CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA on Monday approved next month’s launch to Jupiter’s moon Europa after reviewing the spacecraft’s ability to withstand the intense radiation there.

Questions about the reliability of the transistors on the Europa Clipper spacecraft arose earlier this year after similar problems cropped up elsewhere. With the tight launch window looming, NASA rushed to conduct tests to verify that the electronic parts could survive the $5 billion mission to determine whether the suspected ocean beneath Europa’s icy crust might be suitable for life.

Liftoff remains scheduled for Oct. 10 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. NASA has three weeks to launch the spacecraft before standing down for more than a year to await another proper planetary alignment; the spacecraft needs to swing past Mars and then Earth for gravity assists.

Project manager Jordan Evans said the transistors — located in circuits across the entire spacecraft — are expected to degrade when Europa Clipper is exposed to the worst of the radiation during the 49 flybys of the moon. But they should recover during the three weeks between each encounter, said Evans of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Teams from labs across the country came to that conclusion following round-the-clock testing over the past four months.

The project has “high confidence we can complete the original mission for exploring Europa as planned,” Evans said. “We are ready for Jupiter.”

It will take six years for Europa Clipper to reach Jupiter, where it will orbit the gas giant every three weeks. Dozens of flybys are planned of Europa as close as 16 miles (25 kilometers), allowing cameras and other instruments — including ice-penetrating radar — to map virtually the entire moon.

Europa Clipper is the biggest spacecraft ever built by NASA to investigate another planet, spanning more than 100 feet (30 meters) with its solar panels unfurled.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Monday, the Hampton History Museum will have a talk and tour of the exhibit “Chris Kraft: Hampton’s Unlikely Space Hero.” Allen Hoilman, the museum’s deputy director and curator, will discuss Kraft’s accomplishments and Hampton’s integral role in the Space Race of the 1950s and ’60s.

Kraft was born in Phoebus and attended Hampton High School and Virginia Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Tech) before working at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (now NASA Langley Research Center) in 1945. In 1958, he was assigned to a group to develop manned space flight – putting a man in space and bringing him home safely. Kraft was a central figure in projects Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

He led the development of the operations control system, Mission Control. He became the flight director, responsible for the flight components of the missions near Earth and in space. He was named director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1972 and retired in 1982. After Kraft died in 2019, his family donated to the museum a collection of personal memorabilia that he’d saved from growing up in Hampton and his career at NASA.

The exhibit will be open through March 2.

___

If you go

When: 7 to 8 p.m. Monday
Where: Hampton History Museum, 120 Old Hampton Lane
Tickets: Free for museum members; others, $5
Details: hamptonhistorymuseum.org

Neopestalotiopsis disease, which first appeared several years ago in Florida, can cause light to dark brown spots on plant leaves and rotting of the fruit. To avoid it, some local growers started getting their plants from a supplier in Canada. But now, major nurseries there are also seeing symptoms, and they’ve recently warned the fruit growers.

“They are basically canceling orders (and in many cases refunding the deposit) or telling plug plant producers and farmers to take plants at their own risk — no reimbursements for bad or infected plants delivered this year,” said Phil Brannen, a professor in the Plant Pathology Department at the University of Georgia, in an Aug. 21 post on the university’s cooperative extension’s website.

It’s not the first time Hampton Roads has dealt with a strawberry disease, but this one could have a major impact on growers who count on the popularity of the fruit.

“That’s a major crop that draws the consumers to the farms,” said Jayesh Samtani, associate professor and small fruit extension specialist at the Hampton Roads Agricultural Research and Extension Center. “It’s the first crop that gives you fruit in the spring season.”

The disease can reduce a grower’s harvest by as much as 50%, Samtani said.

“It’s scary for sure,” said Roy Flanagan, Virginia Beach’s agricultural extension agent and owner of Flanagan Farms, which offers u-pick strawberries in the spring. “It’s a new enemy of the plant that you’ve got to figure out to combat.”

