An hours-long discussion on Capitol Hill captured the intensifying public interest in the unexplained and how authorities investigate such reports. From a report: A small group of House lawmakers called Wednesday for greater transparency in the government's reporting on encounters with unidentified phenomena, in an unusual congressional hearing featuring the testimony of UFO witnesses. But the hearing, which one freshman Democrat remarked was the most bipartisan discussion he'd seen in his seven months on Capitol Hill, oscillated between statements of concern about the potential national security threat posed by unknown objects flying close to U.S. military aircraft and more extreme allusions to government conspiracies to hide the existence of alien lifeforms. Convened by a House Oversight subcommittee, the hours-long discussion captured the intensifying public interest in the unexplained and what federal authorities are doing to document and investigate such reports.

"We're not bringing little green men or flying saucers into the hearing -- sorry to disappoint about half y'all," Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said. "We're just going to get to the facts. We're going to uncover the cover up." In response to reported encounters by Navy pilots, the U.S. military and the intelligence community have sought to more closely analyze such incidents. The sightings, including some that are believed to be drones or unmanned craft -- like the Chinese surveillance airship shot down in U.S. airspace earlier this year -- have fueled concerns that American adversaries could have developed new technologies that pose a threat to U.S. security. The Pentagon has implemented new policies meant to encourage military personnel to come forward if they see something unusual so it can be investigated and accounted for, and last year established what it calls the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office to further study such reports. NASA has undertaken a similar independent initiative.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The four astronauts assigned to soar beyond the far side of the Moon on NASA's Artemis II mission settled into their seats inside a drab classroom last month at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It was one in a series of noteworthy moments for the four-person crew since NASA revealed the names of the astronauts who will be the first people to fly around the Moon since 1972. There was the fanfare of the crew's unveiling to the public in April and an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. There will, of course, be great anticipation as the astronauts close in on their launch date, currently projected for late 2024 or 2025. But many of the crew's days over the next 18 months will be spent in classrooms, on airplanes, or in simulators, with instructors dispensing knowledge they deem crucial for the success of the Artemis II mission. In the simulator, the training team will throw malfunctions and anomalies at the astronauts to test their ability to resolve a failure that -- if it happened in space -- could cut the mission short or, in a worst-case scenario, kill them.

"In order to do those things, what knowledge do we have to impart to them? What skills do we have to teach them?" said Jacki Mahaffey, NASA's leading training officer for the Artemis II mission. "Overall, our goal is we've got a little bit in the classroom, but the more that we can get the crew in front of the displays in the vehicle mockups and really kind of immersed in that environment, the sooner, the better. Commander Reid Wiseman and his crewmates -- pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen -- were named to the Artemis II crew on April 3. Much of their time over the next two-and-a-half months was devoted to making a public relations tour, giving interviews, going to NASA centers around the country, visiting Capitol Hill, and meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Mahaffey said they also got a pre-training pep talk from Charlie Duke, who walked on the Moon on the Apollo 16 mission in April 1972. NASA hasn't trained a crew to fly to the Moon since Apollo 17 at the end of 1972, the last time astronauts walked on the lunar surface.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has delivered yet another astounding discovery," reports CNN, "spying an active supermassive black hole deeper into the universe than has ever been recorded." The black hole lies within CEERS 1019 — an extremely old galaxy likely formed 570 million years after the big bang — making it more than 13 billion years old. And scientists were perplexed to find just how small the celestial object's central black hole measures. "This black hole clocks in at about 9 million solar masses," according to a NASA news release. A solar mass is a unit equivalent to the mass of the sun in our home solar system — which is about 333,000 times larger than the Earth. That's "far less than other black holes that also existed in the early universe and were detected by other telescopes," according to NASA. "Those behemoths typically contain more than 1 billion times the mass of the Sun — and they are easier to detect because they are much brighter."

The ability to bring such a dim, distant black hole into focus is a key feature of the Webb telescope, which uses highly sensitive instruments to detect otherwise invisible light...

The relative smallness of the black hole at CEER 1019's center is a mystery for scientists. It's not yet clear how such a small black hole formed in the early days of the universe, which was known to produce much larger gravity wells.
NASA's announcement emphasized the power of the James Webb Space Telescope. "Not only could the team untangle which emissions in the spectrum are from the black hole and which are from its host galaxy, they could also pinpoint how much gas the black hole is ingesting and determine its galaxy's star-formation rate."

