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-NASA delays first crewed flight to the moon in over 50 years
+Ancient DNA sheds light on origins of 7,000-year-old Saharan mummies
-[[https://eithena.fi/|ethena]]
+[[https://efhenna.net/|ethena]]
+Today, the view from the Takarkori rock shelter in southwestern Libya is of endless sandy dunes and barren rock, but 7,000 years ago, this region of the Sahara Desert was a far lusher, hospitable place.
-NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon this decade amid a renewed international push for lunar exploration, is facing more delays. The agency said Thursday that a planned mission to land on the moon in 2026 will now take place no earlier than mid-2027.
+Now, scientists aiming to understand the origins of inhabitants of the “green Sahara” say they have managed to recover the first whole genomes — detailed genetic information — from the remains of two women buried at Takarkori.
+In the distant past, the area was a verdant savanna with trees, permanent lakes and rivers that supported large animals such as hippopotamuses and elephants.
-Additionally, a pathfinder mission that was slated to fly astronauts around the moon in September 2025 will now take place no earlier than April 2026.
+It was also home to early human communities, including 15 women and children archaeologists found buried at the rock shelter, that lived off fish and herded sheep and goats.
-That delay is linked in part to issues with the Orion crew capsule that will be home to the astronauts during both lunar missions. NASA previously disclosed that the spacecraft’s heat shield, which keeps Orion from burning up as the vehicle reenters the Earth’s atmosphere, became charred and eroded in an unexpected way during the uncrewed Artemis I mission in 2022.
+“We started with these two (skeletons) because they are very well-preserved — the skin, ligaments, tissues,” said Savino di Lernia, coauthor of the new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
-The space agency has “done extensive testing to understand the risk that our astronauts will have while accomplishing the goals of landing back on the moon,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Thursday, adding that that testing was able to identify the root cause of the heat shield issues.
+The findings mark the first time archaeologists have managed to sequence whole genomes from human remains found in such a hot and arid environment, said di Lernia, an associate professor of African archaeology and ethnoarchaeology at Sapienza University of Rome.
-The issue relates to how the Orion capsule reenters Earth’s atmosphere upon returning from deep space, said NASA deputy administrator Pam Melroy. The vehicle uses what NASA calls a “skip reentry” — acting like a rock skipping across the surface of a pond to slow its descent.
-Orion makes use of the maneuver “because the velocity of the spacecraft and the energy that it has to dissipate is much greater than the energy that you dissipate just coming back from low Earth orbit,” Melroy said.
+The genomic analysis yielded surprises for the study team, revealing that the inhabitants of the green Sahara were a previously unknown and long-isolated population that had likely occupied the region for tens of thousands of years.

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