What would cuts to Nasa mean for space science?

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Hello, lovely, curious-minded people.

You're listening to BBC Inside Science, which was first broadcast on the 24th of April, 2025.

I'm Victoria Gill.

Today, we are spending a good deal of our programme in outer space because, between asteroids heading in our general direction, signs of possible life on a distant planet, and the world's biggest space agency facing a funding crisis, it's been a very busy week in space science.

So, happily, we have our favourite astrophysicist and friend of the program, Professor Tim O'Brien, in the Inside Science studio here.

Hello, Tim.

Hello.

Welcome back to the show.

Thank you.

It's always lovely to have you here, as well as helping us navigate all of that.

You're going to be telling us about some of your top science stories this week.

Can you give me a quick preview?

Oceans are going to feature large, so ocean's more than 100 light years away, and then oceans close at hand here on our planet and the role in climate change, actually.

But I will have some reassuring news about that asteroid that we were worrying about impacting the Earth.

We talked about last week.

That is very good to hear.

Well, thank you, Tim.

Don't go away.

Because now, space scientists have been talking a lot about the Trump administration this week, specifically about whisperings that suggest things might be about to change at NASA.

According to multiple reports, Donald Trump is about to send a request that if it's approved by Congress, it could see a drastic cut in the agency's science budget.

Following this closely are my former BBC colleague Jonathan Amos and planetary scientist Dr.

Simeon Barber.

Both of them join me now down the line.

Hi Simeon.

Hello John.

Hi, hi.

It's lovely to have you back.

And thanks so much, both of you, for joining us.

We have a lot to talk about.

And of course, we have Tim O'Brien in the studio too, all keen space watchers.

Can I just ask you first of all, John, what do we know about these proposed cuts?

Right, okay.

So the first thing to stress is that these cuts that are being proposed are not for definite.

So this is what's called a pass-back proposal.

So this is the White House sending its ideas to NASA about the sort of budget that the White House will formally request from Congress in due course.

But there are some shockers in this proposal.

So we're talking about the possibility of a 20%

cut to NASA overall, a 20% cut to the greatest space agency on Earth.

And those cuts, they wouldn't fall

across the board.

They're focused in certain areas.

So we're likely to see the science budget in particular suffer if it all goes ahead.

A nearly

one-half cut, which is extraordinary.

A two-thirds cut to astrophysics, which will be of considerable interest to Tim.

A nearly 50% cut in heliophysics.

So that's things like the Parker Solar Probe that goes around the Sun, that sort of science.

A greater than 50% cut to Earth science.

So that's climate, that's Earth observation, and a 30% cut to planetary science, which is where some of the great successes of NASA have been in recent years.

And Simeon will be sweating on that one, I'm sure.

Simeon, you're a planetary scientist.

Can you just explain how your research involves those international collaborations?

So my job is building scientific payloads to be launched on space missions, on spacecraft.

That could be rovers or orbiters or landers.

NASA is

the biggest player in this field.

They're the ones building most of the rovers, most of the landers.

So my collaborations with NASA often involve working with them to develop an instrument which would be flown on a NASA spacecraft and then jointly exploiting that data.

What do these proposed budget cuts mean for your research and for that collaboration?

You know, working together on problems is how you solve, you know, scientific mysteries.

So, the number of opportunities to do that are going to go away.

I'm also really concerned for colleagues in the US who are facing so much uncertainty about their futures with

loss of current jobs, but also uncertainty about career paths.

It used to be a, you know, such a prestigious field to follow to go and work at NASA.

And, you know, my fear is that that could be diminished.

Are there specific missions, are there specific projects underway that are sort of hanging in the balance now?

Something called Mars sample return.

So this has been the holy grail of planetary science for a long time.

It's about picking up samples of Mars rocks and bringing them back to Earth where we can put them through the most rigorous and exquisite analyses possible using amazing equipment on Earth.

Those samples are actually cached.

They're kind of loaded up and ready to go.