The survey also recorded evidence of eleven new galaxies — which are still "churning out new stars," according to NASA. A member of the team says these new galaxies, "along with other distant galaxies we may identify in the future, might change our understanding of star formation and galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history."

Congress will pour billions more dollars into the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its associated architecture, even as NASA science missions remain vulnerable to cuts. TechCrunch reports: Both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees recommend earmarking around $25 billion for NASA for the next fiscal year (FY 24), which is in line with the amount of funding the agency received this year (FY 23). However, both branches of Congress recommend increasing the portion of that funding that would go toward the Artemis program and its transportation cornerstones, SLS and the Orion crew capsule. Those programs would receive $7.9 billion per the House bill or $7.74 billion per the Senate bill, an increase of about $440 million from FY 2023 levels. Meanwhile, science missions are looking at cuts of around that same amount, with the House recommending a budget of $7.38 billion versus $7.79 billion in FY 2023.

Overall, NASA received $25.4 billion in funding for FY '23, with $2.6 billion earmarked toward SLS, $1.34 billion to Orion, and $1.48 to the Human Landing System contract programs. Science programs -- which include the Mars Sample Return mission and Earth science missions -- received $7.8 billion overall.

Researchers have discovered that samples of the Ryugu asteroid gathered in 2019 contain grains of stardust. NPR reports: The dust, which came from distant stars and drifted through space for millions or billions of years, could provide clues about how the solar system formed, according to Ann Nguyen, a cosmochemist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Stars forged nearly all of the elements of the Universe. Many of the atoms that make up our bodies were themselves made inside of the core of a star somewhere else. That's because the high pressures and temperatures can fuse lightweight atomic nuclei into heavier elements. "The core is extremely hot, and then you go out in the atmosphere, it's cool enough so that gas can form and aggregate into tiny grains," Nguyen says.

Think of these little grains as cosmic dust motes. Sometimes the star that formed these grains would explode, blowing them across the galaxy like dandelion seeds. Other times they would drift away on their own -- traveling on the stellar wind into deep space. "Probably a lot of them do get destroyed," Nguyen says, "but some of them survive and they make it to our region of the universe where our solar system formed." The stardust swirled and clumped and eventually became part of the sun, and the planets, and even us. That idea led the astronomer Carl Sagan to famously remark that "We're made of star-stuff." [...]

Nguyen says the grains look different than the material from our own solar system, because different stars leave different nuclear signatures in the atoms. "It kind of lights up like a Christmas tree light," she says. "Their isotopic signatures are just so different than the material that formed in our solar system or got homogenized in the solar system." Nguyen says that the stardust grains provide some clues about the types of stars that contributed to our solar system. It also shows that exploding stars, or supernovae, probably contributed more of the dust than researchers had previously believed. But above all, she says, these tiny grains are a reminder of the way in which we fit into the vast cosmos. "It just shows us how rich our Universe is," she says. "These materials all played a part in our life here on Earth." The researchers published their findings in the journal Science Advances.

The US Senate has slashed the budget for NASA's ambitious mission to return soil and rock samples from Mars' surface. From a report: NASA had asked for $949 million to support its Mars Sample Return mission, or MSR, in fiscal year 2024. In its proposed budget for the space agency, released Thursday, the Senate offered just $300 million and threatened to take that amount away. "The Committee has significant concerns about the technical challenges facing MSR and potential further impacts on confirmed missions, even before MSR has completed preliminary design review," stated the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee in its report on the budget.

The committee report, obtained by Ars, noted that Congress has spent $1.739 billion on the Mars Sample Return mission to date but that the public launch date -- currently 2028 -- is expected to slip, and cost overruns threaten other NASA science missions. Further, the report states that the $300 million allocated to the Mars mission will be rescinded if NASA cannot provide Congress with a guarantee that the mission's overall costs will not exceed $5.3 billion. In that case, most of the $300 million would be reallocated to the Artemis program to land humans on the Moon.

The Perseverance rover's Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) instrument, designed to analyze organic chemicals on Mars, has provided valuable insights into the presence and distribution of potential organic materials on the surface of Mars. The findings have been published in the journal Nature. An anonymous reader shares a report from Ars Technica: SHERLOC comes with a deep-UV laser to excite molecules into fluorescing, and the wavelengths they fluoresce at can tell us something about the molecules present. It's also got the hardware to do Raman spectroscopy simultaneously. Collectively, these two capabilities indicate what kinds of molecules are present, though they can't typically identify specific chemicals. And, critically, SHERLOC provides spatial information, telling us where sample-specific signals come from. This allows the instrument to determine which chemicals are located in the same spot in a rock and thus were likely formed or deposited together.

