NASA announced on Tuesday that it's contracting three suppliers to provide concept designs for nuclear fission energy systems designed for use on the moon. TechCrunch reports: The winning bids for this award came from Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse and IX (a joint venture from Intuitive Machines and X-Energy). Each will be working with a few partners to develop their systems, which will be "initial concepts" only for the purposes of satisfying this particular contract, and each will receive roughly $5 million for their work, expected to take around 12 months.

NASA is aptly partnering with the Department of Energy (DOE) on this project, and the specs include a 40-kilowatt power generation capability, capable of generating that for at least a decade. That's about what a full charge on a current entry-level Nissan Leaf contains -- but as a fission generator it would obviously provide that continuously. It may not seem like much, but deployed singularly or in groups to support a lunar base, it could solve a lot of the challenges of the kind of prolonged occupancy of the moon that NASA plans to eventually establish through its Artemis program, which seeks to return humans to our largest natural satellite for ongoing science missions. NASA also notes that the work done for this contract could have other future applications for propulsion systems for long-range spacecraft for deep space explorations.

Nasa has begun turning off the spacecraft Voyager's systems, signaling the beginning of the end of the probe's 50-year career. The Independent reports: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 -- two identical probes -- were launched in 1977 and travelled across interstellar space to the edge of the solar system, giving humanity its closest look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Now, however, Nasa must start limiting the Voyagers' processes in order to keep them operating until 2030. "We're at 44 and a half years," says Ralph McNutt, a physicist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told Scientific American. "So we've done 10 times the warranty on the darn things."

The first Voyager craft has four remaining functioning instruments, while Voyager 2 has five, all of which are powered by converting decaying plutonium into electricity. This battery has had its output decreasing by approximately four watts every year, leading to Nasa making some tough choices about what to disable; in 2019, engineers had to turn off the heater for the cosmic-ray detector, a key piece of equipment for detecting when Voyager 2 exited the heliosphere- the magnetosphere, astrosphere and outermost atmospheric layer of the Sun.

The final instruments Nasa will disable are likely to be the magnetometer and the plasma science instrument, which are contained in the body of the spacecraft. These are warmed by the excess heat of the computers, while the others are suspended on a 13 meter fiberglass boom, meaning that they are likely to take the longest to get cold. Both craft remain so far from Earth that it takes a radio signal almost 22 hours to reach Voyager 1 and just over 18 for Voyager 2 -- even when traveling at the speed of light.

Jupiter's innards are full of the remains of baby planets that the gas giant gobbled up as it expanded to become the behemoth we see today, scientists have found. The findings come from the first clear view of the chemistry beneath the planet's cloudy outer atmosphere. Space.com reports: In the new study, researchers were finally able to peer past Jupiter's obscuring cloud cover using gravitational data collected by NASA's Juno space probe. This data enabled the team to map out the rocky material at the core of the giant planet, which revealed a surprisingly high abundance of heavy elements. The chemical make-up suggests Jupiter devoured baby planets, or planetesimals, to fuel its expansive growth. [...] [T]he researchers built computer models of Jupiter's innards by combining data, which was predominantly collected by Juno, as well as some data from its predecessor Galileo. The probes measured the planet's gravitational field at different points around its orbit. The data showed that rocky material accreted by Jupiter has a high concentration of heavy elements, which form dense solids and, therefore, have a stronger gravitational effect than the gaseous atmosphere. This data enabled the team to map out slight variations in the planet's gravity, which helped them to see where the rocky material is located within the planet. The researcher's models revealed that there is an equivalent of between 11 and 30 Earth masses of heavy elements within Jupiter (3% to 9% of Jupiter's mass), which is much more than expected.

