"There's an invisible monster on the loose," NASA wrote on Thursday, "barreling through intergalactic space so fast that if it were in our solar system, it could travel from Earth to the Moon in 14 minutes. " This supermassive black hole, weighing as much as 20 million Suns, has left behind a never-before-seen 200,000-light-year-long "contrail" of newborn stars, twice the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy... Rather than gobbling up stars ahead of it, like a cosmic Pac-Man, the speedy black hole is plowing into gas in front of it to trigger new star formation along a narrow corridor. The black hole is streaking too fast to take time for a snack. Nothing like it has ever been seen before, but it was captured accidentally by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. "We think we're seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars. So, we're looking at star formation trailing the black hole," said Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut...

The trail must have lots of new stars, given that it is almost half as bright as the host galaxy it is linked to... Researchers believe gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas, or it could be radiation from an accretion disk around the black hole... Because it was so weird, van Dokkum and his team did follow-up spectroscopy with the W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawaii. He describes the star trail as "quite astonishing, very, very bright and very unusual." This led to the conclusion that he was looking at the aftermath of a black hole flying through a halo of gas surrounding the host galaxy.

This intergalactic skyrocket is likely the result of multiple collisions of supermassive black holes. Astronomers suspect the first two galaxies merged perhaps 50 million years ago. That brought together two supermassive black holes at their centers. They whirled around each other as a binary black hole. Then another galaxy came along with its own supermassive black hole. This follows the old idiom: "two's company and three's a crowd." The three black holes mixing it up led to a chaotic and unstable configuration. One of the black holes robbed momentum from the other two black holes and got thrown out of the host galaxy.

"The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a new stunning image of ice giant Uranus, with almost all its faint dusty rings on display," reports CNN: The image is representative of the telescope's significant sensitivity, NASA said, as the fainter rings have only been captured previously by the Voyager 2 spacecraft and the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii. Uranus has 13 known rings, with 11 of them visible in the new Webb image. Nine rings are classified as the main rings, while the other two are harder to capture due to their dusty makeup and were not discovered until the Voyager 2 mission's flyby in 1986.

Two other, faint outer rings not shown in this latest image were discovered in 2007 from images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and scientists hope Webb will capture them in the future.... "The JWST gives us the ability to look at both Uranus and Neptune in a completely new way because we have never had a telescope of this size that looks in the infrared," said Dr. Naomi Rowe-Gurney, a postdoctoral research scientist and solar system ambassador for the Webb space telescope at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "The infrared can show us new depths and features that are difficult to see from the ground with the atmosphere in the way and invisible to telescopes that look in visible light like Hubble."
"When Voyager 2 looked at Uranus, its camera showed an almost featureless blue-green ball in visible wavelengths," NASA explains. "With the infrared wavelengths and extra sensitivity of Webb we see more detail, showing how dynamic the atmosphere of Uranus really is." On the right side of the planet there's an area of brightening at the pole facing the Sun, known as a polar cap. This polar cap is unique to Uranus — it seems to appear when the pole enters direct sunlight in the summer and vanish in the fall; these Webb data will help scientists understand the currently mysterious mechanism. Webb revealed a surprising aspect of the polar cap: a subtle enhanced brightening at the center of the cap. The sensitivity and longer wavelengths of Webb's NIRCam may be why we can see this enhanced Uranus polar feature when it has not been seen as clearly with other powerful telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck Observatory....

This was only a short, 12-minute exposure image of Uranus with just two filters. It is just the tip of the iceberg of what Webb can do when observing this mysterious planet.

The search for life beyond Earth "follows the water," reports the Economist (since water is vital for earth's lifeforms, and the laws of chemistry are universal). "For most of the space age that insight led scientists to Mars." But... More and more, though, planetary scientists are following the water to other places — and in particular to the so-called "icy moons" that orbit Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus, the solar system's quartet of giant gas planets. Many of those moons are either known or suspected to have oceans beneath their icy shells, kept liquid by gravitational squeezing from the planets they orbit.

On April 13th, if all goes well, a new spacecraft will blast off from French Guiana en route to Jupiter with the aim of investigating some of those watery moons up close. The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (given the slightly contrived acronym "JUICE ") will slingshot once around Venus and three times around Earth before arriving at Jupiter in 2031.... JUICE will investigate three of the so-called Galilean moons — Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, all of which are thought to have subsurface oceans. (The fourth, Io, is arid, and so not of interest.)

