NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine says he plans to leave his position at the space agency under the new Joe Biden administration, even if he's asked to stay, according to an interview he did with Aviation Week. Bridenstine said the decision would be to ensure NASA has the right leader who connects with the new president. From a report: "What you need is somebody who has a close relationship with the president of the United States," Bridenstine told Aviation Week. "You need somebody who is trusted by the administration... including the OMB [Office of Management and Budget], the National Space Council and the National Security Council, and I think that I would not be the right person for that in a new administration." President Trump nominated Bridenstine, then a Republican representative from Oklahoma, to lead NASA in 2017. Bridenstine's confirmation became a contentious one, with many lawmakers decrying the idea of a politician running a scientific agency like NASA. "NASA is one of the last refuges from partisan politics," former Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) said during Bridenstine's confirmation hearing in November 2017. "NASA needs a leader who will unite us, not divide us. Respectfully, Congressman Bridenstine, I don't think you're that leader." Eventually, the Senate did narrowly confirm him in April 2018, with lawmakers voting along party lines.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared this report from the New York Times: A decade ago, a band of astronomers set out to investigate one of the oldest questions taunting philosophers, scientists, priests, astronomers, mystics and the rest of the human race: How many more Earths are out there, if any? How many far-flung planets exist that could harbor life as we know it?

Their tool was the Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in March 2009 on a three-and-a-half year mission to monitor 150,000 stars in a patch of sky in the Milky Way. It looked for tiny dips in starlight caused by an exoplanet passing in front of its home star. "It's not E.T., but it's E.T.'s home," said William Borucki when the mission was launched in March 2009. It was Dr. Borucki, an astronomer now retired from NASA's Ames Research Center, who dreamed up the project and spent two decades convincing NASA to do it. Before the spacecraft finally gave out in 2018, it had discovered more than 4,000 candidate worlds among those stars. So far, none have shown any sign of life or habitation. (Granted, they are very far away and hard to study.) Extrapolated, that figure suggests that there are billions of exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. But how many of those are potentially habitable?

After crunching Kepler's data for two years, a team of 44 astronomers led by Steve Bryson of NASA Ames has landed on what they say is the definitive answer, at least for now. Their paper has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal... The team calculated that at least one-third, and perhaps as many as 90 percent, of stars similar in mass and brightness to our sun have rocks like Earth in their habitable zones, with the range reflecting the researchers' confidence in their various methods and assumptions. That is no small bonanza, however you look at it.

According to NASA estimates there are at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, of which about 4 billion are sunlike. If only 7 percent of those stars have habitable planets — a seriously conservative estimate — there could be as many as 300 million potentially habitable Earths out there in the whole Milky Way alone.

On average, the astronomers calculated, the nearest such planet should be about 20 light-years away, and there should be four of them within 30 light-years or so of the sun...
"The new result means that the galaxy is at least twice as fertile as estimated in one of the first analyses of Kepler data, in 2013."

"Mark Kelly will soon be the fourth NASA astronaut to serve in the U.S. Congress," writes People magazine.

DevNull127 shares their report: In a tweet posted Wednesday, he said he was "deeply honored" to have been elected and to serve in the seat once held by the late Sen. John McCain. A retired U.S. Navy captain and astronaut, Kelly has flown in four space missions, including the final mission of Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2011. He is married to former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, [who] was shot and nearly killed in 2011.

His identical twin Scott Kelly is also a retired astronaut. The two participated in NASA's landmark "twins study," in which Scott spent a year aboard the space station while scientists collected Mark's physiological data back home for comparison...

When he is sworn in, Kelly will be the only active member of Congress to have flown in space. He is preceded by three former NASA astronauts: former Sens. John Glenn and Jack Schmitt and Rep. Jack Swigert. Two other former members of Congress — Sen. Jake Garn and Rep. Bill Nelson — have flown in space as payload specialists. Apollo 13 astronaut John "Jack" Swigert was elected to the House of Representatives in 1982, but died of cancer before he could take office.
Saturday Kelly tweeted, "Congratulations to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We've got some challenges ahead of us, and I'm looking forward to working together to tackle them."

