sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: For years, scientists have believed frigid craters at the Moon's poles hold water ice, which would be both a scientific boon and a potential resource for human missions. Now, researchers have discovered (PDF) a reason why the ice has persisted on an otherwise bone-dry world: Some polar craters may be protected by ancient magnetic fields. Researchers have known about the anomalies ever since the Apollo 15 and 16 missions in 1971 and 1972, when astronauts measured regions of unusual magnetic strength on the surface. Some anomalies are now known to be up to hundreds of kilometers across. Although their origin is debated, one possibility is they were created more than 4 billion years ago when the Moon had a magnetic field and iron-rich asteroids crashed into its surface. The resultant molten material may have been permanently magnetized.

Thousands of the anomalies are thought to exist across the lunar surface, but the team mapped ones at the south pole in detail using data from Japan's Kaguya spacecraft, which orbited the Moon from 2007 to 2009. They found at least two permanently shadowed craters that were overlapped by these anomalies, the Sverdrup and Shoemaker craters, and there are likely more. Although the remnant fields are thousands of times weaker than Earth's, they could be sufficient to deflect the solar wind. Craters with known anomalies could become prime targets for science and exploration. NASA is already planning to visit the south polar region with a rover due for launch next year, called VIPER, and the agency intends to send humans there later this decade as part of its Artemis program. Studying the ice could reveal how it was delivered, which may in turn shed light on how Earth got its water.

BeerFartMoron shares a report from CBS News: After weeks of microscopic adjustments, NASA unveiled the first fully focused image from the James Webb Space Telescope Wednesday, a razor-sharp engineering photo of a nondescript star in a field of more distant galaxies that shows the observatory's optical system is working in near-flawless fashion. The goal was to demonstrate Webb can now bring starlight to a near-perfect focus, proving the $10 billion telescope doesn't suffer from any subtle optical defects like the aberration that initially hobbled the Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxies in the image were a bonus, whetting astronomers' appetites for discoveries to come. "This is one of the most magnificent days in my whole career at NASA, frankly, and for many of us astronomers, one of the most important days that we've had," said NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen. "Today we can announce that the optics will perform to specifications or even better. It's an amazing achievement."

Former astronaut Scott Kelly said he is ending his feud with the head of Russia's space program after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration asked former astronauts to dial down criticism of their Russian counterparts. From a report: The dustup began when Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin and other Russian government entities published a series of social-media posts, including one video showing Russian cosmonauts abandoning the International Space Station and leaving behind U.S. astronaut Mark Vande Hei. Mr. Kelly, who spent nearly a year in 2015 and 2016 aboard the ISS, got into a heated exchange on Twitter last week with the Russian space chief over the series of posts. Now Mr. Kelly said he is ending the spat with Mr. Rogozin after NASA sent an email to former astronauts asking them to stop criticizing their Russian partners because it was hurting the mission aboard the ISS, an orbiting lab where American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts work side by side. "I respect their position. They have a tough job. I believe in NASA and what they do. I want to help them. I respect the person that sent it greatly," Mr. Kelly said in an interview. "I would say that if I was in their position, I would have done the same exact thing."

The US astronaut Mark Vande Hei has made it through nearly a year in space, but now faces what could be his trickiest assignment: riding a Russian capsule back to Earth in the midst of deepening tension between the two countries. From a report: Nasa insists Vande Hei's homecoming at the end of the month remains unchanged, even as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has resulted in canceled launches, broken contracts and an escalating war of words from the leader of the Russian Space Agency. Many worry Dmitry Rogozin is putting decades of peaceful partnership at risk, most notably at the International Space Station (ISS). Vande Hei, who on Tuesday will break the US single spaceflight record of 340 days, is due to leave with two Russians aboard a Soyuz capsule for touchdown in Kazakhstan on 30 March. He will have logged 355 days in space. The world record of 438 days belongs to Russia.