Ganymede is the probe's primary target. Despite being a moon, it is bigger than the planet Mercury. Its subsurface ocean may contain more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. The probe's cameras will add much more detail to the existing, low-resolution maps of Ganymede's surface. An ice-penetrating radar will scan several kilometres below the ground. A magnetometer will take advantage of the fact that Ganymede, apparently uniquely among the solar system's moons, has a weak magnetic field that interacts with the much bigger field generated by Jupiter itself. The subtleties of that magnetic field were an early clue for the existence of an ocean, hinting at the presence of a large chunk of conductive fluid — such as salty water — beneath the surface. Better readings of the magnetic field will help scientists estimate just how big the ocean is....

Nor is JUICE the only probe on its way to Jupiter. Next year NASA will launch Europa Clipper, focused, as its name suggests, on Europa. Despite its later launch, it will take a quicker route to Jupiter, arriving a few months before JUICE . And, because there are limits to what can be discerned from orbit, both NASA and the Europeans are sketching plans for future landers that would descend to the surface of such moons to sample the seawater directly.

A NASA instrument to provide unprecedented resolution of monitoring major air pollutants -- down to four square miles -- lifted off on its way to geostationary orbit at 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday. The Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument will improve life on Earth by revolutionizing the way scientists observe air quality from space. From a report: "The TEMPO mission is about more than just studying pollution -- it's about improving life on Earth for all. By monitoring the effects of everything from rush-hour traffic to pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, NASA data will help improve air quality across North America and protect our planet," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. [...] From a fixed geostationary orbit above the equator, TEMPO will be the first space-based instrument to measure air quality over North America hourly during the daytime and at spatial regions of several square miles -- far better than existing limits of about 100 square miles in the U.S. TEMPO data will play an important role in the scientific analysis of pollution, including studies of rush hour pollution, the potential for improved air quality alerts, the effects of lightning on ozone, the movement of pollution from forest fires and volcanoes, and even the effects of fertilizer application.

TEMPO's observations will dramatically improve the scientific data record on air pollution -- including ozone, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde -- not only over the continental United States, but also Canada, Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, and part of the island of Hispaniola. "Our TEMPO slogan is 'It's about time,' which hints at TEMPO's ability to provide hourly air pollution data," said Xiong Liu, deputy principal investigator for TEMPO at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "After working on the TEMPO for more than 10 years, it is about time to launch TEMPO to produce real TEMPO data and start the new era of air quality monitoring over North America."

A Canadian astronaut and three NASA veterans, including one of the world's most experienced female spacewalkers, will fly around the moon next year in the first piloted voyage beyond Earth orbit since the Apollo program ended 50 years ago, the space agency announced Monday. From a report: NASA's Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch and Victor Glover will join Canadian rookie Jeremy Hansen aboard an Orion crew capsule for the Artemis program's second fight, the first carrying a crew bound for the moon. The Artemis 2 mission is intended to pave the way toward the first moon landing -- Artemis 3 -- in the 2025-26 timeframe. Wiseman, Koch and Glover are all veterans of long-duration stays aboard the International Space Station while Hansen will be making his first space flight. Navy Capt. Wiseman, 47, a widowed father of two, is a veteran F/A-18F Super Hornet pilot who holds a master's in systems engineering. He launched aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2014 and spent 165 days aboard the space station, then served as chief astronaut after his return to Earth.

Koch, 44, holds a master's in electrical engineering who has experience in Antarctic research. She also launched aboard a Soyuz and spent nearly a full year aboard the lab in 2019-20, venturing outside for six spacewalks, including three all-female excursions. With 42 hours and 15 minutes of EVA time, she ranks third on the list of most experienced female spacewalkers. Glover, 46, is a Navy captain, a father of four and one of only a half dozen African Americans in NASA's astronaut corps. He launched to the station aboard the first operational SpaceX Crew Dragon mission in 2021-22, logging 168 days in orbit. Glover is a veteran test pilot with more than 3,000 hours of flight time and more than 400 carrier landings. Hansen, a 47-year-old colonel in the Canadian armed forces and father of three, is a veteran F-18 fighter pilot. He will be the ninth Canadian to fly in space and the first to venture beyond Earth orbit.

