TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
September 10, 2025
The Great Lacerta Nebula
It is one of the largest nebulas on the sky why isn't it better known? Roughly the same angular size as the Andromeda Galaxy, the Great Lacerta Nebula can be found toward the constellation of the Lizard (Lacerta). The emission nebula is difficult to see with wide-field binoculars because it is so faint, but also usually difficult to see with a large telescope because it is so great in angle spanning about three degrees. The depth, breadth, waves, and beauty of the nebula cataloged as Sharpless 126 (Sh2-126) can best be seen and appreciated with a long duration camera exposure. The featured image is one such combined exposure – in this case taken over three nights in August through dark skies in Moses Lake, Washington, USA. The hydrogen gas in the Great Lacerta Nebula glows red because it is excited by light from the bright star 10 Lacertae, one of the bright blue stars just to the left of the red-glowing nebula's center. Most of the stars and nebula are about 1,200 light years distant.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Solar Storm Comes Out of Nowhere, Record Gamma Burst | S0 News
Sep.10.2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rx98n-q2yt0
https://spaceweathernews.com/
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
NASA to Share Details of New Perseverance Mars Rover Finding
Sep 10, 2025
NASA will host a news conference at 11 a.m. EDT Wednesday, to discuss the analysis of a rock sampled by the agency’s Perseverance Mars rover last year, which is the subject of a forthcoming science paper.
The agency previously announced this event as a teleconference.
Watch the news conference on NASA’s YouTube channel and the agency’s website. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.
Participants include:
Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy
NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya
Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington
Lindsay Hays, senior scientist for Mars Exploration, Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters
Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California
Joel Hurowitz, planetary scientist, Stony Brook University, New York
To ask questions by phone, members of the media must RSVP no later than one hour before the start of the event to: rexana.v.vizza@jpl.nasa.gov.
Media who registered for the earlier teleconference-only version of this event do not need to re-register. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online.
The sample, called “Sapphire Canyon,” was collected in July 2024 from a set of rocky outcrops on the edges of Neretva Vallis, a river valley carved by water rushing into Jezero Crater long ago.
Since landing in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater in February 2021, Perseverance has collected 30 samples.
The rover still has six empty sample tubes to fill, and it continues to collect detailed information about geologic targets that it hasn’t sampled by using its abrasion tool.
Among the rover’s science instruments is a weather station that provides environmental information for future human missions, as well as swatches of spacesuit material so that NASA can study how it fares on Mars.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-to-share-details-of-new-perseverance-mars-rover-finding-2/
https://www.nasa.gov/live/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-StZggK4hhA
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-observes-immense-stellar-jet-on-outskirts-of-our-milky-way/
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/addf4b
NASA’s Webb Observes Immense Stellar Jet on Outskirts of Our Milky Way
Sep 10, 2025
A blowtorch of seething gasses erupting from a volcanically growing monster star has been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
Stretching across 8 light-years, the length of the stellar eruption is approximately twice the distance between our Sun and the next nearest stars, the Alpha Centauri system.
The size and strength of this particular stellar jet, located in a nebula known as Sharpless 2-284 (Sh2-284 for short), qualifies it as rare, say researchers.
Streaking across space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour, the outflow resembles a double-bladed dueling lightsaber from the Star Wars films.
The central protostar, weighing as much as ten of our Suns, is located 15,000 light-years away in the outer reaches of our galaxy.
The Webb discovery was serendipitous. “We didn’t really know there was a massive star with this kind of super-jet out there before the observation.
Such a spectacular outflow of molecular hydrogen from a massive star is rare in other regions of our galaxy,” said lead author Yu Cheng of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
This unique class of stellar fireworks are highly collimated jets of plasma shooting out from newly forming stars.
Such jetted outflows are a star’s spectacular “birth announcement” to the universe. Some of the infalling gas building up around the central star is blasted along the star’s spin axis, likely under the influence of magnetic fields.
Today, while hundreds of protostellar jets have been observed, these are mainly from low-mass stars. These spindle-like jets offer clues into the nature of newly forming stars.