Virginia Beach is the commonwealth’s largest producer of strawberries thanks to the area’s temperate climate and nutrient-rich soil. The value of the crop in Virginia Beach ranges from $750,000 to $1 million per year. Meanwhile, a strawberry farm in Virginia Beach sees an estimated 1,500 visitors each week in May, according to the city.

Some area farms were able to order healthy cutoffs, or bare root plants, from California this year before they sold out, according to Samtani. Flanagan Farms and Cullipher Farm are among those. Others will take the risk with the Canadian plants or cancel their orders.

The situation likely will have long-lasting repercussions.

“The disease has a tendency to stay in the soil from one season to another,” Samtani said. “Even next year, if your plants come in clean, it would not be advisable to use the same site.”

Cindy Weatherly, who operates a farm in Pungo and Cindy’s Produce, a farm stand on Harpers Road, will skip growing strawberries this year to avoid contamination.

“This is an aggressive strain,” Weatherly said. “I don’t want to introduce a disease into my soil that I know nothing about until I watch someone else take care of it.”

To help stave off the disease, which thrives in warm climates, some growers will receive their plants a little later than normal, Samtani said. Strawberries in southeast Virginia are typically planted from last week of September through the first week of October. Chandler, Sweet Charlie, and Ruby June varieties are mostly grown locally.

Samtani plants berries at the research center each year. He’s expecting strawberry plants to arrive Oct. 10.

The Henley family is one of the city’s largest strawberry producers, growing them across 10 acres. They received the tips of strawberry plants from a supplier in Nova Scotia and have been rooting them in trays, said farm owner Barbara Henley. She’s already noticed some signs of the disease in one of the varieties, but is on track to plant in three weeks.

“Ours look fairly good,” Henley said, also a City Council member. “I’m afraid to say too much.”

The research center is advising growers about how to mitigate the disease if plants are infected. One option is fumigating the soil, which involves injecting a synthetic chemical gas. Sanitizing clothing, equipment, machinery and pruning tools also will be critical.

And fungicidal treatments can also help keep the disease under control. However, the most effective chemical — thiram — is being phased out by the Environmental Protection Agency, Samtani said.

Some factors, like weather, will be out of the control of growers. A dry, mild spring could keep the disease at bay.

“We don’t really know what’s going to happen until it all unfolds and the season progresses,” Samtani said.

Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com

Boeing’s first astronaut mission ended Friday night with an empty capsule landing and two test pilots still in space, left behind until next year because NASA judged their return too risky.

Six hours after departing the International Space Station, Starliner parachuted into New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, descending on autopilot through the desert darkness.

It was an uneventful close to a drama that began with the June launch of Boeing’s long-delayed crew debut and quickly escalated into a dragged-out cliffhanger of a mission stricken by thruster failures and helium leaks. For months, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams’ return was in question as engineers struggled to understand the capsule’s problems.

Boeing insisted after extensive testing that Starliner was safe to bring the two home, but NASA disagreed and booked a flight with SpaceX instead. Their SpaceX ride won’t launch until the end of this month, which means they’ll be up there until February — more than eight months after blasting off on what should have been a quick trip.

Wilmore and Williams should have flown Starliner back to Earth by mid-June, a week after launching in it. But their ride to the space station was marred by the cascade of thruster trouble and helium loss, and NASA ultimately decided it was too risky to return them on Starliner.

So with fresh software updates, the fully automated capsule left with their empty seats and blue spacesuits along with some old station equipment.

“She’s on her way home,” Williams radioed as the white and blue-trimmed capsule undocked from the space station 260 miles (420 kilometers) over China and disappeared into the black void.

Williams stayed up late to see how everything turned out. “A good landing, pretty awesome,” said Boeing’s Mission Control.

Cameras on the space station and a pair of NASA planes caught the capsule as a white streak coming in for the touchdown, which drew cheer.

