In the early 2000s, trudging through the static of mainstream radio, I stumbled upon RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, the Irish-language outpost of Ireland’s national broadcaster – and a programme that flipped the script on radio as I knew it. Presented by Cian Ó Cíobháin from the Atlantic-hugging west Kerry coast, a fair stretch from my home in rural Northern Ireland, An Taobh Tuathail (“The Other Side”) still feels like a portal to a far-flung realm.

Broadcast every weekday since May 1999, Ó Cíobháin expertly blends leftfield music: it has championed ambient and electronic pioneers such as Mexican composer Murcof and the late Japanese musician Susumu Yokota, and spotlighted the curveballing instrumentalism of Irish artists including cellist Eimear Reidy and revered Limerick producer Naive Ted. Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys is one of many artists to have hailed An Taobh Tuathail’s influence, calling it “one of the most radical radio shows in the world”.

Unlike its flagship station Radio 1, RTÉ upheld a ban on playing songs in English on Raidió na Gaeltachta until 2005, with Ó Cíobháin navigating the restriction by presenting in Irish while predominantly playing instrumental music, spanning post-rock, electronica, jazz, techno, and more.

While the ban has since been lifted, allowing for the inclusion of anglophone music over the past two decades, there’s something in the music of the Irish tongue that continues to cast its own spell. Like countless other regular listeners with only cúpla focal (or “a few words”), straining my ear has only deepened the appreciation.

“Listeners have messaged me to tell me that the programme is their sole connection with the Irish language,” says Ó Cíobháin. “It’s a lovely thing to hear: that were it not for the show, thousands of people around the world might never hear our beautiful, ancient language.”

“I’m aware that most listeners don’t speak the language, so I keep chat to a minimum,” he adds. “I tell you what record I played and what’s up next. Listeners who don’t speak the language have contacted me over the years to tell me how they find it quite comforting to tune in and hear me speak, even if they might not understand everything I say.”

As it celebrates a quarter of a century of quietly kicking against convention, An Taobh Tuathail is a reminder of how dedicated and impassioned radio presenters can unlock new musical worlds – even if you don’t speak their language. Here are some other cult programmes from around Europe to discover.

Klaus Fiehe

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In 1994, five years before An Taobh Tuathail took to the airwaves, Klaus Fiehe embarked on his own journey toward earning the title “the German John Peel”: his program, 1Live Fiehe, broadcast by Cologne public radio station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), showcases a presenter who has always marched to the beat of his own drum.

Fiehe’s career began in the early 1980s as a saxophonist for the alternative rock icons Geier Sturzflug, and his three-hour weekly show, drawing from a personal collection of over 60,000 records, reveals his peerless curation, insatiable spirit and storytelling flair within German pop culture. The Peel parallel holds up. And while preferring to be known as “that guy who spins the right stuff”, it’s Fiehe’s mastery at waxing poetic auf Deutsch that props up this inimitable show.

Rhys Mwyn

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The bassist in the politically outspoken Welsh punk-rock group Anhrefn (or “Chaos”) in the 1980s and 1990s is now a tour guide and respected archaeologist, and his BBC radio show is a veritable trove, too. Largely presented in Welsh, Recordiau Rhys Mwyn (“Rhys Mwyn’s Records”) offers a sublime blend of lesser-heard music and guest reminiscences of the era when his old band extensively toured Europe.

However, it’s not purely nostalgic. Alongside disco, punk, electronica and more, Mwyn’s dedication to featuring numerous contemporary artists, many hailing from Wales, seals its appeal. He occasionally switches to English to benefit English-speaking guests, making the return to the melodious and distinct Welsh language a wonderful payoff.

Grażyna Biedroń

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Taking inspiration from the likes of Lyl Radio in Lyon and Tallinn’s Ida, Radio Kapitał in Warsaw has stepped up to meet the demand in Poland.

One DJ shaping its identity is Grażyna Biedroń, who debuted in August 2023. Every other Tuesday morning, she guides listeners through electronic genres from breakbeat to acid house, with themed episodes and a seamless blend of Polish and international sounds: “An immersion in underground flavours within the realm of electronic music, with a shared thread that sparks conversations,” she says.

A critical NASA mission in the search for life beyond Earth, Mars Sample Return, is in trouble. Its budget has ballooned from US$5 billion to over $11 billion, and the sample return date may slip from the end of this decade to 2040.

The mission would be the first to try to return rock samples from Mars to Earth so scientists can analyze them for signs of past life.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a press conference on April 15, 2024, that the mission as currently conceived is too expensive and too slow. NASA gave private companies a month to submit proposals for bringing the samples back in a quicker and more affordable way.

As an astronomer who studies cosmology and has written a book about early missions to Mars, I’ve been watching the sample return saga play out. Mars is the nearest and best place to search for life beyond Earth, and if this ambitious NASA mission unraveled, scientists would lose their chance to learn much more about the red planet.

The habitability of Mars

The first NASA missions to reach the surface of Mars in 1976 revealed the planet as a frigid desert, uninhabitable without a thick atmosphere to shield life from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. But studies conducted over the past decade suggest that the planet may have been much warmer and wetter several billion years ago.

The Curiosity and Perseverance rovers have each shown that the planet’s early environment was suitable for microbial life.

They found the chemical building blocks of life and signs of surface water in the distant past. Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, is still active; its twin, Perseverance, which landed on Mars in 2021, will play a crucial role in the sample return mission.

