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

dargaud writes: NASA's Parker Solar Probe has captured its first images of Venus' surface in visible light. The images show distinctive areas on the planetary surface, including continental regions, plains and plateaus. The images were taken on the nightside of the planet where the heat reemitted by the various surface areas has differing characteristics. "Venus is the third brightest thing in the sky, but until recently we have not had much information on what the surface looked like because our view of it is blocked by a thick atmosphere," said Brian Wood, lead author on the new study and physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. "Now, we finally are seeing the surface in visible wavelengths for the first time from space."

You can view images of Venus' surface in a video produced by NASA on YouTube.

It's been one year since a nuclear-powered, one-armed, six-wheeled robot punched through the Martian atmosphere at a blazing 12,000 miles per hour, and a supersonic parachute slowed it way down until a rocket-powered "jetpack" could fire its engines and then gently lower it onto the surface. NPR: NASA's Perseverance rover was too far away for engineers on Earth to control it in real time -- which meant that the spacecraft had to execute that daredevil maneuver all by itself. All that the robot's handlers on Earth could do was wait for confirmation that it had touched down safely. "It is a nail-biting experience," Rick Welch, Perseverance's deputy project manager. "There's no doubt about it." Dramatic as the Feb. 18, 2021 touchdown was, the milestones that the car-sized rover has hit in the year since then could one day prove far more momentous.

Perseverance is hunting for evidence of microbes that may have once lived on the red planet -- a first for a NASA robot. It begins a new chapter of Martian exploration: one that not only searches for ancient signs of microbial Martians, but that lays the groundwork to send samples of Mars rocks and dirt back to Earth. One of the mission's main objectives is to collect samples of rocks and dirt and stash them on the surface of Mars so that a future mission could pick them up and bring them back to Earth to study. The $2.7-billion rover is equipped with a suite of scientific instruments including a rock-blasting laser, cameras and spectrometers. But a robot geologist -- even one as advanced as Perseverance -- can only do so much. Scientists really hope to get pieces of the planet back to their labs.

NASA, in a blog post: Coastal flooding will increase significantly over the next 30 years because of sea level rise, according to a new report by an interagency sea level rise task force that includes NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and other federal agencies. Titled Global and Regional Sea Level Rise Scenarios for the United States, the Feb. 15 report concludes that sea level along U.S. coastlines will rise between 10 to 12 inches (25 to 30 centimeters) on average above today's levels by 2050. The report -- an update to a 2017 report -- forecasts sea level to the year 2150 and, for the first time, offers near-term projections for the next 30 years. Agencies at the federal, state, and local levels use these reports to inform their plans on anticipating and coping with the effects of sea level rise.

"This report supports previous studies and confirms what we have long known: Sea levels are continuing to rise at an alarming rate, endangering communities around the world. Science is indisputable and urgent action is required to mitigate a climate crisis that is well underway," said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. "NASA is steadfast in our commitment to protecting our home planet by expanding our monitoring capabilities and continuing to ensure our climate data is not only accessible but understandable." The task force developed their near-term sea level rise projections by drawing on an improved understanding of how the processes that contribute to rising seas -- such as melting glaciers and ice sheets as well as complex interactions between ocean, land, and ice -- will affect ocean height. "That understanding has really advanced since the 2017 report, which gave us more certainty over how much sea level rise we'll get in the coming decades," said Ben Hamlington, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and one of the update's lead authors.

NASA's Sea Level Change Team, led by Hamlington, has also developed an online mapping tool to visualize the report's state-of-the-art sea level rise projections on a localized level across the U.S. "The hope is that the online tool will help make the information as widely accessible as possible," Hamlington said. The Interagency Sea Level Rise Task Force projects an uptick in the frequency and intensity of high-tide coastal flooding, otherwise known as nuisance flooding, because of higher sea level. It also notes that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, global temperatures will become even greater, leading to a greater likelihood that sea level rise by the end of the century will exceed the projections in the 2022 update.

schwit1 shares a report from Politico: Starship is threatening NASA's moon contractors, which are watching its progress with a mix of awe and horror. "They are shitting the bed," said a top Washington space lobbyist who works for SpaceX's competitors and asked for anonymity to avoid upsetting his clients. NASA and its major industry partners are simultaneously scrambling to complete their own moon vehicles: the Space Launch System mega-rocket and companion Orion capsule. But the program is billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule -- and, many would argue, generations behind SpaceX in innovation.

