Scientists are preparing for our best shot yet to find alien life on exoplanets, which are worlds that orbit other stars. As the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a space observatory with unparalleled sensitivity, gears up to take its first observations, researchers are gaming out the potential identification of biosignatures, which are signs of life, on the exoplanets in JWST’s sights.

Now, a team led by Maggie Thompson, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, has presented an updated guide to interpreting detections of methane gas on exoplanets, which can be produced by living and abiotic processes. 

“This is a super exciting time!” said Thomspon in an email. “JWST is going to revolutionize our understanding of exoplanets and will allow us to begin characterizing the atmospheres of rocky, potentially habitable worlds. I'm very excited to see what JWST discovers and what sorts of interesting targets it identifies that we will want to continue observing with future telescopes.” 

Thompson and her colleagues note that “methane is the only biosignature that the James Webb Space Telescope could readily detect in terrestrial atmospheres,” making it “imperative to understand methane biosignatures to contextualize these upcoming observations,” according to a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Scientists are already trying to find biosignatures in the atmospheres of exoplanets that could hint at the presence of life, such as oxygen, oxone, and carbon dioxide. However, the molecular properties of methane line up with the JWST’s sweet observational spot at near-infrared wavelengths, making it a particularly important compound in the search for extraterrestrial life.  

“The way we will observe methane, or any atmospheric gas, in an exoplanet's atmosphere with JWST is going to be through spectral observations in the infrared,” Thompson explained. “Methane's absorption features in the near-infrared, where JWST is most sensitive, are stronger than that of molecular oxygen (O2) and ozone (O3), making methane more easily detectable than oxygen.” 

“In addition, other studies have simulated JWST data, including a paper by co-author Joshua Krissansen-Totton in 2018, found that it will likely be possible to detect and constrain methane abundances but detecting oxygen would be much more challenging,” she added.

To anticipate the complexities of a methane detection on an alien world, Thompson and her colleagues assessed the broader contexts that could help distinguish between bonafide biosignatures and emissions from natural geological processes, such as volcanic eruptions. 

Methane is short-lived in atmospheres compared to other compounds, such as carbon dioxide, so detecting it would be an indication that there is a huge supply of the gas constantly rising into the skies of another planet. One of the keys to determining whether that supply stems from living creatures or geological processes is to look at the overall composition of the atmosphere, the study suggests. 

For instance, volcanic eruptions and tectonic processes belch out methane, but these abiotic events also emit gasses such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Since carbon monoxide is an easy gas for many lifeforms to consume here on Earth, the team suggests that a planet with carbon dioxide and methane in its atmosphere, but relatively little carbon monoxide, is more likely to host life.

“Although JWST alone will likely not be able to fully assess habitability, it may identify interesting targets, like a rocky exoplanet with abundant methane and carbon dioxide with little to no carbon monoxide, which would motivate observations with future telescopes to uncover the broader planetary context necessary to determine if the methane is being produced by life,” Thompson said.

In addition to using past and present Earth as an analogue for studying atmospheric methane, the team looked to Mars, which appears to produce whiffs of the gas, and Saturn’s moon Titan, a world awash in volatile elements, including liquid and gas versions of methane. Atmospheric methane on Mars and Titan is likely to be abiotic, making these worlds useful analogs of lifeless exoplanets that nonetheless produce a powerful biosignature. These examples can help scientists avoid false positives when looking for aliens in other star systems.   

“Mercury is another interesting analog because, although its small size and proximity to the Sun preclude it from having an atmosphere, its crust is enriched in graphite (a crystalline form of carbon) and it serves as an example of worlds with more reducing interiors where you could imagine magmatic outgassing (i.e. volcanic activity) causing a methane-rich atmosphere,” Thompson noted. 

“We investigated this possibility in our study and found that it is unlikely for planets with very reduced interiors like Mercury to magmatically outgas significant methane because most of the carbon will actually remain in the solid form as graphite,” she continued. “That being said, Mercury is still an interesting analog for rocky exoplanets that have very reduced interior compositions, and more work is needed to fully understand the atmospheres that could form abiotically via outgassing of such reduced interiors.”

The new study presents a revamped framework for assessing methane biosignatures on exoplanets, but much more research is needed to tease out all the many ambiguous forms that the gas is bound to take in the skies of other worlds. Interestingly, many revelations about distant worlds are likely to be solved by continuing to look at planets closer to home.

“There are a lot of avenues for future research based on this study,” Thompson said. “I'm particularly excited to further explore the possibility of exoplanets that are like Saturn's moon Titan that have large inventories of volatile species. If such planets exist at the outer edge of the habitable zone (so colder than Earth, but still potentially habitable), I'd like to determine if such planets could have atmospheres rich in methane due to abiotic sources.”