There were some snags during reentry, including more thruster issues, but Starliner made a “bull’s-eye landing,” said NASA’s commercial crew program manager Steve Stich.

Even with the safe return, “I think we made the right decision not to have Butch and Suni on board,” Stich said at a news conference early Saturday. “All of us feel happy about the successful landing. But then there’s a piece of us, all of us, that we wish it would have been the way we had planned it.”

Boeing did not participate in the Houston news briefing. But two of the company’s top space and defense officials, Ted Colbert and Kay Sears, told employees in a note that they backed NASA’s ruling.

“While this may not have been how we originally envisioned the test flight concluding, we support NASA’s decision for Starliner and are proud of how our team and spacecraft performed,” the executives wrote.

Starliner’s crew demo capped a journey filled with delays and setbacks. After the space shuttles retired more than a decade ago, NASA hired Boeing and SpaceX for orbital taxi service. Boeing ran into so many problems on its first test flight with no one aboard in 2019 that it had to repeat it. The 2022 do-over uncovered even more flaws and the repair bill topped $1 billion.

SpaceX’s crew ferry flight later this month will be its 10th for NASA since 2020. The Dragon capsule will launch on the half-year expedition with only two astronauts since two seats are reserved for Wilmore and Williams for the return leg.

As veteran astronauts and retired Navy captains, Wilmore and Williams anticipated hurdles on the test flight. They’ve kept busy in space, helping with repairs and experiments. The two are now full-time station crew members along with the seven others on board.

Even before the pair launched on June 5 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Starliner’s propulsion system was leaking helium. The leak was small and thought to be isolated, but four more cropped up after liftoff. Then five thrusters failed. Although four of the thrusters were recovered, it gave NASA pause as to whether more malfunctions might hamper the capsule’s descent from orbit.

Boeing conducted numerous thruster tests in space and on the ground over the summer, and was convinced its spacecraft could safely bring the astronauts back. But NASA could not get comfortable with the thruster situation and went with SpaceX.

Flight controllers conducted more test firings of the capsule’s thrusters following undocking; one failed to ignite. Engineers suspect the more the thrusters are fired, the hotter they become, causing protective seals to swell and obstruct the flow of propellant. They won’t be able to examine any of the parts; the section holding the thrusters was ditched just before reentry.

Starliner will be transported in a couple weeks back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where the analyses will unfold.

NASA officials stressed that the space agency remains committed to having two competing U.S. companies transporting astronauts. The goal is for SpaceX and Boeing to take turns launching crews — one a year per company — until the space station is abandoned in 2030 right before its fiery reentry. That doesn’t give Boeing much time to catch up, but the company intends to push forward with Starliner, according to NASA.

Stich said post-landing it’s too early to know when the next Starliner flight with astronauts might occur.

“It will take a little time to determine the path forward,” he said.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Starliner making its first crewed spaceflight arrived to the ISS on June 6, one day after launching from Cape Canaveral with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board for what was supposed to be about an eight-day stay. Now they won’t get home for at least eight months.

“NASA has decided that Butch and Sunny will return with Crew-9 in February and that Starliner will return uncrewed,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a press conference Saturday following an agency-level review of Starliner’s flight safety risk.

Dubbed the Crew Flight Test, Boeing has been trying to get Starliner certified to join SpaceX as one of two commercial providers to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS. SpaceX has been doing the job from the U.S. for more than four years, and now Starliner has an uncertain future.

While trying to dock with ISS, problems with Starliner emerged with it propulsion system, when five of 28 reaction control system thrusters failed on approach. The propulsion module also suffered several helium leaks.

“Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest and even at its most routine, and a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine, and so the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Boeing Starliner home uncrewed is a result of a commitment to safety,” Nelson said. “Our core value is safety and it is our North Star.”

He said NASA’s decision considered the specter of the tragedies of Apollo 1, Space Shuttle Challenger and Space Shuttle Columbia.

“This whole discussion, remember, is put in the context of we have had mistakes done in the past,” Nelson added. “We lost two space shuttles as a result of there not being a culture in which information could come forward.”