The space agency's first three Artemis moon missions over the next three years -- including a human landing planned for 2025 -- are all set to travel aboard the SLS rocket and Orion capsule, which are being built by Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Aerojet Rocketdyne and numerous other suppliers and engineering services firms. But with the SLS' first flight this year further delayed at least until late spring, concerns are growing that even if it succeeds, the system, at an estimated $2 billion per launch, could prove too costly for the multiple journeys to the moon that NASA will need to build a permanent human presence on the lunar surface.

That makes Starship, which conducted a successful flight to the edge of space last year, especially threatening to the contractors and their allies in Congress. As Starship progresses, it will further eclipse the argument for sticking with SLS, according to Rand Simberg, an aerospace engineer and space consultant. "Once the new system's reliability is demonstrated with a large number of flights, which could happen in a matter of months, it will obsolesce all existing launch systems," he said. "If SLS is not going to fly more than once every couple of years, it's just not going to be a significant player in the future in space, particularly when Starship is flown," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: On March 4, a human-made piece of rocket detritus will slam into the moon. But it turns out that it is not, as was previously stated in a number of reports, including by The New York Times, Elon Musk's SpaceX that will be responsible for making a crater on the lunar surface. Instead, the cause is likely to be a piece of a rocket launched by China's space agency.

Last month, Bill Gray, developer of Project Pluto, a suite of astronomical software used to calculate the orbits of asteroids and comets, announced that the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was on a trajectory that would intersect with the path of the moon. [...] But an email on Saturday from Jon Giorgini, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, changed the story. Mr. Giorgini runs Horizons, an online database that can generate locations and orbits for the almost 1.2 million objects in the solar system, including about 200 spacecraft. A user of Horizons asked Mr. Giorgini how certain it was that the object was part of the DSCOVR rocket. "That prompted me to look into the case," Mr. Giorgini said.

Part of a rocket is expected to crash into the far side of the moon on March 4. Initially thought to be a SpaceX rocket stage, the object may actually be part of a Long March 3C rocket [that launched China's Chang'e-5 T1 spacecraft on Oct. 23, 2014]. He found that the orbit was incompatible with the trajectory that DSCOVR took, and contacted Mr. Gray. [...] Mr. Gray now realizes that his mistake was thinking that DSCOVR was launched on a trajectory toward the moon and using its gravity to swing the spacecraft to its final destination about a million miles from Earth where the spacecraft provides warning of incoming solar storms. But, as Mr. Giorgini pointed out, DSCOVR was actually launched on a direct path that did not go past the moon. "I really wish that I had reviewed that" before putting out his January announcement, Mr. Gray said. "But yeah, once Jon Giorgini pointed it out, it became pretty clear that I had really gotten it wrong." There is still no chance of the rocket missing the moon, the report says.

"As for what happened to that Falcon 9 part, 'we're still trying to figure out where the DSCOVR second stage might be,' Mr. Gray said," according to the Times. "The best guess is that it ended up in orbit around the sun instead of the Earth, and it could still be out there. That would put it out of view for now."

The first images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have been released, according to Space.com. Slashdot readers g01d4 and fahrbot-bot first shared the news. From the report: The main photo, which doesn't even hint at the power Webb will bring to the universe once it's fully operational, shows a star called HD 84406 and is only a portion of the mosaic taken over 25 hours beginning on Feb. 2, during the ongoing process to align the observatory's segmented mirror. "The entire Webb team is ecstatic at how well the first steps of taking images and aligning the telescope are proceeding," Marcia Rieke, principal investigator of the instrument that Webb relies on for the alignment procedure and an astronomer at the University of Arizona, said in a NASA statement.

