"The very first results from the James Webb Space Telescope seem to indicate that massive, luminous galaxies had already formed within the first 250 million years after the Big Bang," reports Sky and Telescope.

"If confirmed, this would seriously challenge current cosmological thinking." Shortly after NASA published Webb's first batch of scientific data, the astronomical preprint server arXiv was flooded with papers claiming the detection of galaxies that are so remote that their light took some 13.5 billion years to reach us. Many of these appear to be more massive than the standard cosmological model that describes the universe's composition and evolution. "It worries me slightly that we find these monsters in the first few images," says cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London)....

Before the community accepts these claims, the reported redshifts have to be confirmed spectroscopically. Mark McCaughrean, the senior science adviser of the European Space Agency (a major partner on Webb) commented on Twitter: "I'm sure some of them will be [confirmed], but I'm equally sure they won't all be. [...] It does all feel a little like a sugar rush at the moment."

Ellis agrees: "It's one thing to put a paper on arXiv," he says, "but it's quite something else to turn it into a lasting article in a peer-reviewed journal."
Since 1991, science writer Eric Lerner has been arguing that the Big Bang never happened. Now 75 years old, he writes: In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper's title begins with the candid exclamation: "Panic!"

Why do the JWST's images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory's predictions are they contradicting? The papers don't actually say. The truth that these papers don't report is that the hypothesis that the JWST's images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. "Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning," says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, "and wondering if everything I've done is wrong...."

Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance.... [T]he galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.....

Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers. What the JWST actually showed was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today's galaxies. The data in the "Panic!" article showed that smooth spiral galaxies were about "10 times" as numerous as what theory had predicted and that this "would challenge our ideas about mergers being a very common process". In plain language, this data utterly destroys the merger theory....

According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur....

While Big Bang theorists were shocked and panicked by these new results, Riccardo and I (and a few others) were not. In fact, a week before the JWST images were released we published online a paper that detailed accurately what the images would show. We could do this with confidence because more and more data of all kinds has been contradicting the Big Bang hypothesis for years....

Based on the published literature, right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong predictions and only one right one — the abundance of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
UPDATE: Kirkpatrick says her quote was was taken out of context, in an article from Space.com that dismises Eric Lerner as "a serial denier of the Big Bang since the late 1980s, preferring his personal pseudoscientific alternative."

It turns out that JavaScript had a hand in delivering the stunning images that the James Webb Space Telescope has been beaming back to Earth. From a report: I mean that the actual telescope, arguably one of humanity's finest scientific achievements, is largely controlled by JavaScript files. Oh, and it's based on a software development kit from 2002. According to a manuscript (PDF) for the JWST's Integrated Science Instrument Module (or ISIM), the software for the ISIM is controlled by "the Script Processor Task (SP), which runs scripts written in JavaScript upon receiving a command to do so." The actual code in charge of turning those JavaScripts (NASA's phrasing, not mine) into actions can run 10 of them at once.

The manuscript and the paper (PDF) "JWST: Maximizing efficiency and minimizing ground systems," written by the Space Telescope Science Institute's Ilana Dashevsky and Vicki Balzano, describe this process in great detail, but I'll oversimplify a bit to save you the pages of reading. The JWST has a bunch of these pre-written scripts for doing specific tasks, and scientists on the ground can tell it to run those tasks. When they do, those JavaScripts will be interpreted by a program called the script processor, which will then reach out to the other applications and systems that it needs to based on what the script calls for. The JWST isn't running a web browser where JavaScript directly controls the Mid-Infrared Instrument -- it's more like when a manager is given a list of tasks (in this example, the JavaScripts) to do and delegates them out to their team.

Redwire says it would launch the first commercial space greenhouse in Spring next year to boost crop production research outside Earth and support exploration missions. From a report: The space infrastructure company's project will help deliver critical insights for NASA's Artemis missions and beyond, said Dave Reed, Redwire's manager for the greenhouse project. The Artemis program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) aims at sending astronauts to the moon and establishing a long-term lunar colony as a precursor to the eventual human exploration of Mars.

