Closing in on launch: NASA’s gold-mirrored, $8 billion Webb Space Telescope

the first stars and galaxies were forming. It will give scientists the deepest look into space and back in time. Cost overruns led to budget reviews, battles in Congress, near-death experiences, recrimination and, finally, to a reconfigured budget and timetable that lawmakers approved. The project devoured NASA money that might have gone to other science endeavors. It became known as the telescope that ate astronomy. The Webb, which includes major contributions from the Canadian and European space agencies, has long been seen as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The latter is still working fabulously but getting long in the tooth. There have been rumors that the Trump administration could somehow gin up a Hubble repair mission with astronauts on a new shuttle-like spacecraft, but officials at NASA Goddard say they haven’t been asked to plan for anything like that. The Webb is quite different from the Hubble, starting with the fact that it’s much bigger. The Hubble has a 2.4-meter mirror, but the Webb has 18 hexagonal mirrors that collectively are 6.5 meters — more than 21 feet — in diameter. It can collect seven times as much starlight. The new telescope can observe the universe in infrared wavelengths of light that are inaccessible to the Hubble. In deep space, shaded from the sun, the Webb is designed to operate under extremely cold conditions. That’s necessary for infrared astronomy because otherwise the heat from its instruments would block out the faint light from distant objects. As things turned out, the Webb’s problems with schedule may have been fortuitous. The original goal was to look at very faint objects in deepest space — the very first stars and galaxies, so far away that their light, emitted about 13.7 billion years ago, is only now reaching our solar system. But the Webb may play a key role in the search for habitable worlds that are relatively nearby, orbiting stars in our own galactic neighborhood. The very first “exoplanet” — a planet orbiting another star — was discovered 22 years ago, right about the time Mather began working on the Webb. Thousands of exoplanets have been found since. There’s no way for the Webb or any other current telescope to see these planets directly, because they’re too close to the parent star. But as they transit the star — passing across the face of the star as seen from the telescope

A NASA technician works on the primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in October 2018. The telescope will be able to detect light from the earliest stars and galaxies and to search for evidence that distant planets have atmospheres conducive to life. (NASA)
The world’s most expensive telescope is parked for the moment in Greenbelt, Md., shrouded in a protective tent at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. In just two years, this long-delayed, $8 billion, cosmos-penetrating instrument is supposed to be nearly a million miles from Earth.
If it works, the James Webb Space Telescope will collect the oldest light in the universe, emitted soon after the big bang, when the first stars lit up and the first galaxies began to form. It will study black holes lurking at the center of galaxies. It will scrutinize the light from planets around distant stars and look for atmospheres you’d expect to see on worlds rioting with life.
But that’s only after an epic journey. It’s not a straight shot from the Washington suburbs to space.
The telescope first must be sealed in a climate-controlled container. Then, sometime in late March or early April, a truck will haul it very slowly and gently in the dead of night along a partially closed Capital Beltway. A lead car will watch for road obstacles and potholes.
Arriving at Joint Base Andrews, the Webb should slide, barely, into the cargo hold of a C-5C military transport plane.
An artist's illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope. The kite-shaped object beneath the telescope's gold-plated mirror is a sunshield to protect the Webb's instruments. (Northrop Grumman)
Then comes a flight to Houston, to the NASA Johnson Space Center, where it will be tested in a vacuum chamber that will simulate the environment of deep space. From Houston it will be flown to Los Angeles, to a facility run by the project’s primary contractor, Northrop Grumman, where it will be mated with its sunshield and navigational hardware.
Then comes a boat ride, one that will carry the telescope down the southwestern coast of North America and through the Panama Canal to French Guiana. That’s where, in October 2018, it will be blasted into space atop a European Ariane rocket — a quarter-century after the Webb was conceived.
What could go wrong?
“It’s wonderful and terrifying,” says astronomer Heidi Hammel of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, one of six scientists guaranteed observing time with the instrument. “The terrifying part comes because we know that this is rocket science for real, we are taking our fabulous telescope — it’s a beautiful machine — and we’re going to put it on a rocket ship and light the fuse.”
Astronomers have a complicated and anguished relationship with the Webb. It’s amazing. It’s also wildly expensive. And it was supposed to be in space years ago.
John Mather, a Nobel laureate who is the senior project scientist, began working on it in 1995. He and his team had to achieve a long list of innovations to get the Webb built — things like the gold-covered mirrors, the sunshield and the means of keeping everything very cold.
“This job was just so hard, and when you’re at the beginning you don’t have the imagination to see how hard it is. No one had appreciated the difficulty of the test program,” he said this week.
The James Webb Space Telescope, now at NASA Goddard in Greenbelt, Md., is designed to gather light emitted early in the history of the universe, some 13.7 billion years ago, when the first stars and galaxies were forming. It will give scientists the deepest look into space and back in time.
Cost overruns led to budget reviews, battles in Congress, near-death experiences, recrimination and, finally, to a reconfigured budget and timetable that lawmakers approved. The project devoured NASA money that might have gone to other science endeavors. It became known as the telescope that ate astronomy.
The Webb, which includes major contributions from the Canadian and European space agencies, has long been seen as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The latter is still working fabulously but getting long in the tooth.
There have been rumors that the Trump administration could somehow gin up a Hubble repair mission with astronauts on a new shuttle-like spacecraft, but officials at NASA Goddard say they haven’t been asked to plan for anything like that.
The Webb is quite different from the Hubble, starting with the fact that it’s much bigger. The Hubble has a 2.4-meter mirror, but the Webb has 18 hexagonal mirrors that collectively are 6.5 meters — more than 21 feet — in diameter. It can collect seven times as much starlight.
The new telescope can observe the universe in infrared wavelengths of light that are inaccessible to the Hubble. In deep space, shaded from the sun, the Webb is designed to operate under extremely cold conditions. That’s necessary for infrared astronomy because otherwise the heat from its instruments would block out the faint light from distant objects.
As things turned out, the Webb’s problems with schedule may have been fortuitous.
The original goal was to look at very faint objects in deepest space — the very first stars and galaxies, so far away that their light, emitted about 13.7 billion years ago, is only now reaching our solar system. But the Webb may play a key role in the search for habitable worlds that are relatively nearby, orbiting stars in our own galactic neighborhood.
The very first “exoplanet” — a planet orbiting another star — was discovered 22 years ago, right about the time Mather began working on the Webb. Thousands of exoplanets have been found since.
Earlier this week, astronomers announced the remarkable discovery of a system with seven Earth-size planets around a star named Trappist 1, some 39 light-years away. Several have orbits that might allow water, if present, to be liquid at the surface.
There’s no way for the Webb or any other current telescope to see these planets directly, because they’re too close to the parent star. But as they transit the star — passing across the face of the star as seen from the telescope — the starlight will dim slightly. That’s how they were discovered.
An atmosphere around a planet will skew the wavelengths of the starlight. Astronomers can then use spectroscopy to discern which kinds of molecules make up the exoplanet atmosphere.
The Hubble has looked at the Trappist system and already has determined that the planets are probably rocky rather than gaseous like Jupiter or Saturn. But the Webb has sophistication the Hubble lacks. The Webb can detect the clear signatures of atmospheres containing water, ozone, oxygen, methane and other molecules. That could provide compelling evidence of a habitable planet.
As astrophysicist Michelle Thaller of NASA points out, while it wouldn’t be the same thing as direct detection of life, it would be a major achievement for the still-young scientific field known as astrobiology.
Closer to home, the Webb’s prime viewing targets include the Great Red Spot of Jupiter, Saturn’s intriguing moon Titan, the dwarf planet Pluto and its moon Charon, plus the gaggle of “trans-Neptunian objects” way out in the exurbs of the solar system — little-known worlds such as Sedna, Quaoar and Makemake.
But first the telescope, which is supposed to begin observing in April 2019, has to function as planned. It would be hard to repair something parked at L2, the Webb’s destination point in space, which is 930,000 miles from Earth on the opposite side of our planet from the sun.
“I can tell you that we’re doing what we need to do to make sure that it’ll work,” Mather said. “You test. And test and test.”
And look for potholes along the way — literally.


How do the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes compare?

The Hubble space telescope was launched in 1990 and is providing the world with dazzling images of the universe as well as creating breakthroughs in astrophysics.  It is nearing the end of its usable life and is set to be replaced by the James Webb space telescope, which is bigger and will be located in a darker part of space than Hubble, enabling it to capture images of the faintest galaxies.  It will also be able to observe the universe in infrared wavelengths of light, which the Hubble can't. Exclude any documents not mentioning images.

Find information online to answer this space-related question.

New Horizons has gone to Pluto, and now comes the Great Beyond

NASA’s New Horizons has sent back the first in a series of the sharpest views of Pluto it obtained during its July flyby – and the best close-ups of Pluto that humans may see for decades.
The big encounter with Pluto is over. The void is dead ahead.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is hurtling through the Kuiper Belt, a cold, dark realm of tiny, icy objects and the occasional dwarf planet such as Pluto. The spacecraft’s science instruments are detecting plasma and dust, but its cameras have been turned off. For the moment, there’s nothing to see and not much to do other than measure the loneliness of deep space.
New Horizons has a bit of an existential, or perhaps astronomical, dilemma: After you pass Pluto, there’s a whole lot of nothing.
The spacecraft can maneuver slightly, but whatever it is going to look at next has to be more or less directly straight ahead. A couple of weeks ago, the New Horizons team decided to aim the spacecraft at  a small object, roughly 28 miles in diameter and known as 2014 MU69. The spacecraft will fly past it on Jan. 1, 2019.
MU69 was discovered last year by the Hubble Space Telescope, which was looking for something, anything, that might be in the path of New Horizons. The Hubble found five objects, but MU69 was the most inviting target, requiring the least amount of fuel.