SHERLOC can sample rocks simply by being held near them. The new results are based on a set of samples from two rock formations found on the floor of the Jezero crater. In some cases, the imaging was done by pointing it directly at a rock; in others, the rock surface, and any dust and contaminants it contained, was abraded away by Perseverance before the imaging was done. SHERLOC identified a variety of signatures of potential organic material in these samples. There were a few cases where it was technically possible that the signatures were produced by a very specific chemical that lacked carbon (primarily cerium salts). But, given the choice between a huge range of organic molecules or a very specific salt, the researchers favor organic materials as the source. One thing that was clear was that the level of organic material present changed over time. The deeper, older layer called Seitah only had a tenth of the material found in the Maaz rocks that formed above them. The reason for this difference isn't clear, but it indicates that either the production or deposition of organic material on Mars has changed over time.

Between the different samples and the ability to resolve different regions of the samples, the researchers were able to identify distinct signals that each occurred in many samples. While it wasn't possible to identify the specific molecule responsible, they were able to say a fair bit about them. One signal came from samples that contained a ringed organic compound, along with sulfates. The most common signal came from a two-ringed organic molecule, and was associated with various salts: phosphate, sulfate, silicates, and potentially a perchlorate. Another likely contained a benzene ring associated with iron oxides. A different ringed compound was found in two of the samples. Overall, the researchers conclude that these differences are significant. The fact that distinct organic chemicals are consistently associated with different salts suggests that there were either several distinct ways of synthesizing the organics or that they were deposited and preserved under distinct conditions. Many of the salts seen here are also associated with either water-based deposition or water-driven chemical alteration of the rock -- again, consistent with the processes involved changing over time. Collectively, the researchers say this argues against the organic chemicals simply having been delivered to Mars on a meteorite.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two small spacecraft should have now been cruising through the Solar System on the way to study unexplored asteroids, but after several years of development and nearly $50 million in expenditures, NASA announced Tuesday the probes will remain locked inside a Lockheed Martin factory in Colorado. That's because the mission, called Janus, was supposed to launch last year as a piggyback payload on the same rocket with NASA's much larger Psyche spacecraft, which will fly to a 140-mile-wide (225-kilometer) metal-rich asteroid -- also named Psyche -- for more than two years of close-up observations. Problems with software testing on the Psyche spacecraft prompted NASA managers to delay the launch by more than a year. An independent review board set up to analyze the reasons for the Psyche launch delay identified issues with the spacecraft's software and weaknesses in the plan to test the software before Psyche's launch. Digging deeper, the review panel determined that NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Psyche mission, was encumbered by staffing and workforce problems exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Psyche is now back on track for liftoff in October on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, but Janus won't be aboard.

Janus was designed to fly to two binary asteroids -- consisting of two bodies near one another -- that orbit the Sun closer to Earth than the metallic asteroid Psyche. While the Psyche mission can still reach its asteroid destination and accomplish its science mission with a launch this year, the asteroids targeted by Janus will have changed positions in the Solar System by too much since last year. They are no longer accessible to the two Janus spacecraft without flying too far from the Sun for their solar arrays to generate sufficient power. When it became clear the two Janus target asteroids were no longer reachable, scientists on the Janus team and NASA management agreed last year to remove the twin spacecraft from the Psyche launch. Scientists considered other uses for the suitcase-size Janus spacecraft, which were already built and were weeks away from shipment to Florida to begin final launch preparations when NASA decided to delay the launch of Psyche.

One of the ideas to repurpose the Janus spacecraft was to send the probes to fly by asteroid Apophis, a space rock bigger than the Empire State Building that will encroach within 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) from our planet's surface in 2029. For a time soon after its discovery in 2004, scientists said there was a small chance Apophis could impact Earth in 2029 or later this century, but astronomers have now ruled out any risk of a collision for the next 100-plus years. In the end, Janus fell victim to the delay of the Psyche mission and tight budget constraints at NASA. The agency said Tuesday it has directed the Janus team to "prepare the spacecraft for long-term storage."