And so, to kind of imagine that the samples that people have been looking forward to for decades are now ready to come home but won't in the foreseeable future would be devastating to that community.

John, do we know what the reason behind these proposed cuts is?

You know, we've heard a lot about cuts across the board for government funding.

Well, it is quite curious because

NASA is the most popular federal agency in America.

When they do the polls,

the one agency that the public says, yeah, fantastic, it's NASA.

You know, it has that cachet.

But we've seen the Trump administration push back against federal spending in general.

Tim O'Brien, what does this mean for global science?

You know, this isn't just about the US.

Yeah, I mean, in terms of astrophysics, I mean, it's a modern astrophysicist

uses

observations that are made right the way across the spectrum.

And for a large parts of the spectrum, that means you have to be in space.

And NASA's been such a major player.

I mean, as Jonathan said, it's like the world's most famous space agency.

And, you know, we, you know, I use NASA spacecraft in my own research all the time and data from those spacecraft.

And so it's completely crazy that they'd be thinking about making this level of core, if indeed it came to pass.

I mean, people have, not only does it do all this stuff, it's cool, right?

How many people do you see around the world wearing t-shirts with NASA on it, with NASA logger or?

Simeon, NASA's budget is very big.

That's it's putting it very broadly and very simply.

But can you see a sort of reason, an economic reason behind this?

NASA has already been trying to modernize.

It's been trying to embrace the commercial space industry and reduce the cost of missions that way.

So I was involved in launching an instrument which went a year ago.

It was aiming to be the first moon lander by the US since Apollo finished in 1972.

And that was built on a really low budget, quickly during the pandemic.

And this

has been seen as the way forward.

I think everyone knows NASA has to modernize.

I think that's understood.

But this doesn't seem to be the way to go about it to anyone in my community.

There are always efficiencies to be found.

NASA needs to get out of the business of launching its own rockets, operating its own rockets.

It's doing that, right?

It's buying services now from Elon Musk's SpaceX company, and it will do so from Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company as well.

But when you come to do things like planetary science, these are kind of one-offs, right?

So a lot of this stuff is bespoke.

And frankly, there are some proposals in here that are purely bonkers.

I mean, in astrophysics, for example, they're talking about

the next great space telescope, the Nancy Grace-Roman Space Telescope,

which will do work similar to what Europe's Euclid Space Telescope is doing, but crucially using different techniques.

So this will study cosmic expansion over time.

It'll also look for exoplanets.

But that cosmic expansion, it's doing it using a speciality, an expertise of the Americans, which is super nervous.

It's built, it's coming in under budget.

They're talking about putting it in a cupboard, right?

Which is kind of mad, really, when you've spent X billions building the next great space telescope that you don't go and launch it.

When will we have more certainty about whether this proposed budget cut will go through?

The next big event will be the confirmation of NASA's new administrator next week, which will be Jared Isaacman,

this entrepreneur, finance entrepreneur.

And then there will be a formal request to Congress.

And I cannot see Republicans in Congress sitting on their hands on this.

They're almost certain to push back.

You know, the first Trump administration tried to cancel the Nancy Roman Space Telescope, and Congress pushed back.

So I'm almost certain that they will do likewise.

But we have to watch from Europe, right?

We have a number of partnerships.

Simeon talked about Mars sample return.

Europe is building the spacecraft that

would bring back all of the samples from Mars.

They're working on that.

They're cutting metal.

They're making that spacecraft.

Are they going to turn around to Europe and say, nah, actually, you know what?

Stop work on that.

We don't need it anymore.

Well, we'll find out soon enough, and I hope that you'll come back and update us.

Jonathan Amos, thank you very much for joining us.

And Dr.

Simeon Barber, thank you.

Tim O'Brien is still with me.

Now, can we we just talk about signs of alien life, something that might be affected by these NASA cuts?

But last week, we had some quite exciting news.

Scientists at Cambridge University announced the discovery of chemical signals on a distant world that they said was the best evidence yet of possible life on another planet.

