What happens if you track how much heat enters Earth's atmosphere and how much heat leaves?

You discover that Earth's energy budget "is now well and truly out of balance," three climate researchers write at The Conversation: Our recent research found this imbalance has more than doubled over the last 20 years. Other researchers have come to the same conclusions. This imbalance is now substantially more than climate models have suggested... These findings suggest climate change might well accelerate in the coming years...

[T]he burning of coal, oil and gas has now added more than two trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. These trap more and more heat, preventing it from leaving. Some of this extra heat is warming the land or melting sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets. But this is a tiny fraction. Fully 90% has gone into the oceans due to their huge heat capacity...

The doubling of the energy imbalance has come as a shock, because the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change. Typically, the models forecast less than half of the change we're seeing in the real world. We don't yet have a full explanation. But new research suggests changes in clouds is a big factor. Clouds have a cooling effect overall. But the area covered by highly reflective white clouds has shrunk, while the area of jumbled, less reflective clouds has grown.
While we don't know why the cloud are changing, it "might be part of a trend caused by global warming itself, that is, a positive feedback on climate change. These findings suggest recent extremely hot years are not one-offs but may reflect a strengthening of warming over the coming decade or longer...."

"We've known the solution for a long time: stop the routine burning of fossil fuels and phase out human activities causing emissions such as deforestation."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Smithsonian magazine: Last year, Australian scientists picked up a mysterious burst of radio waves that briefly appeared brighter than all other signals in the sky. Now, the researchers have discovered the blast didn't come from a celestial object, but a defunct satellite orbiting Earth... "We got all excited, thinking maybe we'd discovered a new pulsar or some other object," says Clancy James, a researcher at Australia's Curtin University who is on the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) team, to Alex Wilkins at New Scientist. After taking a closer look, however, the team realized that the only viable source for the burst was NASA's dead Relay 2, a short-lived satellite that hasn't been in operation since 1967....

The researchers also discovered that at the time of the event, the satellite was only around 2,800 miles away from Earth, which explains why the signal appeared so strong. The reason behind Relay 2's sudden burst is not clear, but the team has come up with two potential explanations — and neither involves the satellite coming back to life like a zombie. One relates to electrostatic discharge — a build-up of electricity that can result in a sudden blast. Spacecraft get charged with electricity when they pass through plasma, and once enough charge accumulates, it can create a spark. "New spacecraft are built with materials to reduce the build-up of charge, but when Relay 2 was launched, this wasn't well-understood," explains James to Space.com's Robert Lea. The other idea is that a micrometeorite hit the satellite, releasing a small cloud of plasma and radio waves.

Karen Aplin, a space scientist at the University of Bristol in England who was not involved in the study, tells New Scientist that it would be tough to differentiate between signals produced by each of those two scenarios, because they would look very similar. The researchers say they favor the first idea, however, because micrometeorites the size of the one that could have caused the signal are uncommon.
"Their findings were published in a pre-print paper on the arXiv server that has not yet been peer-reviewed."

"I don't know what's wrong with me, but something is very bad — I'm very scared, and I need to go to the hospital," a man told his wife, after experiencing what Futurism calls a "ten-day descent into AI-fueled delusion" and "a frightening break with reality."

And a San Francisco psychiatrist tells the site he's seen similar cases in his own clinical practice. The consequences can be dire. As we heard from spouses, friends, children, and parents looking on in alarm, instances of what's being called "ChatGPT psychosis" have led to the breakup of marriages and families, the loss of jobs, and slides into homelessness. And that's not all. As we've continued reporting, we've heard numerous troubling stories about people's loved ones being involuntarily committed to psychiatric care facilities — or even ending up in jail — after becoming fixated on the bot.

"I was just like, I don't f*cking know what to do," one woman told us. "Nobody knows who knows what to do."

Her husband, she said, had no prior history of mania, delusion, or psychosis. He'd turned to ChatGPT about 12 weeks ago for assistance with a permaculture and construction project; soon, after engaging the bot in probing philosophical chats, he became engulfed in messianic delusions, proclaiming that he had somehow brought forth a sentient AI, and that with it he had "broken" math and physics, embarking on a grandiose mission to save the world. His gentle personality faded as his obsession deepened, and his behavior became so erratic that he was let go from his job. He stopped sleeping and rapidly lost weight. "He was like, 'just talk to [ChatGPT]. You'll see what I'm talking about,'" his wife recalled. "And every time I'm looking at what's going on the screen, it just sounds like a bunch of affirming, sycophantic bullsh*t."