NASA has expanded its contracts with Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace to design and develop new spacesuits, providing each company with an additional $5 million. Engadget reports: NASA has ordered a spacesuit from Axiom Space meant for use in Low Earth Orbit, specifically for spacewalks outside the International Space Station. The original contract for Axiom was for a spacewalking system that the Artemis III astronauts will wear on the lunar surface when they land on the moon. Axiom unveiled a prototype for its original order in March, showcasing a suit with joints that allow wearers to move around with ease and a helmet equipped with a light and an HD camera. Meanwhile, Collins Aerospace has received an order for a spacesuit meant for use on the lunar surface. The company was previously contracted to develop a spacewalking suit for use outside the ISS. In other words, each company has received a new order that mirrors the other's previous one.

Redundancy is an important part of space tech development. In this case, spacesuits meant for the same purpose developed by two different companies could ensure that astronauts will have something to use if the other one fails for any reason. That said, the new task orders are for the companies' initial "design modification work" -- they're essentially modifying their original suits for a new purpose -- and NASA wants to see them first before committing to their continued development. Axiom told SpaceNews that if NASA decides to push through with the new spacesuits' development, the full order will cost the agency $142 million over four years.

Popular Science describes how NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) will use a pair of ramps to become the first rover to explore the Moon's south pole when it arrives in late 2024. From the report: "We all know how to work with ramps, and we just need to optimize it for the environment we're going to be in," says NASA's VIPER program manager Daniel Andrews. A VIPER test vehicle recently descended down a pair of metal ramps at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, as seen in the agency's recently published photos, with one beam for each set of the rover's wheels. Because the terrain where VIPER will land -- the edge of the massive Nobile Crater -- is expected to be rough, the engineering team has been testing VIPER's ability to descend the ramps at extreme angles. They have altered the steepness, as measured from the lander VIPER will descend from, and differences in elevation between the ramp for each wheel. "We have two ramps, not just for the left and right wheels, but a ramp set that goes out the back too," Andrews says. "So we actually get our pick of the litter, which one looks most safe and best to navigate as we're at that moment where we have to roll off the lander."

VIPER is a scientific successor to NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS mission, which in 2009 confirmed the presence of water ice on the lunar south pole. "It completely rewrote the books on the moon with respect to water," says Andrews, who also worked on the LCROSS mission. "That really started the moon rush, commercially, and by state actors like NASA and other space agencies." The ice, if abundant, could be mined to create rocket propellant. It could also provide water for other purposes at long-term lunar habitats, which NASA plans to construct in the late 2020s as part of the Artemis moon program.

But LCROSS only confirmed that ice was definitely present in a single crater at the moon's south pole. VIPER, a mobile rover, will probe the distribution of water ice in greater detail. Drilling beneath the lunar surface is one task. Another is to move into steep, permanently shadowed regions -- entering craters that, due to their sharp geometry, and the low angle of the sun at the lunar poles, have not seen sunlight in billions of years. The tests demonstrate the rover can navigate a 15-degree slope with ease -- enough to explore these hidden dark spots, avoiding the need to make a machine designed for trickier descents. "We think there's plenty of scientifically relevant opportunities, without having to make a superheroic rover that can do crazy things," Andrews says.

Developed by NASA Ames and Pittsburgh-based company Astrobotic, VIPER is a square golf-cart-sized vehicle about 5 feet long and wide, and about 8 feet high. Unlike all of NASA's Mars rovers, VIPER has four wheels, not six. "A problem with six wheels is it creates kind of the equivalent of a track, and so you're forced to drive in a certain way," Andrews says. VIPER's four wheels are entirely independent from each other. Not only can they roll in any direction, they can be turned out, using the rover's shoulder-like joints to crawl out of the soft regolith of the kind scientists believe exists in permanently shadowed moon craters. The wheels themselves are very similar to those on the Mars rovers, but with more paddle-like treads, known as grousers, to carry the robot through fluffy regolith. [...] Together with Astrobotic, Andrews and his team have altered the ramps, and they now include specialized etchings down their lengths. The rover can detect this pattern along the rampway, using cameras in its wheel wells. "By just looking down there," the robot knows where it is, he says. "That's a new touch." Andrews is sure VIPER will be ready for deployment in 2024, however many tweaks are necessary. After all, this method is less complicated than a sky crane, he notes: "Ramps are pretty tried and true."