The navigation strategy of NASA's Curiosity rover means it has to stop frequently to check its position, but soon a software update will allow it to move almost continuously. From a report: A new software update will soon give NASA's Curiosity Mars rover a 50 per cent speed boost, allowing it to cover a greater distance and complete more science. But the update very nearly didn't happen because of a mysterious bug in the software that eluded engineers for years. Curiosity, which landed on Mars 10 years ago this month, has already greatly outlived its planned two-year lifespan.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Last year, NASA achieved something science fiction writers have been dreaming about for decades: It created oxygen on Mars. A microwave-size device [called MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment] attached to the agency's Perseverance rover converted carbon dioxide into 10 minutes of breathable oxygen. Now, physicists say they've come up with a way to use electron beams in a plasma reactor to create far more oxygen, potentially in a smaller package. The technique might someday not just help astronauts breathe on the Red Planet, but could also serve as a way to create fuel and fertilizer, says Michael Hecht, an experimental scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But Hecht, who leads the oxygenmaking rover instrument, says the new approach still has a number of challenges to overcome before it can hitch a ride to our solar neighbor.
[...]
In the lab, he and his colleagues pumped air designed to match the pressure and composition of Mars into metal tubes. Unlike MOXIE, they didn't need to compress or heat the air. Yet, by firing an electron beam into the reaction chamber, they were able to convert about 30% of the air into oxygen. They estimate that the device could create about 14 grams of oxygen per hour: enough to support 28 minutes of breathing, the team reports today in the Journal of Applied Physics. Guerra's team still needs to solve some practical problems, Hecht notes. To work on Mars, the plasma device would need a portable power source and a place to store the oxygen it makes, all of which could make it just as -- if not more -- bulky than MOXIE, he says. If space agencies were willing to spend millions of dollars developing it -- as NASA did with MOXIE -- the plasma approach could mature, Hecht says. He especially likes how the electron beam could be tuned to split other atmospheric molecules, such as nitrogen, to create fertilizer. "There's nothing wrong with the plasma technique other than it's a lot less mature [than MOXIE]," he says.

Did Mars ever support life? One clue might be quantifying just how much ice (and other minerals) are lurking just below the planet's surface, a team of researchers argued this month. "If life exists on Mars, that is where it would be," they said in a news release this week. "There is no liquid water on the surface," but in a contrary scenario, "subsurface life would be protected from radiation."

Locating ice and minerals has another benefit too, they write in the journal Geophysical Research Letters: to "prepare for human exploration." And fortunately, there's a tool on the InSight lander (which touched down in 2018) that can help estimate the velocity of seismic waves inside the geological crust of Mars — velocities which change depending on which rock types are present, and which materials are filling pores within rocks (which could be ice, water, gas, or other mineral cements).

That's the good news. But after running computer models of applied rock physics thousands and thousands of times, the researchers believe it's unlikely that there's any layers saturated with water (or ice) in the top 300 meters (1,000 feet) of the crust of Mars. "Model results confirm that the upper 300 meters of Mars beneath InSight is most likely composed of sediments and fractured basalts."

The researchers reached a discouraging conclusion, reports Space.com "The chances of finding Martian life appear poor at in the vicinity of NASA's InSight lander." The subsurface around the landing zone — an equatorial site chosen especially for its flat terrain and good marsquake potential — appears loose and porous, with few ice grains in between gaps in the crust, researchers said.... The equatorial region where InSight is working, in theory, should be able to host subsurface water, as conditions are cold enough even there for water to freeze. But the new finding is challenging scientists' assumptions about possible ice or liquid water beneath the subsurface near InSight, whose job is to probe beneath the surface.

While images from the surface have suggested there might be sedimentary rock and lava flows beneath InSight, researchers' models have uncertainties about porosity and mineral content. InSight is helping to fill in some of those gaps, and its new data suggests that "uncemented material" largely fills in the region blow the lander. That suggests little water is present, although more data needs to be collected.

It's unclear how representative the InSight data is of the Martian subsurface in general, but more information may come courtesy of future missions. NASA is considering a Mars Life Explorer that would drill 6 feet (2 meters) below the surface to search for possible habitable conditions. Additionally, a proposed Mars Ice Mapper Mission could search for possible water reservoirs for human missions.
And of course, as the researchers point out in their announcement, "big ice sheets and frozen ground ice remain at the Martian poles."