And the same day his brother Scott Kelly tweeted a memory about the moment he left the International Space Station after 500 days, "looked out the window of our space capsule at the truss, and was struck with awe at how we came together & accomplished this great feat.

"And that if we can do this, we can do anything if we commit ourselves and work together."

NASA has formally commented on a request by a US company to build a mega-constellation of satellites at an altitude of 720km above the Earth's surface, citing concerns about collisions. From a report: This appears to be the first time that NASA has publicly commented on such an application for market access, which is pending before the Federal Communications Commission. "NASA submits this letter during the public comment period for the purpose of providing a better understanding of NASA's concerns with respect to its assets on-orbit, to further mitigate the risks of collisions for the mutual benefit of all involved," wrote Samantha Fonder, an engineer for the space agency. At issue are plans put forth by AST & Science, which intends to build a constellation of more than 240 large satellites, essentially deploying "cell towers" in space to provide 4G and possibly 5G broadband connection directly to cell phones on Earth. The company, based in Midland, Texas, calls its constellation "SpaceMobile" and has raised an estimated $120 million.

Here's a good sign for alien hunters: More than 300 million worlds with similar conditions to Earth are scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy. A new analysis [PDF] concludes that roughly half of the galaxy's sunlike stars host rocky worlds in habitable zones where liquid water could pool or flow over the planets' surfaces. From a report: "This is the science result we've all been waiting for," says Natalie Batalha, an astronomer with the University of California, Santa Cruz, who worked on the new study. The finding, which has been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, pins down a crucial number in the Drake Equation. Devised by my father Frank Drake in 1961, the equation sets up a framework for calculating the number of detectable civilizations in the Milky Way. Now the first few variables in the formula -- including the rate of sunlike star formation, the fraction of those stars with planets, and the number of habitable worlds per stellar system -- are known. The number of sunlike stars with worlds similar to Earth "could have been one in a thousand, or one in a million -- nobody really knew," says Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute who was not involved with the new study.

Astronomers estimated the number of these planets using data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft. For nine years, Kepler stared at the stars and watched for the brief twinkles produced when orbiting planets blot out a portion of their star's light. By the end of its mission in 2018, Kepler had spotted some 2,800 exoplanets -- many of them nothing like the worlds orbiting our sun. But Kepler's primary goal was always to determine how common planets like Earth are. The calculation required help from the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft, which monitors stars across the galaxy. With Gaia's observations in hand, scientists were finally able to determine that the Milky Way is populated by hundreds of millions of Earth-size planets orbiting sunlike stars -- and that the nearest one is probably within 20 light-years of the solar system.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Voyager 2 probe, one of NASA's most well-traveled spacecraft, has been unable to communicate with Earth for the past eight months. Voyager 2 has been wandering alone at the edge of interstellar space, gathering data some 11.6 billion miles from Earth and sending it back to us. But we haven't been able to pick up the phone and call back. The only radio antenna that can communicate with the probe, Deep Space Station 43 (DSS43) in Australia, has been offline while NASA completes a series of hardware upgrades. Some of the transmitters on DSS43 haven't been replaced for over 47 years, according to NASA. To test new hardware, the dish pinged Voyager 2 on Oct. 29 with a few commands. It was the first time since mid-March that a signal was beamed to the spacecraft. And because the probe is so far away, the communication team had to wait over 34 hours for a reply. Sure enough, Voyager 2 received the commands with no problems and sent back a "hello."

NASA's 322-foot rocket "Space Launch System" rocket "would be the most powerful rocket ever flown, eclipsing both the Saturn V that flew astronauts to the moon and SpaceX's Falcon Heavy," reports the Washington Post.

But "it's not the rocket's engines that concern officials but the software that will control everything the rocket does, from setting its trajectory to opening individual valves to open and close." Computing power has become as critical to rockets as the brute force that lifts them out of Earth's atmosphere, especially rockets like the SLS, which is really an amalgamation of parts built by a variety of manufacturers: Boeing builds the rocket's "core stage," the main part of the vehicle. Lockheed Martin builds the Orion spacecraft. Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman are responsible for the RS-25 engines and the side boosters, respectively. And the United Launch Alliance handles the upper stage. All of those components need to work together for a mission to be successful. But NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel recently said it was concerned about the disjointed way the complicated system was being developed and tested...