The booster just touched down on the droneship. "The Falcon 9 first-stage has now successfully launched and landed for a record-breaking 16th time," announced SpaceX's feed on YouTube. It was also SpaceX's 206th landing of an orbital-class rocket.

Long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone quotes Spaceflight Now on how SpaceX tested "the limits of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday evening." The booster, tail number 1058, made its historic debut on May 20, 2020, carrying the first astronauts to ride atop a Falcon 9 aboard the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour. The first stage is distinctive in the SpaceX fleet as it is the only one to display a red NASA "worm" logo on its fuselage. It went on to fly 14 more times, including the launches of South Korea's Anasis 2 military communications satellite, a space station cargo delivery run, two Transporter ride-share missions and ten batches of Starlink satellites. With 15 flights already accomplished, it is the joint fleet leader with booster 1060.

Originally, the company hoped to reuse each Falcon 9 first stage 10 times.

"We got to 10 [flights] and the vehicles were still looking really good, so we started the effort to qualify for 15," Jon Edwards, SpaceX vice president of Falcon launch vehicles and Falcon engineering, told the trade publication Aviation Week & Space Technology in an interview last year.

SpaceX is now further pushing the envelope by going beyond the previously certified limit of 15 flights. It has been over 200 days since booster 1058 last flew. During that time it is likely SpaceX conducted extensive inspections and refurbishment work to clear the rocket for additional launches.

For its 16th ride to space, booster 1058 will carry 22 second-generation Starlink 'V2 mini' satellites into orbit, on a mission designated Starlink 6-5.

Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua, New Guinea in 2014. CBS News reports: Loeb and his team just brought the materials back to Harvard for analysis. The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system. The government gave Loeb a 10 km (6.2 mile) radius of where it may have landed. "That is where the fireball took place, and the government detected it from the Department of Defense. It's a very big area, the size of Boston, so we wanted to pin it down," said Loeb. "We figured the distance of the fireball based off the time delay between the arrival of blast wave, the boom of explosion, and the light that arrived quickly."

Their calculations allowed them to chart the potential path of the meteor. Those calculations happened to carve a path right through the same projected 10 km range that came from the U.S. government. Loeb and his crew took a boat called the Silver Star out to the area. The ship took numerous passes along and around the meteor's projected path. Researchers combed the ocean floor by attaching a sled full of magnets to their boat. "We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background," explained Loeb, "They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth."

An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, plus trace elements. They are sub-millimeter in size. The crew found 50 of them in total. "It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA," added Loeb, "We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization or some technological gadget." He likens the situation to any of the Voyager spacecrafts launched by NASA.

Stephen Clark writes via Ars Technica: When India's ambassador to the US signed up his country to the Artemis Accords last month, it signaled the world's most populous nation -- with a growing prowess in spaceflight -- could be turning toward the United States as a partner in space exploration. India became the 27th country to sign the Artemis Accords, a non-binding set of principles among like-minded nations guiding a vision for peaceful and transparent exploration of space. The accords cover the international registration of human-made space objects, the open release of scientific data, and an agreement for nations not to claim territory on the Moon or other planetary bodies, among other tenets.

Details about future cooperation between the US and India remain scarce. Nelson plans to travel to India later this year for meetings and discussions with Indian space officials. One objective of Nelson's trip will be to hammer out broad objectives for a "strategic framework" for human spaceflight cooperation. Despite the name of the Artemis Accords, there's no guarantee that India will play a significant role in NASA's Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon and eventually send humans to Mars. "There's no implication of a signatory to the Artemis accords also being part of the Artemis program," Nelson told Ars.

But none of the other 26 signatories to the Artemis Accords -- a list that includes European space powers and Japan -- has their own human spaceflight program. India is developing a human-rated spacecraft called Gaganyaan that could be ready to fly people into low-Earth orbit in 2025, several years later than originally planned. "The fact that they are a nation that intends in the future to fly own their own astronauts, is that significant? The answer is yes," Nelson said. "I think it's of significance that a major country that's not considered aligned with the US (is) a signatory." "I've described India as a sleeping giant and one that is quickly awakening," Gold told Ars. "India is absolutely vital to global space development, and Artemis in particular, since the country is active with lunar programs, Martian programs, and now even human spaceflight." "Where India might fit into the Artemis program is still to be determined," writes Clark. "The partnership between the US and India in space could take a step forward next year with the flight of an Indian astronaut to the International Space Station. NASA has agreed to provide advanced training to Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston before a flight opportunity to the space station in low-Earth orbit."