New Horizons still has to surmount a bureaucratic obstacle. NASA hasn’t yet approved an “extended mission” for the spacecraft. The New Horizons team has until spring to put together a proposal that lays out what an extended mission would cost. NASA would consult with the broader science community before signing off on the extension.
In some respects, it seems like an easy decision: New Horizons is a healthy spacecraft. It passed through the Pluto system without any nasty collisions with damaging particles, and it has a radioactive power source that can keep it operational for a couple of decades at least. It has half a tank of propellant.
“We don’t have to buy any rocket, we don’t have to fly across 3 billion miles of space, we don’t have to build a spacecraft,” said the team leader, planetary scientist Alan Stern.
The scientific case for closely studying MU69 is that it’s different from Pluto, much smaller, a “cold, classical” Kuiper Belt object that is likely to have formed 4.6 billion years ago, at the birth of the solar system. “It is a completely new family of object,” said project scientist Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, the mission headquarters.
On the other hand: This thing isn’t Pluto. It’s small. It will be hard to obtain images as dramatic as the ones New Horizons got when it buzzed within 7,800 miles of Pluto’s surface.
Project manager Glen Fountain said his team, which he says includes the best navigators in the world, can probably get the spacecraft within 15,000 miles of the target — and maybe much closer.
Images from some of the space agency’s explorations of the solar system.
But because MU69 was just discovered, there’s almost no data about its orbit. If you’re Fountain, the questions are: Where is it, exactly? And where will it be a day from now? This is known as the “ephemeris” data. New Horizons can’t be joysticked in real time because it’s so far away — a one-way message to the spacecraft, which is 3 billion miles from Earth, currently takes about 4.5 hours even at the speed of light, and MU69 is another billion miles farther.
The location uncertainty was a factor during the Pluto encounter, too.
“We really didn’t know where the object was that well, and we only had one chance,” Fountain said.
New Horizons skimmed Pluto 90 seconds earlier than expected and about 50 miles closer to the surface, said Mission Operations manager Alice Bowman. But that was within the margin of error — still a huge success, particularly given a computer glitch 10 days earlier and all the other things that might have derailed the mission.
“I am still amazed and in awe of what we accomplished as a team. In some ways, it’s hard to digest it all,” Bowman wrote last week in an e-mail. “Maybe it’s because taking all those small, continued steps over these past years became a matter of course and when those last steps were taken, it was hard to fully comprehend the magnitude of what we’d done.”
After Pluto, a spacecraft learns what space is really like: big and mostly empty.
Mike Brown, the California Institute of Technology astronomer who has discovered a number of dwarf planets in the outer solar system, has to admit that it’s a rarefied realm: “Each one of them is further away from the next cool thing than the Earth is from Jupiter. It is a vast, almost completely empty region.”
We know, extrapolating from the observations of the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope, that there are probably tens of billions of exoplanets orbiting stars in our galaxy (not to mention all the planets in the billions of other galaxies in the known universe). But space is not designed for ease of human travel.
The nearest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri, and it’s about 25 trillion miles away. If New Horizons were racing directly toward Proxima Centauri, it wouldn’t get there for tens of thousands of years.
The more plausible targets for direct robotic exploration are closer to home. One possibility, someday, is Eris, a dwarf planet discovered by Brown and colleagues in 2005. It’s a virtual Pluto twin. New Horizons can’t go to Eris, because Eris is on the other side of our solar system; it’s also currently three times as far from Earth as Pluto is. This might be a better mission for the next century, when Eris’s eccentric orbit will have brought it much closer.
Brown says a better target might be another of his discoveries: Quaoar, a 700-mile-diameter object that’s not much farther from the sun than Pluto.
Or perhaps a probe will someday go to an as-yet-undiscovered planet.
“There’s probably a lot of objects out there, and I think it’s probably just a matter of time before we find something similar in size to Pluto or possibly bigger,” said John Grunsfeld, the astronomer-astronaut and Hubble repairman who now is head of science for NASA.
“The idea that there’s a large object out there is rattling around the community,” Brown said.
New Horizons cannot go search for mystery planets. It’s not that kind of probe. Its telescope gives it a narrow gaze — “like looking down a straw,” said Fountain, the project manager.
There is, however, one major feat that New Horizons has yet to accomplish, other than taking the plasma and dust measurements and steering itself toward MU69. It still has to tell Earth exactly what it saw at Pluto.
The team leaders keep reminding everyone that New Horizons is carrying a trove of data, including high-resolution imagery, that has yet to return home. The big Pluto download won’t be finished until about the end of October 2016. Transmission rates are slow, and will get even slower, as the distant spacecraft gets more distant.
Read more:
After a wait, spacecraft confirms close pass of Pluto. Sees craters and mounds.
New Horizons spots ice flows on Pluto’s surface
The heroes and the secrets of the Pluto mission


These retro postcards show where the Hubble has taken us in 25 years

Within the Sea Monster it’s thought that the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1073 resembles our own Milky Way. (Open University) The Hubble Space Telescope, which turned 25 on Friday, doesn't travel through space. It's in a fairly low orbit -- 353 miles high, just around 100 miles higher than the space station -- and never leaves Earth's side. But over the past quarter of a century, its increasingly impressive resolution has brought us to strange new places. [NASA unveils 25th anniversary image for the Hubble: Celestial fireworks in a bed of new stars] The Hubble’s color infrared composite image from the Milky Way’s center revealed a new population of massive stars. (Open University) The Open University In a few million years, scientists estimate that the Red Rectangle nebula will actually bloom into a shell of diffuse gas, known as a planetary nebula. (Open University) Sometimes we even get to enjoy a 3-D birds-eye view: This visualization provides a three-dimensional perspective on Hubble's 25th anniversary image of the nebula Gum 29 with the star cluster Westerlund 2 at its core. The Sombrero galaxy is one of the biggest objects in its cluster, equivalent to 800 billion suns. (Open University) The online postcards aren't for sale, unfortunately, but the puns are pretty delightful: The entire Cone Nebula (made of gas and dust) is seven light-years long. (Open University) The globular cluster of stars known as Messier54 was discovered by astronomer Charles Messier way back in 1778. (Open University) Want more Hubble? Give these a click: Still sharp, Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 with a cloudy future NASA unveils 25th anniversary image for the Hubble: Celestial fireworks in a bed of new stars The Hubble spotted this smiley face in space From the Hubble, a new image of a glittering cosmic wonderland with stars as old as the universe itself

Within the Sea Monster it’s thought that the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1073 resembles our own Milky Way. (Open University) [NASA unveils 25th anniversary image for the Hubble: Celestial fireworks in a bed of new stars] The Hubble’s color infrared composite image from the Milky Way’s center revealed a new population of massive stars. (Open University) The Open University In a few million years, scientists estimate that the Red Rectangle nebula will actually bloom into a shell of diffuse gas, known as a planetary nebula. (Open University) Sometimes we even get to enjoy a 3-D birds-eye view: This visualization provides a three-dimensional perspective on Hubble's 25th anniversary image of the nebula Gum 29 with the star cluster Westerlund 2 at its core. The Sombrero galaxy is one of the biggest objects in its cluster, equivalent to 800 billion suns. (Open University) The online postcards aren't for sale, unfortunately, but the puns are pretty delightful: The entire Cone Nebula (made of gas and dust) is seven light-years long. (Open University) The globular cluster of stars known as Messier54 was discovered by astronomer Charles Messier way back in 1778. (Open University) Want more Hubble? Give these a click: Still sharp, Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 with a cloudy future NASA unveils 25th anniversary image for the Hubble: Celestial fireworks in a bed of new stars The Hubble spotted this smiley face in space From the Hubble, a new image of a glittering cosmic wonderland with stars as old as the universe itself


From the Hubble, a new image of a glittering cosmic wonderland with stars as old as the universe itself

All that glitters. (NASA/ESA/Gilles Chapdelaine) It kind of looks like a snow globe -- or maybe like the glittering ornament atop a massive Christmas tree. Or like your neighbor's house during December, if you're lucky enough to live next to an aggressive seasonal decorator. But this image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows Messier 92. Messier 92 is a globular cluster, or a spherical group of old stars bound tightly together by gravity. Their density can make globular clusters appear quite bright, and this is one of the brightest in our whole galaxy. You may even have seen this cosmic bauble before. It's over 25,000 light years away from Earth, but with 330,000 stars packed tightly into it, it's often visible with the naked eye. You can catch its occasional appearances in the constellation Hercules. Astronomers know from Messier 92's molecular composition that it isn't just bright -- it's also very old. About as old as the universe itself, in fact. Like this image? You could have been the one to create it. A version of this photo was submitted by Gilles Chapdelaine as part of the Hubble's Hidden Treasures image competition. The Hubble has beamed back so much data that not all of it has been translated into visible images, but the public is welcome to sift through archives to try to find stellar shots worth sharing. Find out more at the Hubble Web site.

All that glitters. (NASA/ESA/Gilles Chapdelaine) Or like your neighbor's house during December, if you're lucky enough to live next to an aggressive seasonal decorator. You may even have seen this cosmic bauble before. It's over 25,000 light years away from Earth, but with 330,000 stars packed tightly into it, it's often visible with the naked eye. You can catch its occasional appearances in the constellation Hercules. Astronomers know from Messier 92's molecular composition that it isn't just bright -- it's also very old. About as old as the universe itself, in fact.