What went wrong?

The problems that emerged on what had otherwise been a good trip up for Starliner to the ISS led to delays in a decision to return home while Boeing and NASA worked to figure out the source of the problem — including running a series of tests on the ground and hot firing Starliner while still attached to the ISS.

While four of the five thrusters came back online and ground tests revealed the likely cause, there remains nothing that can be done to fix the source problem now in space. The return flight could see a repeat of thruster failures, which are needed for the spacecraft’s departure from the ISS and its reentry burn to land on Earth.

“Our focus is on safety all the time and this certainly is no different. The uncertainty in our margins is where we have come to make the decision,” NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free said. “That uncertainty remains in our understanding of the physics going on in the thrusters, and we still have some work to go.”

NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said the data ultimately drove the decision.

“Bottom line relative to bringing Starliner back is there was just too much uncertainty in the prediction of the thrusters,” Stich said. “If we had a model, if we had a way to accurately predict what the thrusters would do for the undock and all the way through the deorbit burn and through the separation sequence, I think we would have taken a different course of action.”

He said ground testing results were a surprise to NASA and begun the shift in course where NASA began seriously considering keeping Williams and Wilmore on board the ISS and bringing Starliner home without crew.

Boeing future

While Boeing had in weeks past been stumping for a crewed return of the spacecraft to complete the mission as planned, Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, earlier this month revealed there has been dissent among NASA officials worried about the risk involved to the astronauts.

No Boeing official was at Saturday’s press conference, but NASA officials gave them credit and said they thought the decision ultimately laid in NASA’s hands.

“We want to further understand the root causes and understand the design improvements so that the Boeing Starliner will serve as an important part of our assured crew access to the ISS,” Nelson said, noting he had just spoken with Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg. “I have expressed this to him. I told him how well Boeing worked with our team to come to this decision, and he expressed to me an intention that they will continue to work the problems once Starliner is back safely.”

Nelson later stated he believed “100%” that Boeing would continue with its efforts to satisfy their commercial crew contract, which calls for six Starliner flights to the ISS once the spacecraft is certified.

Boeing initially won the larger contract alongside SpaceX in 2016, but it was a fixed-price contract worth $4.2 billion for which Boeing has yet to see payout except for development costs. Years of Starliner program delays, though, including the company having to fly a do-over of its uncrewed flight test when the first go didn’t rendezvous with the ISS, have cost Boeing more than $1.6 billion to date.

“We expect delivery on the contract,” Nelson said.

NASA officials said they were looking at the requirements for certification but would not commit to say whether this completion of CFT minus humans on the way down would be good enough for certification.

Starliner’s planned departure date has not been revealed, but would come no earlier than September with a desert landing in the southwestern United States.

“We’ve accomplished a lot on this mission and learned a lot about this vehicle, satisfied a lot of the objectives,” Free said. “We’ll look at this as we do any of our missions to see does it fall into the any of the categories that we have that we define as a mishap? Once we get the vehicle back, that’s our time to look at that.”

Remaining in space

Wilmore and Williams then, would become active members of Expeditions 71 and 72, and would fly home on the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom in February joining Crew-9, which slated to fly to the ISS no earlier than Sept. 24.

It’s set to fly up with two instead of four astronauts so Wilmore and Williams could take the remaining seats when that mission concludes. Which two astronauts fly up on Crew-9 and which stay home was not revealed by NASA.

The decision now stretches Williams and Wilmore stay on board the ISS to more than eight months. This is their third visit to the ISS with both having visited on both space shuttle flights as well as Russia Soyuz flights during their careers.

ISS Program Manager Dana Weigel said the long stay is not an issue since there have been some astronauts who have gone a year on board.

“While Butch and Suni are on board, they’ll be doing science station maintenance, they’ll execute the SpaceX (CRS-31) research and cargo mission, and we may have a couple spacewalks for them toward the end of their expedition,” she said.