Also troubling to the safety panel was that NASA and its contractors appeared not to have taken "advantage of the lessons learned" from the botched flight last year of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, which suffered a pair of software errors that prevented it from docking with the International Space Station as planned and forced controllers to cut the mission short. NASA has since said that it did a poor job of overseeing Boeing on the Starliner program, and has since vowed to have more rigorous reviews of its work, especially its software testing...

NASA pushed back on the safety panel's findings, saying in a statement that "all software, hardware, and combination for every phase of the Artemis I mission is thoroughly tested and evaluated to ensure that it meets NASA's strict safety requirements and is fully qualified for human spaceflight." The agency and its contractors are "conducting integrated end-to-end testing for the software, hardware, avionics and integrated systems needed to fly Artemis missions," it said.

On October 2, SpaceX automatically aborted the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket (with just two seconds left in the countdown) after two of its first-stage engines ignited early. Investigating the problem ended up delaying the October 31st launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station until November 14, reports Ars Technica, citing a teleconference with SpaceX's Hans Koenigsmann.

"Had the abort not triggered, it is likely that nothing bad would have occurred, but Koenigsmann said that under certain extreme scenarios, rattling from an early ignition may cause significant damage to the Merlin engines." SpaceX technicians removed the two engines and shipped them from Florida to the company's test site in McGregor, Texas, where they were able to replicate the problem. They found that a relief valve within the gas generator — a tiny rocket within the engine that starts up and powers its machinery — was clogged with a masking lacquer akin to nail polish. They were able to show that removing the lacquer from the vent hole allowed the engines to start up normally. This lacquer is applied during an anodizing process to treat aluminum components of the gas generator. It is supposed to be subsequently removed, but in the case of these two engines, a tiny amount of the material had been trapped within a bore hole less than 2mm across...

After this, SpaceX inspected other engines across its fleet (the company inspected new boosters only, as Falcon 9 first stages that have already flown are not subject to this issue). SpaceX found that two of the engines on the Falcon 9 rocket that will be used for the Crew-1 launch also had this problem. Those two engines are now being swapped out for new Merlins...

This lacquer issue came as a surprise given that SpaceX has literally launched hundreds of new Merlin 1D rocket engines over the last decade and, until now, had not seen this problem with the masking agent. "It's certainly possible that we had cases of it earlier, and they were appreciably so harmless that we completely missed them," Koenigsmann said. It is also possible that a small process was changed so that all of the lacquer was not removed, as this particular treatment is done by an outside vendor. But, he admitted, "It's difficult to explain how this works for so many years and then, suddenly, you see this coming up in the data."

What Koenigsmann seems confident in is that the issue will not occur again.

Since 2000, there have always been humans living and working on the International Space Station -- and the streak could just be getting started. National Geographic reports: On Halloween in the year 2000, a Russian Soyuz rocket launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and flew into the history books, carrying one U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts to the nascent International Space Station (ISS). The crew arrived two days later, and the space station has been continuously occupied by humans ever since, a 20-year streak of living and working in low-Earth orbit. "There's kids now who are in college who, for their entire lives, we've been living off the planet," says Kenny Todd, NASA's deputy program manager for the ISS. "When I was a kid, that was all stuff that was just dreams."

The orbiting laboratory is among the most expensive and technologically complex objects ever built: a $150-billion pressurized habitat as long as a football field, whizzing 254 miles above Earth's surface at 17,000 miles an hour. Over the decades, 241 women and men from around the world have temporarily called the space station home, some for nearly a full year at a time. "It's pretty crazy -- I'm surprised we haven't, like, really seriously hurt anybody," says retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent nearly a year on one ISS stay. "It's really a testament to the seriousness [with which] people on the ground take this job, the attention to detail."