No, NASA didn’t fix the Hubble Telescope by just turning it off and on again

It hasn’t been the best month for the Hubble Space Telescope.
During the first week of October, one of the spacecraft’s three gyroscopes failed. The giant telescope needs the devices to measure turning speeds and to zero in on the things in space it observes and photographs.
In a statement, NASA reassured the public that the breakdown was expected, saying the gyro “had been exhibiting end-of-life behavior for approximately a year” and, in any case, “two other gyros of the same type had already failed.”
To replace it, NASA engineers powered up a backup gyroscope that had been dormant since early 2011. They were heartened, at first. The gyroscope began spinning despite not being used for 7½ years. However, it sent back readings that were clearly too high.
The discrepancy was “similar to a speedometer on your car continuously showing that your speed is 100 miles per hour faster than it actually is,” NASA said. “It properly shows when your car speeds up or slows down, and by how much, but the actual speed is inaccurate.”
Engineers concluded the problem must have been some kind of mechanical obstruction. Vowing to fix it, NASA kept the telescope in “safe mode,” limiting its operations in the same way a computer in that mode operates at bare-bones settings.
Keeping the telescope in safe mode also meant “we were not doing science,” Hubble Operations Project Manager Patrick Crouse told The Washington Post.
Days passed.
NASA teams ran tests, reviewed the flight software and considered what they could do to remedy the problem with as little damage as possible to their prized (and expensive) telescope. (Though the Hubble can operate with fewer gyroscopes, it normally uses three for maximum efficiency.)
On Oct. 16, the Hubble team even attempted a “running restart,” turning the problematic gyroscope off for one second, then back on again. Unfortunately, the “have you tried powering it off and on?” approach — long favored as a first-resort by technical support staff on Earth — didn’t work in space. Would that it were that easy, Crouse said.
Instead, what appeared to work was repeatedly turning the entire Hubble spacecraft to see if it would “dislodge” anything that was blocking the gyroscope in question.
NASA explained the fix in more technical terms in a blog post Monday:
The repeated maneuvers seemed to work, with the gyro reporting rotation rates that were back to normal — much to the relief of Hubble engineers, Crouse said.
“We believed all along, or from very early on, that the gyro appeared to be useful and just had to make sure to get it back to a useful state,” he said.
Crouse paused when asked to explain what had happened in layman’s terms.
“At a high level, if people want to call it jiggling around, I suppose they can,” he said. “But we were trying to do very particular activities we thought would clear the problem. It certainly wasn’t as simple as turning it off and turning it back on.”
Still, that didn’t stop a variety of news outlets from reporting that NASA had fixed its telescope “the way you fix your router.”
“NASA fixes Hubble gyroscope by turning it off and on again,” Engadget stated Wednesday.
“What fixed NASA’s Hubble space telescope? Someone flipped a switch on and off,” USA Today followed.
Crouse said those headlines were “an oversimplification,” though he can understand the confusion over extremely technical matters.
“It’s hard to keep everybody up to date on exactly the process,” he said. “I can understand that some people maybe took the easy way out. But to reflect where we are [with Hubble], we’re very optimistic. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we’re very optimistic we can get back to doing science again.”
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit in 1990, and ever since its first photo — an underwhelming grainy, black-and-white image of some stars, thanks to a flaw in a primary mirror — it has gone on to deliver some truly dazzling images from space. Time magazine has a roundup of the 50 “best” photos taken by Hubble, though all are quite extraordinary in their own way, depending on one’s interest in any particular corner of the universe.
NASA has been developing a new telescope, the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, that will be able to see back in time, almost to the beginning of the universe. The Webb will be able to collect seven times the starlight as the Hubble and observe the universe in infrared wavelengths of light, which the Hubble can’t, The Washington Post’s Joel Achenbach reported in February. Eventually, the Webb telescope is expected to replace the Hubble, which “is still working fabulously but getting long in the tooth,” Achenbach wrote.
Read more:
As NASA’s prized telescopes falter, astronomers fear losing their eyes in space
Behold, the Hubble Telescope’s latest close-up photo of Jupiter
NASA’s next great space telescope is stuck on Earth after screwy errors
A NASA astronaut films his spacewalk — and a breathtaking view of Earth


NASA unveils 25th anniversary image for the Hubble: Celestial fireworks in a bed of new stars

The brilliant tapestry of young stars flaring to life resemble a glittering fireworks display in the 25th anniversary NASA Hubble Space Telescope image to commemorate a quarter century of exploring the solar system and beyond since its launch on April 24, 1990. (NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team) In honor of the Hubble Space Telescope's 25th anniversary on Friday, NASA representatives on Thursday unveiled an official celebratory image. You can read more about the Hubble's brilliant past and murky future here. But let's focus on the science behind the photo above, which is just one of so many beautiful shots the Hubble has given us throughout the past quarter of a century. [The Hubble spotted this smiley face in space] The images reveals This visualization provides a three-dimensional perspective on Hubble's 25th anniversary image of the nebula Gum 29 with the star cluster Westerlund 2 at its core. The image captures a section of Gum 29, a region of vigorous star birth around 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Carina. The glittering cluster you see is called Westerlund 2, and it's made up of around 3,000 stars and spans between six and 13 light-years across. [From the Hubble, a new image of a glittering cosmic wonderland with stars as old as the universe itself] Westerlund 2 is a young cluster -- only about 2 million years old -- so the stars its forming have yet to make their way into deeper space. Meanwhile, the clouds of gas and dust that form pillars and valleys around the new stars interact with them -- and serve as an incubator for even more glittering stars. Want more space? Give these a click: Video catches space geckos playing Do stars have a sound? A new study says they might. NASA’s Messenger spacecraft is about to crash into Mercury New images of Ceres show more mysterious white spots

The brilliant tapestry of young stars flaring to life resemble a glittering fireworks display in the 25th anniversary NASA Hubble Space Telescope image to commemorate a quarter century of exploring the solar system and beyond since its launch on April 24, 1990. (NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), A. Nota (ESA/STScI), and the Westerlund 2 Science Team) The images reveals This visualization provides a three-dimensional perspective on Hubble's 25th anniversary image of the nebula Gum 29 with the star cluster Westerlund 2 at its core. Westerlund 2 is a young cluster -- only about 2 million years old -- so the stars its forming have yet to make their way into deeper space. Meanwhile, the clouds of gas and dust that form pillars and valleys around the new stars interact with them -- and serve as an incubator for even more glittering stars. Want more space? Give these a click: Video catches space geckos playing Do stars have a sound? A new study says they might. NASA’s Messenger spacecraft is about to crash into Mercury New images of Ceres show more mysterious white spots


Celebrate the Hubble with this gorgeous cosmic bubble

This stunning image was observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team) The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit on April 24, 1990 – nearly 26 years ago. Ever since, it has been supplying scientists with gorgeous images of the cosmos. The image above, which shows a star "blowing a bubble," is NASA's choice to commemorate the telescope's latest birthday. The Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) lies 7,100 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. It's a staggering seven light-years across, formed by a star 20 times as massive as our sun — that bright purple dot just left of center. Previous Hubble images have captured only pieces of the brilliant, ever-growing gas orb, but this latest shot stitches together multiple frames to show the nebula in its entirety. Hubble Sees a Star 'Inflating' a Giant Bubble NGC 7635 is an emission nebula. The bright star at its not-quite-center throws off hot gases, known as stellar wind, that move at 4 million mph. When these hot gases slam into the cold gas and dust of interstellar space, they form an intriguingly symmetrical bubble. The star's intense ultraviolet radiation causes the gases to glow, with different elements heating to different temperatures to form distinct colors: Oxygen is hot enough to burn blue, while hydrogen and nitrogen form a cooler yellow light. More than a quarter-century into its tenure, the Hubble is still going strong. But its successor will hit the scene soon. The James Webb Telescope, which is set to launch in 2018, will be able to look much deeper into space — and, therefore, earlier into cosmic history — than the Hubble can. Read More: This is what it looks like when a black hole tears a star apart With 46 billion pixels, this is the largest ever image of space The Hubble Space Telescope just spotted a gang of ‘monster’ stars These retro postcards show where the Hubble has taken us in 25 years

This stunning image was observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. (NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team) Hubble Sees a Star 'Inflating' a Giant Bubble Read More: This is what it looks like when a black hole tears a star apart With 46 billion pixels, this is the largest ever image of space The Hubble Space Telescope just spotted a gang of ‘monster’ stars These retro postcards show where the Hubble has taken us in 25 years


Hubble Space Telescope sees geysers on Jupiter’s moon Europa

galaxy, a planetary nebula and more from space. Since the 1980s, shortly after the Voyager probes first ventured to the outer planets, scientists have suspected that Europa has a global ocean, perhaps with more water than in all the oceans on Earth, hidden beneath a shell of ice. The Galileo probe found the signature of a subsurface ocean through an analysis of Europa’s magnetic field. The surface ice of the moon has brown stains that could be the result of organic material snowing from the plumes, scientists said Thursday. Late last year, a team of scientists (the lead author on the new paper is Lorenz Roth of the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio) used the Hubble, and specifically an instrument repaired by Grunsfeld and fellow astronauts in the final Hubble servicing mission, to take a closer look at Europa. The scientists didn’t see a geyser directly, but rather saw a striking surplus of hydrogen and oxygen appearing in a spatially confined area — a plume, in effect — over roughly seven hours. The implication is that tidal forces within the moon — created by Jupiter’s immense gravity — cause Europa to contract and expand, a bit like a tennis ball being squeezed and released. The Hubble spotted the signs of plumes when Europa was farthest from Jupiter in its elliptical orbit of the planet. The likely scenario is that, when the crust decompresses slightly, liquid water squeezes up through a crack. As it hit the vacuum of space, the water would flash freeze and some of it would turn into water vapor. Those water molecules would be split into atomic hydrogen and oxygen in the harsh radiation environment of the Jupiter system. But it wouldn’t just be water in the plume: Whatever else was in that ocean would be squirted into space, too, said James Green, head of NASA’s planetary science division. “For a planetary scientist, it’s huge,” Green said of the news. Robert Pappalardo, a senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said a confirmation of the Europa plumes would make it even more essential for NASA to send a probe to look for signs of life in that distant ocean. “The possibility that it’s there means that we have to go search for it,” Pappalardo said. “For the sake of humanity, for the sake of science, for the sake of knowledge.” Related stories:

This is an artist’s illustration of Europa (foreground), Jupiter (right) and Io (middle). Based on new evidence from Jupiter's moon Europa, astronomers hypothesize that chloride salts bubble up from the moon's global liquid ocean and reach the frozen surface and volcanoes. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
SAN FRANCISCO —
The new observations by the Hubble Space Telescope represent the best evidence yet that Europa, heated internally by the powerful tidal forces generated by Jupiter’s gravity, has a deep subsurface ocean. The hidden ocean has long been suspected, but scientists have never seen anything as dramatic and overt as plumes of water vapor more than 100 miles high.
If this finding holds up — the Hubble will look again, and scientists are already racing to reexamine data gathered years ago by NASA’s Galileo probe — it could provide a major boost to a much-discussed but still unapproved NASA robotic mission to explore the icy moon that circles Jupiter every 31 / 2 days.
“If there’s a geyser 200 kilometers tall, and you could fly a spacecraft through it and sample the water coming out from Europa, that would be phenomenal. What if there are organics in it? That’s getting to the question of ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ ” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s top official for space science.
The discovery, detailed in a paper published Thursday online by the journal Science, was the subject of a news conference in San Francisco on Thursday morning, at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Over the past 12 months, scientists have captured stunning images of the planets, a galaxy, a planetary nebula and more from space.
Since the 1980s, shortly after the Voyager probes first ventured to the outer planets, scientists have suspected that Europa has a global ocean, perhaps with more water than in all the oceans on Earth, hidden beneath a shell of ice. The Galileo probe found the signature of a subsurface ocean through an analysis of Europa’s magnetic field. The surface ice of the moon has brown stains that could be the result of organic material snowing from the plumes, scientists said Thursday.
Late last year, a team of scientists (the lead author on the new paper is Lorenz Roth of the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio) used the Hubble, and specifically an instrument repaired by Grunsfeld and fellow astronauts in the final Hubble servicing mission, to take a closer look at Europa. The scientists didn’t see a geyser directly, but rather saw a striking surplus of hydrogen and oxygen appearing in a spatially confined area — a plume, in effect — over roughly seven hours.
The implication is that tidal forces within the moon — created by Jupiter’s immense gravity — cause Europa to contract and expand, a bit like a tennis ball being squeezed and released. The Hubble spotted the signs of plumes when Europa was farthest from Jupiter in its elliptical orbit of the planet. The likely scenario is that, when the crust decompresses slightly, liquid water squeezes up through a crack.
As it hit the vacuum of space, the water would flash freeze and some of it would turn into water vapor. Those water molecules would be split into atomic hydrogen and oxygen in the harsh radiation environment of the Jupiter system. But it wouldn’t just be water in the plume: Whatever else was in that ocean would be squirted into space, too, said James Green, head of NASA’s planetary science division.
“For a planetary scientist, it’s huge,” Green said of the news.
This is not the first moon to show signs of geysers. Another candidate for exploration is Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, which has similar south pole plumes and might have a subsurface sea, though perhaps not a global ocean as Europa appears to have.
Carolyn Porco, leader of the imaging team for NASA’s spacecraft Cassini, which is exploring the Saturn system, said of the Europa announcement: “If it really is a plume of material coming from the ocean beneath the ice shell, that is truly extraordinary. It would put it in the same league as Enceladus as an accessible target.”
Planetary scientists dream of a mission known as the Europa Clipper, but although it is in the formulation phase at NASA, it has not been fully approved. In recent weeks, budget pressures have made new, expensive NASA robotic missions look increasingly less likely to be funded.
Robert Pappalardo, a senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said a confirmation of the Europa plumes would make it even more essential for NASA to send a probe to look for signs of life in that distant ocean.
“The possibility that it’s there means that we have to go search for it,” Pappalardo said. “For the sake of humanity, for the sake of science, for the sake of knowledge.”
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Mystic Mountain: Is this the Hubble Space Telescope’s greatest image?

A star-forming region in the Carina Nebula, seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and Hubble 20th anniversary team JA: “How big is the Mystic Mountain? I mean, like, in hundreds of miles, billions of miles, light years?” Mario Livio: “It is about 3 light-years tall, which is about 18 trillion miles.” So here is one of the big insights about outer space: It’s big. And it’s full of big stuff. I know I’m threatening to go over everyone’s head here with the scientific and technical language. Sorry, it just makes me feel smarter to sling the jargon. The other thing you see in Hubble images is the dynamism of the cosmos. Nothing out there is static. It’s roiling and rumbling. It’s exploding and exuding and entropically eroding. The whole thing is expanding, and thanks to the Hubble and some other telescopes we now know the expansion is accelerating. Hang on for dear life, folks. I’ll have more to say on the Hubble after this brief intermission when I go find my gate (am at BWI again — my second home!). I’m back. So I’ve already covered space is big and space is dynamic, my two major insights, and now here’s another bonus observation: The Hubble is a great story of human engineering, not only because it works so well but because for a while there it didn’t work very well at all. Spherical aberration: the two most dreaded words in any telescope’s vocabulary. [Mudge from the Boodle suggests two more: “bird poop."] The flawed mirror threatened to render the whole project a disappointment, but in 1993 shuttle astronauts flew to Hubble, grabbed it, and put in an instrument [COSTAR, for “Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement"] that corrected the aberration. Hubble was off to the races. At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, employees keep an eye on the Hubble as it keeps an eye on the universe (Photo by Joel Achenbach)

A star-forming region in the Carina Nebula, seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and Hubble 20th anniversary team
The Hubble is about to turn 25. That’s an awesome milestone for a piece of hardware that’s vastly exceeded expectations. We’re doing a story that will run between now and the anniversary of the launch next Friday. See also Rachel Feltman’s Speaking of Science blog for coverage. Here’s a verbatim e-mail exchange I had the other day with astrophysicist Mario Livio, about the “Mystic Mountain” pillar of dust and gas (above) that became the 20th anniversary image of the Hubble Space Telescope back in 2010:
JA: “How big is the Mystic Mountain? I mean, like, in hundreds of miles, billions of miles, light years?”
Mario Livio: “It is about 3 light-years tall, which is about 18 trillion miles.”
So here is one of the big insights about outer space: It’s big. And it’s full of big stuff. I know I’m threatening to go over everyone’s head here with the scientific and technical language. Sorry, it just makes me feel smarter to sling the jargon.
The other thing you see in Hubble images is the dynamism of the cosmos. Nothing out there is static. It’s roiling and rumbling. It’s exploding and exuding and entropically eroding. The whole thing is expanding, and thanks to the Hubble and some other telescopes we now know the expansion is accelerating. Hang on for dear life, folks.
I’ll have more to say on the Hubble after this brief intermission when I go find my gate (am at BWI again — my second home!).
[Muzak…]
I’m back. So I’ve already covered space is big and space is dynamic, my two major insights, and now here’s another bonus observation: The Hubble is a great story of human engineering, not only because it works so well but because for a while there it didn’t work very well at all. Spherical aberration: the two most dreaded words in any telescope’s vocabulary. [Mudge from the Boodle suggests two more: “bird poop."] The flawed mirror threatened to render the whole project a disappointment, but in 1993 shuttle astronauts flew to Hubble, grabbed it, and put in an instrument [COSTAR, for “Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement"] that corrected the aberration. Hubble was off to the races.
At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, employees keep an eye on the Hubble as it keeps an eye on the universe (Photo by Joel Achenbach)


Still sharp, Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 with a cloudy future

April 24, 2015 marks 25 years since the historic launch of the Hubble Space Telescope aboard the space shuttle Discovery.
The Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 on Friday, but no one should call it old. It’s mature. It’s the great silverback of astronomy, grizzled from wear and tear and yet still powerful and utterly dominant in its field.
The Hubble helped change our understanding of the age of the universe, the evolution of galaxies and the expansion of space itself. Along the way it has had the equivalent of knee and hip replacement surgery: Five times, astronauts on the space shuttle paid a visit to swap out old batteries and install new instruments, including, in 2009, the best camera the telescope has ever had.
How deep into the cosmos can the Hubble see? Deeper than you, punk.
“It’s fantastic. It’s better than ever. That’s not just hype, it’s the truth,” said Jennifer J. Wiseman, the senior project scientist for the Hubble at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
“This is 1970s technology, and it is still, after 25 years, the most powerful scientific instrument in the world,” said astronomer Patrick McCarthy, who’s working on the Giant Magellan Telescope under construction in Chile.