“I also think there is a lot of work to be done to understand the ability of chemical reactions between water and rock to generate abiotic methane under different planetary environments, which will require more laboratory experiments and theoretical modeling,” she concluded.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is launching a battery manufacturing program in West Virginia with a $5 million investment that could turn the rust belt into a lithium belt.

DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm and a cohort of federal officials, including Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and Senator Joe Manchin traveled to Charleston, West Virginia last week to announce that it would begin a pilot training program in Appalachia, to create “good-paying union jobs” in a region that has since been left behind by a dying coal industry. The goal, the agency said in a press release after the visit, is to build out an independent national supply chain for batteries and minerals that will be essential to the renewable transition, and to “break U.S dependence on China.” 

“American leadership in the global battery supply chain will be based not only on our innovative edge, but also on our skilled workforce of engineers, designers, scientists, and production workers,” Granholm said in the statement. “We should be building the full supply chain here.” 

In a part of the country where former fossil fuel towns are pockmarked with empty storefronts and lined by abandoned oil and gas wells, the DOE is making bets that renewable energy could offer a new way out from economic tailspin. The plan expresses specifically an intent to target pilot programs in communities “where energy and automotive industries once held sway.” 

“This community is embracing new chances and opportunity in their own way,” Granholm told local broadcaster WSAZ on Friday. “Nobody is coming here to tell West Virginia what it should do because West Virginia is figuring it out and it’s really exciting.” 

The program is part of a broader endeavor by a federal Interagency Working Group on Coal and Power Plant Communities and Economic Revitalization that uses infrastructure dollars to build out jobs in 13 Appalachian states, from Mississippi to New York. Other actions taken by working group member agencies: the Department of the Interior announced funding for abandoned mine reclamation projects in West Virginia; the Environmental Protection Agency created two grants for job training and environmental cleanup in Huntington; and the Economic Development Administration announced a federal award for a former mining town in Kentucky. 

Though the pilot program is specifically earmarked for workforce development, fragments of the energy industry have recently committed time to exploring the feasibility of extracting lithium from parts of Appalachia. Though much of the lithium industry in the US is clustered in the west, particularly in Southern California, according to the US Geological Survey, one of 20 known lithium deposits in the US surrounds Charlotte, North Carolina. In November, the region became part of an environmental justice debate after local mineral developer Piedmont Lithium Inc. launched a bid to build four 500-foot deep pit lithium mines, which was met by split reaction from residents. 

“Plenty of folks in this rural pocket aren’t willing to go that far,” E&E News reporter Mike Soroghan wrote about the proposed mines in November. “They don’t want the persistent blasting, traffic, dust and environmental degradation that comes with pit mining. It’s the kind of opposition that has dogged fossil fuel projects in the past and isn’t going away just because the projects now support clean energy such as electric vehicles.”

In February, mineral extraction company American Resources announced it had discovered “meaningful concentrations” of lithium and cobalt in Central Appalachia. Lithium is also present in West Virginia coals, and can be extracted from tailings left behind by now-defunct coal plants.

Last April, the DOE announced it was plugging $19-million into research for that, too—a move that Granholm said in a press release at the time would put “the very same fossil fuel communities that have powered our nation for decades” at “the forefront of the clean energy economy. The move that led to the creation of a research consortium at Pennsylvania State University devoted to identifying stores of minerals that will be essential to the renewable transition across Appalachia. 

“We really don’t have a database or an assessment of what is out there and how much of our demand can be met with these secondary resources,” said Sarma Pisupati, professor of energy and mineral engineering at Penn State and director of the project told rural news outlet The Daily Yonder in July. “That’s what’s missing. This is very crucial for industry to have a strategy for developing these resources and making them commercially extractable and available.”

The area has also recently been the focus of other alternative energy proposals. Last month, a group of major fossil fuel companies announced a pact to build a hydrogen hub in Appalachia, a prospect that a number of local environmental groups said would only require and enable further oil and gas production. But the tone of last week’s announcement feels different to local environmental groups, like the Ohio River Valley Institute, who told Motherboard in an email that the announcement was “great news.” 

“Unlike some federal efforts, such as those to develop blue hydrogen and to introduce carbon capture in coal and gas-fired power generation, there is a strong economic rationale and a market for cobalt-free batteries,” Sean O’Leary, senior researcher at the Institute said. “That suggests the business and the jobs have a good chance of being viable for the long term. And the initiative helps West Virginia join the rest of the nation in benefitting from clean energy transition.” 

The U.S. West and Midwest could be facing grid failure this summer, according to a Summer Reliability Assessment by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. 