The energetics, narrowness, and evolutionary time scales of protostellar jets all serve to constrain models of the environment and physical properties of the young star powering the outflow.
“I was really surprised at the order, symmetry, and size of the jet when we first looked at it,” said co-author Jonathan Tan of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Its detection offers evidence that protostellar jets must scale up with the mass of the star powering them. The more massive the stellar engine propelling the plasma, the larger the gusher’s size.
The jet’s detailed filamentary structure, captured by Webb’s crisp resolution in infrared light, is evidence the jet is plowing into interstellar dust and gas. This creates separate knots, bow shocks, and linear chains.
The tips of the jet, lying in opposite directions, encapsulate the history of the star’s formation. “Originally the material was close into the star, but over 100,000 years the tips were propagating out, and then the stuff behind is a younger outflow,” said Tan.
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Outlier
At nearly twice the distance from the galactic center as our Sun, the host proto-cluster that’s home to the voracious jet is on the periphery of our Milky Way galaxy.
Within the cluster, a few hundred stars are still forming. Being in the galactic hinterlands means the stars are deficient in heavier elements beyond hydrogen and helium.
This is measured as metallicity, which gradually increases over cosmic time as each passing stellar generation expels end products of nuclear fusion through winds and supernovae.
The low metallicity of Sh2-284 is a reflection of its relatively pristine nature, making it a local analog for the environments in the early universe that were also deficient in heavier elements.
“Massive stars, like the one found inside this cluster, have very important influences on the evolution of galaxies.
Our discovery is shedding light on the formation mechanism of massive stars in low metallicity environments, so we can use this massive star as a laboratory to study what was going on in earlier cosmic history,” said Cheng.
Unrolling Stellar Tapestry
Stellar jets, which are powered by the gravitational energy released as a star grows in mass, encode the formation history of the protostar.
“Webb’s new images are telling us that the formation of massive stars in such environments could proceed via a relatively stable disk around the star that is expected in theoretical models of star formation known as core accretion,” said Tan.
“Once we found a massive star launching these jets, we realized we could use the Webb observations to test theories of massive star formation. We developed new theoretical core accretion models that were fit to the data, to basically tell us what kind of star is in the center.
These models imply that the star is about 10 times the mass of the Sun and is still growing and has been powering this outflow.”
For more than 30 years, astronomers have disagreed about how massive stars form. Some think a massive star requires a very chaotic process, called competitive accretion.
In the competitive accretion model, material falls in from many different directions so that the orientation of the disk changes over time.
The outflow is launched perpendicularly, above and below the disk, and so would also appear to twist and turn in different directions.
“However, what we’ve seen here, because we’ve got the whole history – a tapestry of the story – is that the opposite sides of the jets are nearly 180 degrees apart from each other.
That tells us that this central disk is held steady and validates a prediction of the core accretion theory,” said Tan.
Where there’s one massive star, there could be others in this outer frontier of the Milky Way. Other massive stars may not yet have reached the point of firing off Roman-candle-style outflows.
Data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, also presented in this study, has found another dense stellar core that could be in an earlier stage of construction.
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NASA Mars Curiosity Rover
Sol 4647: Right Navigation Camera, Cylindrical Projection
September 9, 2025
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity took 31 images in Gale Crater using its mast-mounted Right Navigation Camera (Navcam) to create this mosaic.
The seam-corrected mosaic provides a 360-degree cylindrical projection panorama of the Martian surface centered at 98 degrees azimuth (measured clockwise from north).
Curiosity took the images on September 02, 2025, Sol 4647 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission at drive 2268, site number 118.
The local mean solar time for the image exposures was from 2 PM to 3 PM. Each Navcam image has a 45 degree field of view.
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/sol-4647-right-navigation-camera-cylindrical-projection/
Sol 4650: Right Navigation Camera, Cylindrical Projection
September 9, 2025
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity took 31 images in Gale Crater using its mast-mounted Right Navigation Camera (Navcam) to create this mosaic.
The seam-corrected mosaic provides a 360-degree cylindrical projection panorama of the Martian surface centered at 77 degrees azimuth (measured clockwise from north).