The new models point to a planetesimal-gobbling origin for Jupiter because the pebble-accretion theory cannot explain such a high concentration of heavy elements. If Jupiter had initially formed from pebbles, the eventual onset of the gas accretion process, once the planet was large enough, would have immediately ended the rocky accretion stage. This is because the growing layer of gas would have created a pressure barrier that stopped additional pebbles from being pulled inside the planet. This curtailed rocky accretion phase would likely have given Jupiter a greatly reduced heavy metal abundance, or metallicity, than what the researchers calculated. However, planetesimals could have glommed onto Jupiter's core even after the gas accretion phase had begun; that's because the gravitational pull on the rocks would have been greater than the pressure exerted by the gas. This simultaneous accretion of rocky material and gas proposed by the planetesimal theory is the only explanation for the high levels of heavy elements within Jupiter, the researchers said.

The study also revealed another interesting finding: Jupiter's insides do not mix well into its upper atmosphere, which goes against what scientists had previously expected. The new model of Jupiter's insides shows that the heavy elements the planet has absorbed have remained largely close to its core and the lower atmosphere. Researchers had assumed that convection mixed up Jupiter's atmosphere, so that hotter gas near the planet's core would rise to the outer atmosphere before cooling and falling back down; if this were the case, the heavy elements would be more evenly mixed throughout the atmosphere. However, it is possible that certain regions of Jupiter may have a small convection effect, and more research is needed to determine exactly what is going on inside the gas giant's atmosphere. The researchers' findings could also change the origin stories for other planets in the solar system. The study was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

There are no environmental showstoppers in SpaceX's plans to launch a giant new rocket to orbit from South Texas, the Federal Aviation Administration said on Monday. From a report: An environmental assessment by the agency has concluded that SpaceX's plans for orbital launches will have "no significant impact" on the region along the Gulf Coast near Brownsville, Texas. But the F.A.A. is also requiring the company to undertake more than 75 actions to minimize the impact on the surrounding areas as it begins flights of Starship, a vehicle that is central to NASA's plans to return to the moon as well as the vision of Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, to colonize Mars. The actions Mr. Musk's company must take include earlier notice of launches, monitoring of vegetation and wildlife by a biologist, coordination with state and federal agencies to remove launch debris from sensitive habitats and adjustment of lighting to lessen impact on wildlife and a nearby beach. The mitigation measures required by the F.A.A. also restrict closures of a highway that passes the SpaceX site during launches so that people can visit the nearby beach, park and wildlife refuge. The agency said the highway could not be closed on 18 holidays and not on more than five weekends a year.

"All appeared to be going smoothly," reports CBS News, "when, about a minute before the second stage engine was expected to shut down, an onboard 'rocketcam' showed a flash in the engine's exhaust plume.

"The camera view them showed what appeared to be a tumble before video from the rocket cut off...." California-based Astra on Sunday launched two shoebox-size NASA satellites from Cape Canaveral in a modest mission to improve hurricane forecasts, but the second stage of the company's low-cost booster malfunctioned before reaching orbit and the payloads were lost.

"The upper stage shut down early and we did not deliver the payloads to orbit," Astra tweeted. "We have shared our regrets with @NASA and the payload team. More information will be provided after we complete a full data analysis."

It was the seventh launch of Astra's small "Venture-class" rocket and the company's fifth failure. Sunday's launch was the first of three planned for NASA to launch six small CubeSats, two at a time, into three orbital planes. Given the somewhat risky nature of relying on tiny shoebox-size CubeSats and a rocket with a very short track record, the $40 million project requires just four satellites and two successful launches to meet mission objectives. The NASA contract calls for the final two flights by the end of July. Whether Astra can meet that schedule given Sunday's failure is not yet known.

"Although today's launch with @Astra did not go as planned, the mission offered a great opportunity for new science and launch capabilities," tweeted NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen.... After Sunday's failure, he tweeted: "Even though we are disappointed right now, we know: There is value in taking risks in our overall NASA Science portfolio because innovation is required for us to lead."

"If, as astronomers believe, the death of large stars leave behind black holes, there should be hundreds of millions of them scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy," notes an announcement from the University of California at Berkeley. "The problem is, isolated black holes are invisible.