"SpaceX has its first commercial cargo contract to the lunar surface," says Jaret Matthews, the founder of the tiny startup Astrolab which makes a moon rover the size of a Jeep Wrangler. The New York Times reports: On Friday, Astrolab announced that it had signed an agreement with SpaceX for its Flexible Logistics and Exploration Rover, or FLEX, to be a payload on an uncrewed Starship cargo mission that is to take off as early as mid-2026...." SpaceX, which did not respond to requests for comment, has yet to announce that it is planning this commercial Starship mission to the moon's surface, headed to the south polar region. Astrolab would be just one of the customers sharing the voluminous cargo compartment of the Starship flight, Mr. Matthews said.

Mr. Matthews, an engineer who previously worked at SpaceX and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, founded Astrolab less than four years ago. Located a stone's throw from SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., it has about 20 full-time employees, he said.... Mr. Matthews declined to say how much it would cost to get FLEX to the moon or how much money Astrolab has raised. He said Astrolab would make money by lifting and deploying cargo for customers on the lunar surface. That could include scientific instruments. In the future, the rover could help build lunar infrastructure. "Essentially providing what I like to call last-mile mobility on the moon," Mr. Matthews said. "You can kind of think of it like being U.P.S. for the moon. And in this analogy, Starship is the container ship crossing the ocean, and we're the local distribution solution...."

Mr. Matthews said Astrolab already had several signed agreements for payloads. That appears to be part of the expanding potential market for [SpaceX's] Starship.... For NASA, Starship is how its astronauts will land on the moon during the Artemis III mission, currently scheduled for 2025. Before that, SpaceX is to conduct an uncrewed flight to demonstrate the capability of spacecraft to get to the moon and set down there in one piece. If those schedules hold, the commercial cargo mission with the Astrolab rover could take place the next year....

Farther into the future, the company has even grander visions. "Ultimately our goal is to have a fleet of rovers both on the moon and Mars," Mr. Matthews said. "And I really think I see these vehicles as the catalysts ultimately for the off-Earth economy."

The scientific community is reeling after NASA gutted funding for a key Venus mission that was "poised to answer some of the biggest questions about the planet and its volcanic activity," reports The Verge. From the report: This month saw the announcement of one of the most exciting findings about Venus in decades: the first direct evidence of an active volcano there. [...] This finding is "mind-blowing," Venus scientist Darby Dyar told The Verge, opening up possibilities to learn about Venus' geology and atmosphere as well as whether the planet was once habitable. But in the space science community, the excitement about this finding is being overshadowed by the "soft cancellation" of a key NASA Venus mission, which Dyar is also deputy principal investigator for and which had been set to launch in 2028.

The Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy (VERITAS) mission was one of three missions set to explore Venus in the next few years, kicking off NASA's "decade of Venus" and seeing a return to the study of our planetary neighbor, which scientists have been calling for for years. But at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference held recently in Houston, Texas, VERITAS principal investigator Sue Smrekar announced that the mission's funding had been completely gutted, leaving the mission in a state of precarious limbo.

This came as a surprise to many of the conference attendees, who were soon tweeting their support for the mission using the hashtag #SaveVERITAS. The Planetary Society also put out a statement describing the delay of the mission's launch by at least three years as "uncalled-for" and calling on NASA to commit to launching by 2029. NASA has cited problems with another mission, Psyche, as the reason for delaying VERITAS by at least three years. Both Psyche and VERITAS are managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the NASA / Caltech research center that is responsible for building robotic spacecraft such as the Mars rovers. JPL had problems meeting its requirements for the Psyche mission, which aims to visit a metal asteroid, and missed its launch date last year. An independent review into the missed launch found it was due to, among other problems, workforce issues at JPL. Budget cuts and cancellations aren't uncommon, but the situation with VERITAS is different because it "had already been selected by NASA to be part of its Discovery Program," adds the Verge. "Historically, once a mission has been selected by NASA, those working on it can be confident that funding will be available. If a delay happens -- as is not uncommon in large, complex missions -- then a lower level of funding is typically made available to keep the basic essentials in place, called bridge funding, until full funding can be restored."

Although the team asked NASA for bridge funding to maintain mission essentials, "virtually all of their funding has been cut, leaving them with a tiny $1.5 million per year," says the report. "This is a highly unusual situation for a selected mission because delaying and restarting missions is so expensive."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The U.S., Soviet Union, and Japan have all sent robots to the moon over the past 50 years. Now, a group of college students is joining in by building a shoebox-sized rover that they plan to launch in May, Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The lunar rover, called Iris, will be the first privately-made American robot to explore the surface of the moon, according to the project's website. But that's not all -- it would also be the first student-built rover, and the smallest and lightest one yet. Around 300 students from Carnegie Mellon University have all pitched in on the project.