JWST is now 48 days out from its Christmas Day launch and in the midst of a commissioning process expected to last about six months. The telescope spent the first month unfolding from its launch configuration and trekking out nearly 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth. During the bulk of the remaining time, scientists are focusing on waking and calibrating the observatory's instruments and making the minute adjustments to the telescope's 18 golden mirror segments that are necessary for crisp, clear images of the deep universe. The process is going well, according to NASA.

Still, the telescope has a long way to go, as today's image of HD 84406 shows. [...] HD 84406 is in the constellation Ursa Major, or Big Bear, but is not visible from Earth without a telescope. But it was a perfect early target for Webb because its brightness is steady and the observatory can always spot it, so launch or deployment delays wouldn't affect the plan. Oddly, JWST won't be able to observe HD 84406 later in its tenure; once the telescope is focused, this star will be too bright to look at. Previously, JWST personnel have said that the telescope will be seeing fairly sharply by late April. In addition to the image of HD 84406, NASA also shared a "selfie" image, which Gizmodo and CNN decided to focus on in their reports.

The first operational launch of Astra's Rocket 3.3 vehicle failed Feb. 10 when the rocket's upper stage appeared to tumble out of control after stage separation. SpaceNews reports: The rocket, designated LV0008 by Astra, lifted off from Space Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 3 p.m. Eastern. The launch suffered several days of delays because of a range issue as well as a last-second scrub during the previous launch attempt Feb. 7. However, onboard video of the vehicle showed the upper stage tumbling shortly after separation from the first stage, three minutes after liftoff. The video suggests a potential issue with the separation of the payload fairing, which, according to a mission timeline provided by the company, takes place seconds before stage separation.

This was the fifth orbital launch attempt by Astra of its Rocket 3 vehicle. The first three launches, from September 2020 through August 2021, all failed to reach orbit. The fourth, in November 2021, did reach orbit but did not carry a satellite payload. This launch was carrying four NASA-sponsored cubesats on a mission called Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) 41 by NASA. The agency awarded Astra a $3.9 million contract in December 2020 for the launch through its Venture Class Launch Services (VCLS) Demo 2 competition. "An issue has been experienced during flight that prevented the delivery of our customer payloads to orbit today. We are deeply sorry to our customers," said Carolina Grossman, director of product management at Astra, during the launch webcast. The company did not disclose any additional information about the failure. "I'm with the team looking at data, and we will provide more info as soon as we can," Chris Kemp, chief executive of Astra, tweeted minutes after the failure.

NASA on Monday announced that it has selected the aerospace company Lockheed Martin to build the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), a small rocket that will launch pristine Red Planet samples back toward Earth a decade or so from now. Space.com reports: Mars Sample Return is a joint effort of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The project is already well underway, thanks to NASA's Perseverance rover, which landed on the Red Planet in February 2021.The six-wheeled robot has collected a handful of samples thus far and will eventually snag several dozen more, if all goes according to plan. The next big steps are scheduled to come in the mid-2020s, with the launch of two additional missions -- the NASA-led Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL) and ESA's Earth Return Orbiter (ERO).

