whether it was a giant snowball (a comet) or… a UFO.

One reason for this was that even at its closest to Earth in December, 3I/ATLAS was still 167 million miles away, making observations tricky.

So, why not just send a spacecraft over there? This is what scientists are thinking could be possible by doing a rather risky rocker manoeuvre.

In a new paper, a team from the non-profit Initiative for Interstellar Studies said this would be achievable by exploiting the ‘Oberth effect’.

‘As a spacecraft is falling into the gravitational potential well, it fires its rockets, coming out of it with a greater kinetic energy,’ Dr Alfredo Carpineti, an astrophysicist who was not involved in the paper, told Metro.

The sun’s gravity, in other words, would give the 500kg probe a speed boost – a change in velocity of at least 5.1 miles per second.

If successful, this would make the 3I/ATLAS interceptor the fastest spacecraft in human history.

Our interstellar visitor will do a pit-stop at Jupiter in about 20 days, marking the halfway point of its time in our cosmic neighbourhood.

The plan would also be to fly out the interstellar interceptor to the gas giant first to use its gravity to slow it down. (If it beelined to the sun, it would travel so fast that it would end up being burned out.)

Experts propose launching the probe in 2035, as it could reach 3I/ATLAS by 2085, when it would be 68 million miles away.

As elaborate as this sounds, Dr Carpineti says this is ‘the most efficient time to burn fuel’.

To achieve this, though, would involve flying just 140,000 miles from the sun’s centre, meaning the craft would need to endure searing heat.

The researchers suggest the craft could be clad in a carbon-composite and aerogel, one of the lightest materials in the world.

One thing holding the mission back is that even with the Oberth effect, the craft still wouldn’t be fast enough to get close to entering 3I/ATLAS’ orbit.

3I/ATLAS, formerly known as A11pI3Z, is only the third interstellar visitor to be discovered passing through our neck of the cosmic woods.

The first was Oumuamua, which travelled past us in 2017. In 2019, Borisov, a comet of interstellar origin, passed by.

Like Borisov, scientists believe 3I/ATLAS likely formed as a comet around another star before being flung out into the cosmos.

Dr Carpineti adds: ‘The work doesn’t look at the feasibility of the mission but just the manoeuvre.

‘Indeed, it’s possible to use this approach to catch up with the rocket.

‘But since the interstellar object is so much faster than the previous two, it would take decades.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

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