The retired Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly, America's record-holder until Tuesday, is among those sparring with Rogozin, a longtime ally of Vladimir Putin. Kelly has returned a medal to the Russian embassy in Washington but believes the two sides "can hold it together" in space. "We need an example set that two countries that historically have not been on the most friendly of terms, can still work somewhere peacefully. And that somewhere is the International Space Station. That's why we need to fight to keep it," Kelly said. Nasa wants to keep the space station running until 2030, as do the European, Japanese and Canadian space agencies. The Russians have not committed beyond the original end date of 2024 or so.

Pi day is here — 3/14. And to celebrate, NASA released their ninth annual NASA Pi Day Challenge — "some math problems related to current and future NASA missions."

MIT Bloggers released a videogame-themed video to welcome the class of 2026.

If you Google "pi day" (or Pi), you're given an interactive doodle that (when you click the pi symbol in the upper-left) presents a Simon-like game challenging you to type in approximations of pi to an ever-increasingnumber of digits.

Guinness World Records points out that the most accurate value of pi is 62,831,853,071,796 digits, "achieved by University of Applied Sciences (Switzerland) in Chur, Switzerland, on 19 August 2021." (Note: the number of digits looks suspiciously significant....)

And USA Today published an article which shares the history of how Pi Day got started. Former physicist Larry Shaw, who connected March 14 with 3.14, celebrated the first Pi Day at the Exploratorium with fruit pies and tea in 1988. The museum said Shaw led Pi Day parades there every year until his passing in 2017.

In 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution marking March 14 as National Pi Day.

The date is significant in the world of science. Albert Einstein was born on this day in 1879. The Exploratorium said it added a celebration of Einstein's life as part of its Pi Day activities after Shaw's daughter, Sara, realized the coincidence. March 14 also marks the death of renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who passed away in 2018.
And "For those who don't enjoy math, you get pie," the article quips, noting that numerous pizza chains and restaurants are offering appropriately-adjusted one-day sale prices on pizza (and fruit) pies.

Instacart has even released a list showing which pie flavors enjoy the highest popularity over the national average in each of America's 50 states. ("New York — Boston Cream Pie. Washington — Marionberry Pie....")

This week Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum posted a PDF transcript (and video excerpts) from an interview with 81-year-old Margaret Hamilton, the programmer/systems designer who in the 1960s became director of the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory which developed the on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. Prior to that Hamilton had worked on software to detect an airplane's radar signature, but thought, "You know, 'I guess I should delay graduate school again because I'd like to work on this program that puts all these men on the Moon....'"

"There was always one thing that stood out in my mind, being in the onboard flight software, was that it was 'man rated,' meaning if it didn't work a person's life was at stake if not over. That was always uppermost in my mind and probably many others as well."

Interestingly, Hamilton had originally received two job offers from the Apollo Space Program, and had told them to flip a coin to settle it. ("The other job had to do with support systems. It was software, but it wasn't the onboard flight software.") But what's fascinating is the interview's glimpses at some of the earliest days of the programming profession: There was all these engineers, okay? Hardware engineers, aeronautical engineers and all this, a lot of them out of MIT... But the whole idea of software and programming...? Dick Battin, Dr. Battin, when they told him that they were going to be responsible for the software...he went home to his wife and said he was going to be in charge of software and he thought it was some soft clothing...
Hamilton also remembers in college taking a summer job as a student actuary at Travelers Insurance in the mid-1950s, and "all of a sudden one day word was going around Travelers that there were these new things out there called computers that were going to take away all of their jobs... Pretty soon they wouldn't have jobs. And so everybody was talking about it. They were scared they wouldn't have a way to make a living.

"But, of course, it ended up being more jobs were created with the computers than there were...."

Hamilton's story about Apollo 8 is amazing...

Right now an asteroid is zooming past earth "at a relatively close distance" reports Newsweek, "and the event can be viewed live." The asteroid, called 2022 ES3, will be traveling at 41,000 miles per hour when it comes between the moon and the Earth at around 2:18 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 13, according to NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS).

The space rock isn't expected to hit Earth. Instead, it will pass by at a distance of about 206,000 miles, which is about 87 percent of the distance between us and the moon.

The event provides a great viewing opportunity. An Italian astronomy organization called the Virtual Telescope Project, which often tracks asteroids and other space objects through the sky, is due to host a livestream of what it calls 2022 ES3's "very close, but safe, encounter with us" on its WebTV page starting at 18:30 UTC on March 13th.