Iris is tiny and weighs 2 kgs (4.4 lbs) -- but the design is deliberately small. The rover will fly on a private rocket carrying 14 payloads to the moon, which includes Iris, projects for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as some humans. The project involved around 300 students, who will also control and operate Moonshot Mission Control, the control center for Iris based in CMU's campus in Pittsburgh. Iris will spend a total of 50 hours on the moon's surface before it runs out of battery, after which it will be left on the moon. It has two cameras that will help it capture images of dust on the moon's surface.

Lockheed Martin has created a spinoff devoted to lunar infrastructure, Crescent Space, whose first project is a Moon-to-Earth satellite network. Engadget reports: Parsec, as it's called, uses a constellation of small lunar satellites to provide a non-stop connection between astronauts, their equipment and the people back home. The system will also provide navigation help. The technology should help explorers keep in touch, and assist with spacecraft course changes. As Lockheed Martin explains, though, it could prove vital to those on lunar soil. Parsec's nodes create a lunar equivalent to GPS, giving astronauts their exact positions and directions back to base. A rover crew might know how to return home without driving into a dangerous crater, for instance.

Crescent's first Parsec nodes should be operational by 2025, with Lockheed Martin providing the satellites. And before you ask: yes, the company is clearly hoping for some big customers. CEO Joe Landon (formerly a Lockheed Martin Space VP) claims Crescent is "well positioned" to support NASA's Artemis Moon landings and other exploratory missions.

Careful scrutiny of the debris from the impact of NASA's DART mission into Dimorphos has not found any evidence for water-ice on the asteroid, nor the residue of thruster fuel from the spacecraft, new results from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) show. Space.com reports: However, the data from the MUSE (Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile does indicate differences in the size of particles in the debris, and show how the polarization of the light from the asteroid changed. These could both reveal details about the nature of the ejecta excavated by the impact, the recoil from which gave Dimorphos the biggest push. [...] "Before the impact, we were not really sure what to expect," said Cyrielle Opitom of the University of Edinburgh in an interview with Space.com.

Opitom led a team who used MUSE to go in search of any water on Dimorphos. They observed the Didymos-Dimorphos system on 11 occasions, from just before the impact to about a month afterwards. MUSE is able to split the light from the double-asteroid into a spectrum, or rainbow, of colors, to look for emission at specific wavelengths that corresponds to specific molecules. In particular, Opitom's team searched the ejecta for water molecules and for oxygen that could have come from the break-up of water molecules by the impact. However, no evidence of water was detected. Dimorphos, at least, seems to be a dry asteroid.

There was also no evidence in the ejecta of traces of the hydrazine fuel that was on board DART, nor the xenon from its ion engine, although given their small quantities the non-detection is not a surprise. However, MUSE's observations were able to track the evolution of the cloud of ejecta (debris) thrown up by the impact, and in particular they helped determine the size distribution of the dust particles initially in the ejecta cloud and later in the tail streaming away from the asteroid. The research was published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Choked by a smog of sulfuric acid and scorched by temperatures hot enough to melt lead, the surface of Venus is sure to be lifeless. For decades, researchers also thought the planet itself was dead, capped by a thick, stagnant lid of crust and unaltered by active rifts or volcanoes. But hints of volcanism have mounted recently, and now comes the best one yet: direct evidence for an eruption. Geologically, at least, Venus is alive.

The discovery comes from NASA's Magellan spacecraft, which orbited Venus some 30 years ago and used radar to peer through the thick clouds. Images made 8 months apart show a volcano's circular mouth, or caldera, growing dramatically in a sudden collapse. On Earth, such collapses occur when magma that had supported the caldera vents or drains away, as happened during a 2018 eruption at Hawaii's Kilauea volcano. Witnessing this unrest during the short observation period suggests either Magellan was spectacularly lucky, or, like Earth, Venus has many volcanoes spouting off regularly, says Robert Herrick, a planetary scientist at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Herrick, who led the study, says, "We can rule out that it's a dying planet."