Can you tell me more about this story?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really sort of exciting bit of science, I think.

I mean, amazingly, we've got the technology that we can actually study the atmospheric compositions of planets that in this case are 124 light years away.

Vast, unimaginable distances.

But it's a really

clever idea where you basically you look for planets that are orbiting their stars and some of them will, as they orbit, they will pass in front of the sort of parent star.

And what you can't see the planet itself, but what you do is you see the star and you measure the brightness of the star.

And so every time the planet goes around, the brightness dips a bit as the planet blocks out some of the light.

And so you see this regular dip.

It's called a transit.

That's how these things are discovered.

That's how this one was discovered by the Kepler spacecraft.

When the planet's in front of its star, some of the starlight is passing through the atmosphere of the planet on its way to us.

So if you take that the light that you're picking up from the star and you split it into a spectrum, and in this case they used the the JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope, you split that into a spectrum and you compare the light coming from the star when the planet's not in front of it to the light coming from the star when the planet is in front of it, the difference is the effect that the atmosphere has had on it.

And you see effectively the fingerprint of the molecules that are present in that atmosphere.

So seeing in a light signal from a star the composition of an atmosphere from that planet passing in front of that star and what's been seen in this case has got scientists excited.

Yeah, so in this case, you know, we know already that there's methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of this

There's a slightly controversial question about whether there was water vapor or not in the atmosphere, but the story, as of just this new story, is that they're suggesting they may have detected a molecule called dimethyl sulfide, which on Earth is produced by plankton.

So does that mean we've got living things producing dimethyl sulfide on this distant planet?

Fortunately, I think that really is a leap too far.

I mean, even the detection of the molecule itself is weak and quite controversial, actually.

So the scientists themselves say that it's a sort of one in a hundred chance of it being

definitively that chemical.

No, that that signal is not that chemical, right?

So it's one in a hundred chance of it not being there.

But you know, generally in science, we look for one in one in a few million rather than

one in a hundred.

But actually beyond that,

the way you analyze these spectra and you look for these little lumps and bumps that give away, that's quite a difficult thing to do.

And there's a lot of controversy over how that was done in this case.

So the question of whether it's that molecule is still open, more data will give us a better result.

Beyond that, the question of whether even if we did know there was that molecule there, does it really indicate life?

That's another huge leap.

Classic, more research needed.

Indeed.

That'll cost money.

Well, sadly, everything costs money, yeah.

Thank you very much, Tim.

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We demand to be quality.

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Now, here's a date for your diary.

In April of 2029, Friday, April 13th, 2029, Apophis will be the first asteroid in human history that human eyes, unaided, just your own naked eye, will be able to see an asteroid passing by the Earth.

It will be like one of the fainter stars in the Big Dipper, or the plow, as you might say, moving across the sky.

And it will be, in fact, from Western Europe, probably the southern UK would be the best spot.

The early evening skies will be when Apophis will be visible in April of 2029.

That's Richard Binzel, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, talking about the asteroid Apophis.

At least 340 meters across, Apophis is bigger than Wembley Stadium, and it'll pass us at a distance of about 32,000 kilometers.

That's about one-tenth of the distance between Earth and the moon.

But is there any chance it could hit us?

Richard had this to say.

I always like to say three times, Apophis will safely pass the Earth, Apophis will safely pass the Earth, and Apophis will safely pass the Earth.

That was fairly definitive.

But an asteroid the size of Apophis passes this close to Earth about once every thousand years or so.

And last year, Inside Science brought you news from the Apophis T-5 conference.

Richard Richard organised that meeting to coordinate an international plan to learn as much as possible about this asteroid when it passes by.

The aim is to work out how to defend our planet from asteroids that come even closer in the future.

Now, at T-4 years, Richard has just returned from a follow-up meeting in Tokyo, and I caught up with him.

A year ago, back in April 2024, at T-5 years, that was a really important milestone for getting a mission from the European Space Agent, ESA, involved.