"Now, a team led by University of California, Berkeley, astronomers has for the first time discovered what may be a free-floating black hole by observing the brightening of a more distant star as its light was distorted by the object's strong gravitational field — so-called gravitational microlensing." The team, led by graduate student Casey Lam and Jessica Lu, a UC Berkeley associate professor of astronomy, estimates that the mass of the invisible compact object is between 1.6 and 4.4 times that of the sun. Because astronomers think that the leftover remnant of a dead star must be heavier than 2.2 solar masses in order to collapse to a black hole, the UC Berkeley researchers caution that the object could be a neutron star instead of a black hole. Neutron stars are also dense, highly compact objects, but their gravity is balanced by internal neutron pressure, which prevents further collapse to a black hole.

Whether a black hole or a neutron star, the object is the first dark stellar remnant — a stellar "ghost" — discovered wandering through the galaxy unpaired with another star.

"This is the first free-floating black hole or neutron star discovered with gravitational microlensing," Lu said. "With microlensing, we're able to probe these lonely, compact objects and weigh them. I think we have opened a new window onto these dark objects, which can't be seen any other way...." The analysis by Lam, Lu and their international team has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The analysis includes four other microlensing events that the team concluded were not caused by a black hole, though two were likely caused by a white dwarf or a neutron star.

The team also concluded that the likely population of black holes in the galaxy is 200 million — about what most theorists predicted.

Notably, a competing team from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore analyzed the same microlensing event and claims that the mass of the compact object is closer to 7.1 solar masses and indisputably a black hole. A paper describing the analysis by the STScI team, led by Kailash Sahu, has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal....

The astrometric data came from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.... While surveys like these discover about 2,000 stars brightened by microlensing each year in the Milky Way galaxy, the addition of astrometric data is what allowed the two teams to determine the mass of the compact object and its distance from Earth.

Four months ago, NASA's Mars rover Perseverance picked up a "pet rock," tucked inside its left front wheel, that's been riding along ever since. Space.com reports: So far, its ridden across 5.3 miles (8.5 kilometers) with the Perseverance rover as it drives across its Jezero Crater home on Mars.

Perseverance has carried the rock north across its landing site, named for the famed late science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, and then west across a region called "Kodiak," the remains of a former delta at Jezero. The rover is currently in the midst of what NASA calls its Delta Front Campaign and may have drilled into its first sedimentary Mars rock, Ravanis wrote.

"Perseverance's pet rock is now a long way from home," Ravanis wrote. "It's possible that the rock may fall out at some point along our future ascent of the crater rim. If it does so, it will land amongst rocks that we expect to be very different from itself."

If that happens, a future Martian geologist might be a bit confused to find the rock so out of place, Ravanis added.

schwit1 shares a report from The Verge: NASA's new powerful space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), got pelted by a larger than expected micrometeoroid at the end of May, causing some detectable damage to one of the spacecraft's 18 primary mirror segments. The impact means that the mission team will have to correct for the distortion created by the strike, but NASA says that the telescope is "still performing at a level that exceeds all mission requirements."

Engineers do have the capability to also maneuver JWST's mirror and instruments away from showers of space debris, if NASA can see them coming. The problem, though, was that this micrometeoroid was not part of a shower, so NASA considers it an "unavoidable chance event." Still, the agency is forming an engineering team to come up with ways to potentially avoid or lessen the effects of micrometeoroid strikes of this size. And since JWST is so sensitive, the telescope will also help NASA get a better understanding of just how many micrometeoroids there are in the deep space environment.

Despite the strike, NASA remained optimistic in its post about JWST's future. "Webb's beginning-of-life performance is still well above expectations, and the observatory is fully capable of performing the science it was designed to achieve," according to the blog. Engineers can also adjust the impacted mirror to help cancel out the data distortion. The mission team has done this already and will continue to tinker with the mirror over time to get the best results. It's a process that will be ongoing throughout JWST's planned five to 10 years of life as new observations are made and events unfold. At the same time, NASA warns that the engineers will not be able to completely cancel out the impact of the strike.