Curiosity took the images on September 05, 2025, Sol 4650 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission at drive 2304, site number 118.
The local mean solar time for the image exposures was 2 PM. Each Navcam image has a 45 degree field of view.
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/sol-4650-right-navigation-camera-cylindrical-projection/
Sol 4653: Right Navigation Camera, Cylindrical Projection
September 9, 2025
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity took 31 images in Gale Crater using its mast-mounted Right Navigation Camera (Navcam) to create this mosaic.
The seam-corrected mosaic provides a 360-degree cylindrical projection panorama of the Martian surface centered at 185 degrees azimuth (measured clockwise from north).
Curiosity took the images on September 08, 2025, Sol 4653 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission at drive 2466, site number 118.
The local mean solar time for the image exposures was 3 PM. Each Navcam image has a 45 degree field of view.
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/sol-4653-right-navigation-camera-cylindrical-projection/
Roscosmos Progress 91 Undocked from Space Station
September 9, 2025
The Zvezda service module’s rear port opened up today after the undocking and departure of the trash-filled Progress 91 cargo craft completing a six-and-a-half-month stay at the International Space Station.
The vacant port now awaits the arrival of the Progress 93 cargo craft set to launch from Kazakhstan at 11:54 a.m. EDT on Thursday.
The new Progress, from Roscosmos and packed with 2.8 tons of cargo, is set to dock to Zvezda at 1:27 p.m. on Saturday following its automated approach and rendezvous maneuvers resupplying the Expedition 73 crew.
NASA+ will begin its live launch broadcast at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday followed by docking coverage beginning at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday.
Just over a day later, Northrop Grumman’s expanded Cygnus XL cargo craft will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida at 6:11 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 14. Cygnus XL will orbit Earth for two-and-a-half-days before catching up to the orbital outpost.
NASA Flight Engineers Jonny Kim and Zena Cardman will be at the controls of the Canadarm2 robotic arm ready to capture the Cygnus when it reaches a point about 10 meters away from the space station.
Engineers on the ground will then take over and remotely command Canadarm2 to maneuver Cygnus in its grips toward the Unity module’s Earth-facing port where the cargo craft will be installed.
Kim and Cardman spent Tuesday training for the arrival Cygnus XL, first reviewing its mission profile and the tools and procedures they will use during the spacecraft’s approach and rendezvous.
Second, they practiced on a computer the robotic maneuvers and commanding techniques necessary to grapple Cygnus when it reaches its capture point near the orbital outpost.
Kim and Cardman will be on duty when Cygnus arrives for its capture at 6:35 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 17, loaded with over 11,000 pounds of new science and supplies.
Station flight engineers Mike Fincke of NASA and Kimiya Yui of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) focused on lab hardware on Tuesday checking electronics equipment and readying scientific gear for deployment.
Fincke spent his shift inside the Columbus laboratory module testing power outlets, activating a laptop computer, and connecting cable.
Yui worked in the Kibo laboratory module installing CubeSats inside a small satellite deployer that will soon be placed outside the space station.
The shoebox-sized satellites will be deployed into Earth orbit for educational, public, and private research.
Researchers from around the world continue studying how crew members adapt their sense of balance and orientation in microgravity to train new crews for future space missions.
Station Commander Sergey Ryzhikov and Flight Engineer Alexey Zubritsky took turns wearing electrodes and virtual reality glasses while responding to computer-controlled visual stimuli.
The data collected will help researchers track and measure space-caused changes to a crew member’s vestibular system, or sensory system.
Roscosmos Flight Engineer Oleg Platonov began his shift on orbital plumbing maintenance before servicing electronics hardware in the Zarya module.
He wrapped up his day inside the Zvezda service module refilling the Elektron oxygen generator.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/09/09/cargo-craft-departs-before-two-resupply-spacecraft-launch/
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/09/09/roscosmos-progress-91-undocked-from-space-station/
NASA’s PExT, Wideband Space Communications Demo Begins Commissioning
September 9, 2025
Payload commissioning is underway for NASA’s PExT (Polylingual Experimental Terminal), a first-of-its-kind space communications demonstration designed to allow spacecraft to communicate with government and commercial networks.
