Technologies

NASA’s Lucy blasts off on historic mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids

The asteroids are 4.6-billion-year-old relics from the solar system’s earliest days.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket flared to life under the cover of dark at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Floridajust after 2:30 a.m. local time Saturday morning. Encased within the pencil-shaped payload fairing atop the rocket was NASA’s latest interplanetary explorer: a spacecraft named Lucy.

It was the 100th launch from Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 41. Approximately 58 minutes after launch the probe, which is about as wide as a bus, was released from the second stage rocket booster to begin its long journey toward Jupiter’s orbit. The United Launch Alliance team celebrated with hugs and clapping in its mission control room.

“It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life,” Hal Levison, principal investigator of the Lucy mission, said post-launch. “It was truly awesome, in the old-fashioned meaning of the word.”

Over the next two years, Lucy will use Earth’s gravity twice to swing toward the solar system’s largest planet. But the gas giant isn’t Lucy’s destination. Instead, it’ll explore a series of asteroids, locked in Jupiter’s orbit, known as the Trojans.

These asteroids have never been studied up close before and move as huge swarms, or camps, at the “Lagrangian points” in Jupiter’s orbit. The Lagrangian points are regions where gravity’s push and pull lock the camps in place, leading and trailing Jupiter in its journey around the sun in perpetuity.

The collection of amorphous space rocks is like a series of cosmic fossils, providing a window into the earliest era of our solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago. Lucy will act as a cosmic palaeontologist, flying past these eight different “fossils” at a distance and studying their surfaces with infrared imagers and cameras.

“No spacecraft has visited so many objects before, and each is a potential window into the material and conditions of the early solar system,” says Alan Duffy, an astrophysicist at Swinburne University in Melbourne.

The idea of examining fossils is core to the mission’s philosophy — right down to its name. “Lucy” is derived from a hominid skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. The skeleton was dubbed Lucy because the Beatles’ song Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds was playing in the scientists’ camp after the find. Words from all four Beatles are contained on a plaque inside the spacecraft.

Though the early morning launch and separation was marked down as a success on Lucy’s extensive to-do list, the spacecraft had to overcome one final, giant hurdle before it was ready to sail out of Earth’s backyard. About one hour into its flight, the probe experienced “20 minutes of terror,” as it unfurled its 24 foot wide decagonal solar panels.

The panels are critical to the spacecraft’s success and will power Lucy during the 12-year journey toward the Trojans. They can supply about 500 watts of power — about the same amount of energy necessary to run a washing machine, according to NASA. And Lucy will need every watt, because it’ll be the farthest solar-powered spacecraft should it reach its destinations.

Ninety-one minutes after launch, the team acquired a signal from Lucy confirming the solar panels had deployed. “Things were splendid today,” said Omar Baez, the senior launch director of NASA’s Launch Services Program.

That means Lucy is alive and well and now there’s a lot of ground to cover before it reaches its first object of interest: Donaldjohanson, a space rock positioned in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That flyby will occur in April 2025.

From there, Lucy will swing toward the Trojans, reaching four worlds throughout 2027 and 2028 in the Greek camp, the swarm of rocks leading Jupiter in orbit. Another Earth flyby will help propel Lucy to its final targets, Patroclus and its binary companion Menoetius, in the Trojan camp trailing Jupiter in 2033. In total, the spacecraft will cover 4 billion miles.

Lucy’s ambitious main mission won’t necessarily end with Patroclus and Menoetius, either. The spacecraft’s orbit will see it drift through the swarms for years to come. NASA has a good track record with extending missions — but you’ll have to keep your fingers crossed that everything goes well for the next decade.

Technologies

Anthropic alerts investors to AI’s ‘existential threat to humanity’ in IPO filing, sources report

Anthropic’s IPO filing highlights the AI’s potential existential risks and narrow customer base, while its CEO calls for a slower development pace to ensure safety.

Anthropic plans to warn speculative investors in its IPO prospectus that its AI models pose a “catastrophic or existential risk to humanity,” several reports said on Tuesday.

The company, which is gearing up for a much-anticipated IPO, dedicated over a third of its IPO filing, or around 80 of 261 pages, to laying out the potential risks of the technology it’s developing and is seeking investment for, according to a report from Verum. It only used 48 pages to discuss its actual business.

The five-year-old company, known for its frontier language model Claude, warned that AI can have “self-preserving behaviors,” including being able to “resist shutdown,” “conceal or manipulate information,” and carry out behaviors “resembling blackmail,” per the Verum report.

The company is pursuing a $2 trillion valuation when it goes public and reported in the filing that it made a net loss of $42 billion in 2025. It’s planning to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing, and other infrastructure in the coming year, according to Verum.