NASA is putting a team together to study unidentified aerial phenomena, popularly known as UFOs, the US space agency said Thursday. From a report: The team will gather data on "events in the sky that cannot be identified as aircraft or known natural phenomena -- from a scientific perspective," the agency said. NASA said it was interested in UAPs from a security and safety perspective. There was no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin, NASA added. The study is expected to take nine months. "NASA believes that the tools of scientific discovery are powerful and apply here also," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. "We have access to a broad range of observations of Earth from space -- and that is the lifeblood of scientific inquiry. We have the tools and team who can help us improve our understanding of the unknown. That's the very definition of what science is. That's what we do."

"NASA's DAVINCI mission to Venus is scheduled for launch in 2029," reports Gizmodo, adding that a new paper "details this upcoming journey, a daring mission that could shed new light on the scorching hot planet's mysterious, and potentially habitable, past." Upon its arrival at the second planet from the Sun, the probe will plunge through Venus' atmosphere, ingesting its gases for approximately one hour before landing on the planet's surface, according to the paper published in The Planetary Science Journal. DAVINCI is designed to act as a flying chemistry lab, and it will use its built-in instruments to analyze Venus's atmosphere, temperatures, pressure and wind speed, while taking a few photos of its trip through planetary hell...

If it survives the atmospheric entry, the probe will — hopefully — land in the Alpha Regio mountains, which are roughly the size of Texas, according to the researchers behind the new paper. Under ideal conditions, the probe will operate for 17 to 18 minutes once it sticks the landing, but it isn't really required to operate on Venus since all the precious data will have already been collected during its atmospheric plunge.
Digital Trends calls Venus "a frontier in planetary science about which very little is known" — then explains why that is. The biggest issue for any potential mission to Venus is the heat, as the surface temperatures can be as high as 900 degrees Fahrenheit (475 degrees Celsius). That's hot enough to melt lead, and it wreaks havoc with electronics... The pressure at the surface is around 95 bars, or nearly 100 times the atmospheric pressure on Earth's surface, so engineering a probe for this kind of environment is kind of like building a submarine... To keep the probe active for as long as possible, it is spherical and covered in a thick titanium shell to withstand the pressure and insulate against the heat. Then there's more insulation inside this shell, made of special materials including astroquartz, a type of fiber made from fused quartz... It's then filled with carbon dioxide gas to protect the high-voltage electronics from sparking and to stop any Earth gases from leaking in during launch....

The descent sphere will also have a camera that will be snapping high-contrast images of the surface, which can then be built up into 3D maps. For a camera to operate from inside a metal sphere, though, you need a window. And glass isn't a great material for dealing with intensely high-pressure environments. That's why DAVINCI's window will be made not of glass but sapphire... "Our final images will have 10-centimeter resolution," said the team's principal investigator, Jim Garvin. "That's the scale you'd see looking out across your living room...."

Researchers know that the clouds of Venus have drops of sulfuric acid in them — and sulfuric acid eats through materials. It's a particular concern for the Kevlar lanyard that will attach the descent sphere to the parachute. So to test whether the lanyard can withstand the acidic environment, the engineers don't just suspend it in a few drops of acid — they coat the entire surface in acid, then test the lanyard's pull strength to make sure it can survive long enough to take the probe through the atmosphere even in the worst possible case.
SciTechDaily notes DAVINCI "is the first mission to study Venus using both spacecraft flybys and a descent probe....

"It will also provide the first descent imaging of the mountainous highlands of Venus while mapping their rock composition and surface relief at scales not possible from orbit."

"We have reestablished reliable communications with Ingenuity," reported the team lead for NASA's Mars helicopter, Teddy Tzanetos, in a blog post last week. As detailed in our last blog post, for the first time in our yearlong extended mission we had a loss of communications with Ingenuity from the downlink of May 3 (Sol 427) and May 4 (Sol 428). After a week of anomaly investigation, two sols dedicated to data collection, and the heroic efforts of the Perseverance and Ingenuity operations teams, I am very happy to report that we have reestablished reliable communications with Ingenuity.