After launching on July 23, York Space Systems established first contact with their Bard satellite, the host spacecraft for PExT, and began bus commissioning on schedule.
Over the next four weeks, the team verified the satellite’s ability to send commands and receive data. It confirmed key systems, such as the flight computers and navigation controls, are functioning as expected.
Commissioning of the Bard satellite is complete, and PExT payload commissioning will continue through September.
As a technology demonstration, PExT aims to showcase the power of wideband terminals, an emerging technology that uses software-defined radios to dynamically switch between frequencies while transmitting data in space.
Developed by NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Program and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the PExT payload matured from concept to design to launch on budget in just over two and a half years.
Wideband terminals could allow future missions to communicate seamlessly across multiple networks, a major benefit as NASA continues to commercialize space communications services.
In the past, agency missions relied on NASA’s TDRS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite) system to provide communication links between the ground and satellites in near-Earth orbit.
However, in November 2024, the agency announced future missions will acquire their near-Earth relay services from commercial providers.
The agency’s existing infrastructure was not designed for interoperability between government and commercial networks, so NASA now is working with industry to develop wideband technology to provide interoperability for new missions.
With this new technology, missions could “roam” seamlessly between government and commercial networks for the first time, just as cell phones jump between networks on Earth without service interruption.
Throughout the initial stages of the demonstration, PExT will attempt to send data through space while roaming between NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite fleet, the SES Space & Defense O3b mPOWER network, and Boeing’s High Capacity services on Viasat’s Global Xpress network.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/smallsatellites/2025/09/09/nasas-pext-wideband-space-communications-demo-begins-commissioning/
https://www.nasa.gov/mission/pext/
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasa-study-celestial-accident-sheds-light-on-jupiter-saturn-riddle/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09369-1
NASA Study: Celestial ‘Accident’ Sheds Light on Jupiter, Saturn Riddle
Sep 09, 2025
An unusual cosmic object is helping scientists better understand the chemistry hidden deep in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres — and potentially those of exoplanets.
Why has silicon, one of the most common elements in the universe, gone largely undetected in the atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, and gas planets like them orbiting other stars?
A new study using observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope sheds light on this question by focusing on a peculiar object that astronomers discovered by chance in 2020 and called “The Accident.”
The Accident is a brown dwarf, a ball of gas that’s not quite a planet and not quite a star. Even among its already hard-to-classify peers, The Accident has a perplexing mix of physical features, some of which have been previously seen in only young brown dwarfs and others seen only in ancient ones.
Because of those features, it slipped past typical detection methods before being discovered five years ago by a citizen scientist participating in Backyard Worlds: Planet 9.
The program lets people around the globe look for new discoveries in data from NASA’s now-retired NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer), which was managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
The Accident is so faint and odd that researchers needed NASA’s most powerful space observatory, Webb, to study its atmosphere. Among several surprises, they found evidence of a molecule they couldn’t initially identify.
It turned out to be a simple silicon molecule called silane (SiH4). Researchers have long expected — but been unable — to find silane not only in our solar system’s gas giants, but also in the thousands of atmospheres belonging to brown dwarfs and to the gas giants orbiting other stars.
The Accident is the first such object where this molecule has been identified.
Scientists are fairly confident that silicon exists in Jupiter and Saturn’s atmospheres but that it is hidden. Bound to oxygen, silicon forms oxides such as quartz that can seed clouds on hot gas giants, bearing a resemblance to dust storms on Earth.
On cooler gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, these types of clouds would sink far beneath lighter layers of water vapor and ammonia clouds, until any silicon-containing molecules are deep in the atmosphere, invisible even to the spacecraft that have studied those two planets up close.
Some researchers have also posited that lighter molecules of silicon, like silane, should be found higher up in these atmospheric layers, left behind like traces of flour on a baker’s table.
That such molecules haven’t appeared anywhere except in a single, peculiar brown dwarf suggests something about the chemistry occurring in these environments.
“Sometimes it’s the extreme objects that help us understand what’s happening in the average ones,” said Faherty, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and lead author on the new study.