In the last 2½ months, they’ve already completed about 100 hours of work on 42 different experiments along with critical station maintenance, she said.

“Since they’ve been up there, they’ve been a welcome set of helping hands,” she said.

Norm Knight, the head of NASA’s Flight Operations Directorate, said every astronaut understands the chance a mission could go longer than planned.

“They’re professionals. When they launch, they know that there are circumstances where they can be on board for up to a year,” he said. “So mentally, you know that you could be in that situation. Now, once you’re in the arena, obviously it’s a little different. It’s challenging. You know, it’s disappointing that that they’re not coming home on Starliner, but that’s OK. It’s a test flight. That’s what we do.”

When Adam A. Pack, a marine mammal researcher at the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, was photographing whales in Alaska’s Frederick Sound in July, he instantly recognized the flukes of an old friend.

Emphasis on old. The tail — mostly black, with a wash of white speckles near the edge — belongs to a whale named Old Timer. First spotted in 1972, Old Timer is now a male of at least 53 years, making him “the oldest known humpback whale in the world,” said Pack, who is also the co-founder and president of The Dolphin Institute.

Humpback whale populations, once severely depleted by commercial whaling, have rebounded in recent decades. But the animals are threatened by ship strikes, entanglements in fishing gear and climate change. And Pack had worried about Old Timer. The last time he had seen the whale, in 2015, was in the middle of a record-breaking, yearslong heat wave. Scores of seabirds and marine mammals, including humpback whales, died.

But after nine years, he saw with his own eyes that Old Timer had survived.

“It was heartwarming, because I realized it wasn’t just the old whales who were perishing,” Pack said. “Some of them were resilient.”

Historically, tracking the whereabouts of the whales has been done the hard way: by scientists using their own eyes to compare new fluke photos with old ones. But future studies of Old Timer and other humpbacks of all ages are set to be accelerated with artificial intelligence. And Pack hopes it will help him learn how, and why, some whales can withstand tough conditions.

Multiple humpback populations dwell in the North Pacific. Old Timer is part of a population that spends winters breeding in the waters around Hawaii and summers in southeastern Alaska, filling up on fish and tiny shrimplike animals known as krill. These humpbacks have been the subject of an ongoing scientific study, which began in 1976, when a marine mammal researcher, Louis Herman, began photographing the whales and their distinctive flukes.

Herman conducted annual surveys, amassing an enormous collection of tail pictures that allowed scientists to keep tabs on individual whales over the course of their lifetimes. These fluke photos, which now number more than 30,000, have provided new insight into the lives of whales, from their migration patterns to their social behaviors.

“It’s one of the longest ongoing scientific studies of humpback whales in the world,” said Pack, one of Herman’s former students and colleagues and now leader of the whale project.

The study is now entering the age of machine learning, with the help of an online platform called Happywhale, which collects whale fluke photos from scientists and members of the public from around the world. The Happywhale database currently contains roughly 1.1 million images of more than 100,000 individual humpbacks, said Ted Cheeseman, a co-founder of Happywhale and a doctoral candidate at Southern Cross University in Australia.

Artificial intelligence-powered photo matching algorithms help automatically identify the whales in submitted photos, aiding scientists in the field or others who need to look up previous sightings of a given animal.

“Happywhale has revolutionized our field and has made large-scale collaborations possible,” Pack said.

Earlier this year, Cheeseman, Pack and dozens of other researchers used Happywhale’s image recognition tool to estimate humpback whale abundance in the North Pacific from 2002 through 2021. Initially, the population boomed, climbing to about 33,500 whales in 2012.

But then it dropped sharply. This population decline coincided with the severe marine heat wave, when Pack last spotted Old Timer. It lasted from 2014 to 2016 and slashed the supply of fish and krill. “There’s a lot more we want to learn about the event, but it is quite clear: warmer waters mean food is less available overall, and what is available is more dispersed and deeper,” Cheeseman said in an email.