And that is, we want to be able to see this asteroid before it comes by the Earth because we think the Earth's going to tug on it and change it.

And this is where Europe is involved with a refly of their HERA mission that they call Ramses.

Why did that need to be done at that point?

And where are we now?

Because I understand you've had another follow-up conference because we've got four years to go now, which is not a lot in space science planning, is it?

Where are we now?

What are the developments at this point?

So as we stand now, the Ramses mission is underway in terms of its planning, detailed final plans to begin building, but we need one more step, and that is for the formal ESA ministerial approval, which we hope will come later this year in 2025.

And that would be the full go-ahead that ESA is indeed going to partner with NASA and maybe other space agencies towards getting the best look at this asteroid, both before, during, and after it goes safely past the Earth in 2029.

What will that mission do?

What are you hoping to scientifically do and learn as Apophis flies by?

Well, we believe that as the Apophis asteroid flies by the Earth, the Earth's gravity is going to tug on it and maybe distort it a little bit.

And however the asteroid responds is going to tell us how it's put together on its inside.

That's something we've never seen or understood before about these hazardous asteroids.

So, NASA has a mission called OSIRIS-APEX that is going to get to Apophis

after the Earth encounter.

Where that spacecraft is now, it was the OSIRIS-REx mission that got an asteroid sample a few years ago.

It doesn't have the propulsion and the laws of orbital physics.

Don't let us get that spacecraft to Apophis until after it goes by the Earth.

We need to get a before look.

And that before look is what the Ramses spacecraft proposes to do in partnership with NASA.

It's a beautiful NASA, ESA, ESA, NASA collaboration that says to the world that planetary defense is something that all international space agencies take seriously.

When we see the Apophis asteroid after it's gone by the Earth with the OSIRIS-APEX spacecraft, we won't know what changed unless we get a good look at it before it comes by the Earth.

And so it's both the before and after studies that are really going to help us understand how these potentially hazardous asteroids are put together, and knowing how they're put together, maybe some of the most important information the space program could ever deliver to humanity in case we actually had to push one of these things out of the way.

And you talked about that international effort

in planetary defense, and we've seen a lot about the suggestions that NASA's budget is going to be cut.

Is that something that could have any impacts on this mission to up office?

Well, certainly it's in the United States right now.

It's a moving target for how different agencies' budgets are going to be structured as we move forward.

But we think this has such a high priority, not only for the security of a single country, but for the entire world.

And as we like to say, Asteroid impacts know no boundaries.

And so as we learn how to protect the Earth from this rare but you know serious natural hazard category, we know it's an international effort and it's something that all nations and every nation benefits from by getting as knowledgeable as we can.

And speaking of that international effort, you held this year's T-4 conference in Tokyo.

Has the Japanese space agency JAXA revealed any specific plans?

The Japanese have a spacecraft called Destiny Plus that is going to go out and explore some of these near-Earth asteroids as a scientific mission.

And its launch profile can take it past Apophis before that asteroid, the Epophas asteroid, comes by the Earth.

And so we're trying to coordinate that launch and the Destiny Plus activity with the ESA Ramses effort, the NASA OSIRIS-APEX effort, and maybe even Japan will be able to help us launch the ESA spacecraft.

That was Richard Binzel.

And a reminder of that date again, Friday, the 13th of April, 2029.

And you can count on Inside Science to remind you much closer to the time.

Now, Tim O'Brien is still with us.

And Tim, the last time you were on Inside Science, you were warning us about another asteroid called 2024 YR4.

There were reports that it might, stress might, be heading our way.

Do you have any more news?

Yep.

And the good news, of course, is that it's not going to hit us.

And I will repeat that three times if I take Richards.

but yeah so it's not it's definitely not going to hit us now i mean we sort of suspected that was going to be the outcome but we weren't we weren't sure at the time but yeah the the chances of it hitting earth have really shrunk to zero now however it will be coming quite close and in fact now the question is is it going to hit the moon ah it's now sort of moving away from earth and it's gone far enough away that we're not able to get sort of optical telescope observations to refine the orbit.