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Happy accident
Located about 50 light-years from Earth, The Accident likely formed 10 billion to 12 billion years ago, making it one of the oldest brown dwarfs ever discovered.
The universe is about 14 billion years old, and at the time that The Accident developed, the cosmos contained mostly hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of other elements, including silicon.
Over eons, elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen forged in the cores of stars, so planets and stars that formed more recently possess more of those elements.
Webb’s observations of The Accident confirm that silane can form in brown dwarf and planetary atmospheres.
The fact that silane seems to be missing in other brown dwarfs and gas giant planets suggests that when oxygen is available, it bonds with silicon at such a high rate and so easily, virtually no silicon is left over to bond with hydrogen and form silane.
So why is silane in The Accident? The study authors surmise it is because far less oxygen was present in the universe when the ancient brown dwarf formed, resulting in less oxygen in its atmosphere to gobble up all the silicon.
The available silicon would have bonded with hydrogen instead, resulting in silane.
“We weren’t looking to solve a mystery about Jupiter and Saturn with these observations,” said JPL’s Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission, which was later repurposed as NEOWISE.
“A brown dwarf is a ball of gas like a star, but without an internal fusion reactor, it gets cooler and cooler, with an atmosphere like that of gas giant planets. We wanted to see why this brown dwarf is so odd, but we weren’t expecting silane.
The universe continues to surprise us.”
Brown dwarfs are often easier to study than gas giant exoplanets because the light from a faraway planet is typically drowned out by the star it orbits, while brown dwarfs generally fly solo.
And the lessons learned from these objects extend to all kinds of planets, including ones outside our solar system that might feature potential signs of habitability.
“To be clear, we’re not finding life on brown dwarfs,” said Faherty.
“But at a high level, by studying all of this variety and complexity in planetary atmospheres, we’re setting up the scientists who are one day going to have to do this kind of chemical analysis for rocky, potentially Earth-like planets.
It might not specifically involve silicon, but they’re going to get data that is complicated and confusing and doesn’t fit their models, just like we are. They’ll have to parse all those complexities if they want to answer those big questions.”
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Extreme Negative Polarization of 3I/ATLAS
September 10, 2025
A new study of 3I/ATLAS (reported here) establishes this interstellar object as uniquely distinct in its polarization properties from solar system bodies as well as the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov.
Light is a wave consisting of a coupled oscillating electric and magnetic fields which are orthogonal to each other in a plane that is perpendicular to the direction of propagation of the wave (in vacuum).
The polarization of the wave corresponds to different modes of field oscillations. For linear polarization, the electric and magnetic fields oscillate along a single direction, whereas for circular polarization — the fields rotate at a constant rate in their plane as the wave travels, either in the right-hand or in the left-hand direction.
The level of polarization displayed by an object which scatters sunlight like 3I/ATLAS, reflects asymmetries in its global shape or its corpuscular composition.
The polarization depends on the phase angle at which the 3I/ATLAS is observed, namely the angle between the Sun-3I/ATLAS axis and the 3I/ATLAS-observer axis.
This semester, I am teaching these fundamental principles about radiation and matter in “Radiative Processes in Astrophysics,” the only mandatory course for PhD students in the Harvard Astronomy department.
3I/ATLAS is characterized by an extremely deep and narrow negative polarization of −2.77 percent at a phase angle of 6.41 degrees with displays a low inversion angle, where the polarization changes sign, of 17.05 degrees.
This polarimetric behavior is significantly different from all known comets, either interstellar or those bound to the Solar System, not fitting into either the high or low-polarization comet categories.
The combination of low inversion angle and extreme negative polarization is unprecedented among comets and asteroids, marking 3I/ATLAS the first object known with such polarimetric behavior and representing a previously unobserved population.
This polarization anomaly highlights the fact that 3I/ATLAS is different from previous interstellar objects.
The first interstellar object 1I/`Oumuamua displayed no signs of gas or dust around it but nevertheless exhibited non-gravitational acceleration. The second interstellar object 2I/Borisov behaved like a familiar comet.