Based on all available telemetry, the helicopter appears healthy, and we have resumed a modified form of operations. Assuming winter recommissioning activities complete nominally, Ingenuity's 29th flight may occur in the next few sols.... All telemetry downlinked so far suggests that Ingenuity is healthy, with no signs of damage from the overnight cold cycles.
That's the good news.

The bad news? Telemetry from Ingenuity confirmed that the loss of communications was due to insufficient battery state-of-charge (SOC) going into the night, which resulted in a reset of our mission clock. This daily state-of-charge deficit is likely to persist for the duration of Martian winter (until September/October).

Challenges like these are to be expected: After hundreds of sols and dozens of flights beyond the five flights originally planned, the solar-powered helicopter is in uncharted terrain. We are now operating far outside our original design limits. Historically, Mars is very challenging for spacecraft (particularly solar-powered spacecraft). Each sol could be Ingenuity's last....

We have reached the point in Martian late fall/early winter at which Ingenuity can no longer support the energy demands of nominal operations. Starting on the evening of Sol 426, we believe Ingenuity started experiencing overnight battery brownouts (drops in the battery's voltage), which reset the electronics. Due to the seasonal decrease in available solar energy, increases in airborne dust density, and the drop in temperatures, the energy demand to keep the electronics powered and warm throughout the night has surpassed Ingenuity's available energy budget.... We expect to be in this challenging winter energy paradigm until around Sol 600, at which point we expect to return to being power-positive from sol to sol.
The blog post says NASA can cope with a resetting mission clock. But the helicopter's battery (and other electronics) are now facing overnight ambient temperatures of about minus 80 degrees C (minus 112 degrees F), "a lifetime risk to our electronic components." Although component failure has always been a risk that we have carried since rover deployment, that risk is now magnified... We do have limited electronics core module (ECM) component testing to suggest that select components may survive through the winter, but we cannot predict how the entire ECM will fare throughout winter. Cold-soaking electronics is believed to have caused the end of the Opportunity and Spirit Mars rover missions.

Given our elevated risk posture, our focus in the last several sols has been to prioritize data downlink from Ingenuity to the Helicopter Base Station (HBS). We have a handful of Heli-to-HBS transfer activities left before all unique data are copied from Ingenuity to the HBS. Specifically, we are copying flight performance logs, electronics logs, and high-resolution color images from the last eight flights that are still onboard Ingenuity.

After all critical logs are transferred, the team will proceed with a recommissioning phase during which we will reestablish Ingenuity's flight-readiness given our ongoing overnight cold-cycling. Like during the technology demonstration phase, we will perform a high-speed spin before proceeding to flight. Should Ingenuity receive a clean bill of health, we would be ready to execute a short sortie to the southwest in Flight 29. This flight will improve our radio link for approximately the next four to six months while Perseverance samples at the river delta.

In the meantime, the Ingenuity flight software team will be preparing a series of upgrades to enable advanced navigation features. These new capabilities will help Ingenuity ascend the river delta and continue its missions as a forward scout for Perseverance past winter.
Mashable notes that Ingenuity recently sent back new footage showing its April 8th flight — calling it Ingenuity's "farthest and fastest flight yet." Flying 33 feet above the surface of Mars on April 8, "it traveled 2,310 feet — a bit less than half a mile — at 12 mph." The whole record-breaking feat lasted a little over 2.5 minutes, but that's much longer than its first flight of 39 seconds in the spring of 2021. NASA increased the new video's speed fivefold, reducing its runtime to less than 35 seconds.

NASA said this week that it plans to purchase five additional Crew Dragon missions from SpaceX to carry astronauts to the International Space Station. Ars Technica reports: Although the space agency's news release does not specifically say so, these may be the final flights NASA needs to keep the space station fully occupied into the year 2030. As of now, there is no signed international agreement to keep the station flying until then, but this new procurement sends a strong signal that the space agency expects the orbital outpost to keep flying that long.