Upward of a hundred thousand people have worked together to design, build, launch, and operate the sprawling station, says David Nixon, who worked with NASA on ISS designs in the mid-1980s. "When you compare the station to the procession of great structures and buildings built by humanity since the dawn of civilization, it's up there with the Pyramids, the Acropolis -- all the great structures and edifices," he says. The future of the ISS remains uncertain. "The station is currently slated to run until at least 2024, and much of its hardware is certified to operate safely until at least 2028, if not longer for its younger components," the report notes.

"Will the ISS be disassembled and scavenged in orbit to construct a future space station? Will it be turned over to private companies as nations venture farther into space? Will the whole structure go out in a final blaze of glory, steered into a Pacific crash landing like the Russian space station Mir?"

fahrbot-bot shares a press release from NASA: NASA's Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission has successfully stowed the spacecraft's Sample Return Capsule (SRC) and its abundant sample of asteroid Bennu. On Wednesday, Oct. 28, the mission team sent commands to the spacecraft, instructing it to close the capsule -- marking the end of one of the most challenging phases of the mission.

The mission team spent two days working around the clock to carry out the stowage procedure, with preparations for the stowage event beginning Oct. 24. The process to stow the sample is unique compared to other spacecraft operations and required the team's continuous oversight and input over the two-day period. For the spacecraft to proceed with each step in the stowage sequence, the team had to assess images and telemetry from the previous step to confirm the operation was successful and the spacecraft was ready to continue. Given that OSIRIS-REx is currently more than 205 million miles (330 million km) from Earth, this required the team to also work with a greater than 18.5-minute time delay for signals traveling in each direction.

Throughout the process, the OSIRIS-REx team continually assessed the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism's (TAGSAM) wrist alignment to ensure the collector head was being placed properly into the SRC. Additionally, the team inspected images to observe any material escaping from the collector head to confirm that no particles would hinder the stowage process. StowCam images of the stowage sequence show that a few particles escaped during the stowage procedure, but the team is confident that a plentiful amount of material remains inside of the head. By the evening of Oct. 27, the spacecraft's TAGSAM arm had placed the collector head into the SRC. The following morning, the OSIRIS-REx team verified that the collector head was thoroughly fastened into the capsule by performing a "backout check." This sequence commanded the TAGSAM arm to attempt to back out of the capsule -- which tugged on the collector head and ensured the latches are well secured.

A reader shares a report from Observer: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a rare, heavy and immensely valuable asteroid called "16 Psyche" in the Solar System's main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Asteroid Psyche is located at roughly 230 million miles (370 million kilometers) from Earth and measures 140 miles (226 kilometers) across, about the size of West Virginia. What makes it special is that, unlike most asteroids that are either rocky or icy, Psyche is made almost entirely of metals, just like the core of Earth, according to a study published in the Planetary Science Journal on Monday.

Given the asteroid's size, its metal content could be worth $10,000 quadrillion ($10,000,000,000,000,000,000), or about 10,000 times the global economy as of 2019. Using ultraviolet spectrum data collected by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope during two observations in 2017, researchers deduced that Psyche's surface could be mostly pure iron. However, they recognized that the presence of an iron composition of as small as 10 percent could dominate ultraviolet observations. Psyche is the target of the NASA Discovery Mission Psyche, expected to launch in 2022 atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Further facts about the asteroid, including its exact metal content, will hopefully be uncovered when an orbiting probe arrives in early 2026. The asteroid is believed to be the dead core left by a planet that failed during its formation early in the Solar System's life or the result of many violent collisions in its distant past.

NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission has logged a lot of flight miles since being lofted skyward on July 30 -- 146.3 million miles (235.4 million kilometers) to be exact. Turns out that is exactly the same distance it has to go before the spacecraft hits the Red Planet's atmosphere like a 11,900 mph (19,000 kph) freight train on Feb. 18, 2021. From a report: "At 1:40 p.m. Pacific Time today, our spacecraft will have just as many miles in its metaphorical rearview mirror as it will out its metaphorical windshield," said Julie Kangas, a navigator working on the Perseverance rover mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "While I don't think there will be cake, especially since most of us are working from home, it's still a pretty neat milestone. Next stop, Jezero Crater." The Sun's gravitational influence plays a significant role in shaping not just spacecraft trajectories to Mars (as well as to everywhere else in the solar system), but also the relative movement of the two planets. So Perseverance's route to the Red Planet follows a curved trajectory rather than an arrow-straight path.