Hubble’s fate, however, is cloudy. The great telescope is essentially stranded in space.
The Hubble was designed to be serviced by the space shuttle. But the space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, and the Hubble hasn’t had a repair job since that 2009 mission. At some point, under the laws of entropy that dominate the cosmos, the Hubble will begin to deteriorate — for example, losing its navigational ability as its gyroscopic sensors fail one by one.
“It’s kind of like predicting when’s the next time your car’s going to break down,” said Jim Jeletic, deputy project manager for the Hubble at NASA Goddard, who on a recent morning led a reporter and photographer on a tour of the telescope’s operations center in Greenbelt, Md.
Electronics eventually go haywire in a space environment that is flush with radiation. As it orbits the Earth 15 times a day, the 44-foot-tall Hubble goes in and out of sunlight, expanding and contracting, and that puts stress on various systems. Micrometeorites ding the exterior. A Hubble antenna has a hole in it that looks as if someone hit it with a squirrel gun.
The Hubble was conceived in the 1940s, designed in the 1970s and 1980s, and still has vintage hardware on board, including a 1980s-era computer that freezes up occasionally and has to be rebooted remotely.
And then there’s gravity. The Hubble is orbiting the Earth about 340 miles above the surface, significantly higher than the International Space Station. There’s just a trace of atmosphere that high, but it’s enough to drag the Hubble a tiny bit and cause it to descend a little over a mile per year.
NASA said this week that, based on current orbital projections, the Hubble is expected to reenter the atmosphere “around 2037.” The telescope has no means of propulsion.
The iconic space telescope may be worn from wear and tear, but it remains the most dominant tool in its field.
One option would be to send a robotic craft to dock with the Hubble and guide it to a fiery, but controlled, reentry into the Pacific Ocean. The charred remnants of the great telescope would sink to the bottom of the sea. Another option would be to boost the telescope to a higher, “parking” orbit where it would stay for centuries as a piece of space junk.
“When the time comes, NASA will make a decision on the disposal plan. Until then, NASA will continue operating Hubble as long as the hardware lasts, enabling it to remain scientifically productive,” NASA spokesman Dwayne Brown said.
A celebrity scope
As Jeletic gave his tour at Goddard, the Hubble was pointed at a quasar — an extremely bright source of light at the core of a distant galaxy with a black hole at the center.
That’s just one of Hubble’s many projects. Built with the assistance of the European Space Agency, the Hubble is a global resource. NASA gets more than 1,000 proposals a year from scientists around the world hoping to take advantage of the telescope’s unique capabilities. The resolution of the Hubble is akin to reading the date on a dime that is two miles away, says astrophysicist Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute.
That wasn’t the case at first: The Hubble has a 2.4-meter diameter mirror with a notorious “spherical aberration” that blurred the telescope’s initial images. Astronomers could do plenty of science, but they couldn’t get the gorgeous pictures, because the stars weren’t points of light but rather looked like squashed spiders.
Three years later, in 1993, astronauts fixed the problem. They installed a series of coin-size mirrors that corrected the light as it bounced through the telescope, plus a new camera with the optical corrections already built in.
That inaugurated the new era in which Hubble dazzled the world with one spectacular image after another. The telescope became something of a celebrity. When lawmakers threatened to cancel a repair mission, school kids turned over their lunch money to help pay for it.
“Hubble gave us beauty in a way that no other telescope had ever done,” said John Mather, the Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at NASA Goddard who is the senior scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in late 2018.
Astronomers a couple of decades ago said the universe is 10 billion to 20 billion years old. Thanks to the Hubble and other telescopes, they can now say it’s 13.8 billion years old.
The Hubble played a key role in the stunning discovery, announced in 1998, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Astronomers detected this acceleration, which they attribute to a mysterious force they call “dark energy,” in part by using the Hubble to study supernovas in extremely distant galaxies.
A long, hard look at the past
The deep gaze of the Hubble offers a view into the remote past; all telescopes are time machines of sorts, gathering light emitted long ago. The Hubble, thanks to new instruments, can see deeper into space than anyone had anticipated when the telescope was designed, said astronomer John Grunsfeld, NASA’s top official for science, who as an astronaut visited and repaired the Hubble three times.
“Before Hubble, we didn’t know how many galaxies there are in the universe,” Grunsfeld said.
The orthodoxy was that there were tens of billions of galaxies. Now, thanks to the Hubble, scientists can say there are roughly 200 billion.
That estimate stems from Hubble’s “deep field” images, obtained by training the Hubble on a single point of seemingly empty, dark space, and holding it there for a couple of weeks, collecting the thin stream of photons (particles of light) coming from the farthest regions of the universe. The Hubble might get just one photon per minute from the faintest objects.
Some astronomers assumed that, looking far back in time, they wouldn’t see much.
“When the Hubble Deep Field pictures were taken, people didn’t expect to see anything. It had thousands and thousands of galaxies in it. We were so far off it was incredible,” said Goddard’s Mather.
“That’s one of the pleasures of astronomy,” Mather said. “It’s an observational science, and it’s a surprise science.”
Wiseman points out that those early galaxies looked different from the ones we see today. They were small, fragmentary, and made of hydrogen and not much else. Closer to us in space and time we see larger galaxies, including the majestic spiral galaxies akin to our own Milky Way galaxy, which have heavier elements that include carbon and oxygen — the stuff of life as we know it.
This cosmic narrative is written in ancient light, and it is ready to be decoded and appreciated by any species that can figure out how to build the right instruments.
Jeletic thinks that the Hubble can keep doing good science at least until 2020. That might mean the Hubble would overlap for a couple of years with the operations of the Webb telescope.
Five of Hubble’s six gyros, the navigation sensors, still work. The sixth failed last year, but the Hubble can navigate with only three gyros, Jeletic said. In fact, he said, NASA engineers think they might be able to find scientific uses for the Hubble even with only one gyro, or no gyros.
It might not be able to point accurately anymore, but there’s something interesting anywhere you look.


Find information about troops who have been accused of war crimes during their service in Afghanistan.

Australian forces are accused of war crimes while on duty in Afghanistan. Some other countries are also investigating what their troops may have done while serving there. There have also been American contractors accused and convicted of war crimes while fighting the War on Terror. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been investigating these accusations for years, but the US government has not always been cooperative. Relevant documents include events related to bombings.

Research global war crime investigations related to this question.

Was the U.S. attack on the Kunduz hospital a war crime?

A wounded staff member of Doctors Without Borders receives treatment in Kabul after a U.S. strike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images) A hospital bombed in the midst of intense fighting. Patients and staff killed and wounded, the facility destroyed. An unspeakable tragedy — and unfortunately one seen before in recent and current conflicts. Bombing a hospital and killing doctors and wounded or sick persons may seem, on first glance, to be an obvious war crime. If it isn’t, one might wonder, what is? MSF’s outrage is understandable and genuine. However, the reality of both the law and the facts is significantly more complicated. This incident highlights not only the challenges and tragic consequences of war in populated areas, but also the dynamic interplay between media coverage of military operations and the legal regulation of armed conflict. The White House says President Obama telephoned the head of Doctors Without Borders and apologized for a deadly airstrike on the aid group's hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. War crimes are serious violations of the law of war. They include unlawful attacks on civilians and attacks on protected objects such as hospitals and religious or cultural property. Not all attacks that result in civilians dying or hospitals destroyed are automatically war crimes, however. The lawfulness of any attack will depend on both the intended target of the attack and the method of carrying it out. So what do we know — or at least potentially know — right now about the incident in Kunduz? [There will be another devastating military attack on civilian targets soon] News reports The first question is whether the intended target of the airstrikes was a lawful target. The law of war authorizes attacks against enemy soldiers, members of armed groups, civilians directly participating in hostilities and military objectives. Deliberate attacks on civilians or civilian objects (such as schools or residential buildings) are prohibited. Hospitals enjoy special protection under the law of war and are immune from attack. Using a hospital for military activities, personnel or equipment is prohibited. However, when a hospital is used for military purposes, it loses its protection from attack and can become a lawful military objective. As fighters in the enemy armed group, the Taliban insurgents were legitimate targets. If the Taliban were using the MSF hospital to launch attacks, then the Taliban violated the law of war by using medical facilities

A wounded staff member of Doctors Without Borders receives treatment in Kabul after a U.S. strike on a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images)
A hospital bombed in the midst of intense fighting. Patients and staff killed and wounded, the facility destroyed. An unspeakable tragedy — and unfortunately one seen before in recent and current conflicts.
The U.S. airstrike that hit the Medecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, on Saturday was a horrible tragedy. But was it a war crime, as the organization immediately asserted?
Bombing a hospital and killing doctors and wounded or sick persons may seem, on first glance, to be an obvious war crime. If it isn’t, one might wonder, what is? MSF’s outrage is understandable and genuine.
However, the reality of both the law and the facts is significantly more complicated. This incident highlights not only the challenges and tragic consequences of war in populated areas, but also the dynamic interplay between media coverage of military operations and the legal regulation of armed conflict.
The law of war — also called international humanitarian law or the law of armed conflict — governs the conduct of states, armed groups and individuals during armed conflict and seeks to minimize harm to civilians as much as possible.
The White House says President Obama telephoned the head of Doctors Without Borders and apologized for a deadly airstrike on the aid group's hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
War crimes are serious violations of the law of war. They include unlawful attacks on civilians and attacks on protected objects such as hospitals and religious or cultural property. Not all attacks that result in civilians dying or hospitals destroyed are automatically war crimes, however. The lawfulness of any attack will depend on both the intended target of the attack and the method of carrying it out.
So what do we know — or at least potentially know — right now about the incident in Kunduz?
[There will be another devastating military attack on civilian targets soon]
News reports
Other reports from Afghan sources asserted that the Taliban was using the hospital grounds to plot and launch attacks, including “firing rocket-propelled grenades from the property,” and the airstrikes were aimed at the perimeter of the hospital property to stop the attacks. The hospital building suffered several direct hits. Twenty-two people were killed and many more injured.
The first question is whether the intended target of the airstrikes was a lawful target.
The law of war authorizes attacks against enemy soldiers, members of armed groups, civilians directly participating in hostilities and military objectives. Deliberate attacks on civilians or civilian objects (such as schools or residential buildings) are prohibited.
Hospitals enjoy special protection under the law of war and are immune from attack. Using a hospital for military activities, personnel or equipment is prohibited. However, when a hospital is used for military purposes, it loses its protection from attack and can become a lawful military objective.
As fighters in the enemy armed group, the Taliban insurgents were legitimate targets. If the Taliban were using the MSF hospital to launch attacks, then the Taliban violated the law of war by using medical facilities to shield military objectives, namely their personnel and their rocket-launchers. In addition, the hospital would have lost its protection from attack after due warning to cease the military activity, becoming a legitimate target for attack.
Doctors Without Borders Executive President Jason Cone called on President Obama to support a fact-finding mission through the International Humanitarian Fact-Finding Commission after the bombing of a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
If, as reports suggest, the airstrikes were aimed at Taliban fighters near the hospital or Taliban fighters and equipment using hospital property and facilities to shield their activities, then the choice of these targets would not run afoul of the law.
But that is not the end of the story.
The law does not focus only on the target of the attack, because prohibiting direct attacks against civilians and civilian objects can only go so far in protecting civilians. The law also mandates extensive steps to protect civilians and civilian objects from incidental harm during lawful military operations.
The two most important are precautions and proportionality.
- The principle of precautions mandates additional steps to minimize harm to civilians from attacks. An attacking party must verify that the target is a lawful military objective, use weapons that will minimize incidental harm to civilians, avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks and provide effective advance warning where feasible.
- The principle of proportionality requires that an attacker refrain from any attack in which the expected civilian casualties will be excessive in light of the anticipated military gain from the attack. That is, an attack expected to cause excessive collateral damage is unlawful.
Proportionality is at once both simple and highly complex.
It is simple because the idea of maximizing protection of civilians by minimizing incidental harm from military operations is straightforward and sensible. It is complex, however, because it demands that one understand the military advantage of a particular attack, assess the likely expected civilian casualties and determine whether those casualties will be excessive in the circumstances at the time of the attack.
The airstrikes in Kunduz raise significant questions about precautions:
- Did the Afghan forces calling for the strike and the U.S. forces launching the strike establish the location of the hospital as a protected site?
- Were the Taliban fighters indeed using the hospital?
- If so, did either Afghan or U.S. forces warn the hospital of the pending strike?
- Were weapons chosen that could minimize harm to civilians?
The proportionality rule poses equally important questions:
- What did the U.S. forces know about the hospital and how many people were in it?
- What damage to the hospital did they anticipate from the attacks?
- What other options did they have to neutralize the Taliban threat?
In the end, only a comprehensive investigation — like those under way by the United States, NATO and Afghanistan — can determine the cause and legality of the strike by examining these and other questions.
Most important, however, any legal analysis must examine these questions prospectively; that is, from the perspective of the U.S. forces and what they knew at the time of the attack — not from the perspective of the hospital staff or from the retrospective view of the horrified observer or readers of the news after the fact.
Here lies perhaps the biggest challenge in the aftermath of a horrible tragedy: the suffering and horror are all too evident immediately after the incident, but the legality or illegality of an attack rests on the information available to the commander at the time, and the intent and reasonable judgment of the commander in launching that attack.
Real-time media coverage can do justice — in a sense — to the tragedy and suffering, but not to the question of legality without the information essential to and uncovered in the course of a thorough investigation.