The announcement also suggests that SpaceX will fly more than twice as many crews to the space station than the other partner in NASA's commercial crew program, Boeing. Under the new agreement, SpaceX would fly 14 crewed missions to the station on Crew Dragon, and Boeing would fly six during the lifetime of the station.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Researchers in Japan have clocked a new speed record for data transmission -- a blistering 1.02 petabits per second (Pb/s). Better yet, the breakthrough was achieved using optical fiber cables that should be compatible with existing infrastructure. For reference, 1 petabit is equivalent to a million gigabits, meaning this new record is about 100,000 times faster than the absolute fastest home internet speeds available to consumers. Even NASA will "only" get 400 Gb/s when ESnet6 rolls out in 2023. At speeds of 1 Pb/s, you could theoretically broadcast 10 million channels per second of video at 8K resolution, according to the team.

The new record was set by researchers at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), using several emerging technologies. First, the optical fiber contains four cores -- the glass tubes that transmit the signals -- instead of the usual one. The transmission bandwidth is extended to a record-breaking 20 THz, thanks to a technology known as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). That bandwidth is made up of a total of 801 wavelength channels spread across three bands -- the commonly used C- and L-bands, as well as the experimental S-band. With the help of some other new optical amplification and signal modulation technologies, the team achieved the record-breaking speed of 1.02 Pb/s, sending data through 51.7 km (32.1 miles) of optical fiber cables.

New spacesuits made by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace could be worn by astronauts that land on the moon later this decade through NASA's Artemis program, the agency announced Wednesday. The suits will also be worn by crew members living and working on the International Space Station. CNN reports: The contracts were awarded by NASA as part of its strategy of growing commercial partnerships. Both companies have been selected to move forward in developing the next generation of spacesuits. Depending on how the two companies deliver on the suits and their spacewalking capabilities, one company could prevail over the other. That flexibility has been built into the task awards as the two companies progress in product development.

The Artemis program seeks to land the first woman and the first person of color at the lunar south pole by 2025, and eventually prepare for landing crewed missions on Mars. Experts from NASA have developed the required safety and technical standards for the spacesuits. Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace will design, develop and potentially produce the suits and any necessary equipment for space station crew and Artemis astronauts. [...] The suits are expected to be ready by the mid-2020s.

Boeing's Orbital Flight Test 2 (OFT-2) "is officially a success," reports Space.com: That's the verdict that leaders at NASA and Boeing gave during a press briefing on Wednesday night (May 25), a few hours after the aerospace giant's Starliner capsule returned to Earth to wrap up OFT-2, a crucial uncrewed demonstration mission to the International Space Station.

Starliner touched down in the White Sands Missile Range, a U.S. Army facility in New Mexico, at 6:49 p.m EDT (2249 GMT) on Wednesday, hitting the desert dirt just 0.3 miles (0.5 kilometers) from its target landing point. Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, described the landing as "picture perfect" during Wednesday night's briefing, saying that the test flight accomplished all of its mission objectives....

OFT-2 went smoothly from start to finish, though it did have a few minor hiccups. For example, two thrusters on Starliner's service module failed during the orbital insertion burn, which occurred about 30 minutes after launch. And as Starliner approached the space station on Friday (May 20), an additional two thrusters needed to be shut down, this time in the capsule's reaction control system. In both cases, backups for each system worked as they were designed to do, and neither issue substantially affected the mission. But Starliner's thrusters will be a focus of several post-flight checks and tests in the near future.
The Washington Post writes that on-the-ground engineers "won't be able to examine the two main thrusters that cut out since they are housed in the spacecraft's service module, which was jettisoned during the return." (And during the flight, their article adds, "the spacecraft's thermal control system, used to keep the spacecraft at the right temperature, also failed.") But NASA's Steve Stich tells Space.com that "Putting the vehicle through its paces on this flight is really the only way to prepare us for the crewed flight test.