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shared this thought-provoking anecdote from Science magazine: NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission was brutish and short. It began on 9 October 2009, when the hull of a spent Centaur rocket stage smashed into Cabeus crater, near the south pole of the Moon, with the force of about 2 tons of TNT. And it ended minutes later, when a trailing spacecraft flew through and analyzed the lofted plume of debris before it, too, crashed. About 6% of the plume was water, presumably from ice trapped in the shadowed depths of the crater, where the temperature never rises above -173ÂC. The Moon, it turned out, wasn't as bone dry as the Apollo astronauts believed. "That was our first ground truth that there is water ice," says Jennifer Heldmann, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center who worked on the mission.

Today, Heldmann wants to send another rocket to probe lunar ice — but not on a one-way trip. She has her eye on Starship, a behemoth under development by private rocket company SpaceX that would be the largest flying object the world has ever seen. With Starship, Heldmann could send 100 tons to the Moon, more than twice the lunar payload of the Saturn V, the workhorse of the Apollo missions. She dreams of delivering robotic excavators and drills and retrieving ice in freezers onboard Starship, which could return to Earth with tens of tons of cargo. By analyzing characteristics such as the ice's isotopic composition and its depth, she could learn about its origin: how much of it came from a bombardment of comets and asteroids billions of years ago versus slow, steady implantation by the solar wind. She could also find out where the ice is abundant and pure enough to support human outposts. "It's high-priority science, and it's also critical for exploration," Heldmann says.

When SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talks up Starship, it's mostly about human exploration: Set up bases on Mars and make humans a multiplanetary species! Save civilization from extinction! But Heldmann and many others believe the heavy lifter could also radically change the way space scientists work. They could fly bigger and heavier instruments more often — and much more cheaply, if SpaceX's projections of cargo launch costs as low as $10 per kilogram are to be believed. On Mars, they could deploy rovers not as one-offs, but in herds. Space telescopes could grow, and fleets of satellites in low-Earth orbit could become commonplace. Astronomy, planetary science, and Earth observation could all boldly go, better than they ever have before.

Of course, Starship isn't real yet. All eyes will be on a first orbital launch test, expected sometime in the coming months.
Starship would've made it easier to deploy the massive James Webb Space Telescope, the article points out, while in the future Starship's extra fuel capacity could make it easier to explore Mercury, earth's outermost planets, and even interstellar space. In fact, Heldmann and colleagues have now suggested that NASA create a dedicated funding line for missions relying on Starship. Heldmann argues that "We on the science side need to be ready to take advantage of those capabilities when they come online."

The article notes that at an event in February, Elon Musk "explained how a single Starship, launching three times per week, would loft more than 15,000 tons to orbit in a year — about as much as all the cargo that has been lifted in the entire history of spaceflight."

Patrick Wardle, founder of the Objective-See Foundation, a nonprofit that creates open-source security tools for macOS, has had his code make its way into a number of commercial products over the years -- "all without the users crediting him or licensing and paying for the work," reports The Verge. Wardle, a Mac malware specialist and former employee of the NSA and NASA, will lay out his case in a presentation today at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference with Tom McGuire, a cybersecurity researcher at Johns Hopkins University. From the report: The problem, Wardle says, is that it's difficult to prove that the code was stolen rather than implemented in a similar way by coincidence. Fortunately, because of Wardle's skill in reverse-engineering software, he was able to make more progress than most. "I was only able to figure [the code theft] out because I both write tools and reverse engineer software, which is not super common," Wardle told The Verge in a call before the talk. "Because I straddle both of these disciplines I could find it happening to my tools, but other indie developers might not be able to, which is the concern."

One of the central examples in Wardle's case is a software tool called OverSight, which Wardle released in 2016. Oversight was developed as a way to monitor whether any macOS applications were surreptitiously accessing the microphone or webcam, with much success: it was effective not only as a way to find Mac malware that was surveilling users but also to uncover the fact that a legitimate application like Shazam was always listening in the background. [...] But years after Oversight was released, he was surprised to find a number of commercial applications incorporating similar application logic in their own products -- even down to replicating the same bugs that Wardle's code had.

Three different companies were found to be incorporating techniques lifted from Wardle's work in their own commercially sold software. None of the offending companies are named in the Black Hat talk, as Wardle says that he believes the code theft was likely the work of an individual employee, rather than a top-down strategy. The companies also reacted positively when confronted about it, Wardle says: all three vendors he approached reportedly acknowledged that his code had been used in their products without authorization, and all eventually paid him directly or donated money to the Objective-See Foundation. The Verge notes that Wardle's cousin Josh Wardle created the popular Wordle game, which was purchased earlier this year by The New York Times.