Astronomers don't consider 2022 ES3 to be potentially hazardous, probably due to its size. The asteroid is predicted to be somewhere between 33 and 72 feet in diameter — about as wide as the length of a bowling lane.... [S]cientists track more than 28,000 near-Earth asteroids as they travel through the solar system. Around 900 of these are more than one kilometer, or 3,280 feet, in size.

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, the fate of the International Space Station, which has 15 partner nations and is the crown jewel of unity in space between NASA and Russia, has been up in the air (figuratively, of course). What we do know is that there are no plans to abandon NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei on the space station, despite a number of stories claiming otherwise. "Vande Hei is scheduled to return to Earth in a Soyuz capsule at the end of this month, landing in Kazakhstan," reports Ars Technica. "NASA officials are expected to be there to greet him and bring him back to the United States." Ars Technica sets the record straight and explains where these Russian "threats" originated: The source of this "news" appears to be a video published more than a week ago by a Kremlin-aligned publication, RIA Novosti. Roscosmos TV provided footage for the video, but in sharing it acknowledged that the video was a "joke." Now, this is an exceptionally poor joke given the tensions on Earth, but it is important to understand that sharing a video a week ago does not mean Russia is threatening to leave Vande Hei behind. Nothing has changed since the video was posted. Since the beginning of this crisis, NASA officials have said operations with Russian colleagues working on the space station have proceeded nominally. "Operations have not changed at all," one NASA source confirmed Friday. On Monday, NASA's manager of the International Space Program, Joel Montalbano, is scheduled to speak at a news conference about upcoming spacewalks. He likely will say something similar.

Additionally, Vande Hei could not be abandoned. At present there are three other Americans living on board the International Space Station -- Raja Chari, Kayla Barron, and Thomas Marshburn. There is also an allied astronaut, Matthias Maurer, from Germany. NASA has its own transportation to and from the station, so Vande Hei can be assured of a safe ride home whenever NASA wants. The status of the ISS partnership is subject to change, of course. It could do so quite quickly. Russia is doing horrible things in Ukraine, and the Western world has responded with harsh sanctions. No one really knows whether Vladimir Putin will decide to end Russian participation in the International Space Station. Certainly, making it appear to a domestic audience that he was stranding a NASA astronaut in space might make him look "strong" to some Russian people. But there are simply no indications this will happen.

Scientists at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston are preparing to open the first tube that one of the astronauts on the Apollo missions hammered into the surface of the moon. As NPR reports, it's "remained tightly sealed all these years since that 1972 Apollo 17 mission -- the last time humans set foot on the moon." From the report: The unsealed tube from that mission was opened in 2019. The layers of lunar soil had been preserved, and the sample offered insight into subjects like landslides in airless places. Because the sample being opened now has been sealed, it may contain something in addition to rocks and soil: gas. The tube could contain substances known as volatiles, which evaporate at normal temperatures, such as water ice and carbon dioxide. The materials at the bottom of the tube were extremely cold at the time they were collected. The amount of these gases in the sample is expected to be very low, so scientists are using a special device called a manifold, designed by a team at Washington University in St. Louis, to extract and collect the gas.

Another tool was developed at the European Space Agency (ESA) to pierce the sample and capture the gases as they escape. Scientists there have called that tool the "Apollo can opener." The careful process of opening and capturing has begun, and so far, so good: the seal on the inner sample tube seems to be intact. Now, the piercing process is underway, with that special "can opener" ready to trap whatever gases might come out. If there are gases in the sample, scientists will be able to use modern mass spectrometry technology to identify them. (Mass spectrometry is a tool for analyzing and measuring molecules.) The gas could also be divided into tiny samples for other researchers to study.