"Once we work through all the data, we'll be ready to fly crew on this vehicle."

joshuark writes: NASA programmer/scientist, Ron Garret shares his experience debugging LISP code from 150-million miles away on the robotic Mars rover Sojourner. Garret describes his experience in a recent episode of Adam Gordon Bell's Corecursive podcast. Garret later explains, "And it didn't work..." for the next project NASA's New Millennium project using LISP.

Like a professor said in LISP programming class, LISP -- getting it done is half DEFUN. Garret had written an essay in 2006 , titled, "How knowing LISP destroyed my programming career." Available on the web archive. So much for LISPcraft, or the Little LISPer.

"NASA has released a huge new report that astronomers are calling Hubble's magnum opus," reports New Atlas.

"Analyzing 30 years of data from the famous space telescope, the new study makes the most precise measurement yet of how fast the universe is expanding." Astronomers have known for the better part of a century that the universe is expanding, thanks to the observation that galaxies are moving away from us — and the farther away they are, the faster they're traveling. The speed at which they're moving, relative to their distance from Earth, is a figure called the Hubble constant, and measuring this value was one of the primary missions of the space telescope of the same name.

To measure the Hubble constant, astronomers study distances to objects whose brightness is known well — that way, the dimmer it appears, the farther away it is. For relatively close objects within our galaxy or in nearby ones, this role is filled by Cepheids, a class of stars that pulse in a predictable pattern. For greater distances, astronomers use what are called Type Ia supernovae — cosmic explosions with a well-defined peak brightness....

For the new study, a team of scientists has now gathered and analyzed the most comprehensive catalog of these objects so far, to make the most precise measurement of the Hubble constant yet. This was done by studying 42 galaxies that contained both Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae, as imaged by the Hubble telescope over the last 30 years.

"This is what the Hubble Space Telescope was built to do, using the best techniques we know to do it," said Adam Riess, lead scientist of the team. "This is likely Hubble's magnum opus, because it would take another 30 years of Hubble's life to even double this sample size."
The article points out that these detailed real-world observations of the Hubble "constant" now show a small discrepancy, which suggests "new physics could be at work."

And it's the new James Webb Space Telescope that will now be studying these same phenomena at an even higher resolution.

Boeing's Starliner successfully docked to the International Space Station Friday night for the first time.

And right now, Boeing is beginning the official hatch-opening ceremon, in which the space station astronauts already on the ISS "open the hatch to the vehicle and retrieve some cargo that's packed inside," explains the Verge: NASA tasked Boeing with conducting an uncrewed flight demonstration of Starliner to show that the capsule can hit all of the major milestones it'll need to hit when it is carrying passengers... This mission is called OFT-2 since it's technically a do-over of a mission that Boeing attempted back in 2019, called OFT. During that flight, Starliner launched to space as planned, but a software glitch prevented the capsule from getting in the right orbit it needed to reach to rendezvous with the ISS. Boeing had to bring the vehicle home early, and the company never demonstrated Starliner's ability to dock with the ISS....

Using a series of sensors, the capsule autonomously guided itself onto an open docking port on the space station.... Docking occurred a little over an hour behind schedule, due to some issues with Starliner's graphics and docking ring, which were resolved ahead of the docking....

[Thursday] At 6:54PM ET, Starliner successfully launched to space on top of an Atlas V rocket, built and operated by the United Launch Alliance. Once Starliner separated from the Atlas V, it had to fire its own thrusters to insert itself into the proper orbit for reaching the space station. However, after that maneuver took place, Boeing and NASA revealed that two of the 12 thrusters Starliner uses for the procedure failed and cut off too early. The capsule's flight control system was able to kick in and rerouted to a working thruster, which helped get Starliner into a stable orbit.... Today, Boeing revealed that a drop in chamber pressure had caused the early cutoff of the thruster, but that system behaved normally during follow-up burns of the thrusters. And with redundancies on the spacecraft, the issue "does not pose a risk to the rest of the flight test," according to Boeing.