"Although we're halfway into the distance we need to travel to Mars, the rover is not halfway between the two worlds," Kangas explained. "In straight-line distance, Earth is 26.6 million miles [42.7 million kilometers] behind Perseverance and Mars is 17.9 million miles [28.8 million kilometers] in front." At the current distance, it takes 2 minutes, 22 seconds for a transmission to travel from mission controllers at JPL via the Deep Space Network to the spacecraft. By time of landing, Perseverance will have covered 292.5 million miles (470.8 million kilometers), and Mars will be about 130 million miles (209 million kilometers) away from Earth; at that point, a transmission will take about 11.5 minutes to reach the spacecraft.

Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies (USNC-Tech) has developed a concept for a new Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) engine that they claim is safer and more reliable than previous NTP designs and with far greater efficiency than a chemical rocket. The concept could reduce Earth-Mars travel time to just three months. New Atlas reports: According to Dr. Michael Eades, principal engineer at USNC-Tech, the new concept engine is more reliable than previous NTP designs and can produce twice the specific impulse of a chemical rocket. Specific impulse is a measure of a rocket's efficiency. To fuel the concept, UNSC-Tech uses a Fully Ceramic Micro-encapsulated (FCM) fuel to power the engine's reactor. This fuel is based on High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU), which is derived from reprocessed civilian nuclear fuel and is enriched to between 5 and 20 percent -- greater than that of civilian reactors and less than that of naval reactors. The fuel is then encapsulated into particles coated with zirconium carbide (ZrC).

The company claims that this fuel is much more rugged than conventional nuclear fuels and can operate at high temperatures. This produces safer reactor designs and a high thrust and specific impulse that could previously only be obtained with highly-enriched uranium. In addition, such fuel can be produced with current supply chains and manufacturing plants. It is hoped the new concept could lead to nuclear engines that reduce deep space mission times drastically, with a crewed mission to Mars arriving in as little as three months. Beyond that, the concept is aimed at a commercial market as well as with NASA and the US Department of Defense, allowing for more ambitious private missions.

NASA has confirmed the presence of water on the moon's sunlit surface, a breakthrough that suggests the chemical compound that is vital to life on Earth could be distributed across more parts of the lunar surface than the ice that has previously been found in dark and cold areas. From a report: "We don't know yet if we can use it as a resource," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said, but he added that learning more about the water is crucial to U.S. plans to explore the moon. The discovery comes from the space agency's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA -- a modified Boeing 747 that can take its large telescope high into Earth's atmosphere, at altitudes up to 45,000 feet. Those heights allow researchers to peer at objects in space with hardly any visual disruptions from water vapor. The water molecules are in Clavius crater, a large crater in the moon's southern hemisphere. To detect the molecules, SOFIA used a special infrared camera that can discern between water's specific wavelength of 6.1 microns and that of its close chemical relative hydroxyl, or OH. "Data from this location reveal water in concentrations of 100 to 412 parts per million -- roughly equivalent to a 12-ounce bottle of water -- trapped in a cubic meter of soil spread across the lunar surface," NASA said in a release about the discovery.

"This is not puddles of water but instead water molecules that are so spread apart that they do not form ice or liquid water," said Casey Honniball, the lead author of a study about the discovery. The data confirm what experts have suspected, that water might exist on the moon's sunny side. But in recent years, researchers had been able to document only water ice at the moon's poles and other darker and colder areas. Experts will now try to figure out exactly how the water came to form and why it persists. NASA scientists published their findings in the latest issue of Nature Astronomy.

A reader shares some space news from OPB: A NASA spacecraft sent out to collect a sample of rock and dust from an asteroid has nabbed so much that it's created an unexpected problem. Rocks are jammed in the device in a way that's keeping a Mylar flap open, creating a gap that's letting some of the collected pebbles and dust drift out into space.