If Congress' sweeping new spending bill is signed, it would finally provide full funding to some major NASA projects that have been underfunded over the last few years. From a report: Notably, NASA's program to develop a new human lunar lander would be fully funded as the president's budget requested, as will a program to develop new commercial space stations in low Earth orbit. Overall, NASA would receive $24.041 billion for 2022 in this new bill, which will fund the US government for fiscal year 2022. NASA's portion is roughly $800 million less than the $24.8 billion that President Joe Biden's budget request called for in May of 2021. However, NASA would still see a slight bump from its total funding for fiscal year 2021, which sat at $23.27 billion.

Though Congress's plan would not fully meet the president's budget request, there are a few projects that House and Senate lawmakers are finally agreeing to fund in their entirety. The bill would give NASA's human landing system the full $1.195 billion that the request asked for. Currently, NASA is developing a new human lunar lander as part of its Artemis program, an initiative to send the first woman and first person of color to the Moon. Previously, Congress showed its reluctance to give NASA the money it requested for the lander. For 2021, appropriators only provided $850 million of the requested $3.4 billion for the lander.

McGruber writes: Retired NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly just announced that he was returning a medal awarded to him by Russia. A translation of his announcement, which Mr Kelly made in Russian:

"In a galaxy far, far away, two giant black holes appear to be circling each other like fighters in a galactic boxing ring," reports USA Today.

"Gravity is causing this death spiral, which will result in a collision and formation of a single black hole, a massive event that will send ripples through space and time." The collision itself happened eons ago — the two black holes are located about 9 billion light years from Earth. Scientists won't be able to document it for 10,000 years. Even so, there are imperceptible gravitational waves generated before the collision that are hitting us right now. These waves from the black holes' activity will increase, but will not affect Earth. However, they could help increase our understanding of how our universe has evolved.

Such supermassive black holes "are the most powerful and energetic objects in the universe and they have an enormous effect on the evolution of galaxies and stars," Tony Readhead, an astronomy professor at the California Institute of Technology, told USA TODAY. He is the co-author of the report by Caltech astronomers who detail the discovery in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. "If we want to understand the evolution of our universe we need to understand these objects," Readhead said....

Each of the black holes identified in this study has a mass amounting to hundreds of millions of times more than that of our sun, the researchers say. It took about 100 million years for the two objects to converge on their orbit, which has them at a distance of about 50 times that separating our sun and Pluto, NASA said. The two black holes are more than 99% of the way toward colliding, the agency said....

This is only the second pair of orbiting black holes identified by scientists, the researchers say. Space-time undulations from gravitational waves made by two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light-years away were recorded in 2015 by the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the US Air Force Research Laboratory released a video on YouTube that didn't get much attention. But it made an announcement that is fairly significant -- the US military plans to extend its space awareness capabilities beyond geostationary orbit, all the way to the Moon. "Until now, the United States space mission extended 22,000 miles above Earth," a narrator says in the video. "That was then, this is now. The Air Force Research Laboratory is extending that range by 10 times and the operations area of the United States by 1,000 times, taking our reach to the far side of the Moon into cislunar space."

The US military had previously talked about extending its operational domain, but now it is taking action. It plans to launch a satellite, likely equipped with a powerful telescope, into cislunar space. According to the video, the satellite will be called the Cislunar Highway Patrol System or, you guessed it, CHPS. The research laboratory plans to issue a "request for prototype proposals" for the CHPS satellite on March 21 and announce the contract award in July. The CHPS program will be managed by Michael Lopez, from the lab's Space Vehicles Directorate. (Alas, we were rooting for Erik Estrada).

This effort will include the participation of several military organizations, and it can be a little confusing to keep track of. Essentially, though, the Air Force lab will oversee the development of the satellite. The US Space Force will then procure this capability for use by the US Space Command, which is responsible for military operations in outer space. Effectively, this satellite is the beginning of an extension of operations by US Space Command from geostationary space to beyond the Moon. [...] So why is US Space Command interested in expanding its theater of operations to include the Moon? The primary reason cited in the video is managing increasing space traffic in the lunar environment, including several NASA-sponsored commercial missions, the space agency's Artemis program, and those of other nations. Another strategic element includes the ability to detect space objects, such as those placed into cislunar space by other governments, that could swing around the Moon and potentially come back to attack a U.S. military satellite in geostationary space.