In its seasonal reliability assessment for the summer of 2022, the nonprofit corporation, which sets regulatory standards for U.S. grid operators, warned that the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) is at “high” risk of its energy reserves falling short of its normal energy needs. MISO provides energy transmission for the Midwest, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Texas and the western U.S., meanwhile, are at “elevated risk” of seeing grid shortages should its power needs peak beyond normal volumes, according to the report. 

Screengrab: NERC

The latter eventuality is most likely to be the result of drought conditions that Texas and the Western and Southern U.S. have grappled with for years, the report says. As for the West, hydro-powered generators rely upon dwindling water reserves, without which the region must instead import electricity to meet demand on hot evenings. 

“In the event of wide-area extreme heat event, all U.S. assessment areas in the Western Interconnection are at risk of energy emergencies,” the report says definitively, leading to “forced outages.”

In Texas and the South, extreme heat threatens to increase peak demand, forcing outages and other emergency procedures for load shedding, or cutting supply to reduce strain on the grid. This is what happened last summer, when the grid operator asked Texans to reduce their usage amid a June heat wave, just months after the February, 2021 freeze forced widespread blackouts. In hot conditions, grid shortages introduce a number of heat-related health risks to vulnerable communities, beyond the day-to-day discomfort of being asked to raise one’s thermostat to 78 degrees fahrenheit, as Texans were asked to do. 

In the Midwest, things are a bit more dire, and perhaps more certain: MISO is gearing up to have 2.3 percent less generation capacity this summer than it had last year, while its projections for peak demand have gone up by 1.7 percent in kind. Crucially, at the start of the summer, the operator is missing a key transmission line connecting the northern and southern segments of its coverage area to damage caused by a tornado last December.

That means the Midwest grid operator will likely need to shed load or import extra electricity to meet normal demand this summer—a fact that MISO itself has expressed awareness of, per an April report from Utility Dive. 

NERC’s summer projections also point to ongoing strain on the supply chain, a result of both COVID-19 labor gaps and Russia’s war in Ukraine, to explain likely forthcoming grid strain. A number of ongoing energy generation and transmission projects have been slowed by a lack of product availability, shipping delays and labor shortages, the report says. That’s on top of the cybersecurity threats that Russia and other actors could pose to electricity and critical infrastructure in the U.S., and the forthcoming late-summer wildfire season, which could affect transmission lines in regions where flames break out.

In tandem, these factors create a mosaic of risk for grid operators, whom the report authors encourage to prepare for strain. 

“It’s a sobering report,” John Moura, NERC director of reliability assessment and performance analysis told Utility Dive. “It’s clear the risks are spreading ... and the pace of our grid transformation is a bit out of sync with the underlying realities and the physics of the system.” 

If you’ve been sitting on a creative idea for how to build a nuclear power plant on the Moon, NASA and the Department of Energy want you. 

Theagencies put out a joint request for proposals (RFP) on Friday for design concepts for a flight-qualified nuclear fission system to power exploration of the Moon’s surface under the Artemis Plan—a lunar exploration program that will send humans back to the Moon, including the first woman and the first person of color, by 2024. The goal of the program is to take what new knowledge and technologies are developed to go back to the Moon and establish a human presence there, and use it to eventually do the same on Mars.

The aim is to create a system that sits on the Moon’s surface and provides the power needed to operate rovers, conduct experiments and turn the water and other resources into life support for astronauts. Whatever is created must operate independently of the sun, and be light enough to be shuttled into space after being built on earth. A contract of up to $5 million is up for grabs for whichever company supplies the best statement of work by the February, 2022 application deadline. According to NASA, it wants the lunar nuclear plant ready for launch “within a decade.”

Nuclear fission—the process through which atoms are split apart, releasing energy from the breaking of bonds that hold a nucleus together—is the power source of choice for this project, which must be able to produce 40 kilowatts of power, enough to sustain 30 households continuously for ten years. The reasoning behind this is three-fold: Nuclear fission systems can operate round-the-clock without reliance on the sun, “in shadowy craters and during the weeks-long lunar nights,” they’re compact, and they’re powerful, the agencies argue in a press release published Friday.

“Plentiful energy will be key to future space exploration,” Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) said in the press release. “I expect fission surface power systems to greatly benefit our plans for power architectures for the Moon and Mars and even drive innovation for uses here on Earth.”

The project will be managed by NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland; competing design companies will develop their initial ideas over a 12-month period after applying. Creating a power source on the moon will bring the agencies closer to establishing long-term presence on the moon by the end of the decade, a leapfrog to a longer-term goal of sending people to Mars. 

“We need several years in orbit and on the surface of the Moon to build operational confidence for conducting long-term work and supporting life away from Earth before we can embark on the first multi-year human mission to Mars,” the Artemis Plan reads. “The sooner we get to the Moon, the sooner we get American astronauts to Mars.”

Motherboard reached out to NASA for comment and did not hear back by publication.