SRL will deliver an ESA "fetch rover" and the MAV to the Martian surface. The fetch rover will carry the collected samples from Perseverance -- or the spot(s) where Perseverance has cached them -- to the MAV, which will then launch them into orbit around the Red Planet. A container holding the samples will then meet up with the ERO, which will haul it home to Earth, perhaps as early as 2031. Once the samples are down on the ground, scientists in well-equipped labs around the world will study them for signs of ancient Mars life, clues about the planet's evolutionary history and other topics of interest, NASA officials have said. [...] The newly announced MAV contract has a potential value of $194 million, NASA officials said in today's statement. The contracted work will begin on Feb. 25 and run for six years. During this time, Lockheed Martin will build multiple MAV test units as well as the flight unit. "Committing to the Mars Ascent Vehicle represents an early and concrete step to hammer out the details of this ambitious project not just to land on Mars, but to take off from it," Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. "We are nearing the end of the conceptual phase for this Mars Sample Return mission, and the pieces are coming together to bring home the first samples from another planet," Zurbuchen added. "Once on Earth, they can be studied by state-of-the-art tools too complex to transport into space."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Falcon 9 reached a notable US milestone in January, equaling and then exceeding the tally of space shuttle launches. During its more than three decades in service, NASA's space shuttle launched 135 times, with 133 successes. To put the Falcon 9's flight rate into perspective, it surpassed the larger shuttle in flights in about one-third of the time. There is no way to know how many missions the Falcon 9 will ultimately fly. At its current rate, the rocket could reach 500 flights before the end of this decade. However, SpaceX is also actively working to put its own booster out of business. The success of the company's Starship project will probably ultimately determine how long the Falcon 9 will remain a workhorse. Nevertheless, it seems likely the Falcon 9 will fly for a long time yet. That is because it now provides the only means for US astronauts to get into space. And while NASA's deep-space Orion vehicle and Boeing's Starliner spacecraft should come online within the next couple of years, the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft will very likely remain the lowest risk, and lowest cost, means of putting humans into orbit for at least the next decade.

Speaking of safety, this is where the Falcon 9 rocket has really shone of late. Since the Amos-6 failure during its static fire test, SpaceX has completed a record-setting run of 111 successful Falcon 9 missions in a row. It probably will be 112 after Thursday. There are only two other rockets with a string of successful flights comparable to the Falcon 9. One is the Soyuz-U variant of the Russian rocket, which launched 786 times from 1973 to 2017. The other is the American Delta II rocket, which recently retired. (Eventually, the Atlas V rocket could also exceed 100 consecutive successes before its retirement later this decade.) According to Wikipedia, amid its long run, the Soyuz-U rocket had a streak of 112 consecutive successful launches between July 1990 and May 1996. However this period includes the Cosmos 2243 launch in April 1993. This mission should more properly be classified as a failure. According to noted space scientist Jonathan McDowell, the control system of the rocket failed during the final phase of the Blok-I burn, and the payload was auto-destructed.

Taking this failure into account, the Soyuz-U had a run of 100 successful launches from 1983 to 1986. This happens to be the exact same number of consecutive successes by the Delta II rocket, originally designed and built by McDonnell Douglas and later flown by Boeing and United Launch Alliance. Overall the Delta II rocket launched 155 times, with two failures. Its final flight, in 2018, was the rocket's 100th consecutive successful mission. So the Falcon 9 has now exceeded both the Soyuz-U and Delta II rockets for consecutive mission successes, and apparently its low flight insurance costs reflect this. What seems remarkable about all of this is that the Falcon 9 amassed this safety record at the very same time SpaceX was experimenting with and demonstrating reuse. At the time of the Amos-6 failure in 2016, the company had yet to re-fly a single Falcon 9 first stage. Now it has pushed some of its boosters to fly 11 flights, and SpaceX has never lost a mission on a reused first stage, even though founder Elon Musk and other officials have explicitly said they are pushing the technology to find its limits.

The International Space Station (ISS) will continue its operations until 2030 before heading for a watery grave at the most remote point in the Pacific, Nasa confirmed in a new transition plan this week. The Guardian reports: More than 30 years after its 1998 launch, the ISS will be "de-orbited" in January 2031, according to the space agency's budget estimates. Once out of orbit the space station will make a dramatic descent before splash landing in Point Nemo, which is about 2,700km from any land and has become known as the space cemetery, a final resting place for decommissioned space stations, old satellites, and other human space debris. Also known as the "Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility" or the "South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Area," the region around the space cemetery is known for its utter lack of human activity. It's "pretty much the farthest place from any human civilization you can find," as NASA put it. Nasa said it plans to continue future space research by buying space and time for astronaut scientists on commercial spacecraft.

