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.

After traveling 300 miles on the underbelly of the Perseverance rover, the "Ingenuity" helicopter has made 28 different flights over the surface of Mars, reports the Washington Post, staying aloft for a total of nearly one hour, flying 4.3 miles with a maximum speed of 12.3 miles per hour and a top altitude of 39 feet. "It's traversed craters, taken photos of regions that would be hard to reach on the ground, and served as a surprisingly resilient scout that has adapted to the changing Martian atmosphere and survived its harsh dust storms and frigid nights.

"Now the engineers and scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are worried that their four-pound, solar-powered drone on Mars, may be nearing the end of its life." Winter is setting in on Mars. The dust is kicking up, coating Ingenuity's solar panels and preventing it from fully charging its six lithium-ion batteries. This month, for the first time since it landed on Mars more than a year ago, Ingenuity missed a planned communications session with Perseverance, the Mars rover that it relies on to send data and receive commands from Earth. Will a dust-coated Ingenuity survive a Martian winter where temperatures routinely plunge below minus-100 degrees Fahrenheit? And if it doesn't, how should the world remember the little helicopter that cost $80 million to develop and more than five years to design and build? Those closest to the project say that as time winds down for Ingenuity, it's hard to overstate its achievements....

"We built it as an experiment," Lori Glaze, the director of NASA's planetary science division, told The Washington Post. "So it didn't necessarily have the flight-qualified parts that we use on the big missions like Perseverance." Some, such as components from smartphones, were even bought off-the-shelf, so "there were chances that they might not perform in the environment as we expected. And so there was a risk that it wasn't going to work.... What happened was, and this is really key, after Ingenuity performed so well on those first five flights, the science team from Perseverance came to us and said, 'You know what, we want this helicopter to keep operating to help us in our exploration and achieving our science goals,' " Glaze said.

So NASA decided to keep flying....

On April 29, it took its last flight to date, No. 28, a quarter-of-a-mile jaunt that lasted two-and-a-half minutes. Now NASA wonders if that will be the last one. The space agency thinks the helicopter's inability to fully charge its batteries caused the helicopter to enter a low-power state. When it went dormant, the helicopter's onboard clock reset, the way household clocks do after a power outage. So the next day, as the sun rose and began to charge the batteries, the helicopter was out of sync with the rover: "Essentially, when Ingenuity thought it was time to contact Perseverance, the rover's base station wasn't listening," NASA wrote.

Then NASA did something extraordinary: Mission controllers commanded Perseverance to spend almost all of May 5 listening for the helicopter.

Finally, little Ingenuity phoned home.

The radio link, NASA said, "was stable," the helicopter was healthy, and the battery was charging at 41 percent.

But, as NASA warned, "one radio communications session does not mean Ingenuity is out of the woods. The increased (light-reducing) dust in the air means charging the helicopter's batteries to a level that would allow important components (like the clock and heaters) to remain energized through the night presents a significant challenge."

Maybe Ingenuity will fly again. Maybe not.

"At this point, I can't tell you what's going to happen next," Glaze said. "We're still working on trying to find a way to fly it again. But Perseverance is the primary mission, so that we need to start setting our expectations appropriately."
For Ingenuity's "Wright Brothers moment" — when it flew for the first time on another planet — it was actually carrying a postage-sized bit of fabric from the Wright Brothers original 1903 aircraft.

The prospect of growing crops on the moon has edged a little closer after researchers nurtured plants -- some more successfully than others -- in lunar soil for the first time. From a report: Scientists planted thale cress seeds in moon dust brought back by three Apollo missions and watched them sprout and grow into fully fledged plants, raising the potential for astronauts to farm off-world crops. But while the plants survived in the lunar soil, or regolith, they fell short of thriving, growing more slowly than cress planted in volcanic ash, developing stunted roots, and showing clear signs of physiological stress.

"We found that plants do indeed grow in lunar regolith, however they respond as if they are growing in a stressful situation," said Dr Anna-Lisa Paul, a molecular biologist at the University of Florida. Thale cress, or Arabidopsis thaliana, is a small flowering plant related to broccoli, cauliflower and kale. "It's not especially tasty," Paul added. The experiments are the first to investigate whether plants can grow in lunar soil and follow an 11-year effort to obtain the rare material. Because the soil is so precious, Nasa loaned only 12g of it -- a few teaspoons -- to the researchers who conducted the tests. Scientists have long wondered whether the moon could support crops, but with space agencies now planning to return humans to the surface, and potentially build lunar settlements for visitors, the question has become more pressing.

An anonymous reader writes: Former NASA engineer Mark Rober builds some awesome stuff on his YouTube channel, like devious squirrel mazes, but his most popular video series is the annual glitter bomb, a beautifully over-engineered fake package that douses porch pirates with a shower of glitter and fart spray. In an unexpected twist, last year's glitter bomb video also helped police catch and arrest someone involved in a phone scam scheme, and Rober's spent the subsequent year digging into just how these phone scam operations work. In a new video he shows off the extensive results of that effort, including hiring double agents to infiltrate several phone centers in India and hacking their security camera footage. And of course he got off a stink bomb, too.