"I think that's far fetched, but it is feasible from a physics perspective and would definitely exploit a gap in their current space domain awareness," said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation. "I think they are far more concerned about that than any actual threats in cislunar space because the US doesn't have any military assets in cislunar space right now."

Thelasko shares a report from CNET: NASA's Curiosity rover snapped a gorgeous, delicate formation on Mars that looks like it could be a branching piece of ocean coral. It's not coral, but it's worth contemplating how we see familiar Earth objects in random shapes on Mars. The miniscule Martian sculpture invites poetic comparisons. It resembles a water droplet captured at the moment of explosion against a surface, or the tendrils of an anemone in a tide pool.

The image comes from Curiosity's Mars Hand Lens Imager (Mahli) instrument, which NASA describes as "the rover's version of the magnifying hand lens that geologists usually carry with them into the field." So the formation in the image is quite small. Abigail Fraeman, a deputy project scientist for Curiosity, tweeted a helpful visual guide that compares the object with a US penny to give an approximate sense of the scale. Fraeman writes that the image "shows teeny, tiny delicate structures that formed by mineral precipitating from water."

On Thursday the head of Russia's space agency "warned that new sanctions imposed on his country could have dire consequences for the International Space Station program," reports Space.com (in an article shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm): "Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS?" read one of the tweets from Roscosmos Director-General Dimitry Rogozin, which was translated by Rob Mitchell for Ars Technica senior space editor Eric Berger, who shared Mitchell's translation on Twitter. Russia and the United States are the major partners in the ISS program, which also includes Canada, Japan and multiple European nations...

NASA, however, told Space.com later Thursday that civil cooperation between the U.S. and Russia in space will continue, particularly with regard to the ISS.

But Rogozin struck a much different tone, suggesting that the new sanctions could potentially result in the ISS crashing to Earth in an uncontrolled fashion. (The Russian segment of the ISS is responsible for guidance, navigation and control for the entire complex, according to the European Space Agency. And Russian Progress cargo craft provide periodic orbit-raising boosts for the ISS, to ensure that it doesn't sink too low into Earth's atmosphere....) Rogozin also stressed that the ISS would deorbit naturally without periodic reboosts courtesy of Progress freighters....

Just days ago, however, a Cygnus spacecraft built by aerospace company Northrop Grumman arrived at the ISS with a mandate to perform the program's first operational reboost, which may eventually transfer this capability to U.S. vehicles as well.
Business Insider reports that Thursday's tweets from the head of Russia's space agency also included a dire hypothetical. "If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe?"

On Saturday Elon Musk "responded by posting the logo of his company, SpaceX." Musk appeared to confirm that SpaceX would get involved, should the ISS fall out of orbit. A Twitter user asked if that's what the tech mogul really meant, to which Musk simply replied: "Yes."

NASA, meanwhile, said it "continues working with Roscosmos and our other international partners in Canada, Europe, and Japan to maintain safe and continuous ISS operations," in a statement to Euronews.

Slashdot reader Tangential shares what he describes as "an interesting article on Gizmodo discussing how we could easily contaminate other planets/moons as we explore them."

"Based on our recently demonstrated vulnerability to locally evolved bacteria and viruses, what will other worlds's pathogens do to us (and what will ours do to them?) What I also find interesting is what a small percentage of SciFi actually addresses this."

From Gizmodo's article: The year is 2034. Humans have sent a probe to Jupiter's moon Europa to drill through the icy surface and photograph the ocean beneath. In the few hours before it stops functioning, the probe returns images of shapes that could be some form of life. Scientists quickly organize a followup mission that will collect samples of that spot and bring them back to Earth. But, unknown to anyone, the first probe wasn't sterile — it carried a hardy bacteria that had survived even the mission's clean rooms. By the time the samples finally reach Earth years later, they're dominated by this bacteria, which has happily set up shop in Europa's dark, salty waters. Just like that, our first opportunity to study a truly alien ecosystem has been destroyed.