The discovery, published today in Science and presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, makes Venus only the third planetary body in the Solar System with active magma volcanoes, joining Earth and Io, Jupiter's fiery moon. It means future missions to Venus will be able to study "bare, gorgeous new rock" that provides a sample of the planet's interior, Gilmore says. The discovery of more volcanoes, in old or future data, will also help scientists understand how Venus is shedding its interior heat and evolving. And it will shake scientists out of their long-standing view that a spasm of activity a half-billion years ago repaved the planet's surface -- as evidenced by a relative paucity of impact craters -- and was followed by a long period of quiet.

"Based on initial data review, vehicle is healthy," Relativity Space tweeted today. "More info to follow on cause of aborts today. Thanks for playing."

Remaining back on the launchpad is the largest 3D printed object ever to exist. And they're still hoping to launch it into space.

They'd planned a launch this morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida of a 110-foot rocket (33.5 meters) on a mission they're calling GLHF — "Good Luck, Have Fun".

The rocket's makers — California-based Relativity Space — call it "the world's first 3D printed rocket." A full 85% of the rocket's weight comes from 3D printed parts, explains Wired, and "only the computing system, electronics, and readily available parts like fasteners were not." Named Terran 1, the 7.5-foot-wide rocket (2.2 meters) inaugurates the company's ambitious plans for 3D printing in space: Relativity Space wants to use Terran 1 to (comparatively) cheaply lift satellites for other companies and NASA into Earth orbit. It also plans to construct Terran R, a larger, more powerful, fully reusable rocket that the company hopes will compete with SpaceX's Falcon 9, which has a smaller payload capacity and only reuses the rocket's first stage. In late 2024, Relativity plans to test using Terran R to launch payloads to Mars; another startup, Impulse Space, will provide the lander.
From the company's web site: Like its structure, all Relativity engines are 3D printed and use liquid oxygen and liquid natural gas, which are not only the best for rocket propulsion, but also for reusability, and the easiest to eventually transition to methane on Mars.
The tagline for the company's Twitter feed says they're "Building humanity's multiplanetary future." And excitement is running high, reports Spaceflight Now" "There are a number of firsts here potentially on this rocket," said Josh Brost, vice president of revenue operations at Relativity Space....

"Hard to believe the day is nearly here to launch Terran 1, our first rocket!" Tim Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Relativity Space tweeted Tuesday....

The company now boasts some 1,000 employees, a million-square-foot headquarters and factory in Long Beach, California, and $1.3 billion in venture capital and equity fundraising, including an early $500,000 investment from billionaire Mark Cuban. In 2021, the company reached a valuation of $4.2 billion before launching any rockets....

"No new company has ever had their liquid rocket make it to space on their first attempt," Brost, also a former engineer and manager at SpaceX, told Spaceflight Now in a pre-launch interview. "So if everything goes incredibly well, and we achieve orbit on our first launch ... that would be a remarkable milestone for us, which we would be, of course, over the moon excited about. But that doesn't define success for us."
Wired adds that they're not the only company working on space-related 3D printing: Australia's Fleet Space has already been producing lightweight, 3D-printed radio frequency antennas for satellites. Next year, using printers half the size of a bus, they plan to create a satellite constellation called Alpha that will be entirely 3D-printed.... Flavia Tata Nardini, the company's CEO, believes space-based 3D printing is coming next. "In my ideal future, in 10 to 15 years, I won't have to launch satellites from here; I can build them up there."

A newly discovered asteroid roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool has a "small chance" of colliding with Earth in 23 years, with a potential impact on Valentine's Day in 2046, according to NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. From a report: The asteroid has a 1 in 625 chance of striking Earth, based on data projections from the European Space Agency, though NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Sentry system calculated the odds closer to 1 in 560. The latter tracks potential collisions with celestial objects. But the space rock -- named 2023 DW -- is the only object on NASA's risk list that ranks 1 out of 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, a metric for categorizing the projected risk of an object colliding with Earth. All other objects rank at 0 on the Torino scale.

NASA officials have warned that the odds of impact could be dramatically altered as more observations of 2023 DW are collected and additional analysis is performed. It may be a few days before new data can be collected because of the asteroid's proximity to the moon [...]. The last full moon was two days ago, and it still appears bright and large in the sky, likely obscuring 2023 DW from immediate observation.