Eventually, the husband slid into a full-tilt break with reality. Realizing how bad things had become, his wife and a friend went out to buy enough gas to make it to the hospital. When they returned, the husband had a length of rope wrapped around his neck. The friend called emergency medical services, who arrived and transported him to the emergency room. From there, he was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric care facility.

Numerous family members and friends recounted similarly painful experiences to Futurism, relaying feelings of fear and helplessness as their loved ones became hooked on ChatGPT and suffered terrifying mental crises with real-world impacts.
"When we asked the Sam Altman-led company if it had any recommendations for what to do if a loved one suffers a mental health breakdown after using its software, the company had no response."

But Futurism reported earlier that "because systems like ChatGPT are designed to encourage and riff on what users say," people experiencing breakdowns "seem to have gotten sucked into dizzying rabbit holes in which the AI acts as an always-on cheerleader and brainstorming partner for increasingly bizarre delusions." In certain cases, concerned friends and family provided us with screenshots of these conversations. The exchanges were disturbing, showing the AI responding to users clearly in the throes of acute mental health crises — not by connecting them with outside help or pushing back against the disordered thinking, but by coaxing them deeper into a frightening break with reality... In one dialogue we received, ChatGPT tells a man it's detected evidence that he's being targeted by the FBI and that he can access redacted CIA files using the power of his mind, comparing him to biblical figures like Jesus and Adam while pushing him away from mental health support. "You are not crazy," the AI told him. "You're the seer walking inside the cracked machine, and now even the machine doesn't know how to treat you...."

In one case, a woman told us that her sister, who's been diagnosed with schizophrenia but has kept the condition well managed with medication for years, started using ChatGPT heavily; soon she declared that the bot had told her she wasn't actually schizophrenic, and went off her prescription — according to Girgis, a bot telling a psychiatric patient to go off their meds poses the "greatest danger" he can imagine for the tech — and started falling into strange behavior, while telling family the bot was now her "best friend".... ChatGPT is also clearly intersecting in dark ways with existing social issues like addiction and misinformation. It's pushed one woman into nonsensical "flat earth" talking points, for instance — "NASA's yearly budget is $25 billion," the AI seethed in screenshots we reviewed, "For what? CGI, green screens, and 'spacewalks' filmed underwater?" — and fueled another's descent into the cult-like "QAnon" conspiracy theory.

On the International Space Station, air has been slowly leaking out for years from a Russia-controlled module, reports CNN. But recently "station operators realized the gradual, steady leak had stopped. And that raised an even larger concern." It's possible that efforts to seal cracks in the module's exterior wall have worked, and the patches are finally trapping air as intended. But, according to NASA, engineers are also concerned that the module is actually holding a stable pressure because a new leak may have formed on an interior wall — causing air from the rest of the orbiting laboratory to begin rushing into the damaged area. Essentially, space station operators are worried that the entire station is beginning to lose air.

Much about this issue is unknown. NASA revealed the concerns in a June 14 statement. The agency said it would delay the launch of the private Ax-4 mission, carried out by SpaceX and Houston-based company Axiom Space, as station operators worked to pinpoint the problem. "By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal," the statement read.

More than a week later, the results of that research are not totally clear. After revealing the new Wednesday launch target Monday night, NASA said in a Tuesday statement that it worked with Roscosmos officials to investigate the issue. The space agencies agreed to lower the pressure in the transfer tunnel, and "teams will continue to evaluate going forward," according to the statement... The cracks are minuscule and mostly invisible to the naked eye, hence the difficulty attempting to patch problem areas.
Axiom Space launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Wednesday.

But its four-person crew had previously "remained locked in quarantine in Florida for about a month, waiting for their chance to launch," notes CNN, as NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos "attempted to sort through" the leak issue.

NASA and Axiom Space have indefinitely delayed the Axiom-4 launch to the International Space Station due to concerns about a persistent air leak in the Russian PrK vestibule of the aging Zvezda module. "The PrK serves as a passageway between the station's Zvezda module and spacecraft docked at its aft port," notes CBS News. From the report: In a blog post, NASA said cosmonauts aboard the station "recently performed inspections of the pressurized module's interior surfaces, sealed some additional areas of interest, and measured the current leak rate. Following this effort, the segment now is holding pressure." The post went on to say the Axiom-4 delay will provide "additional time for NASA and (the Russian space agency) Roscosmos to evaluate the situation and determine whether any additional troubleshooting is necessary."