The Hawaii humpback population was especially hard hit, falling by 34% from 2013 to 2021. Although there had been some sightings of Old Timer reported after 2015, Pack was excited to finally set eyes on the whale himself. That excitement soon gave way to curiosity: Why had Old Timer survived, when so many others had perished?

Now, Pack is hoping to dive deeper himself, with the help of Happywhale. He plans to investigate how humpbacks survived the lean years and whether there are any discernible patterns. Could Old Timer’s age have been an advantage?

“It is possible that Old Timer’s been around enough to be adaptable when certain food resources are limited,” Pack said.

The idea remains speculative, and it is not yet clear whether Old Timer was the exception or the rule. “How many whales like Old Timer were resilient to this devastation of marine resources?” he said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Rather than flying Boeing’s Starliner back to Earth, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams would catch a ride on SpaceX’s next flight. That option would keep them at the space station until next February.

The test pilots anticipated being away just a week or so when they rocketed away as Starliner’s first crew. But thruster failures and helium leaks marred the capsule’s trip to the space station, raising doubts about its ability to return safely and leaving the astronauts in limbo.

NASA officials said they’re analyzing more data before making a decision by end of next week or beginning of the next. These thrusters are crucial for holding the capsule in the right position when it comes time to descend from orbit.

“We’ve got time available before we bring Starliner home and we want to use that time wisely,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s space operations mission chief.

Switching to SpaceX would require bumping two of the four astronauts assigned to the next ferry flight, currently targeted for late September. Wilmore and Williams would take the empty seats in SpaceX’s Dragon capsule once that half-year mission ends.

Another complication: The space station has just two parking places for U.S. capsules. Boeing’s capsule would have to depart ahead of the arrival of SpaceX’s Dragon in order to free up a spot.

NASA would like to keep SpaceX’s current crew up there until the replacements arrive, barring an emergency. Those four should have returned to Earth this month, but saw a seventh month added to their mission because of the uncertainty over Starliner, keeping them up there until the end of September. Most space station stays last six months, although some have gone a full year.

Eager to have competing services and backup options, NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing to transport astronauts to and from the space station after the shuttles retired in 2011.

SpaceX’s first astronaut flight was in 2020. Boeing suffered so much trouble on its initial test flight without a crew in 2019 that a do-over was ordered. Then more problems cropped up, costing the company more than $1 billion to fix before finally flying astronauts.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The findings released Monday are based on seismic measurements from NASA’s Mars InSight lander, which detected more than 1,300 marsquakes before shutting down two years ago.

This water — believed to be seven miles to 12 miles (11.5 kilometers to 20 kilometers) down in the Martian crust — most likely would have seeped from the surface billions of years ago when Mars harbored rivers, lakes and possibly oceans, according to the lead scientist, Vashan Wright of the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Just because water still may be sloshing around inside Mars does not mean it holds life, Wright said.

“Instead, our findings mean that there are environments that could possibly be habitable,” he said in an email.

His team combined computer models with InSight readings including the quakes’ velocity in determining underground water was the most likely explanation. The results appeared Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

If InSight’s location at Elysium Planitia near Mars’ equator is representative of the rest of the red planet, the underground water would be enough to fill a global ocean a mile or so (1 kilometer to 2 kilometers) deep, Wright said.

It would take drills and other equipment to confirm the presence of water and seek out any potential signs of microbial life.

Although the InSight lander is no longer working, scientists continue to analyze the data collected from 2018 through 2022, in search of more information about Mars’ interior.

Wet almost all over more than 3 billion years ago, Mars is thought to have lost its surface water as its atmosphere thinned, turning the planet into the dry, dusty world known today. Scientists theorize much of this ancient water escaped out into space or remained buried below.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The annual meteor shower, active since July, peaks before dawn Monday. It’s one of the brightest and most easily viewed showers of the year, producing “bright blue meteors — and lots of them,” said University of Warwick astronomer Don Pollacco.