In addition to this new anomaly, 3I/ATLAS displayed a number of other anomalies that make it unique, leaving the option of a technological origin for it as a viable alternative:
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The retrograde trajectory of 3I/ATLAS is aligned with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the Sun to within 5 degrees, with a chance probability of 1 in 500 (as discussed here). This brings 3I/ATLAS within several tens of millions of kilometers from Mars, Venus and Jupiter.
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The estimated diameter of the nucleus of 3I/ATLAS is up to 46 kilometers (as derived here). On October 3, the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter will be able to image 3I/ATLAS with a pixel resolution of 30 kilometers, providing a tight limit on the diameter of its nucleus.
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When 3I/ATLAS was at a heliocentric distance of 3–4.5 times the Earth-Sun separation, it featured a glow which extended towards the Sun and not in the opposite direction. This feature of an anti-tail was never observed before for comets (as discussed here).
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The plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS is composed primarily of carbon dioxide — CO2 (87% by mass) with traces of carbon monoxide — CO (9%), and water — H2O (most of the remaining 4%), as derived here. It also features nickel without iron (as known to exist in industrially-produced nickel alloys) and cyanide, both rising sharply with decreasing heliocentric distance (as reported here).
Given these unprecedented anomalies, we must stay open-minded regarding the nature of 3I/ATLAS until we get better data.
Once the HiRISE camera gets a close-up image of 3I/ATLAS on October 3, 2025, its brightest pixel will tightly constrain the nucleus diameter.
At that time, I will update the rank I assigned to 3I/ATLAS on the so-called “Loeb Scale,” defined in two recent papers (available here and here). Science is exciting because it resembles a detective story. Stay tuned.
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/extreme-negative-polarization-of-3i-atlas-75d01d13d5c7
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05181
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/explaining-the-anomalous-anti-tail-of-3i-atlas-009ff1059f71
Crews Knock Down Building at ORNL, Opening Space to Demolish Others Nearby
September 9, 2025
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) and contractor UCOR have completed demolition of another aging, contaminated structure at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the latest in a line of projects steadily removing risks and transforming the heart of the site to enable future modernization.
Demolition of Building 3003 began in June and workers finished removing debris from the project in recent weeks.
Removal of the facility cleared 10,000 square feet of space essential to support future teardowns of neighboring facilities.
Heavy equipment operators now have room necessary to demolish the adjacent Building 3002 and Building 3018, a 200-foot-tall stack.
“While finishing up deactivation and making our way to demolition start, challenges would arise, but all were faced with teamwork and problem-solving mindsets,” said UCOR ORNL Area Cleanup Project Manager Zachary Dew.
“The skill of our craft and strength of our partnerships provided us with a clear path to success. I’m thankful to all involved for their part in making this project a success.”
Located on a small footprint in a heavily congested area on a hilltop, Building 3003 presented many challenges during demolition.
To overcome spatial constraints, OREM and UCOR developed a plan to use the nearby footprint of the former Low Intensity Test Reactor.
Workers built a ramp connecting the two areas and used the footprint to reduce the size of debris and load 80 shipments of that waste for disposal without further congesting the active demolition site.
Built in 1943, Building 3003 contained a fan house and provided ventilation for the Graphite Reactor. The fan house drew air from the reactor through underground ducts and released it through the stack.
Constructed in only nine months, the Graphite Reactor achieved criticality in 1943, and it was the world’s first continuously operating nuclear reactor.
Its initial mission involved showing plutonium could be extracted from irradiated uranium. After the Manhattan Project, it supported nuclear energy and medical research missions.
The Graphite Reactor was shut down in 1963, and it was designated a national historic landmark in 1965.
Today, the facility is part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. Taking down Building 3003 has removed risks near the historic facility, opened land for reuse and enhanced access for park visitors.
Planning and preparation are ongoing for the demolition of the two remaining Graphite Reactor support facilities. Teardown of Building 3002 and Building 3018 will occur in coming years.
https://www.energy.gov/em/articles/crews-knock-down-building-ornl-opening-space-demolish-others-nearby
https://www.ornl.gov/content/graphite-reactor
https://www.nps.gov/mapr/planyourvisit/oakridge-tn.htm