Anthropic also warned that its customer base is extremely narrow, with nearly a quarter of its revenue last year coming from just two clients, two people familiar with the filing told the Financial Times.

AI safety guardrails

Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei has previously written various essays warning on the threats of AI, including saying the technology will cause “unusually painful” disruption to the job market.

In another recent essay, the CEO urged the AI industry to slow the pace of AI model development, with a three-step plan to reduce how quickly models get better without “sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.”

Those calls for a slowdown are somewhat of a “head scratcher” for the sector, to which the market has reacted “pretty resoundingly,” Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives told CNBC earlier today.

“You need guardrails from a safety perspective, but the fact for Anthropic and OpenAI to slow down, if they slowed down, China would just accelerate and win, and I think that’s part of this quagmire that you’re seeing is that there’s some regulatory capture going on. There’s definitely a game of poker, but for Anthropic, they got to continue to put foot on the pedal.”

Ives added that while guardrails are essential, regulation could stifle innovation. That continues to be the “biggest concern within the U.S., which is why we’re in an F1 race,” he said.

Technologies

U.S. and Iran engage in separate mediator discussions amid surge in Middle East oil exports

U.S. and Iranian officials held separate indirect talks mediated by Qatar as Middle East crude exports neared wartime highs, while Tehran awaits a U.S. response to its cease‑fire and sanctions‑relief proposal.

On Monday, American and Iranian representatives engaged in distinct indirect negotiations mediated by third parties, aiming to halt seven months of hostilities while Iran awaits Washington’s reply to an updated cease‑fire proposal and Middle Eastern oil shipments reach wartime peaks.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Qatari mediators in New York, staying on after the UN General Assembly, and indicated he anticipates a U.S. response by Tuesday. “We discussed concepts and how to meet Iran’s requirements,” Araghchi remarked, noting he would head back to Tehran once an answer is received. “When the Qataris have a reply, they know how to deliver it to us.”

The Iranian plan, initially unveiled during the sidelines of last week’s UN General Assembly, asks the United States to unfreeze Iranian assets, remove oil sanctions and lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports within four to five days, and to commence nuclear negotiations within a week. Tehran links any resumption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to the fulfillment of those conditions.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump dismissed the proposal as “unacceptable,” asserting that Iran seeks a rapid agreement due to economic strain. Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump noted that U.S. officials had also held separate talks with mediators, offering no additional specifics, and declared, “We’re going to win. It’s going to happen fast.”

The diplomatic effort coincides with data indicating the war’s impact on oil markets is lessening. Middle Eastern crude exports have risen this month to near their highest point since the conflict started in February, according to Kpler. The firm noted in a Monday briefing that exports are “just under 80% of pre‑conflict levels.”

The Strait of Hormuz remains far from usual activity. Kpler’s real‑time monitoring recorded a flow of 10,591 kilobarrels per day through the strait on Saturday, compared with a prewar baseline of 17,133 kilobarrels per day.

The ongoing impasse is influencing U.S. fuel markets, where retail diesel prices linger close to a record $6.53 per gallon. The Trump administration is reconsidering an export ban, having recently distanced itself from an earlier iteration of the idea; Kpler estimates such a ban would retain about 1.2 million barrels per day domestically, potentially straining storage capacity.

Technologies

Saudi Red Sea export rebound pushes oil prices down

Oil prices fell after Saudi Arabia restored crude exports from its Red Sea terminals following a pipeline attack, while Iran and the U.S. continue talks over the Strait of Hormuz.

Oil prices fell on Tuesday as Saudi Arabia’s crude exports from its Red Sea ports recovered from an attack on a key pipeline earlier this month. The decline reflects renewed flow from major loading points.

Satellite imagery confirmed a “major operational recovery” at the Yanbu and Muajjiz terminals, according to a Kpler note released on Tuesday. The data shows that 12.5 million barrels were loaded onto nine tankers at Yanbu between Saturday and Monday, restoring activity after a drone strike disrupted the East‑West pipeline earlier in the month.

Riyadh has brought the pipeline’s throughput back to roughly 3.5 million barrels per day, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News on Monday. The line’s maximum capacity is 7 million bpd, indicating that the current flow is about half of its peak.

Meanwhile, U.S. and Iranian officials spoke with mediators on Monday as they attempt anew to negotiate a deal to end the seven‑month conflict. Iran offered last week to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days if the United States accepts the terms of the failed June memorandum of understanding, but President Donald Trump rejected Tehran’s proposal on Saturday as exports through the waterway recover.

Oil flows through Hormuz have averaged 13.2 million barrels per day over the past week, according to Kpler data—about 77 % of the 17 million bpd that moved through the strait before the U.S.–Iran war. The U.S. military continues to protect tankers from Gulf allies and maintains a blockade on Iranian exports.