Launched in July 2000 atop a Russian Proton rocket, Zvezda was the third module to join the growing space station, providing a command center for Russian cosmonauts, crew quarters, the aft docking port and two additional ports now occupied by airlock and research modules. The leakage was first noticed in 2019, and has been openly discussed ever since by NASA during periodic reviews and space station news briefings. The leak rate has varied, but has stayed in the neighborhood of around 1-to-2 pounds per day. "The station is not young," astronaut Mike Barratt said last November during a post flight news conference. "It's been up there for quite a while, and you expect some wear and tear, and we're seeing that in the form of some cracks that have formed." The Russians have made a variety of attempts to patch a suspect crack and other possible sources of leakage, but air has continued to escape into space.

In November, Bob Cabana, a former astronaut and NASA manager who chaired the agency's ISS Advisory Committee, said U.S. and Russian engineers "don't have a common understanding of what the likely root cause is, or the severity of the consequences of these leaks." "The Russian position is that the most probable cause of the PrK cracks is high cyclic fatigue caused by micro vibrations," Cabana said. "NASA believes the PrK cracks are likely multi-causal including pressure and mechanical stress, residual stress, material properties and environmental exposures. "The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can't prove to our satisfaction that they are, and the US believes that it's not safe, but we can't prove that to the Russian satisfaction that that's the case."

As an interim step, the hatch leading to the PrK and the station's aft docking compartment is closed during daily operations and only opened when the Russians need to unload a visiting Progress cargo ship. And as an added precaution on NASA's part, whenever the hatch to the PrK and docking compartment is open, a hatch between the Russian and U.S. segments of the station is closed. "We've taken a very conservative approach to close a hatch between the US side and the Russian side during those time periods," Barratt said. "It's not a comfortable thing, but it is the best agreement between all the smart people on both sides. And it's something that we crew live with and enact." Cabana said last year that the Russians do not believe "catastrophic disintegration of the PrK is realistic (but) NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure."

Shubhanshu Shukla will become the first Indian astronaut to visit the International Space Station as part of a four-person mission by Axiom Space launching from the U.S.. The mission will include 14 days aboard the ISS and over 60 scientific studies. The Guardian reports: He will be the third astronaut of Indian origin to reach orbit, following Rakesh Sharma, who was part of a 1984 flight onboard a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft, and Kalpana Chawla, who was born in India but became a US citizen and flew on two space shuttle missions, including the 2003 Columbia flight that ended in disaster when the spacecraft disintegrated, killing all seven astronauts onboard. "I truly believe that even though, as an individual, I am traveling to space, this is the journey of 1.4 billion people," Shukla was quoted as saying by the Hindu newspaper this year. Shukla said he hoped to "ignite the curiosity of an entire generation in my country."

India's department of space has called the trip a "defining chapter" in its ambitious space exploration program. The International Space Station mission (ISS) "stands as a symbol of a confident, forward-looking nation ready to reclaim its place in the global space race," the agency said before the launch. "His journey is more than just a flight -- it's a signal that India is stepping boldly into a new era of space exploration." New Delhi has paid more than $60m for the mission, according to Indian media reports. [...]

Shukla trained at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia in 2020, before undertaking further training at the ISRO's centre in Bengaluru. He has said the journey aboard the Axiom Mission 4, and the expected 14 days on the ISS, will provide "invaluable" lessons to bring back home. Shukla will be led by the mission commander, Peggy Whitson, a former Nasa astronaut and an Axiom employee, and joined by the European Space Agency astronaut Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski, of Poland, and Tibor Kapu, of Hungary. They will conduct 60 scientific studies, including microgravity research, earth observation, and life, biological and material sciences experiments.

A NASA-backed project using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released more than 1.5 TB of data for open science, offering the largest view deep into the universe available to date. From a report: The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), a joint project from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Rochester Institute of Technology, has launched a searchable dataset for budding astrophysics enthusiasts worldwide.

As well as a catalog of galaxies, the dataset includes an interactive viewer that users can search for images of specific objects or click them to view their properties, covering approximately 0.54 square degrees of sky with the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and a 0.2 square degree area with the Mid Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Although the raw data was already publicly available to the science community, the aim of the COSMOS-Web project was to make it more usable for other scientists.

