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NASA recently launched the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative whose aim is to find the best future payloads to deliver to the surface of the moon. These payloads would include instruments for basic science investigations. Shown here, a Lockheed Martin space concept for a commercial lunar lander. As we probe deeper into the innermost workings of the universe, our particle physics experiments have become ever more complex. In order to reveal the secrets of the tiniest subatomic particles, physicists must make colliders and detectors as cold as possible, remove as much air as possible, and keep them as still as possible to get reliable results.

Recent measurements of particles called B mesons deviate from predictions. Alone, each oddity looks like a fluke, but their collective drift is more suggestive. Computer reconstruction of a collision event in the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment. The collision produces a B meson, which subsequently decays into other particles that strike LHCb’s detectors. Amid the chaotic chains of events that ensue when protons smash together at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, one particle has popped up that appears to go to pieces in a peculiar way.