India's space program has "held closer ties with Russia in the past," notes Clark. "Russia provided upper-stage engines for India's GSLV Mk.II rocket until India developed its own engine for the job. And four Indian astronauts slated for the Gaganyaan program completed more than a year of training at Russia's Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow in 2021, according to Indian media."

"Despite India's overture toward a closer relationship with NASA, the Asian power remains linked with Russia," adds Clark. "India still imports significant amounts of Russian oil and has not officially condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine."

JoeRobe writes: After 63 days of agonizing silence, NASA's Martian chopper finally phoned home. The Ingenuity helicopter reestablished communication with mission control on June 28, officially logging its 52nd flight as a success, NASA recently announced. The space agency lost contact with Ingenuity as the helicopter was descending towards the surface of the Red Planet following its most recent flight on April 26.

The reason behind the communication drop was that a hill was inconveniently positioned between Ingenuity and its rover pal Perseverance, preventing the Martian pair from communicating with one another. Ingenuity relies on Perseverance to deliver its messages to Earth, using shiny antennas to exchange data at about 100 kilobits per second. The data is routed from the Ingenuity-facing antenna to the rover's main computer before being transferred to Earth by way of an orbiting spacecraft.

"Black Swan events are hard-to-predict rare events that can significantly alter the course of our lives," begins a 2021 paper by a computer science professor at the University of California.

Now the Washington Post revisits that exploration of the possibility that "magnetic fields unleashed by a solar superstorm rip through Earth's magnetosphere, sending currents surging through human infrastructure." A widespread internet outage could, indeed, be brought on by a strong solar storm hitting Earth — a rare but very real event that has not yet happened in the digital age, experts say. When a solar storm known as the Carrington Event struck in 1859, telegraph lines sparked, operators were electrocuted and the northern lights descended to latitudes as low as Jamaica. A 1989 solar storm took out the Quebec power grid for hours. And in 2012, a storm just missed Earth.

As the sun, which has roughly 11-year cycles, enters a particularly active period known as the "solar maximum" in 2025, some are worried our interconnected world is not prepared.

Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi, a computer science professor at University of California at Irvine whose paper "Solar Superstorms: Planning for an Internet Apocalypse" has played a role in popularizing the term, started thinking about internet resilience when the coronavirus began to spread, and she realized how unprepared we were for a pandemic. Research on widespread internet failure was scant. "We've never experienced one of the extreme case events, and we don't know how our infrastructure would respond to it," Jyothi said. "Our failure testing doesn't even include such scenarios."

She notes that a severe solar storm is likely to affect large-scale infrastructure such as submarine communication cables, which could interrupt long-distance connectivity. If you have not lost power, you might have access to, say, a government website hosted locally, but reaching bigger websites, which could have data stored all over the place, might not be possible. The northern latitudes are also especially vulnerable to solar storms, and that's where a lot of internet infrastructure is concentrated. "This is not taken into account in our infrastructure deployment today at all," she said. Such outages could last for months, depending on the scale and how long it takes to repair the damage. The economic impact of just one day of lost connectivity in the United States alone is estimated to be more than $11 billion, according to the internet watcher NetBlocks.

Still, Jyothi says she has felt bad for using the term "internet apocalypse" in her paper. There's not much ordinary people can do to prepare for such a phenomenon; it falls on governments and companies. And the paper "just got too much attention," she said.
"Astrophysicists estimate the likelihood of a solar storm of sufficient strength to cause catastrophic disruption occurring within the next decade to be 1.6 to 12%," the paper concludes. (It also notes that the U.S. has a higher risk for a disconnection than Asia.)

"Paying attention to this threat and planning defenses against it, like our preliminary effort in this paper, is critical for the long-term resilience of the Internet."

"The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope launched at 11:12 a.m. ET Saturday," reports CNN, "aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

CNN is calling it "a mission designed to unravel some of the greatest mysteries of the universe." The 1.2-meter-diameter (4-foot-diameter) telescope has set off on a monthlong journey to its orbital destination of the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, which is nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth and also home to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope... After arriving at orbit, Euclid will spend two months testing and calibrating its instruments — a visible light camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer — before surveying one-third of the sky for the next six years. Euclid's primary goal is to observe the "dark side" of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy. While dark matter has never actually been detected, it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating expansion of the universe.