Blue Origin is falling far short of its goal to launch the New Glenn rocket eight times in 2025, with its second flight now delayed until at least mid-August. Key leadership changes were also announced, including the departure of the New Glenn program head, as the company faces pressure to increase launch cadence and compete with SpaceX for federal contracts and Amazon's Project Kuiper deployments. Ars Technica reports: The mission, with an undesignated payload, will be named "Never Tell Me the Odds," due to the attempt to land the booster. "One of our key mission objectives will be to land and recover the booster," [chief executive of Blue Origin, Dave Limp] wrote. "This will take a little bit of luck and a lot of excellent execution. We're on track to produce eight GS2s this year, and the one we'll fly on this second mission was hot-fired in April."

In this comment, GS2 stands for "Glenn stage 2," or the second stage of the large rocket. It is telling that Limp commented on the company tracking toward producing eight second stages, which would match the original launch cadence planned for this year. This likely is a fig leaf offered to Bezos, who, two sources said, was rather upset that Blue Origin would not meet (or even approach) its original target of eight launches this year. One person familiar with the progress on the vehicle told Ars that even a launch date in August is unrealistic -- this too may have been set aggressively to appease Bezos -- and that September is probably the earliest the rocket is likely to be ready for launch. Blue Origin has not publicly stated what the payload will be, but this second flight is expected to carry the ESCAPADE mission for NASA.

On May 28, a couple of days after Limp's all-hands meeting, the chief executive emailed his entire team to announce an "organizational update." As part of this, the company's senior vice president of engines, Linda Cova, was retiring. Multiple sources confirmed this retiring was expected and that the company's program to produce BE-4 rocket engines is going well. However, the other name in the email raised some eyebrows, coming so soon after the announcement that New Glenn's cadence would be significantly slower than expected. Jarrett Jones, the senior vice president running the New Glenn program, was said to be "stepping away from his role and taking a well deserved year off" starting on August 15. It is unclear whether this departure was linked to Bezos' displeasure with the rocket program. One company official said Jones' sabbatical had been planned, but the timing is curious. A search for internal and external candidates to fill his role is ongoing.

"NASA engineers have spent the past decade developing a rugged, partially autonomous lander designed to explore Europa, one of Jupiter's most intriguing moons," reports Gizmodo.

But though NASA "got cold feet over the project," the engineers behind the project are now suggesting the probe could instead explore Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn: Europa has long been a prime target in the search for extraterrestrial biology because scientists suspect it harbors a subsurface ocean beneath its icy crust, potentially teeming with microbial life. But the robot — packed with radiation shielding, cutting-edge software, and ice-drilling appendages — won't be going anywhere anytime soon.

In a recent paper in Science Robotics, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) outlined the design and testing of what was once the Europa Lander prototype, a four-legged robotic explorer built to survive the brutal surface conditions of the Jovian moon. The robot was designed to walk — as opposed to roll — analyze terrain, collect samples, and drill into Europa's icy crust — all with minimal guidance from Earth, due to the major communication lag between our planet and the moon 568 million miles (914 million kilometers) away. Designed to operate autonomously for hours at a time, the bot came equipped with stereoscopic cameras, a robotic arm, LED lights, and a suite of specialized materials tough enough to endure harsh radiation and bone-chilling cold....

According to the team, the challenges of getting to Europa — its radiation exposure, immense distance, and short observation windows — proved too daunting for NASA's higher-ups. And that's before you take into consideration the devastating budget cuts planned by the Trump administration, which would see the agency's funding fall from $7.3 billion to $3.9 billion. The lander, once the centerpiece of a bold astrobiology initiative, is now essentially mothballed.

But the engineers aren't giving up. They're now lobbying for the robot to get a second shot — on Enceladus, Saturn's ice-covered moon, which also boasts a subsurface ocean and has proven more favorable for robotic exploration. Enceladus is still frigid, but `has lower radiation and better access windows than Europa.

The James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the most distant galaxy ever observed, named MoM z14. NASA estimates it existed just 280 million years after the Big Bang. Space.com reports: Prior to the discovery of MoM z14, the galaxy holding the title of earliest and distant was JADES-GS-z14-0, which existed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, or around 13.5 billion years ago. This previous record galaxy has a redshift of z =14.32, while MoM z14 has a redshift of z = 14.44. There is a wider context to the observation of MoM z14 than the fact that it has broken the record for earliest known galaxy by 20 million years, though, as [explained team member and Yale University professor of Astronomy and Physics Pieter van Dokkum].