With the help of SpaceX and a Falcon 9 rocket, South Korea launched its first mission to the moon. "The successful launch of Danuri, officially known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, takes the country beyond Earth's orbit for the first time," reports Nature. From the report: Danuri should arrive at its destination around mid-December. Its trajectory means it will take longer than most past missions to the Moon, which typically arrived in days, but will require minimal fuel. About an hour after lift-off, the spacecraft detached from the Falcon 9 rocket on which it launched. The Korea Aerospace Research Institute's control centre in Daejeon then took command and made contact with the spacecraft.

The bulk of the mission's scientific observations will take place once Danuri reaches the Moon, which it will orbit for a year at 100 kilometres above the lunar surface. KGRS has a broader energy range than previous y-ray detectors sent to the Moon, and scientists hope that it will create the clearest maps yet of the distribution of elements including iron, titanium, uranium and thorium. [...] [T]he spectrometer is also sensitive enough to detect hydrogen, which can be used to infer the presence of water on the surface, and create a water-resource map of the entire Moon. Previous probes have struggled to map the presence of water beyond the poles, where it is relatively more abundant [...].

KMAG will take precise measurements of the magnetic field on the surface. It will also study electric currents induced by the magnetic field of the solar wind, which streams out into space from the Sun, says Garrick-Bethell, who is part of the instrument's science team. Studying how these currents pass through the Moon could reveal what the Moon is made of deep inside. To do this, Danuri will make use of simultaneous measurements by two NASA probes currently circling the Moon, says Garrick-Bethell. This "will make a beautiful experiment that was only briefly attempted in the Apollo era, but not over the entire Moon," he says. You can watch a recording of the launch here.

To the naked eye, the Mako Compressor Station outside the dusty West Texas crossroads of Lenorah appears unremarkable, similar to tens of thousands of oil and gas operations scattered throughout the oil-rich Permian Basin. What's not visible through the chain-link fence is the plume of invisible gas, primarily methane, billowing from the gleaming white storage tanks up into the cloudless blue sky. From a report: The Mako station, owned by a subsidiary of West Texas Gas, was observed releasing an estimated 870 kilograms of methane -- an extraordinarily potent greenhouse gas -- into the atmosphere each hour. That's the equivalent impact on the climate of burning seven tanker trucks full of gasoline every day.

But Mako's outsized emissions aren't illegal, or even regulated. And it was only one of 533 methane "super emitters" detected during a 2021 aerial survey of the Permian conducted by Carbon Mapper, a partnership of university researchers and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The group documented massive amounts of methane venting into the atmosphere from oil and gas operations across the Permian, a 250-mile-wide bone-dry expanse along the Texas-New Mexico border that a billion years ago was the bottom of a shallow sea. Hundreds of those sites were seen spewing the gas over and over again. Ongoing leaks, gushers, going unfixed.

A sad announcement was posted online today, reports CNN: "Last night, my mother, Nichelle Nichols, succumbed to natural causes and passed away. Her light however, like the ancient galaxies now being seen for the first time, will remain for us and future generations to enjoy, learn from, and draw inspiration," Johnson said in a statement shared to Nichols' official site on Sunday. "Hers was a life well lived and as such a model for us all."

Nichols died from natural causes, he said...

George Takei, who portrayed the USS Enterprise's helmsman Hikaru Sulu, posted a touching tribute to his co-star.

"I shall have more to say about the trailblazing, incomparable Nichelle Nichols, who shared the bridge with us as Lt. Uhura of the USS Enterprise, and who passed today at age 89," wrote Takei on Twitter. "For today, my heart is heavy, my eyes shining like the stars you now rest among, my dearest friend."

"We lived long and prospered together," he added with a photo of the pair making the iconic Vulcan salute.
It was Nichols herself who came up with the name "Uhura" for her character, she revealed years in a 2010 interview. After the series Nichols authored the science fiction novels Saturn's Child and Saturna's Quest, as well as a memoir titled Beyond Uhura — Star Trek and Other Memories.