The asteroid measures about 160 feet (about 50 meters) in diameter, according to NASA data. As 2023 DW orbits the sun, it has 10 predicted close approaches to Earth, with the nearest landing on February 14, 2046, and nine others between 2047 and 2054. The closest the asteroid is expected to travel to Earth is about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), NASA's Eyes on Asteroids website notes. The space rock was first spotted in our skies on February 2. It's traveling about 15.5 miles per second (25 kilometers per second) at a distance of more than 11 million miles (18 million kilometers) from Earth, completing one loop around the sun every 271 days.

NASA's Orion spacecraft performed better than expected on its first deep-space flight despite experiencing unpredicted loss of its heat shield material. Space.com reports: During Tuesday's call, NASA program managers revealed that Orion's heat shield did not perform as expected, losing more material than the agency had planned for. Nevertheless, NASA leadership is confident that everything will be ready for the crewed around-the-moon flight of Artemis 2, which is planned for next year. Howard Hu, manager of NASA's Orion Program, lauded the crew module's performance during the test flight, noting that NASA was able to accomplish 161 overall test objectives planned for the mission, even adding an additional 21 during the flight based on the spacecraft's performance.

"We also accomplished what our number one objective was, which is returning the crew module back to Earth safely from 24,500 miles per hour to a landing about 16 miles per hour when it touched down, and we were able to land within 2.4 miles of our target," Hu said during Tuesday's teleconference. "Our requirement was 6.2 miles. So, really great performance as we were able to return back from the moon." "Some of the expected char material that we would expect coming back home ablated away differently than what our computer models and what our ground testing predicted," Hu said. "So we had more liberation of the charred material during reentry before we landed than we had expected."

Hu explained that NASA teams are investigating a wide range of data related to the performance of Orion's heat shield, including images and videos of reentry, onboard sensor readings, and even X-ray images of sample materials taken from the shield. "Overall, there's a lot of work to be done in this investigation going forward," Hu said. "We are just starting that effort because we've just gotten together all those pieces of information. Those samples, the videos, images, and the data from the spacecraft itself and correlated them together. And now we're assessing that data and moving forward with that assessment." Despite the heat shield issue, NASA says they feel confident that the crewed Artemis 2 mission will be able to launch on schedule in 2024.

"NASA is currently aiming to launch Artemis 2 in November 2024," adds Space.com. "The mission will send a crew of astronauts on an eight-day mission around the moon and back to test Orion's performance, crew interfaces, and guidance and navigation systems."

Unprecedented access to space is leading to all sorts of cool new ideas, including the prospect of storing data on the lunar surface. Cloud computing startup Lonestar Data Holdings announced the results of its latest funding round, taking it one step closer to this very goal. Gizmodo reports: The Florida-based company raised $5 million in seed funding to establish lunar data centers, Lonestar announced in a press release on Monday. Lonestar wants to build a series of data centers on the Moon and establish a viable platform for data storage and edge processing (i.e. the practice of processing data near the source, as a means to reduce latency and improve bandwidth) on the lunar surface. "Data is the greatest currency created by the human race," Chris Stott, founder of Lonestar, said in an April 2022 statement. "We are dependent upon it for nearly everything we do and it is too important to us as a species to store in Earth's ever more fragile biosphere. Earth's largest satellite, our Moon, represents the ideal place to safely store our future."

In December 2021, Lonestar successfully ran a test of its data center on board the International Space Station. The company is now ready to launch a small data center box to the lunar surface later this year as part of Intuitive Machines's second lunar mission, IM-2 (the company's first mission, IM-1, is expected to launch in June). Intuitive Machines is receiving funding from NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program for delivering research projects to the Moon as part of the space agency's Artemis program. The lunar data centers will initially be geared towards remote data storage and disaster recovery, allowing companies to back up their data and store it on the Moon. In addition, the data centers could assist with both commercial and private ventures to the lunar environment.

The miniature data center weighs about 2 pounds (1 kilogram) and has a capacity of 16 terabytes, Stott told SpaceNews. He said the first data center will draw power and communications from the lander, but the ones that will follow (pending its success) will be standalone data centers that the company hopes to deploy on the lunar surface by 2026. The test is only supposed to last for the duration of the IM-2 mission, which is expected to be around 11-14 days, an Intuitive Machines spokesperson told SpaceNews.

An anonymous readers this surprising story from Mashable: When a Russian spaceship docked as a lifeboat for three stranded men at the International Space Station in February, one may have wondered if Sergei Krikalev, heading the rescue mission, felt any deja vu.