For Rober, this crusade started when he teamed up with another YouTuber, Jim Browning, to try to send a glitter bomb to a scammer operation. Browning's whole channel, which has 3.7 million followers, is devoted to identifying the call centers behind tech support scams and refund scams. These scams typically target the elderly and less computer-savvy folks and usually rely on the scammers gaining remote access to your computer and then tricking them into giving up personal information like their bank account login. 'Refund' scams make people believe they've been overcompensated with some bogus refund and trick them into sending cash in the mail to the scammers. The people who receive those cash packages in the United States are essentially underlings in these scam operations, so after getting a glitter bomb in their hands last year, Rober set his sights on the call centers themselves. With Browning's help, they were able to gain access to the CCTV of the infiltrated call centers, while another YouTube pair, Trilogy Media, traveled to Kolkata, India to run operations on the ground. Also worth checking out: Kitboga's YouTube channel.

During a press conference Monday morning, NASA provided an update on the status of the Webb Space Telescope and released images from the telescope that put Webb's progress on dazzling display. Gizmodo reports: "I'm delighted to report that the telescope alignment has been completed with performance even better than we had anticipated," said Michael McElwain, a Webb observatory project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a NASA press conference. "This is an extraordinary milestone for humanity." Webb sits at an observational point called L2 nearly 1 million miles from Earth, where it will look further back in time than the Hubble Space Telescope. (Hubble will continue to operate alongside Webb once the latter is operational). [...] The preparation and testing of the telescope's science instruments (a process called commissioning) will take about two months to complete. Only once the commissioning is complete can Webb begin taking the scientific images that will define its tenure in space.

But some images are already being collected, to make sure the telescope is functioning properly. Webb's coldest instrument -- the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) -- recently took a test image of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that was previously imaged by the now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope's Infrared Array Camera. Webb's image of the same region makes Spitzer's look like a finger painting, showing interstellar gas clearly distributed across the star field. The stars -- blots, in Spitzer's view -- are seven-pointed beacons of light in the MIRI test.

Webb's next steps will focus on taking images of its science targets, known as early release observations. These will not only be the first images of Webb science targets, but they will be the first images processed into full color. (Webb sees the cosmos in the infrared and near-infrared wavelengths, but the images will be translated into visible light.) Klaus Pontoppidan, a Webb project scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, said in the briefing that the chief differences between the most recent images and the ones to come are that the former were taken to test the telescope's ability to see clearly, whereas the latter will test the telescope's ability to image science targets. Pontoppidan wouldn't elaborate on what Webb team will capture in the early release observations -- the targets are a "surprise," he said.

NASA has released some surprisingly colorful visualization of black holes. Digital Trends explains their origins: We're coming to the end of Black Hole Week, NASA's celebration of the beastly cosmic monsters which suck in light, matter, and everything else that comes too close to them....

As part of the festivities, the media department at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has shared a selection of some of the best visualizations of black holes, so you can get an idea of what these mind-bending phenomena are like. The images, which are also available as desktop and mobile wallpapers should you wish to decorate your devices with black hole imagery, show simulations and visualizations created to try and picture what the weird effects of the extreme gravitational forces around a black hole would be.
NASA describes this as "translating the inherently digital data (in the form of ones and zeroes) captured by telescopes in space into images, [creating] visual representations of what would otherwise be invisible to us."

"But what about experiencing these data with other senses, like hearing?

"Sonification is the process that translates data into sound. Our new project brings parts of our Milky Way galaxy, and of the greater Universe beyond it, to listeners for the first time."


And elsewhere, CNN reports astronomers used the unique X-ray echoes released by rare "binary" black hole-star systems to identify six more such systems. (Only two were known previously.) And then converted their data into sound waves. The team tracked changes in the X-ray echoes, determined time lags during transition stages and traced commonalities in the evolution of each black hole outburst. The result sounds like something from a 1950s sci-fi film.

Iamthecheese writes: The Mars XR Operations Support System is a virtual environment making use of [Epic Games'] Unreal Engine 5. [NASA is seeking to gather contributions to "replicate the harsh conditions of Mars in order to better train the next generation of astronauts," reports VRScout.] There is a $70,000 prize to be split between 20 contestants. It will be awarded to those with the best assets and scenarios.

There are five (5) different categories to participate in, with particular scenarios to explore in each category:

-Set Up Camp
-Scientific Research
-Maintenance
-Exploration
-Blow Our Minds

I'm guessing little green men will feature heavily in submissions. In any case, it's not just a chance to earn money, but prove oneself to potential employers. Prize and contest information here.

SpaceX brought four astronauts home with a midnight splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday, capping the busiest month yet for Elon Musk's taxi service. From a report: The three U.S. astronauts and one German in the capsule were bobbing off the Florida coast, near Tampa, less than 24 hours after leaving the International Space Station. NASA expected to have them back in Houston later in the morning. NASA's Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, and the European Space Agency's Matthias Maurer, embraced the seven astronauts remaining at the station, before parting ways. "It's the end of a six-month mission, but I think the space dream lives on," Maurer said. SpaceX brought up their U.S. and Italian replacements last week, after completing a charter trip to the station for a trio of businessmen.