More than 50 meteors per hour are expected, according to the American Meteor Society. The shower lasts through Sept. 1.

Here’s what to know about the Perseids and other meteor showers.

What is a meteor shower?

Multiple meteor showers occur annually and you don’t need special equipment to see them.

Most meteor showers originate from the debris of comets. The source of the Perseids is the comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.

When rocks from space enter Earth’s atmosphere, the resistance from the air makes them very hot. This causes the air to glow around them and briefly leaves a fiery tail behind them — the end of a “shooting star.”

The glowing pockets of air around fast-moving space rocks, ranging from the size of a dust particle to a boulder, may be visible in the night sky.

The Perseids result from “bigger particles than a lot of other showers,” said NASA’s Bill Cooke, giving them the appearance of “bright fireballs” — easier to spot than many others.

How to view a meteor shower

Meteor showers are usually most visible between midnight and predawn hours.

It’s easier to see shooting stars under dark skies, away from city lights. Meteor showers also appear brightest on cloudless nights when the moon wanes smallest.

The Northern Hemisphere will have the best view of the Perseids. This year’s peak coincides with a moon around 44% full.

When is the next meteor shower?

The meteor society keeps a list of upcoming large meteor showers, including the peak viewing days and moonlight conditions.

The next major meteor shower will be the Orionids, peaking in mid-October.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

During that time, between 2016 and 2024, the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem and one of the most biodiverse, suffered mass coral bleaching events. That’s when water temperatures get too hot and coral expel the algae that provide them with color and food, and sometimes die. Earlier this year, aerial surveys of over 300 reefs in the system off Australia’s northeast coast found bleaching in shallow water areas spanning two-thirds of the reef, according to Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

Researchers from Melbourne University and other universities in Australia, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, were able to compare recent ocean temperatures to historical ones by using coral skeleton samples from the Coral Sea to reconstruct sea surface temperature data from 1618 to 1995. They coupled that with sea surface temperature data from 1900 to 2024.

They observed largely stable temperatures before 1900, and steady warming from January to March from 1960 to 2024. And during five years of coral bleaching in the past decade — during 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024 — temperatures in January and March were significantly higher than anything dating back to 1618, researchers found. They used climate models to attribute the warming rate after 1900 to human-caused climate change. The only other year nearly as warm as the mass bleaching years of the past decade was 2004.

“The reef is in danger and if we don’t divert from our current course, our generation will likely witness the demise of one of those great natural wonders,” said Benjamin Henley, the study’s lead author and a lecturer of sustainable urban management at the University of Melbourne. “If you put all of the evidence together … heat extremes are occurring too often for those corals to effectively adapt and evolve.”

Across the world, reefs are key to seafood production and tourism. Scientists have long said additional loss of coral is likely to be a casualty of future warming as the world approaches the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold that countries agreed to try and keep warming under in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Even if global warming is kept under the Paris Agreement’s goal, which scientists say Earth is almost guaranteed to cross, 70% to 90% of corals across the globe could be threatened, the study’s authors said. As a result, future coral reefs would likely have less diversity in coral species — which has already been happening as the oceans have grown hotter.

Coral reefs have been evolving over the past quarter century in response to bleaching events like the ones the study’s authors highlighted, said Michael McPhaden, a senior climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was not involved with the study. But even the most robust coral may soon not be able to withstand the elevated temperatures expected under a warming climate with “the relentless rise in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere,” he said.

The Great Barrier Reef serves as an economic resource for the region and protects against severe tropical storms.

As more heat-tolerant coral replaces the less heat-tolerant species in the colorful underwater rainbow jungle, McPhaden said there’s “real concern” about the expected extreme loss in the number of species and reduction in area that the world’s largest reef covers.

“It’s the canary in the coal mine in terms of climate change,” McPhaden said.

___

This story has corrected attribution for the aerial surveys in the 2nd paragraph to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, rather than NASA.

___

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.