Right.

That sort of faded away towards the end of March.

But at the beginning of April, based on those measurements, we were on a 3.8% chance of it hitting the moon.

What's the date on that one?

It's 2032, December 2032.

So we have time for another story.

I believe you're bringing us back down to Earth.

And to the ocean specifically, what did you want to talk about?

This is a, I thought it was an interesting story about the ocean's role in climate change and how we can mitigate climate change really.

And it's a project that's been run out at the University of Exeter down in Plymouth.

They're pumping seawater out of the ocean and extracting carbon dioxide that's dissolved in the seawater and then storing it safely and putting the seawater back into the ocean.

So, the idea is to sort of

remove the amount of carbon dioxide that's there for global warming, much of which gets dissolved into the ocean.

So, you sort of pump it out of the ocean, you apply an electric field to it, which is a sort of electrolysis process, makes it slightly acidified.

That sort of bubbles the carbon dioxide out of it.

You take that, capture it, pump the seawater back again where it can be ready to absorb more fuel.

This is a form of geoengineering, but rather than sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere, we're sucking it out of the ocean.

And what do you think of the prospect of this to help us in the battle against climate change?

One of the questions one would ask is how scalable it is.

The other question then is how quickly are we able to get these sorts of technologies working.

Personally, I'm sort of a bit suspicious of these things.

I think clearly the way forward is to reduce the emissions.

We've got to reduce the emissions.

You know, whether you combine that with some form of carbon capture, a lot of people say you should combine the two.

There's a question then over how you safely store that carbon as well.

So you take that carbon dioxide, you have to store it somewhere, maybe in a geological space, you know, underground somewhere.

But then that has to be stored for millions of years.

Yeah.

And it's a sort of similar question as radioactive.

Geological time scale.

You know, do we trust ourselves to be able to safely store the carbon for that long?

So those are the questions I would have.

How fast can you do it?

How scalable is it to this sort of huge scale that we'd needed?

And, you know, how safely can you store it?

Tim O'Brien, thank you very much.

It's lovely to have you on the programme.

Do come back.

Finally, now.

This week I went to visit a skeleton of a gladiator that was discovered just over 20 years ago near York.

It's currently on display at the city's Dig Archaeology Museum because a new forensic examination of these ancient bones has revealed the truth about how this young man died.

Here's Malin Holst, osteoarchaeologist from the University of York.

The first thing we can see is that he probably had quite a poor childhood because he has stress lesions in his teeth that are indicative of malnutrition during childhood.

And then we can see that this individual trained quite physically during adolescence as a teenager.

He was very physically active, a bit like an athlete training which shaped the bones and also caused injuries in the skeleton that are related to overuse of the muscles.

Then during his life we also see that he's got inflammation on his legs as well.

Again that could be from kicks to the shins or related to conflict or battle.

And then the final sort of evidence we have are these bite marks here on the hips.

This is extraordinary.

These are punctures, holes in the bone.

These are bite marks left by the tooth of of an animal.

That's right, yes.

But you've never seen a physical injury like that before, a puncture, a bite through a bone.

No, I've been analysing skeletons for 30 years, but I've never seen anything like it.

So that was really unusual.

So what animal bit this gladiator?

What was he fighting when he died?

To answer that question, the archaeologists turned to a forensic anthropologist, Tim Thompson.

He specialises in revealing the story of a death that can be hidden inside a skeleton.

Here's Tim.

We came to the skeleton a little bit serendipitously, really.

We were doing a piece of work on this particular skeleton, creating 3D models of the remains for curation and for museums and those sorts of things.

And it was through that work that we started examining and looking at these bite marks and really kind of trying to understand a bit more about what caused them.

The new techniques and the technology that you're able to apply, how much has this moved on?

What did we have before in terms of what we could tell about these bones and what were you able to do?

Anthropology, forensic anthropology, bioarchaeology, it's a really visual subject.

You're looking at things all the time.