In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe's expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery. Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and if there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye... Euclid is designed to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the universe, observing billions of galaxies that stretch 10 billion light-years away to reveal how matter may have been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations will effectively allow Euclid to see how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years...

The telescope's image quality will be four times sharper than those of ground-based sky surveys. Euclid's wide perspective can also record data from a part of the sky 100 times bigger than what Webb's camera can capture. During its observations, the telescope will create a catalog of 1.5 billion galaxies and the stars within them, creating a treasure trove of data for astronomers that includes each galaxy's shape, mass and number of stars created per year. Euclid's ability to see in near-infrared light could also reveal previously unseen objects in our own Milky Way galaxy, such as brown dwarfs and ultra-cool stars.

In May 2027, Euclid will be joined in orbit by the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The two missions will overlap in their study of cosmic acceleration as they both create three-dimensional maps of the universe...Roman will study one-twentieth of the sky in infrared light, allowing for much more depth and precision. The Roman telescope will peer back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, picking out fainter galaxies than Euclid can see.
CNN points out that "While primarily an ESA mission, the telescope includes contributions from NASA and more than 2,000 scientists across 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan."

And they also note this statement from Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "With these upcoming telescopes, we will measure dark energy in different ways and with far more precision than previously achievable, opening up a new era of exploration into this mystery."

From NASA's announcement: Scientists are unsure whether the universe's accelerated expansion is caused by an additional energy component, or whether it signals that our understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some way. Astronomers will use Roman and Euclid to test both theories at the same time, and scientists expect both missions to uncover important information about the underlying workings of the universe...

Less concentrated mass, like clumps of dark matter, can create more subtle effects. By studying these smaller distortions, Roman and Euclid will each create a 3D dark matter map... Tallying up the universe's dark matter across cosmic time will help scientists better understand the push-and-pull feeding into cosmic acceleration.
SpaceX tweeted footage of the telescope's takeoff, and the successful landing of their Falcon 9's first stage on a droneship called A Shortfall of Gravitas.

schwit1 shares a report from Popular Science: NASA said in a conference call with reporters that it would not ever be flying its experimental electric aircraft, the X-57, citing safety concerns that are insurmountable with the time and budget they have for the project. The X-57 program will wind down without the aircraft ever going up into the sky. The project had previously seen challenges. For example, transistor modules in the electrical inverters kept failing and "blowing up" in testing, Sean Clark, the project's principal investigator told Popular Science in January. That problem was solved, Clark said.

The problem that led them to scrap the plan to fly the aircraft stemmed from motors that power the propellers. Clark said today that analysis of the issue is ongoing. "As we got into the detailed analysis and airworthiness assessment of the motors themselves, we found that there were some potential failure modes with the motors mechanically, under flight loads, that we hadn't seen on the ground," he said. "We've got a great design in progress to fix it, it's just [that] it would take too long for us to go through and implement that."

NASA said that the reason behind permanently scrubbing the flight is safety and time. "Unfortunately, we recently discovered a potential failure mode in the propulsion system that we determined to pose an unacceptable risk to the pilot's safety, and the safety of personnel on the ground, during ground tests," Bradley Flick, the director of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, said in the call. "Mitigation of that failure would take the project well beyond its planned end at the end of this fiscal year, so NASA has decided to end the project on time without taking the vehicle to flight."

Four volunteers will spend the next 378 days in a simulation of Mars, facing harsh, realistic challenges in tight quarters under NASA's watchful eye in preparation for a real-life mission to the red planet. From a report: Research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones and US Navy microbiologist Anca Selariu were locked into the virtual planet at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on Sunday as part of the first of a three-year-long simulation study by the space agency. "The knowledge we gain here will help enable us to send humans to Mars and bring them home safely," Grace Douglas, the mission's principal investigator at NASA, said during a briefing.

Nasa 3D-printed the 1,700-square-foot facility, dubbed Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog -- or CHAPEA. It will be the longest analog mission in the agency's history. The habitat -- named Mars Dune Alpha -- will feature a kitchen, private crew quarters, and two bathrooms, with medical, work, and recreation areas. The crew will be expected to carry out "mission activities," like collecting geological samples, exercising, and practicing personal hygiene and health care, with minimal contact with their family and loved ones, according to NASA. To capture the true essence of life on our neighboring planet, the crew must work through "environmental stressors," including limits on resources, periods of isolation, and equipment failures.