Why astronomers want Mars samples

The first time NASA looked for life in a Mars rock was in 1996. Scientists claimed they had discovered microscopic fossils of bacteria in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. This meteorite is a piece of Mars that landed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Scientists disagreed over whether the meteorite really had ever harbored biology, and today most scientists agree that there’s not enough evidence to say that the rock contains fossils.

Several hundred Martian meteorites have been found on Earth in the past 40 years. They’re free samples that fell to Earth, so while it might seem intuitive to study them, scientists can’t tell where on Mars these meteorites originated. Also, they were blasted off the planet’s surface by impacts, and those violent events could have easily destroyed or altered subtle evidence of life in the rock.

There’s no substitute for bringing back samples from a region known to have been hospitable to life in the past. As a result, the agency is facing a price tag of $700 million per ounce, making these samples the most expensive material ever gathered.

A compelling and complex mission

Bringing Mars rocks back to Earth is the most challenging mission NASA has ever attempted, and the first stage has already started.

Perseverance has collected over two dozen rock and soil samples, depositing them on the floor of the Jezero Crater, a region that was probably once flooded with water and could have harbored life. The rover inserts the samples in containers the size of test tubes. Once the rover fills all the sample tubes, it will gather them and bring them to the spot where NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander will land. The Sample Retrieval Lander includes a rocket to get the samples into orbit around Mars.

The European Space Agency has designed an Earth Return Orbiter, which will rendezvous with the rocket in orbit and capture the basketball-sized sample container. The samples will then be automatically sealed into a biocontainment system and transferred to an Earth entry capsule, which is part of the Earth Return Orbiter. After the long trip home, the entry capsule will parachute to the Earth’s surface.

The complex choreography of this mission, which involves a rover, a lander, a rocket, an orbiter and the coordination of two space agencies, is unprecedented. It’s the culprit behind the ballooning budget and the lengthy timeline.

Sample return breaks the bank

Mars Sample Return has blown a hole in NASA’s budget, which threatens other missions that need funding.

The NASA center behind the mission, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just laid off over 500 employees. It’s likely that Mars Sample Return’s budget partly caused the layoffs, but they also came down to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory having an overfull plate of planetary missions and suffering budget cuts.

Within the past year, an independent review board report and a report from the NASA Office of Inspector General raised deep concerns about the viability of the sample return mission. These reports described the mission’s design as overly complex and noted issues such as inflation, supply chain problems and unrealistic costs and schedule estimates.

NASA is also feeling the heat from Congress. For fiscal year 2024, the Senate Appropriations Committee cut NASA’s planetary science budget by over half a billion dollars. If NASA can’t keep a lid on the costs, the mission might even get canceled.

Thinking out of the box

Faced with these challenges, NASA has put out a call for innovative designs from private industry, with a goal of shrinking the mission’s cost and complexity. Proposals are due by May 17, which is an extremely tight timeline for such a challenging design effort. And it’ll be hard for private companies to improve on the plan that experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had over a decade to put together.

An important potential player in this situation is the commercial space company SpaceX. NASA is already partnering with SpaceX on America’s return to the Moon. For the Artemis III mission, SpaceX will attempt to land humans on the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

However, the massive Starship rocket that SpaceX will use for Artemis has had only three test flights and needs a lot more development before NASA will trust it with a human cargo.

In principle, a Starship rocket could bring back a large payload of Mars rocks in a single two-year mission and at far lower cost. But Starship comes with great risks and uncertainties. It’s not clear whether that rocket could return the samples that Perseverance has already gathered.

Starship uses a launchpad, and it would need to be refueled for a return journey. But there’s no launchpad or fueling station at the Jezero Crater. Starship is designed to carry people, but if astronauts go to Mars to collect the samples, SpaceX will need a Starship rocket that’s even bigger than the one it has tested so far.

Sending astronauts also carries extra risk and cost, and a strategy of using people might end up more complicated than NASA’s current plan.

With all these pressures and constraints, NASA has chosen to see whether the private sector can come up with a winning solution. We’ll know the answer next month.

Chris Impey, University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ibadan, 1 May 2024. – Rocket Lab USA, Inc. has announced that it has begun preparation for two back-to-back Electron launches to deploy NASA’s PREFIRE (Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment) mission. The two dedicated missions will each deploy one satellite to a 525km circular orbit from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in Mahia, New Zealand.

The first mission – named ‘Ready, Aim, PREFIRE’ – will tentatively launch no earlier than May 22, 2024. The launch date of the second mission – named ‘PREFIRE And Ice’ – takes place within three weeks of the successful deployment of the first PREFIRE mission. The missions will also be Rocket Lab’s 48th and 49th Electron launches overall and its sixth and seventh launches of 2024.

NASA’s PREFIRE mission is a climate change-focused mission that will systematically measure the heat, in the form of infrared and far-infrared wavelengths, lost from Earth’s polar regions for the first time. Once in their separate orbits, the two PREFIRE satellites will crisscross over the Arctic and Antarctica, measuring thermal infrared radiation that will make climate models more accurate and help predict changes as a result of global warming. PREFIRE consists of two 6U CubeSats with a baseline mission length of 10 months.

Speaking about the mission, Rocket Lab Founder and CEO, Peter Beck, said, “Helping climate scientists better understand climate change means they need precisely located measurements of Earth’s polar heat loss, which NASA’s PREFIRE mission is setting out to achieve, and helping the PREFIRE mission achieve its science objectives means its satellites need precise and accurate deployments to their locations in space.”

The CEO also added, “We have an excellent track record of delivering NASA’s payloads to exactly where they need to go and when they need to, and we’re looking forward to adding to that tally further with these next back-to-back launches.”