But Nichols also served on the board of directors of the National Space Society (a charity advocating for space advocacy) — and maintained ties to other real-world space agencies. "Nichols was always interested in space travel," according to a NASA web page. "She flew aboard the C-141 Astronomy Observatory, which analyzed the atmospheres of Mars and Saturn on an eight hour, high altitude mission." But in addition, "From the late 1970's until the late 1980's, NASA employed Nichelle Nichols to recruit new astronaut candidates" (including Dr. Sally Ride).

"Lunar scientists think they've found the hottest places on the Moon," reports Live Science, "as well as some 200 'Goldilocks' zones that are always near the average temperature in San Francisco."

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report: The moon has wild temperature fluctuations, with parts of the moon heating up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) during the day and dropping to minus 280 F (minus 173 C) at night. But the newly analyzed 200 shaded lunar pits are always always 63 F (17 C), meaning they're perfect for humans to shelter from the extreme temperatures. They could also shield astronauts from the dangers of the solar wind, micrometeorites and cosmic rays.

Some of those pits may lead to similarly warm caves. These partially-shaded pits and dark caves could be ideal for a lunar base, scientists say.

"Surviving the lunar night is incredibly difficult because it requires a lot of energy, but being in these pits and caves almost entirely removes that requirement," Tyler Horvath, a doctoral student in planetary science at the University of California, Los Angeles and lead author on the NASA-funded research published online July 8 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, told Live Science.

The 25-ton core stage of a Long March 5B rocket "reentered Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean this afternoon," reports Space.com, citing an announcement on Twitter from the U.S. Space Command. Mission managers didn't screw anything up; this end-of-life scenario is built into the Long March 5B's design, to the consternation of exploration advocates and much of the broader spaceflight community. This disposal strategy is reckless, critics say, given that the big rocket doesn't burn up completely upon reentry.

Indeed, 5.5 tons to 9.9 tons (5 to 9 metric tons) of the Long March 5B likely survived all the way to the ground today, experts with The Aerospace Corporation's Center for Orbital Reentry and Debris Studies have estimated. And it's possible that falling rocket chunks caused some injuries or infrastructure damage today, given where the Long March 5B reentered. One observer appeared to capture the rocket's breakup from Kuching, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, for example, posting video of the dramatic event on Twitter. "The video from Kuching implies it was high in the atmosphere at that time — any debris would land hundreds of km further along track, near Sibu, Bintulu or even Brunei," astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said via Twitter today. It's "unlikely but not impossible" that one or more chunks hit a population center, he added in another tweet....

"What really should have happened is, there should have been some fuel left on board for this to be a controlled reentry," Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the California-based tracking company LeoLabs, said Thursday (July 28) during a Long March 5B reentry discussion that The Aerospace Corporation livestreamed on Twitter. "That would be the responsible thing to do...."

This was the third uncontrolled fall for a Long March 5B core stage to date.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson also released a critical statement today pointing out that China "did not share specific trajectory information as their Long March 5B rocket fell back to Earth." All spacefaring nations should follow established best practices, and do their part to share this type of information in advance to allow reliable predictions of potential debris impact risk, especially for heavy-lift vehicles, like the Long March 5B, which carry a significant risk of loss of life and property.

Newsweek reports that "A huge piece of space debris appears to have fallen from the sky and landed on a sheep farm in Australia." On July 9, locals across the Snowy Mountains in southern New South Wales heard a bang, ABC Australia reported. It was heard for miles, by those as far away as Albury, Wagga Wagga and Canberra.... Sheep farmer Mick Miners then came across a strange, charred object on his ranch, south of Jindabyne, on July 25. "I didn't know what to think, I had no idea what it was," Miners told ABC Australia.

He found the 10 foot chunk of metal wedged into the ground in a remote part of his sheep paddock.

He was not the only one. His neighbor, Jock Wallace also found some strange debris in the area. "I didn't hear the bang, but my daughters said it was very loud," Wallace told ABC. "I think it's a concern, it's just fallen out of the sky. If it landed on your house it would make a hell of a mess."

Serial numbers were noted on the charred, pieces of debris. Australian National University College of Science astrophysicist Brad Tucker told ABC News that the debris is likely from the trunk section of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. The spacecraft launched in 2020, and the debris may have fallen as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.

Tucker told ABC that is may have been the largest piece of space debris to fall in Australia for decades — the last time was in 1979, when NASA's Skylab space station fell in Western Australia.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader 192_kbps for sharing the article!