"We had a successful sample collection attempt — almost too successful. Material is escaping," says Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, the principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission. "We think we're losing a small fraction of material, but it's more than I'm comfortable with. I was pretty concerned when I saw these images coming in." To prevent any further loss, the team is now preparing to stow the sample collection device quickly into its return capsule, possibly starting the stowing process as soon as Tuesday. The capsule is expected to return to Earth in 2023...

It's now looking like the collection device must have penetrated farther down into the asteroid's surface than expected — perhaps as deep as 48 centimeters, or about a foot and a half.
Maybe that's because new findings from mission "suggest that the interior of the asteroid Bennu could be weaker and less dense than its outer layers — like a crème-filled chocolate egg flying though space..." according to an article earlier this month in the news digest of the University of Colorado Boulder: The results appear in a study published in the journal Science Advances and led by the University of Colorado Boulder's OSIRIS-REx team, including professors Daniel Scheeres and Jay McMahon... Using OSIRIS-REx's own navigational instruments and other tools, the group spent nearly two years mapping out the ebbs and flows of Bennu's gravity field. Think of it like taking an X-ray of a chunk of space debris with an average width about the height of the Empire State Building. "If you can measure the gravity field with enough precision, that places hard constraints on where the mass is located, even if you can't see it directly," said Andrew French, a coauthor of the new study and a former graduate student at CU Boulder, now at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

What the team has found may also spell trouble for Bennu. The asteroid's core appears to be weaker than its exterior, a fact that could put its survival at risk in the not-too-distant future. "You could imagine maybe in a million years or less the whole thing flying apart," said Scheeres, a distinguished professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences.

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have discovered that "gravitational redshift" exists in two stars orbiting each other in our galaxy about 29,000 light years (200,000 trillion miles) away from Earth. Gravitational redshifts, where light is shifted to redder colors because of gravity, "have tangible impacts on modern life, as scientists and engineers must take them into account to enable accurate positions for GPS," reports Phys.Org. From the report: The intriguing system known as 4U 1916-053 contains two stars in a remarkably close orbit. One is the core of a star that has had its outer layers stripped away, leaving a star that is much denser than the Sun. The other is a neutron star, an even denser object created when a massive star collapses in a supernova explosion. The neutron star (grey) is shown in this artist's impression at the center of a disk of hot gas pulled away from its companion (white star on left). These two compact stars are only about 215,000 miles apart, roughly the distance between the Earth and the Moon. While the Moon orbits our planet once a month, the dense companion star in 4U 1916-053 whips around the neutron star and completes a full orbit in only 50 minutes.

In the new work on 4U 1916-053, the team analyzed X-ray spectra -- that is, the amounts of X-rays at different wavelengths -- from Chandra. They found the characteristic signature of the absorption of X-ray light by iron and silicon in the spectra. In three separate observations with Chandra, the data show a sharp drop in the detected amount of X-rays close to the wavelengths where the iron or silicon atoms are expected to absorb the X-rays. One of the spectra showing absorption by iron -- the dips on the left and right -- is included in the main graphic. An additional graphic shows a spectrum with absorption by silicon. In both spectra the data are shown in grey and a computer model in red.

However, the wavelengths of these characteristic signatures of iron and silicon were shifted to longer, or redder wavelengths compared to the laboratory values found here on Earth (shown with the blue, vertical line for each absorption signature). The researchers found that the shift of the absorption features was the same in each of the three Chandra observations, and that it was too large to be explained by motion away from us. Instead they concluded it was caused by gravitational redshift. The article goes on to explain how gravitational redshifts connect with Einstein's General Theory Relativity: "As predicted by Einstein's theory, clocks under the force of gravity run at a slower rate than clocks viewed from a distant region experiencing weaker gravity. This means that clocks on Earth observed from orbiting satellites run at a slower rate. To have the high precision needed for GPS, this effect needs to be taken into account or there will be small differences in time that would add up quickly, calculating inaccurate positions..."

The findings have been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

NASA will announce an exciting new discovery about the Moon from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) at a media teleconference at 12 p.m. EDT Monday, Oct. 26. Audio of the teleconference will stream live on the agency's website. From a press release: This new discovery contributes to NASA's efforts to learn about the Moon in support of deep space exploration. Under NASA's Artemis program, the agency will send the first woman and next man to the lunar surface in 2024 to prepare for our next giant leap -- human exploration of Mars as early as the 2030s. Understanding the science of the Moon also helps piece together the broader history of the inner solar system.