This is a nightmare scenario for NASA and other space agencies, and it's one they've worked intensely to avoid with every mission to another orb. But some researchers from a lesser-known branch of ecology argue that even the current strict standards aren't rigorous enough, and as more ambitious missions to other planets and moons get ready to launch, the risk of interplanetary contamination becomes more dire. They say we need to better plan for "forward contamination," in which our technology disseminates Earth microbes, as well as "back contamination," in which life from elsewhere hitches a ride to Earth.

In fact, we already have a playbook to lean on: the discipline of invasion science, the study of how species on our planet invade each other's ecosystems. "What I would say is that, given that there are now concrete plans in place to explore new areas that could have extant life — these pose a new set of risks that were not in play before," Anthony Ricciardi, a professor of invasion ecology and aquatic ecosystems at McGill University, told Gizmodo. "Invasion science has been applied to biosecurity at national and international levels. My colleagues and I believe that it could similarly guide biosecurity at the planetary or interplanetary scales."

Because of the groundbreaking technological advances of recent years, our ability to explore other worlds — from asteroids to planets to ocean moons — is expanding, and so are the risks that come with that. NASA plans to bring bits of Mars to Earth in the early 2030s, and missions to Titan and Europa, which could very well host life, are set to launch this decade.... Although the 2034 Europa tale is invented, there's plenty of precedent for it. We've likely accidentally brought drug-resistant bacteria into the Antarctic ecosystem already, infecting seabirds and seals.

Our lack of foresight and carelessness is driving mass extinctions on Earth — are we willing to do the same thing to the next inhabited world we touch?

Slashdot reader XXongo writes: Astra is trying to make some of the smallest launch vehicles in history. But their most recent launch of their Rocket 3 vehicle had an unusual failure, where the second stage seemed to get stuck inside the booster stage. Hackaday analyzes the failure.
From Hackaday's article: The structure, engines, avionics, and useful payload of a rocket only make up a tiny portion of its liftoff mass, while the rest is dedicated to the propellant it must expend to reach orbital velocity. That's why a Falcon 9 tipping the scales at 549,054 kilograms (1,207,920 pounds) can only loft a payload of 22,800 kg (50,265 lb) — roughly 4% of its takeoff weight. As you might imagine, there's a lower limit where there simply isn't enough mass in the equation for the hardware necessary to build a fully functional rocket. But where is that limit? That's precisely what aerospace newcomer Astra is trying to find out. Their Rocket 3 is among the smallest orbital boosters to ever fly, closer in size and mass to the German V2 of World War II than the towering vehicles being built by SpaceX or Blue Origin. Even the Rocket Lab Electron, itself an exceptionally svelte rocket, is considerably larger.

The reason they're trying to build such a small rocket is of course very simple: smaller means cheaper.... Such a low ticket price would have been unfathomable a decade ago, and promises to shake up an already highly competitive commercial launch market. But naturally, Astra has to get the thing flying reliably before we can celebrate this new spaceflight milestone....

[R]ather than placing just the payload into a protective aerodynamic fairing, the entire second stage needs to be enclosed. The lower portion of the second stage is tucked into the hollow interstage, and an elongated fairing makes sure the payload and its ride to space aren't exposed to supersonic airflow in the early phases of flight.... Looking at the live video from the February 11th launch, we can clearly see the chain of events that led to the upper stage losing control and ultimately failing to enter orbit. At almost exactly three minutes into the flight the payload fairing visibly shudders, but fails to open. Four seconds later the second stage, propelled forward by a spring-loaded mechanism, slams into the fairing but fails to knock it lose. Finally, at three minutes and eleven seconds into the mission, the second stage's engine ignites while still inside the interstage. This build up of pressure blows off the fairing, but unfortunately also destabilizes the second stage and sends it tumbling.
One of Astra's earlier low-cost rockets actually began its launch by travelling sideways. And Hackaday now notes that this month's mission "ended in a total loss of the vehicle and payload when the upper stage tumbled out of control roughly three minutes after an otherwise perfect liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida." But they also add an encouraging note.