Top U.S. general in Afghanistan: Hospital was ‘mistakenly struck’

Afghan government reclaim Kunduz, the first major Afghan city to fall to the Taliban since the war began in 2001, would be available after a Pentagon investigation. He declined to give a timeline for that probe. But numerous questions remain about how Saturday’s strike, in which an AC-130 gunship conducted repeated bombing raids on a building housing the hospital’s emergency rooms and intensive care unit, could have happened. Campbell described the incident as a mistake, but he did not specify whether the American pilots had tried to hit another target and missed or whether they intended to strike the hospital building but did not know it was a medical facility. Neither have officials said whether U.S. forces violated their own rules of engagement in Afghanistan, which permit the United States to use air power in three situations: for counterterrorism operations, in self-defense or to protect Afghan forces “in extremis.” In a statement released Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said he would hold those responsible accountable. “The U.S. military takes the greatest care in our operations to prevent the loss of innocent life,” Carter said. “And when we make mistakes, we own up to them.” Doctors Without Borders has described the attack as deliberate and a possible war crime. Twelve of the group’s staffers and 10 patients, including three children, were killed. White House press secretary Josh Earnest reacts to a U.S. general's testimony that a deadly U.S. air strike on a hospital in Afghanistan was a mistake. U.S. military officials have already revised their account of what occurred overnight on Saturday. On Monday, speaking at the Pentagon, Campbell said the attack was authorized after Afghan troops, under attack by the Taliban, requested American air support. That contradicted earlier statements from Pentagon officials that the strike was ordered to protect U.S. forces on the ground who were taking direct fire from the Taliban. According to Pentagon officials, U.S. Special Operations forces were positioned in Kunduz, advising elite Afghan troops nearby, when the strike took place. It now appears that U.S. forces were not facing direct attack from the Taliban. About 9,800 U.S. troops are stationed in Afghanistan. Almost 7,000 are tasked to a multinational mission to help Afghan forces fight the Taliban, while a smaller number are part of a U.S. effort to hunt down al-Qaeda and other militants. Under questioning by lawmakers, Campbell acknowledged that he believes the current

Army General John Campbell clarified that the decision to provide air support to Afghan forces in Kunduz, which hit a hospital, was a U.S. decision. "We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility," Gen. Campbell said while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Oct. 6.
A senior U.S. general on Tuesday said the air attack that killed 22 patients and medical staffers in northern Afghanistan was not intended to strike a hospital run by an international aid group, adding to an evolving Pentagon account of one of the deadliest American strikes on a civilian target in recent history.
Gen. John F. Campbell, who commands U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, said the powerful U.S. gunship that struck a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the city of Kunduz acted in response to a request from Afghan troops facing a Taliban attack.
But, Campbell told the Senate Armed Services Committee, the United States bore ultimate responsibility for authorizing strikes on a civilian compound.
“A hospital was mistakenly struck,” he said. “We would never intentionally target a protected medical facility.”

Campbell said a full accounting of the weekend incident, which occurred as U.S. forces sought to help the Afghan government reclaim Kunduz, the first major Afghan city to fall to the Taliban since the war began in 2001, would be available after a Pentagon investigation. He declined to give a timeline for that probe.
But numerous questions remain about how Saturday’s strike, in which an AC-130 gunship conducted repeated bombing raids on a building housing the hospital’s emergency rooms and intensive care unit, could have happened.
Campbell described the incident as a mistake, but he did not specify whether the American pilots had tried to hit another target and missed or whether they intended to strike the hospital building but did not know it was a medical facility.
Neither have officials said whether U.S. forces violated their own rules of engagement in Afghanistan, which permit the United States to use air power in three situations: for counterterrorism operations, in self-defense or to protect Afghan forces “in extremis.”
In a statement released Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said he would hold those responsible accountable.
“The U.S. military takes the greatest care in our operations to prevent the loss of innocent life,” Carter said. “And when we make mistakes, we own up to them.”
Doctors Without Borders has described the attack as deliberate and a possible war crime. Twelve of the group’s staffers and 10 patients, including three children, were killed.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest reacts to a U.S. general's testimony that a deadly U.S. air strike on a hospital in Afghanistan was a mistake.
“This attack cannot be brushed aside as a mere mistake or an inevitable consequence of war,” Joanne Liu, president of MSF International, said in a statement. Doctors Without Borders is also known by its French initials, MSF. The organization said it repeatedly provided the hospital’s coordinates to U.S. and Afghan authorities.
U.S. military officials have already revised their account of what occurred overnight on Saturday. On Monday, speaking at the Pentagon, Campbell said the attack was authorized after Afghan troops, under attack by the Taliban, requested American air support. That contradicted earlier statements from Pentagon officials that the strike was ordered to protect U.S. forces on the ground who were taking direct fire from the Taliban.
According to Pentagon officials, U.S. Special Operations forces were positioned in Kunduz, advising elite Afghan troops nearby, when the strike took place. It now appears that U.S. forces were not facing direct attack from the Taliban.
The incident adds fuel to a debate about the future of the limited U.S. mission in Afghanistan as the White House considers further changes to its plan for bringing the U.S. military footprint to under 1,000 troops at the end of 2016. President Obama has linked his legacy to pulling U.S. forces from Afghanistan and ending America’s longest war.
About 9,800 U.S. troops are stationed in Afghanistan. Almost 7,000 are tasked to a multinational mission to help Afghan forces fight the Taliban, while a smaller number are part of a U.S. effort to hunt down al-Qaeda and other militants.
Under questioning by lawmakers, Campbell acknowledged that he believes the current exit plan should be changed, given security conditions on the ground.
Campbell spoke as Afghan forces struggle to fully retake Kunduz. While much of the city is now under government control, the Taliban’s ability to seize a major urban area illustrates the militants’ resilience despite years of assaults from NATO forces.
Fierce clashes were reported Tuesday.
A U.S. military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to comment freely, said U.S. forces conducted two airstrikes in Kunduz province Monday, both of which targeted insurgents “threatening Afghan and coalition forces.” Special Operations soldiers remain embedded with Afghan troops battling the Taliban in and around Kunduz.
In Kabul, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s government did not deny it had requested the U.S. airstrike Saturday but said the matter was being investigated.
Sayed Zafar Hashemi, a Ghani spokesman, said it would be common for the Afghan military to solicit air support from the coalition. Hashemi said most of the airstrikes that occurred in Kunduz after the Taliban overran it last week resulted from a specific request from the Afghanistan military.
Saturday’s incident was among the deadliest U.S. strikes to result in civilian casualties in Afghanistan. In July 2002, more than 40 people were killed and more than 100 were injured when a U.S. aircraft fired on a wedding party.
Of the 12 Doctors Without Borders staffers killed, three were physicians. After the attack, the group withdrew from Kunduz; it still operates five other facilities in Afghanistan.
Officials with Doctors Without Borders have raised doubts about the U.S. military’s ability to conduct a satisfactory investigation of its own actions. NATO and the Afghan government have launched separate probes.
The Afghan Ministry of Health issued a statement expressing its support for an independent probe. The ministry said the strike “threatens the health of millions of Afghans” because private charities are now reconsidering operating in the country.
“Staff no longer feel safe in any health facility anywhere in the country,” the ministry said. “And some international health organizations are questioning whether the risks of staying in the country are just too high after such an attack.”
Some Afghan leaders continue to defend the airstrike. Hamdullah Danishi, the acting governor of Kunduz province, said Taliban fighters had been using hospital grounds as a staging area from which to launch attacks on the provincial capital, Kunduz city.
Danishi said he played no role in ordering the airstrike, but he reiterated that the area around the hospital had to be cleared of militants. “We have a military decision-making council that decides such issues,” Danishi said. “I don’t know if it made the request.”
“But if it was me,” Danishi continued, “I would have ordered the airstrike.”
Afghan military leaders declined to comment.
The aircraft that carried out the Kunduz attack was an AC-130 gunship, a platform that is dedicated almost entirely to supporting Special Operations forces, such as those advising Afghan troops around Kunduz. The plane flies at a relatively low altitude and can loiter over a target. Its pilots must rely on visual targeting to strike locations on the ground.
Craig reported from Kabul. Sayed Salahuddin in Kabul and Thomas Gibbons-Neff in Washington contributed to this report.
Read more:
The bloody history of Kunduz, from Afghanistan’s ‘Convoy of Death’ to now
In Kunduz, echoes of a 1988 guerrilla assault after the Soviets withdrew
Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world