NASA's Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) sample return spacecraft has successfully touched the asteroid Bennu and collected a 2-oz sample of its surface. New Atlas reports: Launched atop an Atlas/Centaur booster from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on September 8, 2016 at 7:05 pm EDT, the robotic OSIRIS-REx probe spent four years matching orbits to rendezvous with Bennu before making a detailed survey of the body's surface to find a safe area of scientific interest. Because Bennu is 205 million miles (330 million km) from Earth, it takes a radio signal 18 minutes to reach the spacecraft from mission control, so today's Touch-And-Go (TAG) maneuver was carried out under completely autonomous control by the onboard computer, relying on updated instructions from NASA engineers.

During the approach, the robotic arm called the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) was deployed with its disk-shaped sample collection head forward and the solar panels angled back to avoid accidental contact with the asteroid. The spacecraft then slowly approached the 26-ft (8-m) diameter "Nightingale" landing site from its normal orbit altitude of 2,500 ft (770 m) using its Natural Feature Tracking system to make a safe approach and then pull back from Bennu before a collision could occur. When the arm made contact with the asteroid surface for about 15 seconds, a blast of nitrogen gas dislodged a small, carbon-rich sample of pebbles and soil, which were collected by the sampler head and then stowed. If it turns out that insufficient material is recovered, the spacecraft will try again at a different area in January 2021. Otherwise, the current sample will be placed in a return capsule and in March 2021, OSIRIS-REx will depart from Bennu and begin its journey back to Earth.

The sample return capsule will separate from the mothership in September 2023, reenter the Earth's atmosphere to land at the Utah Test and Training Range for collection and be transferred to NASA's Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston for storage and distribution to select research teams.

Imagine parallel parking a 15-passenger van into just two to three parking spaces surrounded by two-story boulders. On Oct. 20, a University of Arizona-led NASA mission 16 years in the making will attempt the astronomical equivalent more than 200 million miles away. A NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx will soon attempt to touch the surface of an asteroid and collect loose rubble. bobbied writes: OSIRIS-REx is the United States' first asteroid sample return mission, aiming to collect and carry a pristine, unaltered sample from an asteroid back to Earth for scientific study. The spacecraft will attempt to touch the surface of the asteroid Bennu, which is hurtling through space at 63,000 miles per hour. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will deploy an 11-foot-long robotic arm called TAGSAM -- Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism -- and spend about 10 seconds collecting at least two ounces of loose rubble from the asteroid. The spacecraft, monitored remotely by a team of scientists and engineers, will then stow away the sample and begin its return to Earth, scheduled for 2023. You can watch this sample collection "Touch-And-Go" maneuver Oct. 20 at 5 p.m. EDT/ 2 p.m. PDT on NASA Television and the agency's website. As senior vice president for research and innovation at UArizona and a mechanical engineer with a long career in space systems engineering, I believe this milestone for OSIRIS-REx captures perfectly the spirit of research and innovation, the careful balance of problem-solving and perseverance, of obstacle and opportunity.

With competition among Earth's telecoms providers as fierce as ever, equipment maker Nokia has announced its expansion into a new market, winning a deal to install the first cellular network on the moon. From a report: The Finnish equipment manufacturer said it was selected by NASA to deploy an "ultra-compact, low-power, space-hardened" wireless 4G network on the lunar surface, as part of the US space agency's plan to establish a long-term human presence on the moon by 2030. The $14.1m contract, awarded to Nokia's US subsidiary, is part of Nasa's Artemis programme which aims to send the first woman, and next man, to the moon by 2024. The astronauts will begin carrying out detailed experiments and explorations which the agency hopes will help it develop its first human mission to Mars. Nokia's network equipment will be installed remotely on the moon's surface using a lunar hopper built by Intuitive Machines in late 2022, Nokia said. "The network will self-configure upon deployment," the firm said in a statement, adding that the wireless technology will allow for "vital command and control functions, remote control of lunar rovers, real-time navigation and streaming of high definition video."