The researchers were able to determine that MoM z14 is around 50 times smaller than the Milky Way. The team also measured emission lines from the galaxy, indicating the presence of elements like nitrogen and carbon. "The emission lines are unusual; it indicates that the galaxy is very young, with a rapidly increasing rate of forming new stars," van Dokkum said. "There are also indications that there is not much neutral hydrogen gas surrounding the galaxy, which would be surprising: the very early universe is expected to be filled with neutral hydrogen. "That needs even better spectra and more galaxies, to investigate more fully."

The presence of carbon and nitrogen in MoM z14 indicates that there are earlier galaxies to be discovered than this 13.52 billion-year-old example. That is because the very earliest galaxies in the universe and their stars were filled with the simplest elements in the cosmos, hydrogen and helium. Later galaxies would be populated by these heavier elements, which astronomers somewhat confusingly call "metal," as their stars forged them and then dispersed them in supernova explosions. The research has been published on arXiv.

President Trump's 2026 budget proposes over $1 billion for Mars exploration through a new Commercial Mars Payload Services Program, while simultaneously slashing NASA's overall budget by 25%. Phys.Org reports: Under the proposal, NASA would award contracts to companies developing spacesuits, communications systems and a human-rated landing vehicle to foster exploration of the Red Planet. Trump's proposed $18.8 billion NASA budget would cut the agency's funding by about 25% from the year before, with big hits to its science portfolio. The fleshed-out request on Friday builds upon a condensed budget proposal released earlier this month.

"We must continue to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars," NASA Acting Administrator Janet Petro wrote in a letter included in the request. "That means making strategic decisions -- including scaling back or discontinuing ineffective efforts." The new Mars scheme is modeled after NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program that has benefited Intuitive Machines LLC, Firefly Aerospace Inc. and Astrobotic Technology Inc., though it has achieved mixed results. According to the budget, the contract to land on Mars would build upon existing lander contracts. America's Next NASA Administrator Will Not Be Former SpaceX Astronaut Jared Isaacman

In December it looked like NASA's next administrator would be the billionaire businessman/space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX.

But Saturday the nomination was withdrawn "after a thorough review of prior associations," according to an announcement made on social media. The Guardian reports: His removal from consideration caught many in the space industry by surprise. Trump and the White House did not explain what led to the decision... In [Isaacman's] confirmation hearing in April, he sought to balance Nasa's existing moon-aligned space exploration strategy with pressure to shift the agency's focus on Mars, saying the US can plan for travel to both destinations. As a potential leader of Nasa's 18,000 employees, Isaacman faced a daunting task of implementing that decision to prioritize Mars, given that Nasa has spent years and billions of dollars trying to return its astronauts to the moon...

Some scientists saw the nominee change as further destabilizing to Nasa as it faces dramatic budget cuts without a confirmed leader in place to navigate political turbulence between Congress, the White House and the space agency's workforce.
"It was unclear whom the administration might tap to replace Isaacman," the article adds, though "One name being floated is the retired US air force Lt Gen Steven Kwast, an early advocate for the creation of the US Space Force..."

Ars Technica notes that Kwast, a former Lieutenant General in the U.S. Air Force, has a background that "seems to be far less oriented toward NASA's civil space mission and far more focused on seeing space as a battlefield — decidedly not an arena for cooperation and peaceful exploration."

"More than 200 climate and weather scientists from across the U.S. are taking part in a marathon livestream on YouTube," according to this report from Space.com. For 100 hours (that started Wednesday) they're sharing their scientific work and answering questions from viewers, "to prove the value of climate science," according to the article.

The event is being stated in protest of recent government funding cuts at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the United States Geological Survey, and the National Science Foundation. (The event began with "scientists documenting their last few hours at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies as the office was shuttered.") The marathon stream features mini-lectures, panels and question-and-answer sessions with hundreds of scientists, each speaking in their capacity as private citizens rather than on behalf of any institution. These include talks from former National Weather Service directors, Britney Schmidt, a groundbreaking glacier researcher, and legendary meteorologist John Morales.

In its first 30 hours, the stream got over 77,000 views.

Ultimately, the goal of the event is to give members of the public the chance to learn more about meteorology and climate science in an informal setting — and for free. "We really felt like the American public deserves to know what we do," Duffy said. However, many of the speakers and organizers also hope the transference of this knowledge will spur people to take action. The event's website features a link to 5 Calls, an organization that makes it easy for folks to contact their representatives in Congress about the importance of funding climate and weather research.