"Such issues aren't uncommon for a new orbital booster, and few rockets in history have entered regular service without a lost payload or two on the books."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The exoplanet WASP-121b, which resides about 900 light-years from Earth, is an egg-shaped scorcher. Temperatures on the planet's day side can reach up to 4,600 degrees Fahrenheit. It's so hot that heavy metal elements, like iron and magnesium, exist as gases and are constantly streaming out of the atmosphere and into space. But the planet's night side has, until now, remained in the dark. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Feb. 21, astronomers shared their first look at the planet's dark side using NASA's Hubble Telescope.

Telescopes at the South African Astronomical Observatory discovered WASP-121b in 2015. The planet, which is a little bigger and heavier than Jupiter, is on the verge of being ripped apart by the gravitational forces of its home star, known as WASP 121. It makes a full orbit of that star once every 1.3 days and is tidally locked -- one side is perpetually bathed in starlight, the other is forever staring out into space. "This is one of the most extreme systems we have," says Ben Montet, an astrophysicist at the University of New South Wales who was not affiliated with the study. He notes its extremely hot day side is hotter than some stars.

Astronomers have only caught glimpses of the two interstellar objects identified in our solar system, reports Space.com — but there's hope that the Webb Space Telescope will show us more: "With Webb, we can do really interesting science at much fainter magnitudes or brightnesses," Cristina Thomas, an astronomer at Northern Arizona University, said in a statement from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which oversees operations for the Webb mission. Thomas is on a research team that has arranged to use the observatory to study an interstellar object, should one appear during the telescope's first year of work.

Webb brings some new talents to the table as well. "The supreme sensitivity and power of Webb now present us with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the chemical composition of these interstellar objects and find out so much more about their nature: where they come from, how they were made, and what they can tell us about the conditions present in their home systems," Martin Cordiner, principal investigator of the project, said in the statement. Cordiner is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C....

"We've never been able to observe interstellar objects in this region of the infrared," Thomas said. "It opens a lot of opportunities for the different compositional signatures that we're interested in. That's going to be a huge boon for us!" Specifically, the team would use infrared observations to study any gas and dust that the interstellar object is emitting, giving scientists a taste of the object's native system.
Right now, far out in space, the Webb Telescope has finished the first stage of aligning its 18-segmented primary mirror, reports another article at Space.com. "A single star that the observatory looked at was deliberately rendered 18 times into a hexagonal shape.

"Eventually, those 18 images will perfectly align into a single, sharp focus, but the interim result portrays a star repeated perfectly in a hexagonal pattern reminiscent of a stunning celestial snowflake."

Further Reading: "Exclusive interview: answers to 20 questions from the James Webb Space Telescope team."

Over the past few weeks the sun "has undergone a series of giant eruptions that have sent plasma hurtling through space," reports Science Alert: Perhaps the most dramatic was a powerful coronal mass ejection and solar flare that erupted from the far side of the Sun on February 15 just before midnight. Based on the size, it's possible that the eruption was in the most powerful category of which our Sun is capable: an X-class flare.

Because the flare and CME were directed away from Earth, we're unlikely to see any of the effects associated with a geomagnetic storm, which occurs when material from the eruption slams into Earth's atmosphere. These include interruptions to communications, power grid fluctuations, and auroras. But the escalating activity suggests that we may anticipate such storms in the imminent future. "This is only the second farside active region of this size since September 2017," astronomer Junwei Zhao of Stanford University's helioseismology group told SpaceWeather. "If this region remains huge as it rotates to the Earth-facing side of the Sun, it could give us some exciting flares."

According to SpaceWeatherLive, which tracks solar activity, the Sun has erupted every day for the month of February, with some days featuring multiple flares. That includes three of the second-most powerful flare category, M-class flares: an M1.4 on February 12; an M1 on February 14; and an M1.3 on February 15. There were also five M-class flares in January. The mild geomagnetic storm that knocked 40 newly launched Starlink satellites from low-Earth orbit followed an M-class flare that took place on January 29.
The article suggests this is normal activity, since the sun is about halfway towards "solar maximum" (its peak of sunspot and flare activity) expected to arrive in 2025, while the "solar minimum" was in 2019.

Further Reading: SciTechDaily reports that the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter spacecraft has now "captured the largest solar prominence eruption ever observed in a single image together with the full solar disc."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story