Nathaniel Scharping writes via Science Magazine: On 15 January, Tonga's Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted under the sea, rocking the South Pacific nation and sending tsunamis racing around the world. The eruption was the most powerful ever recorded, causing an atmospheric shock wave that circled the globe four times, and sending a plume of debris more than 50 kilometers into the atmosphere. But it didn't stop there. The ash and gasses punching into the sky also shot billions of kilograms of water into the atmosphere, a new study concludes. That water will likely remain there for years, where it could eat away at the ozone layer and perhaps even warm Earth.

In all, the plume shot approximately 146 billion kilograms of water into Earth's stratosphere, an arid layer of the atmosphere that begins several miles above sea level, the authors report this month in Geophysical Research Letters. That's equivalent to about 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, or about 10% of the entire water content of the stratosphere, [study co-author and JPL atmospheric scientist Luis Millan] says. Other volcanoes have added measurable amounts of water vapor to Earth's atmosphere, he says, but the scale this time was unprecedented. That's likely because of the eruption's magnitude and underwater location, he says. The water will probably remain in the stratosphere for half a decade or more, he says.

Big volcanic eruptions often cool the climate, because the sulfur dioxide they release forms compounds that reflect incoming sunlight. But with so much water vapor flung aloft, the Tonga eruption could have a different impact. Water absorbs incoming energy from the Sun, making it a potent greenhouse gas. And the sulfur dioxide will dissipate in just a few years whereas the water will likely stick around for at least 5 years -- and potentially longer Millan thinks. That could make Earth warmer for years and accelerate the warming from greenhouse gasses, [says Matthew Toohey, a physicist who focuses on climate modeling and the effects of volcanic eruptions at the University of Saskatchewan and was not involved with the work]. "We'll kind of just jump forward by a few years." But the actual effects on climate will likely take time to understand [...]. High above Earth, the water will likely react with other chemicals, potentially degrading the ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet light, and even changing the circulation of air currents that govern weather patterns.

Russian space officials have informed U.S. counterparts that Moscow would like to keep flying its cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) until their own orbital outpost is built and operational, a senior NASA official told Reuters on Wednesday. Reuters reports: Taken together with remarks from a senior Russian space official published on Wednesday, the latest indications are that Russia is still at least six years away from ending an orbital collaboration with the United States that dates back more than two decades.

A schism in the ISS program seemed to be closer at hand on Tuesday, when Yuri Borisov, the newly appointed director-general of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, surprised NASA by announcing that Moscow intended to withdraw from the space station partnership "after 2024." Kathy Lueders, NASA's space operations chief, said in an interview that Russian officials later on Tuesday told the U.S. space agency that Roscosmos wished to remain in the partnership as Russia works to get its planned orbital outpost, named ROSS, up and running. "We're not getting any indication at any working level that anything's changed," Lueders told Reuters on Wednesday, adding that NASA's relations with Roscosmos remain "business as usual."

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) hope to take custody of the samples Perseverance has been patiently collecting and return them safely to Earth, and they'll need the help of two more helicopters. IFLScience reports: NASA and the ESA are collaborating on putting a lander on Mars that is capable of taking off again and making a rendezvous with an orbiter which will then bring the cargo back to Earth. Rather than collect its own samples, the return mission will take over those collected by Perseverance, and the biggest change to the plans lies in how that transfer will occur. The project has not got funding yet but the space agencies are refining their plans. In a quest for the backing they need new details have been announced, along with a return date -- 2033 -- only slightly further off than 1969 was when Kennedy promised a Moon landing "before this decade is out."

Previously the Sample Return Lander was planned to carry a Sample Fetch Rover and its associated second lander. Instead, NASA and the ESA are now proposing to equip the lander with two helicopters based on the phenomenally successful Ingenuity. They will be able to traverse the gap between the Mars Ascent Vehicle and where Perseverance left them much more quickly and having two offers redundancy if one fails. There's also a possibility that Perseverance could deliver the samples directly to the Mars Ascent Vehicle if it is still operating when the ascent vehicle lands.

If everything goes to plan the Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Retrieval Lander will launch in 2027 and 2028 respectively. Although delays are common for space missions, the fact Ingenuity has continued to operate -- and even set records for its flights -- well beyond its anticipated mission time has increased the sample return team's optimism.