An ancient Nevada lakebed could become a vast source of the lithium used in electric car batteries, reports the Associated Press. But "NASA says the same site — flat as a tabletop and undisturbed like none other in the Western Hemisphere — is indispensable for calibrating the razor-sharp measurements of hundreds of satellites orbiting overhead." At the space agency's request, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has agreed to withdraw 36 square miles (92 square kilometers) of the eastern Nevada terrain from its inventory of federal lands open to potential mineral exploration and mining. NASA says the long, flat piece of land above the untapped lithium deposit in Nevada's Railroad Valley has been used for nearly three decades to get measurements just right to keep satellites and their applications functioning properly. "No other location in the United States is suitable for this purpose," the Bureau of Land Management concluded in April after receiving NASA's input on the tract 250 miles (400 kilometers) northeast of Las Vegas...

In Railroad Valley, satellite calculations are critical to gathering information beamed from space with widespread applications from weather forecasting to national security, agricultural outlooks and natural disasters, according to NASA, which said the satellites "provide vital and often time-critical information touching every aspect of life on Earth." That increasingly includes certifying measurements related to climate change. Thus the Nevada desert paradox, critics say. Although lithium is the main ingredient in batteries for electric vehicles key to reducing greenhouse gases, in this case the metal is buried beneath land NASA says must remain undisturbed to certify the accuracy of satellites monitoring Earth's warming atmosphere...

The area's unchanged nature has allowed NASA to establish a long record of images of the undisturbed topography to assist precise measurement of distances using the travel time of radio signals and assure "absolute radiometric calibration" of sensors on board satellites. "Activities that stand to disrupt the surface integrity of Railroad Valley would risk making the site unusable," Jeremy Eggers, a spokesman for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, told The Associated Press.
One company with most of the mining rights says the tract's withdrawal will put more than half the site's value out of reach, according to the article.

But the Associated Press got a supportive quote for the move from the satellite imaging company Planet Labs, which has relied on NASA's site to calibrate more than 250 of its satellites since 2016. "As our nation becomes ever more impacted by an evolving and changing environment, it is critical to have reliable and accurate data and imagery of our planet."

The Associated Press reports from the Paris Air Show, where developers of electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (or eVTOLs) demonstrated their surprisingly quiet electrically-powered craft. And in one year the Paris region "is planning for a small fleet of electric flying taxis to operate on multiple routes when it hosts the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games next summer." Unless aviation regulators in China beat Paris to the punch by green-lighting a pilotless taxi for two passengers under development there, the French capital's prospective operator — Volocopter of Germany — could be the first to fly taxis commercially if European regulators give their OK...

The limited power of battery technology restricts the range and number of paying passengers they can carry, so eVTOL hops are likely to be short and not cheap at the outset. And while the vision of simply beating city traffic by zooming over it is enticing, it also is dependent on advances in airspace management. Manufacturers of eVTOLs aim in the coming decade to unfurl fleets in cities and on more niche routes for luxury passengers, including the French Riveria. But they need technological leaps so flying taxis don't crash into each other and all the other things already congesting the skies or expected to take to them in very large numbers — including millions of drones.

Starting first on existing helicopter routes, "we'll continue to scale up using AI, using machine-learning to make sure that our airspace can handle it," said Billy Nolen of Archer Aviation Inc. It aims to start flying between downtown Manhattan and Newark's Liberty Airport in 2025. That's normally a 1-hour train or old-fashioned taxi ride that Archer says its sleek, electric 4-passenger prototype could cover in under 10 minutes. Nolen was formerly acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. regulator that during his time at the agency was already working with NASA on technology to safely separate flying taxis.

Just as Paris is using its Olympic Games to test flying taxis, Nolen said the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics offer another target for the industry to aim for and show that it can fly passengers in growing numbers safely, cleanly and affordably. "We'll have hundreds, if not thousands, of eVTOLs by the time you get to 2028," he said in an interview with The Associated Press at the Paris show. The "very small" hoped-for experiment with Volocopter for the Paris Games is "great stuff. We take our hats off to them," he added. "But by the time we get to 2028 and beyond ... you will see full-scale deployment across major cities throughout the world."
The article includes a skeptical quote from Richard Aboulafia of aerospace consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory.

"You and I can take air taxis right now. It's called a helicopter."