There are still a lot of questions around the U.S. bombing of the MSF hospital in Kunduz

Afghan National Army soldiers arrive to start an operation soon, outside of Kunduz city, Afghanistan, on Sept. 30. (Najim Rahim/AP)
The bombardment that struck a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan was requested by an Army Special Forces unit that apparently knew that the structure was a hospital but believed it was under Taliban control, according to an Associated Press report.
The report, released Monday and citing a number of anonymous sources, also indicated that the hospital’s location was well-circulated to U.S. forces and that, in the days prior to the attack, U.S. officials had confronted Doctors Without Borders about the Taliban’s presence in their facility.

Doctors Without Borders have denied that Taliban fighters had seized the facility.
“The hospital was under the control of [Doctors Without Borders]. Our staff reported no armed combatants or fighting in the compound prior to the airstrike,” said Tim Shenk, a Doctors Without Borders spokesman, in an email.
[Kunduz faces tough resurrection after brief Taliban takeover]
Pentagon spokesman Army Maj. Roger Cabiness, did not dispute the AP’s report, but wrote in an email that there are still multiple ongoing investigations and that “it would be premature to draw any conclusions before those investigations are complete.”
Even with the apparent coordination and knowledge of the facility, a prominent one-story building towards the south of the city, a U.S. AC-130U gunship from 4th Special Operations Squadron targeted and fired upon the facility with a combination of 25mm and 40mm cannon as well as a 105mm howitzer in the early hours of Oct. 3rd. According to those on the ground, the strike lasted for almost an hour and involved four distinct passes from the aircraft. AC-130’s traditionally circle their targets in a wide orbit, banking continuously to the left in order to align their weapon systems. The AC-130 is known as a premier close air support platform and more often than not operate as attachments to special operation teams.
The attack, according to new reports from Doctors Without Borders, left 30 dead and resulted in the shuttering of the hospital.
In this Oct. 16, 2015 file photo, the charred remains of the Doctors Without Borders hospital is seen after it was hit by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan. (Najim Rahim via AP)
According to those familiar with the incident, the crew of the AC-130, call sign Hammer, verified their permission to fire twice before engaging the hospital. AC-130Us carry a crew of 14, often including a special forces liaison officer responsible for communicating with ground units. While it is still unclear who relayed the initial call for an airstrike, according to U.S. officials, the request came from an Afghan special forces unit that was pinned down by Taliban fire. The request was then relayed to the Joint Operations Command manned by soldiers from the Army’s 3rd Special Forces Group and their Afghan counterparts located south of the city near the Kunduz airport. The JOC then directed the AC-130 to the vicinity of the hospital where the AC-130 identified Taliban fighters firing from the hospital grounds. From there the JOC authorized the AC-130 to fire.
[By evening, a hospital. By morning, a war zone.]
AC-130s operate with a variety of infared and low-light sensors that allow them to see almost everything on the battlefield below, albeit not in color. In order for the aircraft to fire, it must locate the friendly forces it is supporting before engaging enemy targets. Though there are now various accounts circulating about what happened that night, it is still unknown who talked to the aircraft and when. Was there an American combat controller embedded with the Afghan forces talking to the AC-130? Or was the aircraft only talking to American special forces soldiers located at the command center nowhere near the battle?
Another important question raised by the hospital bombardment is whether the U.S. government can be charged with war crimes for knowingly targeting a hospital — something that Doctors Without Borders has repeatedly accused U.S. forces of doing. According to the Law of Armed Conflict and the Army field manual of the law of land warfare, “Medical units/establishments lose protection if committing ‘acts harmful to the enemy.’ Acts harmful to the enemy are not only acts of warfare proper, but also any activity characterizing combatant action, such as setting up observation posts, or the use of the hospital as a liaison center for fighting troops.”
The Law of Armed Conflict also notes that even if a hospital is being used in a manner which voids its protected status that “protection ceases only after a warning has been given, and it remains unheeded after a reasonable time to comply.”
[From ‘collateral damage’ to ‘deeply regrets’: How the Pentagon has shifted on the Afghan hospital attack]
So in this case, even if the Taliban had been using the hospital, the United States could still possibly be at the same level of fault regardless of the Taliban’s presence.
While Doctors Without Borders had called for an external investigation into the incident, the Pentagon is still conducting one of its own that has yet to be released.
“My intent is to disclose the findings of the investigation once it is complete,” said Gen. John Campbell, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in an emailed statement Saturday. “We will be forthright and transparent and we will hold ourselves accountable for any mistakes made. While we desire the investigation to be timely, what’s most important is that it be done thoroughly and correctly.”


By evening, a hospital. By morning, a war zone.

Medical personnel treat the injured Oct. 3 following an attack by a U.S. gunship on the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. (Doctors Without Borders/AFP/Getty Images)
KABUL —
The spillover from the militant assault, which had overwhelmed local security forces, was an unsettling sign at the lightly guarded civilian facility, where doctors and nurses were tending to a crush of patients.
It was also a foreshadowing of a far greater calamity that would descend on the hospital four days later when, in the early hours of Oct. 3, nearby U.S. combat advisers authorized a gunship to unleash a powerful attack. The AC-130U plane, circling above in the dark, raked the medical compound with bursts of cannon fire, potentially even using high explosive incendiary munitions, for more than an hour. The assault left at least 22 people dead, some of them burned to death.
The aid group, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières, has demanded an international investigation of what it deems a possible war crime.
The U.S. military, whose own account of what took place changed in the initial days after the attack, has said that the hospital was “mistakenly struck” in an attempt to support Afghan security forces. But the military has declined to provide full details of the incident while its investigators examine what occurred in the worst example of errant U.S. air power in recent years.
This account of what took place is based on multiple interviews in Afghanistan and the United States with U.S. and Afghan military officials, Doctors Without Borders personnel and local Kunduz residents; some of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation.

Although government forces have recaptured much of Kunduz, the city’s collapse to a relatively small militant force was a blow to the Afghan government and its Western allies, illustrating the Taliban’s potency at a time when foreign forces are winding down their long mission in the country.
In the days after the city’sSept. 28 collapse, Taliban fighters consolidated their control of the neighborhood around the hospital’s tree-lined compound, clamping down on residents’ movement and imposing their harsh interpretation of Islam.
For much of that week, the central Kunduz neighborhood of Spinzar, which was under the militants’ control, was relatively quiet, according to residents and hospital officials.
Inside the hospital, which the international relief agency in recent years had turned into the province’s most advanced medical facility, doctors and nurses were busier than ever. Between Sept. 28 and Oct. 3, exhausted hospital staffers treated 394 people, many of whom had received gunshot wounds during the battle for the city.
All that week, a steady stream of Taliban fighters appeared at the hospital seeking treatment, adding to the patient load, according to a hospital security guard.
Before fighters were admitted onto hospital grounds, the guard said, they were required to hand over their assault weapons to facility guards. Once inside, the Taliban fighters — many of whom had been shot — were treated like any other patient.