If that name doesn't ring a bell, he's also sometimes known as "the last Soviet" for his more than 311 days spent in space as the Soviet Union collapsed 250 miles beneath him in 1991. He was only meant to be at the Mir station for five months. Instead, he remained for close to a year, never abandoning the outpost.

Today, Krikalev, the former cosmonaut, is the executive director of human spaceflight for the Russian space agency. That means it's on his watch to make sure NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin get back home safely after their ship sprang a leak at the station in December 2022. The three marooned crew members were supposed to return this month. But their mission will now stretch for a year, until a new crew arrives to relieve them on a separate spacecraft in six months.

Krikalev's story of being stranded in space is now getting a perhaps overdue spotlight with a new podcast series called "The Last Soviet." And it's being told by another cosmonaut, Lance Bass.... Few may remember that boy-band member Bass almost made it to space on a Soyuz spacecraft himself. In 2002, he spent about six months, off and on, training in Star City, Russia, and was certified by Russia and NASA to fly a mission to the space station.

With more lunar missions than ever on the horizon, the European Space Agency wants to give the moon its own time zone. The Associated Press reports: This week, the agency said space organizations around the world are considering how best to keep time on the moon. The idea came up during a meeting in the Netherlands late last year, with participants agreeing on the urgent need to establish "a common lunar reference time," said the space agency's Pietro Giordano, a navigation system engineer. "A joint international effort is now being launched towards achieving this," Giordano said in a statement.

For now, a moon mission runs on the time of the country that is operating the spacecraft. European space officials said an internationally accepted lunar time zone would make it easier for everyone, especially as more countries and even private companies aim for the moon and NASA gets set to send astronauts there. [...] The international team looking into lunar time is debating whether a single organization should set and maintain time on the moon, according to the European Space Agency.

There are also technical issues to consider. Clocks run faster on the moon than on Earth, gaining about 56 microseconds each day, the space agency said. Further complicating matters, ticking occurs differently on the lunar surface than in lunar orbit. Perhaps most importantly, lunar time will have to be practical for astronauts there, noted the space agency's Bernhard Hufenbach. "This will be quite a challenge" with each day lasting as long as 29.5 Earth days, Hufenbach said in a statement. "But having established a working time system for the moon, we can go on to do the same for other planetary destinations."

After analyzing the data collected from NASA's successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) last year, the DART team found that the kinetic impactor mission "can be effective in altering the trajectory of an asteroid, a big step toward the goal of preventing future asteroid strikes on Earth." The findings were published in four papers in the journal Nature. From a NASA press release: The first paper reports DART's successful demonstration of kinetic impactor technology in detail: reconstructing the impact itself, reporting the timeline leading up to impact, specifying in detail the location and nature of the impact site, and recording the size and shape of Dimorphos. The authors, led by Terik Daly, Carolyn Ernst, and Olivier Barnouin of APL, note DART's successful autonomous targeting of a small asteroid, with limited prior observations, is a critical first step on the path to developing kinetic impactor technology as a viable operational capability for planetary defense. Their findings show intercepting an asteroid with a diameter of around half a mile, such as Dimorphos, can be achieved without an advance reconnaissance mission, though advance reconnaissance would give valuable information for planning and predicting the outcome. What is necessary is sufficient warning time -- several years at a minimum, but preferably decades. "Nevertheless," the authors state in the paper, DART's success "builds optimism about humanity's capacity to protect the Earth from an asteroid threat."

The second paper uses two independent approaches based on Earth-based lightcurve and radar observations. The investigation team, led by Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University, arrived at two consistent measurements of the period change from the kinetic impact: 33 minutes, plus or minus one minute. This large change indicates the recoil from material excavated from the asteroid and ejected into space by the impact (known as ejecta) contributed significant momentum change to the asteroid, beyond that of the DART spacecraft itself. The key to kinetic impact is that the push to the asteroid comes not only from colliding spacecraft, but also from this ejecta recoil. The authors conclude: "To serve as a proof-of-concept for the kinetic impactor technique of planetary defense, DART needed to demonstrate that an asteroid could be targeted during a high-speed encounter and that the target's orbit could be changed. DART has successfully done both."