Now, traditionally, what we do is take photographs, but the problem with photographs is that these are 2D representations of 3D shapes and the body is fundamentally a 3D structure.

So what we were developing at the time when we started working on this was something called structured light scanning, and it's a method of take...

creating a 3D model of an object using light.

So what that 3D method allows you to do is it creates a genuine 3D model of your object.

Now that's great for looking at something like bite marks or trauma because it gives you information about depth and volume of the injury which you don't have from just looking at photographs.

Oh and that's key if you're trying to say how big of a tooth and therefore what animal.

That's exactly it.

It just gives you that little bit of extra information around that particularly when you're trying to do some comparative work because you know you could easily look at the jaw of I don't know like a lion, a tiger and a cheetah and it looks the same but actually they are different they're different shapes they're different sizes and this 3d method allows a much better and more nuanced understanding of that than just looking at photographs so what did you think when you saw these bite marks i think what really struck us was the size of them these were large bite marks they were deep in there as well you could you could really see the canines and incisors in in the wounds there and so for us that was what the puzzle was you know we are looking for something that is bigger than the usual things that we see in the UK forensic context.

But also what was interesting about gladiator individual was that we could tell that the bite marks were perimortem.

So they happen around the time of death.

Oh, fascinating.

So, so, what did you do?

You were trying to find out what sort of animal.

So, that was the really challenging bit.

We were working on a different project at this time.

We were looking at elephant birds from Madagascar, so completely different.

But we happened to be working with researchers based at London Zoom.

And it was really those kind of two ideas coming together, trying to understand what animals have caused this, working with the zoos that made us think, well, let's go and work with some zoos around the country and really start to analyze the carcasses that are left after animals are eating and that way we know absolutely for sure what animal is causing what marks them right so you you looked at those zoological collections and and what animals did you examine what did you find so we looked at all sorts we looked at lions and cheetahs and all sorts of big cats, big dogs.

But what you can tell about them is that because the jaws of these different animals are different, you know, the size of the teeth are different, the positioning of the teeth are all different, that's reflected in the bones that we look at as well.

So you can identify a species from the bite marks that are left behind on bone.

So what we concluded is that the bite marks in this particular individual match those of a lion, a big cat, but we think a lion.

What requires some thought though is that it's not in the usual places where you perhaps might expect the lion to attack.

So lions tend to attack around the neck and up on the shoulders.

But this damage was in the pelvis.

So what we think has happened is that this individual has been incapacitated and then the lions come along and bitten on the pelvis and dragged that individual away while they were incapacitated.

Wow, it's a brutal scene.

You know, we have this kind of scene in our heads from the gladiator movies of these beasts and these unfortunate people being kind of thrown into the ring with weapons.

But have we seen evidence of that before on a body?

Well, that's the interesting thing.

The evidence for this is limited.

There's written evidence and there's evidence in things like mosaics and perhaps other artefacts, but actually evidence from the body is really rare.

In fact, this is the first time we believe that we have found evidence of gladiator fighting big cats in that sort of context.

Now you've become involved in this Roman mystery.

Are there any other particular remains and skeletons that you would really like to investigate?

Now that we've identified for sure bite marks and we've identified what the species is, you know, and this is the first time that we've spotted this, but this can't be the first time that this has happened.

So what we would be fascinating is to perhaps go back and have a look at some of the other remains that have been identified as gladiators, and there aren't many, but perhaps reanalyse some of those now that we have this new information and this new approach to hand.

Thank you, Tim Thompson.

And on that rather bloody note, that is all we have time for this week.

You've been listening to BBC Inside Science with me, Victoria Gill.

The producers were Jonathan Blackwell, Debbie Kilbride and Claire Salisbury.

The technical production was by Chris Mather and Diffan Rose.

The show was made in Cardiff by BBC Wales and West.

And don't forget, if you have any science mysteries you'd like us to examine with our forensic techniques, you can get in touch with the programme by email at insidescience at bbc.co.uk.

Until next week, thanks for listening and bye-bye.