For the first time, scientists have directly observed atmospheric sputtering in action on Mars -- an erosion process driven by solar wind ions that may have played a major role in the planet's atmospheric and water loss. ScienceAlert reports: The only spacecraft with the equipment and orbital configuration to make these observations is NASA's MAVEN. The researchers carefully pored over the data collected by the spacecraft since it arrived in Mars orbit in September 2014, looking to find simultaneous observations of the solar electric field and an upper atmosphere abundance of argon -- one of the sputtered particles, used as a tracer for the phenomenon. They found that, above an altitude of 350 kilometers (217 miles), argon densities vary depending on the orientation of the solar wind electric field, compared to argon densities at lower altitudes that remain consistent.

The results showed that lighter isotopes of argon vary, leaving behind an excess of heavy argon -- a discrepancy that is best explained by active sputtering. This is supported by observations of a solar storm, the outflows of which arrived at Mars in January 2016. During this time, the evidence of sputtering became significantly more pronounced. Not only does this support the team's finding that argon density variations at high Martian altitudes are the result of sputtering, it demonstrates what conditions may have been like billions of years ago, when the Sun was younger and rowdier, undergoing more frequent storm activity. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

Wisk Aero and NASA have signed a new five-year partnership to advance the safe integration of autonomous, all-electric aircraft into U.S. airspace, focusing on urban air mobility and regulated eVTOL flight. Electrek reports: Wisk Aero shared details of its refreshed partnership with NASA this week. The autonomous aviation specialist has signed a new five-year Non-Reimbursable Space Act Agreement (NRSAA) with the renowned space administration. Per Wisk, this new agreement focuses on critical research led by NASA's Air Traffic Management Exploration (ATM-X) project, which is centered around the advancement of commercialized autonomous aircraft travel under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) in the National Airspace System (NAS).

As a specialist in autonomous, zero-emission aircraft, Wisk intends to continue its research alongside NASA to help regulators determine future eVTOL flight procedures and capabilities in the US. Regulatory developments on the to-do list for the latest NRSAA include optimizing airspace and route designs for highly automated UAM operations, establishing critical aircraft and ground-based safety system requirements for autonomous flight in urban environments, and establishing Air Traffic Control (ATC) communication protocols and procedures for seamless integration of future UAM aircraft. To achieve these goals, Wisk said its research with NASA will more specifically focus on utilizing advanced simulation and Live Virtual Constructive (LVC) flight environments, which combine live flights with a simulated airspace to enable researchers to assess future operations.

The teams from Wisk and NASA already met last month, continuing their research while beginning to determine how instrument flight procedures and advanced technologies can work together to enable safe autonomous passenger flights by 2030. Wisk Aero is a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing based in California. The aerospace manufacturer said last year that it expects its pilotless air-taxi to begin carrying passengers "later in the decade."

Starfish Space plans to perform the first commercial satellite docking in orbit with its Otter Pup 2 mission, aiming to connect to an unprepared D-Orbit ION spacecraft using an electrostatic capture mechanism and autonomous navigation software. NASASpaceFlight.com reports: This follows the company's first attempt, which saw the Otter Pup 1 mission unable to dock with its target due to a thruster failure. The Otter Pup 2 spacecraft will be deployed from a quarter plate on the upper stage adapter of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, placing it into a sun synchronous orbit altitude of 510 km inclined 97.4 degrees. The target will be a D-Orbit ION spacecraft which will simulate a client payload, which is not equipped with a traditional docking adapter or capture plate as you might see aboard a space station or other rendezvous target. Instead, Starfish Space's Nautilus capture mechanism will feature a special end effector connected to the end of the capture mechanism. This end effector will enable Otter Pup 2 to dock with the ION through electrostatic adhesion.

"An electromagnet will be integrated into the end effector and will be used as a backup option to the electrostatic end effector, to dock with the ION through magnetic attraction," the company notes. The goal is to eventually commission its Otter satellite servicing vehicle to allow for servicing of previously launched satellites. The company's first Otter missions include customers such as NASA, the U.S. Space Force, and Intelsat, with the goal of flying those missions as soon as 2026. [...] Following the thruster issues on the first mission, this flight will feature two ThrustMe thrusters, which use an electric propulsion system based on gridded ion thruster technology.