In the third paper, the investigation team, led by Andrew Cheng of APL, calculated the momentum change transferred to the asteroid as a result of DART's kinetic impact by studying the change in the orbital period of Dimorphos. They found the impact caused an instantaneous slowing in Dimorphos' speed along its orbit of about 2.7 millimeters per second -- again indicating the recoil from ejecta played a major role in amplifying the momentum change directly imparted to the asteroid by the spacecraft. That momentum change was amplified by a factor of 2.2 to 4.9 (depending on the mass of Dimorphos), indicating the momentum change transferred because of ejecta production significantly exceeded the momentum change from the DART spacecraft alone. DART's scientific value goes beyond validating kinetic impactor as a means of planetary defense. By smashing into Dimorphos, the mission has broken new ground in the study of asteroids. DART's impact made Dimorphos an "active asteroid" -- a space rock that orbits like an asteroid but has a tail of material like a comet -- which is detailed in the fourth paper led by Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute.

schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica, written by Eric Berger: One of the world's most important rocket companies, United Launch Alliance, may be sold later this year. The potential sale has not been disclosed publicly, but three sources confirmed to Ars that potential buyers have been contacted about the opportunity. These sources said a deal is expected to be closed before the end of this year and that investment firm Morgan Stanley and consulting firm Bain & Company are managing the transaction.

The sale of United Launch Alliance, or ULA as it is known within the industry, would mark the end of an era that has lasted for nearly two decades. The company was officially formed in 2005 as part of a deal brokered by the US government, ensuring the military had access to both Atlas and Delta rockets to put national security satellites into space. To form ULA, Lockheed Martin and Boeing merged their launch businesses into a single company, each taking a 50 percent stake. This union was profitable for both parent companies, as ULA held a monopoly on launching national security missions and, effectively, NASA science probes. In return for 100 percent mission success, ULA received large launch contracts and an approximately $1 billion annual subsidy from the US Department of Defense to maintain "launch readiness."

The emergence of SpaceX in the early 2010s with the increasingly reliable Falcon 9 rocket started to disrupt this profitable arrangement. SpaceX sold the Falcon 9 rocket at a substantial discount to ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. The company also successfully sued the US government to allow the Falcon 9 rocket to compete for national security missions, and SpaceX launched its first one in 2017. In recent years, SpaceX has come to dominate United Launch Alliance in terms of cadence. By the end of 2022, the upstart was launching as many rockets each month as ULA launched during a calendar year. During the last four years, in fact, SpaceX has landed more rockets than ULA has launched during its existence. However, ULA still holds a prominent place in the global launch industry, and there will likely be no shortage of suitors.

SpaceX is livestreaming coverage of its latest launch tonight. SpaceX and NASA were "preparing to launch a fresh crew to the International Space Station," reports CNN, "continuing the public-private effort to keep the orbiting laboratory fully staffed and return astronaut launches to U.S. soil

For this mission a reusable Falcon 9 rocket will eventually propel a Crew Dragon capsule into space — carrying six astronauts "from all over the world — two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates... to take over operations from the SpaceX Crew-5 astronauts who arrived at the space station in October 2022." They're expected to spend up to six months on board the orbiting laboratory, carrying out science experiments and maintaining the two-decade-old station.... During their stint in space, the Crew-6 astronauts will oversee more than 200 science-oriented projects, including researching how some substances burn in the microgravity environment and investigating microbial samples that will be collected from the exterior of the ISS.

They will play host to two other key missions that will stop by the ISS during their stay. The first is the Boeing Crew Flight Test, which will mark the first astronaut mission under a Boeing-NASA partnership. Slated for April, the flight will carry NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the space station, marking the last phase of a testing and demonstration program Boeing needs to carry out to certify its Starliner spacecraft for routine astronaut missions.

Then, in May, a group of four astronauts will arrive on a mission called AX-2 — a privately funded tourism mission to the space station. That mission, which will be carried out by a separate SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, will include former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, now a private astronaut with the Texas-based space tourism company Axiom, which brokered and organized the mission. It will also include three paying customers, similar to the AX-1 mission that visited the ISS last year.
"It's another paradigm shift," mission commander Stephen Bowen said in January. "Those two events — huge events — in spaceflight happening during our increment, on top of all the other work we get to do, I don't think we're going to fully be able to absorb it until after the fact."

Roughly 25 hours after the launch the crew capsule willdock with the space station. This will be SpaceX's seventh astronaut-carrying flight for NASA since 2020.