The Taliban appeared to respect the neutrality of the charity operation, the only hospital functioning in Kunduz that week.
“Even the Taliban didn’t harm wounded Afghan security forces taken to the hospital,” the guard said.
Doctors Without Borders has declined to discuss patient identities, pointing to rules under the Geneva Conventions that state wounded soldiers or militants must be treated like other noncombatants. “We don’t even want to know who is inside because that is a basic protection, as a patient,” said Guilhem Molinie, director of the organization’s operations in Afghanistan.
But organization officials said that some Taliban fighters were treated.
According to the guard’s account, not just wounded Taliban fighters were present at the hospital that week. On Monday, Sept. 28, as the battle for Kunduz kicked off, Mullah Abdul Salam, the most senior Taliban commander in Kunduz province, visited wounded fighters receiving treatment there, the guard said.
Some Afghan leaders have suggested that the Taliban had been using the hospital as a base. MSF officials have strongly denied those claims, saying no Taliban commanders and fighters had used hospital grounds to plan or carry out attacks.
Shattered calm
Early on Saturday, Oct. 3, a team of U.S. Special Operations forces was tracking the fighting across Kunduz from a small U.S.-Afghan joint operations center at the airport, about five miles south of the city. The JOC, as it is called, has become a hallmark of the long insurgent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. forces liaise closely with their local counterparts.
As part of the limited U.S. military mission in Afghanistan, that night the U.S. forces were supporting elite Afghan troops as they fought their way through the city, and helped coordinate U.S. air power to back their assault against the Taliban.
Gen. John F. Campbell, commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, told lawmakers in Washington on Thursday that his forces were providing planning and “training advice” for local forces around Kunduz, with a headquarters support group at the airfield.
In the days after the city’s fall, Afghan security forces had advanced into Kunduz’s commercial district but were still locked in intense clashes with Taliban militants holed up in government buildings, private homes and the abandoned offices of international aid groups. That Afghan security forces had made it into the city at all was a result of the airstrikes that the U.S. military began to conduct to support their advance.
The strikes earlier in the week were reported to have killed nearly 50 Taliban fighters who were attempting to advance on Afghan and coalition troops at the Kunduz airport.
In central Kunduz on the night of Oct. 2, hospital staffers were settling in. Five patients — members of a family shot while trying to flee Kunduz — had been brought in earlier that evening, around 6 p.m. The wards were mostly quiet after that, and no major fighting had been reported.
“It was the first time the team could rest and [the] first time we could plan some operations that had been delayed before,” Molinie said.
Shortly before midnight, clashes erupted nearby between Taliban and government forces and quickly intensified, said Islamuddin, a Kunduz resident who lives about 50 yards from the hospital gates and, like many Afghans, goes by one name. At the airport, U.S. advisers received a request from Afghan special forces for urgent help in the vicinity of the hospital, where they reported receiving Taliban fire.
Scrambling to assist, American Special Operations forces advisers requested immediate close air support for the Afghan commandos.
Soon after, an AC-130U from the 4th Special Operations Squadron — call sign “Hammer” — was lumbering through a mostly clear night sky toward the target position.
The AC-130U is one variant of the AC-130 gunship. A holdover from the Vietnam War, the plane is a converted transport aircraft loaded with 25mm and 40mm cannons as well as a 105mm howitzer. As its weapons jut from the left side the aircraft, the AC-130 engages targets in a wide left turn. Crewed by a dozen airmen, including a Special Operations Ground liaison officer responsible for coordinating with ground forces, the AC-130 has low-light and thermal sensors that give it a “God’s eye” of the battlefield in almost all weather conditions.

According to individuals familiar with the incident, American forces from the JOC directed the aircraft over the Afghan special forces and sent up the initial “call for fire” to the aircraft. The request gave the aircraft the necessary targeting information as well as the location of friendly forces.
According to an individual familiar with the aircraft’s operations that night, the sensor operators identified fighters moving into and firing from one of the hospital’s front porticos. The crew, piloting an aircraft that rarely targets buildings, asked the JOC twice if they wanted the aircraft to engage, the individual said. How close active Taliban forces may have been to the hospital — a point where the accounts of the charity’s personnel and Afghan security officials diverge — is now a central question for investigators. Even if Taliban militants were firing from the compound, U.S. rules of engagement would not have allowed an airstrike if the crew knew it was a protected civilian facility.

On Saturday, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said that the U.S. military was authorized to make “appropriate” condolence payments to the families of civilians killed in the hospital attack, and to provide funding for repairing the hospital.
U.S. investigators are now trying to determine whether the air crew knew that the target was a hospital.
While the Afghan government has not said definitively whether it thinks that the Taliban forces were firing from near or within the compound, local officials have said that the group had set up a “command center” at the facility — an assertion Doctors Without Borders has strongly rejected.
Who placed the call?
Another unresolved question is who placed the request for the air support. According to Brig. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, troops from the Afghan army’s 209th Corps were fighting on the ground in that area, but officials in Kabul were unsure whether they made the request processed by U.S. advisers at the Kunduz airport.
Waziri suspects that Afghan soldiers were aware of the hospital’s location. Before soldiers begin combat, they receive detailed maps from local police outlining the locations of mosques, schools and hospitals, he said.
A few minutes after 2 a.m., following approval from U.S. forces, the plane fired a massive initial burst at the main hospital building, which houses the facility’s emergency rooms and intensive care unit.
While it is unclear what weapons were employed, the AC-130U’s 40mm round has a high explosive incendiary munition that is lined with zirconium. The rounds are known for causing fires.

One MSF physician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for security reasons, had finished his shift and was drifting off to sleep in the hospital’s break room when a giant blast shook the building. Light fixtures and parts of the ceiling crashed down on him.
The explosion, possibly from the plane’s 105mm gun, was so powerful that it shattered windows of nearby homes. “I saw the flame of fire rise from the hospital,” Islamuddin said.
The Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz in flames following the Oct. 3 airstrike. (Doctors Without Borders/AP)
The physician and other staff members rushed to the hospital’s basement, which was used as a makeshift bomb shelter.
Far above, the U.S. pilots banked the aircraft into a wide orbit circling the hospital. Over the next 65 minutes, the plane unleashed additional fire on each pass around the facility below, every 15 minutes or so.
Some staff members and patients may have died instantly; others died amid the rubble or as colleagues tried fruitlessly to administer care. A pharmacist died in the hospital office. As a fire engulfed the hospital building, at least six patients burned to death in the intensive care unit.
Doctors Without Borders medical personnel treat wounded colleagues and patients after the assault. (AFP/Getty Images)
During the attack, staff members placed desperate calls to colleagues, who relayed messages to U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington, including to the Pentagon’s Joint Staff in Washington, the organization said.
In the days before the assault, Doctors Without Borders said, it provided the hospital’s location repeatedly to the same officials. But the relief group has declined to provide details of exactly who it alerted. The office of the Joint Staff says it has not yet located an individual who received that information.

At about 3:30 a.m., staffers huddled in the basement bomb shelter heard the guns fall silent. It is not known why the air crew chose to halt the attack.
Many of those who had taken shelter below ground were too frightened to emerge and stayed there until dawn. “Then we heard this calling, ‘Anyone alive? You can come out,’ ” the physician recalled.
When he emerged into the rubble of the smoldering hospital, the doctor immediately saw the bodies of patients and colleagues. Other staffers began to make their way out into the open and rushed to treat those wounded in the attacks. Some could not be saved. One doctor died on a desk while another staff member tried to perform emergency surgery to save him.
Mohammad Sharif in Kabul and Julie Tate and Andrew Katz in Washington contributed to this report.
Read more:
Doctors Without Borders says U.S. airstrike hit hospital in Afghanistan
The bloody history of Kunduz, from Afghanistan’s ‘Convoy of Death’ to now
In Kunduz, echoes of a 1988 guerrilla assault after the Soviets withdrew


Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan: The world’s most-needed hospitals are under attack

Burnt vehicles are pictured in front of the damaged the Doctors Without Borders-backed al-Quds hospital after it was hit by airstrikes, in a rebel-held area of Syria's Aleppo, April 28, 2016. (Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters)
The al-Quds hospital in Aleppo targeted in Wednesday night's attacks was one of 150 hospitals supported by Doctors Without Borders in Syria. The organization directly runs six in the country, but provides funding and medical supplies to other medical facilities.
The international charity group, also referred to as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in French, said the medical facility was directly hit and reduced to "rubble."  The organization has condemned the overnight attack, which also claimed the life of one of the area's last pediatricians.
"Where is the outrage among those with the power and obligation to stop this carnage?” said Muskilda Zancada, the MSF head in Syria, in an online statement.
The United Nations estimates that at least half of Syria's hospitals have been destroyed, and the spark of attacks on hospitals is an especially disturbing trend. In armed conflict, hospitals are protected by international law. Yet the facilities supported and run by the Nobel Prize-winning organization have frequently come under attack. And it's not only medical structures. The group said five rescue workers from the Syrian Civil Defense organization have also been killed.
Here is a look at the three recent attacks on Doctors Without Borders hospitals:
1. Kunduz, Afghanistan.
Doctors Without Borders medical personnel treat civilians injured following an offensive against Taliban militants by Afghan and coalition forces at a hospital in Kunduz. (Doctors Without Borders/AFP via Getty Images)
On Oct. 3, 2015, U.S. military forces "mistakenly struck" a hospital as they attempted to help Afghan forces. The attack killed 44 people and injured 30. The hospital was deemed a neutral zone, even for Taliban militants fighting Afghan forces who were being treated there.
Inside the hospital, which the international relief agency in recent years had turned into the province’s most advanced medical facility, doctors and nurses were busier than ever. Between Sept. 28 and Oct. 3, exhausted hospital staffers treated 394 people, many of whom had received gunshot wounds during the battle for the city.
All that week, a steady stream of Taliban fighters appeared at the hospital seeking treatment, adding to the patient load, according to a hospital security guard.
Before fighters were admitted onto hospital grounds, the guard said, they were required to hand over their assault weapons to facility guards. Once inside, the Taliban fighters — many of whom had been shot — were treated like any other patient.
2. Saada, Yemen
First photos for our health facility in Haydan #Saada after the airstrikes that took place last night. #Yemen https://t.co/P2mr7sgp63
On Oct. 27, 2015, a Saudi-led airstrike campaign destroyed a hospital in northern Yemen, injuring one staff member. All others escaped. As my colleague Thomas Gibbons-Neff notes, hospitals must be given prior warning to evacuate before they can be targeted as a military facility.
The loss of another hospital to destruction from the air is just one more instance in a disturbing month-long trend that has spanned multiple conflict zones.
Hospitals are protected areas under the International Law of Armed Conflict and are only viable military targets if the hospital is being used for a military objective. Even then, however, the facility must be given ample time to evacuate before it can be legally targeted.
3. Syria
On Feb. 15, 2016, two airstrikes hit northern Syrian hospitals supported by Doctors Without Borders. The attacks killed at least 25 people and injured 11, according to reports. Data compiled by the organization shows that a total of 94 attacks have hit facilities supported by the group.

This image taken from video provided by the Syrian activist-based media group Maara Media Center shows Syrian Civil Defense rescuers running from the site of a second explosion near a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Maaret al-Numan, Idlib, Syri.  (Maara Media Center/AP)
Read more:
International Red Cross official sees ‘disturbing trend’ in attacks on hospitals in conflict zones
War in Yemen is pushing health-care facilities to the brink of collapse
What the ruins of Kobane tell us about the destruction of Syria