Boeing also noted today that the Starliner team is investigating some weird behavior of a "thermal cooling loop" but said that temperatures are stable on the spacecraft.
From the space station, NASA astronaut Bob Hines said the achievement "marks a great milestone towards providing additional commercial access to low Earth orbit, sustaining the ISS and enabling NASA's goal of returning humans to the Moon and eventually to Mars.

"Great accomplishments in human spaceflight are long remembered by history. Today will be no different."

A long-time Slashdot reader shares this schedule (EST): 5/20, 3:30 pm — Starliner docking with ISS.
5/21, 11:30 am — Safety checks completed. Hatches opened.
5/24, 12:00 pm — Starliner loading completed. Hatched closed.
5/25, 2:00 pm — Starliner undocking from ISS.
5/25, 5:45 pm — Coverage of Starliner landing begins.

Again, the streams will be broadcast at NASA Television. I don't know about any of you, but I know what I'm doing this weekend.

Vangelis, the Greek composer and musician whose synth-driven work brought huge drama to film soundtracks including Blade Runner and Chariots of Fire, has died aged 79. The Guardian reports: Born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou in 1943, Vangelis won an Oscar for his 1981 Chariots of Fire soundtrack. Its uplifting piano motif became world-renowned, and reached No 1 in the US charts, as did the accompanying soundtrack album. [...] Chariots of Fire became inextricable from Vangelis's timeless theme, and the music became synonymous with slow-motion sporting montages. "My music does not try to evoke emotions like joy, love, or pain from the audience. It just goes with the image, because I work in the moment," he later explained. His score to Blade Runner is equally celebrated for its evocation of a sinister future version of Los Angeles, where robots and humans live awkwardly alongside one another, through the use of long, malevolent synth notes; saxophones and lush ambient passages enhance the film's romantic and poignant moments. "It has turned out to be a very prophetic film -- we're living in a kind of Blade Runner world now," he said in 2005.

Later in the decade he scored the Palme d'Or-winning Costa-Gavras political drama Missing, starring Jack Lemmon; the Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins drama The Bounty; and the Mickey Rourke-starring Francesco. He worked again with the Blade Runner director, Ridley Scott, on 1992 film 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and elsewhere during the 1990s, soundtracked Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon and documentaries by Jacques Cousteau. [...] A fascination with outer space found voice in 2016's Rosetta, dedicated to the space probe of the same name, and Nasa appointed his 1993 piece Mythodea (which he claimed to have written in an hour) as the official music of the Mars Odyssey mission of 2001. His final album, 2021's Juno to Jupiter, was inspired by the Nasa probe Juno and featured recordings of its launch and the workings of the probe itself in outer space.

The engineering team with NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is trying to solve a mystery: The interstellar explorer is operating normally, receiving and executing commands from Earth, along with gathering and returning science data. But readouts from the probe's attitude articulation and control system (AACS) don't reflect what's actually happening onboard. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reports: The AACS controls the 45-year-old spacecraft's orientation. Among other tasks, it keeps Voyager 1's high-gain antenna pointed precisely at Earth, enabling it to send data home. All signs suggest the AACS is still working, but the telemetry data it's returning is invalid. For instance, the data may appear to be randomly generated, or does not reflect any possible state the AACS could be in. The issue hasn't triggered any onboard fault protection systems, which are designed to put the spacecraft into "safe mode" -- a state where only essential operations are carried out, giving engineers time to diagnose an issue. Voyager 1's signal hasn't weakened, either, which suggests the high-gain antenna remains in its prescribed orientation with Earth.

The team will continue to monitor the signal closely as they continue to determine whether the invalid data is coming directly from the AACS or another system involved in producing and sending telemetry data. Until the nature of the issue is better understood, the team cannot anticipate whether this might affect how long the spacecraft can collect and transmit science data. Voyager 1 is currently 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes light 20 hours and 33 minutes to travel that difference. That means it takes roughly two days to send a message to Voyager 1 and get a response -- a delay the mission team is well accustomed to.