America's Department of Defense "wants to clean up space...at least the increasingly polluted region in low Earth orbit, where thousands of bits of debris, spent rocket stages and dead satellites whiz uncontrollably," writes the Washington Post.

They're reporting that America's Space Force has now launched a program to give companies seed money to develop space-cleaning technology to eventually demo in space (starting with awards of $250,000 that rise as high as $1.5 million). The name of the program: Orbital Prime. The issue also has gotten the attention of the White House. Its Office of Science and Technology Policy recently held a meeting asking for input from space industry leaders about what to do about the problem. Speaker after speaker said that governments around the world need to fund these efforts to help create a market for companies to operate. They also said that it had become an imperative for the governments largely responsible for the problem in the first place. "If the U.S. Navy had had a derelict ship sitting in sovereign waters, creating a safety hazard, the U.S. Navy would go out and grab that ship," said Doug Loverro, a former top Pentagon and NASA space official. "And I'm not sure why we don't see the same responsibility for government for their derelict ships and their derelict bodies that are in space today."

Or as James Lowenthal, a professor of astronomy at Smith College in Michigan, put it: "Just as we rely on the government to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink, we have to rely on the government to protect the resource and the global commons of low Earth orbit."

Europe and Britain have also begun to work toward cleaning up debris — a move that's long overdue, space industry experts say. ClearSpace, a Swiss company, has a contract with the European Space Agency to remove a large piece of debris — a symbol that the issue is finally being addressed. It proposes using a spacecraft with large arms that would grapple the debris like a Venus' flytrap. "This is why we're here. Because we think change is possible," said Luc Piguet, ClearSpace's co-founder and CEO. "And we think we can build a space industry that operates with a different model, where maintenance is just a normal part of it."
"This debris and associated congestion threaten the longer sustainability of the space domain," said Space Force's vice chief of space operations, in a video advertising the seed-money program, adding that America's Department of Defense tracks 40,000 objects in orbit the size of a fist or larger, with at least 10 times as many smaller objects the Pentagon can't reliably track.

NBC News analyzed data from 8,892 weather stations with records going back at least 30 years. 691 of them recorded their highest temperature ever in 2021.

And there's more cause for concern: Each January, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the European Union Earth observation agency Copernicus publish reports on the previous year's temperature data. Copernicus ranked 2021 as the fifth-hottest year since 1850, while NOAA and NASA ranked it as the sixth-hottest since 1880...

In 2021, as Europe recorded its hottest summer, June's weather anomalies in North America were so significant that the continent recorded its hottest June in 171 years, according to the January Copernicus report. The record-breaking heat was even more notable, scientists say, given that 2021 was a La Niña year, in which climate patterns in the Pacific Ocean produce cooler temperatures across the globe.

An August 2021 United Nations International Panel on Climate Change report concluded that climate change caused by humans "is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe." Friederike Otto [senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment in London who helped write the report] said that last year's weather events proved 2021 was "a year that made the evidence unavoidable." Scientists say damaging spring frosts — such as the one that destroyed winemakers' crops in France last April — are an example of a weather event that is more likely in a warming world. Denis Lesgourgues, co-owner of ChÃteau Haut Selve, a vineyard in southwest France, lost 60 percent of his crop during last year's spring freeze. Warmer winters have caused grapevine buds to grow earlier in the year, leaving them vulnerable to previously harmless early spring frosts. Lesgourgues said that now if the buds are out when the frosts hit, they die and are unable to grow grapes....

In other parts of the world, the increased heat can become a matter of life or death. In Portland, the June heat wave sent temperatures up to 116 degrees, shattering heat records by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) and killing hundreds of people in the region.