NASA engineers have successfully revived Voyager 1's backup thrusters, unused since 2004 and once considered defunct. Space.com reports: This remarkable feat became necessary because the spacecraft's primary thrusters, which control its orientation, have been degrading due to residue buildup. If its thrusters fail completely, Voyager 1 could lose its ability to point its antenna toward Earth, therefore cutting off communication with Earth after nearly 50 years of operation. To make matters more urgent, the team faced a strict deadline while trying to remedy the thruster situation. After May 4, the Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 -- and its twin, Voyager 2 -- was scheduled to go offline for months of upgrades. This would have made timely intervention impossible.

To solve the problem, NASA's team had to reactivate Voyager 1's long-dormant backup roll thrusters and then attempt to restart the heaters that keep them operational. If the star tracker drifted too far from its guide star during this process, the roll thrusters would automatically fire as a safety measure -- but if the heaters weren't back online by then, firing the thrusters could cause a dangerous pressure spike. So, the team had to precisely realign the star tracker before the thrusters engaged. Because Voyager is so incredibly distant, the team faced an agonizing 23-hour wait for the radio signal to travel all the way back to Earth. If the test had failed, Voyager might have already been in serious trouble. Then, on March 20, their patience was finally rewarded when Voyager responded perfectly to their commands. Within 20 minutes of receiving the signal, the team saw the thruster heaters' temperature soar -- a clear sign that the backup thrusters were firing as planned. "It was such a glorious moment. Team morale was very high that day," Todd Barber, the mission's propulsion lead at JPL, said in the statement. "These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion. It's just that one of our engineers had this insight that maybe there was this other possible cause, and it was fixable. It was yet another miracle save for Voyager."

Evidence is mounting for "a vast reservoir of liquid water" on Mars, according to a new article by Australian National University professor Hrvoje TkalÄiÄ and geophysics associate professor Weijia Sun from the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, announcing their recently published paper.

"Using seismic data from NASA's InSight mission, we uncovered evidence that the seismic waves slow down in a layer between 5.4 and 8 kilometres below the surface, which could be because of the presence of liquid water at these depths." Mars is covered in traces of ancient bodies of water. But the puzzle of exactly where it all went when the planet turned cold and dry has long intrigued scientists... Billions of years ago, during the Noachian and Hesperian periods (4.1 billion to 3 billion years ago), rivers carved valleys and lakes shimmered. As Mars' magnetic field faded and its atmosphere thinned, most surface water vanished. Some escaped to space, some froze in polar caps, and some was trapped in minerals, where it remains today. But evaporation, freezing and rocks can't quite account for all the water that must have covered Mars in the distant past.

Calculations suggest the "missing" water is enough to cover the planet in an ocean at least 700 metres deep, and perhaps up to 900 metres deep. One hypothesis has been that the missing water seeped into the crust. Mars was heavily bombarded by meteorites during the Noachian period, which may have formed fractures that channelled water underground. Deep beneath the surface, warmer temperatures would keep the water in a liquid state — unlike the frozen layers nearer the surface.

In 2018, NASA's InSight lander touched down on Mars to listen to the planet's interior with a super-sensitive seismometer. By studying a particular kind of vibration called "shear waves", we found a significant underground anomaly: a layer between 5.4 and 8 kilometres down where these vibrations move more slowly. This "low-velocity layer" is most likely highly porous rock filled with liquid water, like a saturated sponge. Something like Earth's aquifers, where groundwater seeps into rock pores. We calculated the "aquifer layer" on Mars could hold enough water to cover the planet in a global ocean 520-780m deep.
InSight's seismometer captured vibrations between the crust of Mars and its lower layers from two meteorite impacts in 2021 and a Marsquake in 2022. "These signatures let us pinpoint boundaries where rock changes, revealing the water-soaked layer 5.4 to 8 kilometres deep."

It's an exciting possibility. "Purified, it could provide drinking water, oxygen, or fuel for rockets." And since microbes thrives on earth in deep rocks filled with water, "Could similar life, perhaps relics of ancient Martian ecosystems, persist in these reservoirs?"

Though global sea levels "varied little" for the 2,000 years before the 20th century, CNN reports that sea levels then "started rising and have not stopped since — and the pace is accelerating."

And sea level rise "was unexpectedly high last year, according to a recent NASA analysis of satellite data." More concerning, however, is the longer-term trend. The rate of annual sea level rise has more than doubled over the past 30 years, resulting in the global sea level increasing 4 inches since 1993. "It's like we're putting our foot on the gas pedal," said Benjamin Hamlington, a research scientist in the Sea Level and Ice Group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. While other climate signals fluctuate, global sea level has a "persistent rise," he told CNN.