What if we glimpsed alien life for the first time by peering through a natural telescope made by the Sun's gravity? This wild idea, known as a solar gravitational lens (SGL) mission, may sound like an Einsteinian fever dream, but scientists have now found that it is "feasible with technologies that are either extant or in active development," according to a new study. Motherboard reports: Researchers led by Henry Helvajian, senior scientist in the Physical Sciences Laboratories at the nonprofit research center The Aerospace Corporation, have now shared the initial results of this ongoing NIAC study on the preprint server arxiv, which have not been peer-reviewed. Though the team cautioned that the mission would need to overcome several technical challenges, it could ultimately answer one of humanity's most fundamental questions: Are we alone in the universe?

"The SGL offers capabilities that are unmatched by any planned or conceivable optical instrument," according to the study, which was co-authored by Slava Turyshev, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and principal investigator of the NIAC mission concept. "With its unique optical properties, the SGL can be used to obtain detailed, high resolution images of Earth-like exoplanets as far as 100 light years from Earth, with measurement durations lasting months, or at most a few years." "Of particular interest is the possibility of using the SGL to obtain images of high spatial and spectral resolution of a yet-to-be-identified, potentially life-bearing exoplanet in another solar system in our Galactic neighborhood," the researchers added. "The direct high-resolution images of an exoplanet obtained with the SGL could lead to insight on the on-going biological processes on the target exoplanet and find signs of habitability."

The focal point of the Sun's gravitational lens is located all the way out in interstellar space, some 550 and 900 times the distance that Earth orbits our star, which is much farther than any spacecraft has ventured beyond our planet. Helvajian and his colleagues envision their mission as consisting of a one-meter telescope that is accompanied by a sunshade and propelled by solar sails that produce thrust by capturing solar radiation, in a somewhat analogous fashion to wind-propelled sails. Even if they were able to overcome the technical hurdles involved with this concept -- which include the development of more reliable solar sails and long-duration navigation and communications systems -- the team estimated that it would take at least 25 to 30 years for a spacecraft to reach this far-flung location, in the best case scenario. That said, if a telescope were able to spot alien life, arguably the biggest breakthrough in science, it would be well worth the long wait.

Russia has announced that it will officially end its international collaboration with NASA around operation of the International Space Station (ISS) as of 2024, according to the AP. From a report: Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, also announced plans to construct its own orbital station, which build and operate independently of the U.S. The ISS was originally intended to be decommissioned sometime around 2024, but NASSA shifted its official retirement date to 2030. Roscosmos and NASA set an agreement earlier in July to still continue to exchange rides for American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts aboard each other's respective launch vehicles -- Russia's Soyuz and SpaceX's Crew Dragon -- on four upcoming missions to rotate the station's crew.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: China's latest launch of a huge rocket is, once again, raising alarm that the debris will crash into the Earth's surface in an uncertain location and at great speed. On Sunday afternoon local time, the Long March 5B blasted off from the Wenchang launch site on the southern island province of Hainan, carrying a solar-powered new lab, the Wentian experiment module, to be added to China's Tiangong Space Station. But the size of the heavy-lift rocket -- it stands 53.6 meters (176 feet) tall and weighs 837,500 kilograms (more than 1.8 million pounds) -- and the risky design of its launch process have led experts to fear that some debris from its core stage could fail to burn up as it reenters Earth's atmosphere.

As with two previous launches, the rocket shed its empty 23-ton first stage in orbit, meaning that it will continue to loop the Earth over coming days as it gradually comes closer to landing. This flight path is difficult to predict because of fluctuations in the atmosphere caused by changes in solar activity. Although experts consider the chances of debris hitting an inhabited area very low, many also believe China is taking an unnecessary risk. After the core stage of the last launch fell into the Indian Ocean, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said China was "failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris," including minimizing risks during reentry and being transparent about operations. China rejects accusations of irresponsibility. In response to concerns about last year's launch, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the likelihood of damage was "extremely low."

Many scientists agree with China that the odds of debris causing serious damage are tiny. An article published in the journal Nature Astronomy this month put the chance that, under current launch practices, someone would die or be injured from parts of a rocket making an uncontrolled reentry at 1 in 10 over the next decade. But many believe launch designs like the Long March 5B's are an unnecessary risk. "Launch providers have access to technologies and mission designs today that could eliminate the need for most uncontrolled re-entries," the authors wrote. They proposed global safety standards mandating controlled reentry.
UPDATE: It crashed into the Indian Ocean.