Observations by a long-running Mars mission suggest that liquid water may have flowed on the Red Planet as little as 2 billion years ago, much later than scientists once thought. Space.com reports: Scientists charted the presence of chloride salt deposits left behind by flowing water using years of data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2006. By studying dozens of images of salt deposits taken by the spacecraft's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), the scientists interpreted a younger age for the salt deposits using a method "crater counting." The younger a region is, the fewer craters it should have, with adjustments for aspects such as a planet's atmosphere, allowing scientists to estimate its age. The new results push forward the existence of water on Mars from 3 billion years ago to as little as 2 billion years ago, based on the observations, which could have implications for life on Mars and more broadly, the planet's geological history. [...]

The scientists also created elevation maps using MRO's wide-angle context camera, and the zoomed-in views provided by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) that can spot craters as small as the Curiosity or Perseverance Mars rovers. The salt minerals were first spotted by a different spacecraft 14 years ago, called Mars Odyssey, but MRO's advantage is it has higher resolution instruments than its older (and still operational) companion in orbit. The study based on the research was published in AGU American Geophysical Union Advances.

Commercial space company SpaceX plans to launch a whopping 52 flights in 2022, a NASA safety panel revealed today during a meeting. If successful, it would be the most launches the company has ever conducted in a single year, with its previous record last year at 31 launches. The Verge reports: The impressive figure was given during a virtual meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, or ASAP, which gives guidance to the space agency on how to maintain safety within its biggest programs. "NASA and SpaceX will have to be watchful during 2022 that they're not victims of their success," Sandy Magnus, a former NASA astronaut and member of the panel, said during the meeting. "There's an ambitious 52-launch manifest for SpaceX over the course of the year. And that's an incredible pace."

Spaceflight schedules are always subject to change, so there's no guarantee that SpaceX will meet the 52-launch figure. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company was striving to hit 48 launches in 2021 but only made it to 31. So far this year, SpaceX has already launched three missions, and it has another one scheduled for this afternoon. While meeting the number would certainly be admirable, NASA's ASAP panel also warned about the downsides of having such a packed manifest. "Both NASA and SpaceX will have to ensure the appropriate attention and priority are focused on NASA missions," Magnus said, "and that the right resources are brought to bear to maintain that pace at a safe measure."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: When Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, a mostly submerged volcanic cauldron in the South Pacific Ocean, exploded on January 15, it unleashed a blast perhaps as powerful as the world's biggest nuclear bomb, and drove tsunami waves that crashed into Pacific shorelines. But 3 hours or so before their arrival in Japan, researchers detected the waves of another small tsunami. Even stranger, tiny tsunami waves just 10 centimeters high were detected around the same time in the Caribbean Sea, which is in an entirely different ocean basin. What was going on?

Researchers say there is only one reasonable explanation: The explosion's staggeringly powerful shock wave, screaming around the world close to the speed of sound, drove tsunamis of its own in both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It's the first time a volcanic shock wave has been seen creating its own tsunamis, says Greg Dusek, a physical oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who documented the phenomenon using a combination of tide and pressure gauges around the world. But, "It's almost certainly happened in the past," says Mark Boslough, a physicist at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. The discovery suggests the shock waves generated by explosive eruptions in Earth's history, and by other violent cataclysms, like the airbursts of comets or asteroids colliding with the planet's atmosphere, may have also created transoceanic tsunamis, perhaps with considerably bigger waves.

NASA has confirmed that the James Webb Space Telescope has successfully entered its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point after one last course correction burn. Engadget reports: The telescope's primary mirror segments and secondary mirror have already been deployed, but you'll have to wait until the summer for the first imagery. NASA will spend the next several months readying the JWST for service, including a three-month optics alignment process. The L2 orbit is crucial to the telescope's mission. It provides a largely unobstructed view of space while giving the spacecraft a cold, interference-free position that helps its instruments live up to their full potential. The JWST is expected to study the early Universe using infrared light, providing data that wouldn't be available from an Earth orbit telescope like Hubble.