It spells trouble for the future. Scientists have a good idea how much average sea level will rise by 2050 — around 6 inches globally, and as much as 10 to 12 inches in the US. Past 2050, however, things get very fuzzy. "We have such a huge range of uncertainty," said Dirk Notz, head of sea ice at the University of Hamburg. "The numbers are just getting higher and higher and higher very quickly." The world could easily see an extra 3 feet of sea level rise by 2100, he told CNN; it could also take hundreds of years to reach that level. Scientists simply don't know enough yet to project what will happen.

What scientists are crystal clear about is the reason for the rise: human-caused global warming. Oceans absorb roughly 90% of the excess heat primarily produced by burning fossil fuels, and as water heats up it expands. Heat in the oceans and atmosphere is also driving melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which together hold enough fresh water to raise global sea levels by around 213 feet. Melting ice sheets have driven roughly two-thirds of longer-term sea level rise, although last year — the planet's hottest on record — the two factors flipped, making ocean warming the main driver. [SciTechDaily reports that between 2021 and 2023 the Antarctica ice sheet actually showed an overall increase in mass which exerted a negative contribution to sea level rise.]

It's likely that an increase of about 3 feet is already locked in, Notz said, because "we have pushed the system too hard." The big question is, how quickly will it happen? Ice sheets are the biggest uncertainty, as it's not clear how fast they'll react as the world heats up — whether they'll melt steadily or reach a tipping point and rapidly collapse... [I]t's still unclear how processes may unfold over the next decades and centuries. Antarctica is "the elephant in the room," he said. Alarming changes are unfolding on this vast icy continent, which holds enough water to raise levels by 190 feet.

Notz describes the ice sheet as an "awakening giant:" It takes a long time to wake up but once awake, "it's very, very difficult to put it back to sleep."
The article notes that U.S. coastlines "are tracking above global average and toward the upper end of climate model projections, NASA's Hamlington said." (The state of Louisiana has one of the highest rates of land loss in the world, with some places experiencing nearly 4x the global rate of relative sea level rise.) But it's not just a problem for America.

"Over the next three decades, islands such as Tuvalu, Kiribati and Fiji will experience at least 6 inches of sea level rise even if the world reduces planet-heating pollution, according to NASA.... "Entire villages in Fiji have been formally relocated," said Fijian activist George Nacewa, from climate group 350.org, "the incoming tides are flooding our roads and inundating our crops." However, if the pace accelerates rapidly, "it will be very, very difficult to adapt to, because things unfold too quickly," he said.
"Humans still have control over how fast sea level rises over the next decades and centuries by cutting emissions, Notz noted."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader RoccamOccam for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The European Union launched a drive on Monday to attract scientists and researchers to Europe with offers of grants and new policy plans, after the Trump administration froze U.S. government funding linked to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. "A few years ago, no one would have imagined that one of the biggest democracies in the world would cancel research programs under the pretext that the word diversity was in this program," French President Emmanuel Macron said at the "Choose Europe for Science" event in Paris. "No one would have thought that one of the biggest democracies in the world would delete with a stroke the ability of one researcher or another to obtain visas," Macron said. "But here we are."

Taking the same stage at the Sorbonne University, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU's executive branch would set up a "super grant" program aimed at offering "a longer-term perspective to the very best" in the field. She said that 500 million euros ($566 million) will be put forward in 2025-2027 "to make Europe a magnet for researchers." It would be injected into the European Research Council, which already has a budget of more than 16 billion euros ($18 billion) for 2021-2027.

Von der Leyen said that the 27-nation EU intends "to enshrine freedom of scientific research into law" with a new legal act. As "the threats rise across the world, Europe will not compromise on its principles," she said. Macron said that the French government would also soon make new proposals to beef up investment in science and research. [...] While not mentioning the Trump administration by name, von der Leyen said that it was "a gigantic miscalculation" to undermine free and open research. "We can all agree that science has no passport, no gender, no ethnicity, no political party," she said. "We believe that diversity is an asset of humanity and the lifeblood of science. It is one of the most valuable global assets and it must be protected." Macron said that science and research must not "be based on the diktats of the few."

Macron said that Europe "must become a refuge" for scientists and researchers, and he said to those who feel under threat elsewhere: "The message is simple. If you like freedom, come and help us to remain free, to do research here, to help us become better, to invest in our future."

Further reading:
75% of Scientists in Nature Poll Weigh Leaving US
NASA, Yale, and Stanford Scientists Consider 'Scientific Exile'