An anonymous reader shares a report: NASA's Spinoff magazine is one of the things I look forward to reading every year. The space agency's research trickles down to the rest of the world in surprising and interesting ways, which it tracks and collects in this annual publication. This year is no different, and NASA tech can be found in everything from hiking gadgets to heavy industry and, funnily enough, space. There are dozens of technologies that have made their way to everyday use in a variety of places highlighted in this year's issue, which you can browse here [PDF]. I talked with Daniel Lockney, the head of NASA's Tech Transfer Program overseeing the deployment of its tech and research among terrestrial companies looking to put it to good use. "Typically what happens is: NASA develops something, they report it to my office, and we look at it to figure out, first, does it work? And second, who else can use it? And if someone can, we figure out how to get it to them," Lockney explained. "I try to give as much away for free as I can. I've got no direction to generate revenue or bring something back to the U.S. treasury. The 1958 NASA act that created us says to disseminate our work -- nothing in there about making a dime."

The result is cheap or free licensing of interesting tech like compact, long-lasting water filters, unusual mechanical components, and other tech that was needed for space or launch purposes but might find a second use on the ground. Lockney highlighted a couple items in the latest batch that he thought were especially interesting. "There was a partnership with GM to develop the Robo-Glove, a functional glove that astronauts will wear to help reduce strain during repetitive tasks and increase grip strength," he said. "Squeezing something on a spacewalk, you can do it a couple times, but if you're gripping a tool for the whole afternoon... so we developed this glove to assist in that work, and now it's being used at factories around the world."

Space.com reports: A rogue iceberg that drifted dangerously close to an Antarctic penguin population in 2020 and 2021 released billions of tons of fresh water into the ocean during its breakup.

A new study, based on satellite data, tracks the aftermath of the once-mighty iceberg A-68a, which held the title of world's largest iceberg for more than three years before shattering into a dozen pieces.... [T]he new research shows that the iceberg flooded the region with fresh water, potentially affecting the local ecosystem and providing yet another example of the effects of global warming on the oceans.

The research consulted data gathered by missions including Sentinel-1 (operated by European Space Agency, or ESA), Sentinel-3 (ESA), CryoSat-2 (ESA) and ICESat-2 (NASA), as well as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument that flies aboard two NASA satellites, Aqua and Terra. The satellite data shows that during the iceberg's three-month melting period in late 2020 and early 2021, the former A-68a flushed into the ocean about 162 billion tons (152 billion metric tonnes) of fresh water — equivalent to 61 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to a press release from United Kingdom study participant University of Leeds.
"Our ability to study every move of the iceberg in such detail is thanks to advances in satellite techniques and the use of a variety of measurements," said Tommaso Parrinello, CryoSat Mission Manager at the European Space Agency, in the press release.

The BBC reports that the "monster" iceberg "was dumping more than 1.5 billion tonnes of fresh water into the ocean every single day at the height of its melting."

CNET reports: Saturn has some famous moons, like Enceladus (a plume-spewing moon of mystery) and Titan (the intriguing target of NASA's future Dragonfly mission). But what about dainty Mimas, a moon that's mostly known for its resemblance to the Star Wars Death Star?

Turns out it might be hiding an ocean.

A study published in the journal Icarus lays out evidence that suggests Mimas has liquid deep under its icy surface. "If Mimas has an ocean, it represents a new class of small, 'stealth' ocean worlds with surfaces that do not betray the ocean's existence," said lead author Alyssa Rhoden in a Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) statement on Wednesday. Mimas might look quiet, but NASA's now-defunct Saturn-studying Cassini spacecraft "identified a curious libration, or oscillation, in the moon's rotation, which often points to a geologically active body able to support an internal ocean," SwRI said.

The libration spotted by Cassini suggests Mimas's interior is warm enough for a liquid ocean, but not so warm it compromises the moon's thick shell of ice.

The researchers calculate that ice shell could be up to 19 miles (31 kilometers) thick. There's a nifty acronym for interior water ocean worlds: IWOWs. Known IWOWs include Enceladus, Titan and Jupiter's fascinating moon Europa. These places are particularly interesting because they may be habitable for microbial life.