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Tag: Space and Astronomy

  • Dozens of rockets fired from Lebanon into Israel after raids on al-Aqsa mosque | CNN

    Dozens of rockets fired from Lebanon into Israel after raids on al-Aqsa mosque | CNN

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    Jerusalem
    CNN
     — 

    Dozens of rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel on Thursday, the Israeli military said, in a major escalation that comes amid regional tensions over Israeli police raids at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

    Some 34 rockets were launched from Lebanese territory into Israeli territory, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said, with the majority intercepted but six landing in Israel.

    It was the largest such attack since a 2006 war between the two countries left around 1,200 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis dead.

    Videos posted on social media showed rockets streaking through the skies over northern Israel, and the sounds of explosions in the distance.

    The country closed its northern airspace in the wake of the barrage. No deaths were reported, and it is not yet known which group in Lebanon launched the rockets.

    Israel said it would “decide on the place and time” of its response, an IDF defense official who asked not to be named told CNN. An Israeli military spokesman said they believed a Palestinian militant group was behind the attack, not the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

    The Lebanese army confirmed a number of a rockets were launched from the country’s south, but did not detail who had fired them. It said on Twitter that a unit had found “missile launchers and a number of rockets intended for launch” in the vicinity of the Lebanese towns of Zibqin and Qlaileh, and was “currently working to dismantle them.”

    Hezbollah has not yet commented on the incident. It comes a day after Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, arrived in Beirut for meetings with Hezbollah officials.

    Tensions are sky-high in the region after Israeli police stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on two separate occasions Wednesday, as Palestinian worshipers offered prayers during the holy month of Ramadan.

    Footage from inside the mosque showed Israeli officers beating people with their batons and rifle-butts, then arresting hundreds of Palestinians. Israeli police said they entered the mosque after “hundreds of rioters” tried to barricade themselves inside.

    The incident, which was met with widespread condemnation from the Arab and Muslim world, sparked retaliatory rocket fire from Gaza into Israel.

    Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told CNN “we are at a very dangerous moment.”

    “What we see unfolding on the Lebanese border is obviously a consequence, a reaction to what we saw happening in al-Aqsa [mosque].” Safadi said.

    Trails from rockets can be seen over the skies of northern Israel in this video screengrab, as authorities raised concerns over increased tensions between Israel and Lebanon.

    Lebanon and Israel are considered enemy states, but a truce between them has largely held since the 2006 war.

    There have been several small-scale rocket attacks from Lebanon in recent years that have prompted retaliatory strikes from Israel. Few casualties were reported in those incidents, with the largest death toll in an exchange of fire in 2015 that left two Israeli soldiers and a Spanish peacekeeper dead. Palestinian factions in Lebanon were believed to be behind those rocket attacks.

    The 2006 conflict was the biggest flare-up between Lebanon and Israel since 1982. Around 1,200 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis died in an exchange of fire that involved a nationwide Israeli aerial assault, and a naval and aerial blockade. Hezbollah fired many rounds of rockets reaching deep into Israeli territory during the conflict.

    The Israeli military pinned the blame for the rockets on either Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, with international spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht saying the IDF assumed that “Hezbollah knew about it, and Lebanon also has responsibility.”

    But he emphasized several times that the IDF viewed the attack as having come from a Palestinian source, and that it did not represent a widening of the conflict to actors outside of the direct Israeli-Palestinian conflict, raising hopes that tensions could be ratcheted down after the incident.

    The Lebanese foreign ministry also said it was ready to cooperate with the United Nations and take steps to “restore calm and stability” in the south, while calling on “the international community to put pressure on Israel to stop escalation,” the state-owned National News Agency reported.

    The IDF has been concerned for some time about an escalation on the Lebanese border, and hosted a high-level seminar in the spring of 2022 to brief journalists and policy makers about it.

    The UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said Thursday’s escalation of violence between Lebanon and Israel was “extremely serious.”

    UNIFIL also said it has directed its personnel stationed at the border between the two countries to move to air raid shelters, as a “common practice.”

    The White House said it was “extremely concerned by the continuing violence and we urge all sides to avoid further escalation.”

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  • Israeli police storm al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan prayers, sparking rocket fire from Gaza | CNN

    Israeli police storm al-Aqsa mosque during Ramadan prayers, sparking rocket fire from Gaza | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Israeli police stormed the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, during Ramadan prayers early Wednesday, arresting hundreds of Palestinians and sparking retaliatory rocket fire from militants in Gaza.

    Footage shared on social media showed Israeli officers striking screaming people with batons inside the darkened building. Eyewitnesses told CNN that police had smashed doors and windows to enter the mosque and deployed stun grenades and rubber bullets once inside. Video shared by Israeli police show forces holding riot shields up as fireworks were launched back at them, ricocheting off the walls.

    Israeli police said in a statement that its forces entered al-Aqsa after “hundreds of rioters and mosque desecrators (had) barricaded themselves” inside.

    “When the police entered, stones were thrown at them, and fireworks were fired from inside the mosque by a large group of agitators,” according to the statement.

    The Palestinian Red Crescent in Jerusalem said at least 12 people were injured during clashes in and around the mosque, and at least three of the injured were transferred to hospital, some with injuries from rubber bullets.

    The Red Crescent added that at one point its ambulances were targeted by police and were prevented from reaching the injured.

    The incident drew condemnation from across the Arab and Muslim world. Jordan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the Israeli police actions “in the strongest terms,” and called on Israel to immediately remove its forces from the mosque. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry also condemned the “storming” of the mosque by police, saying it had caused “numerous injuries among worshipers and devotees” and was “in violation of all international laws and customs.”

    Police said they arrested and removed more than 350 people in the mosque, and that one Israeli police officer was wounded in the leg by stones.

    Images shared on social media showed dozens of detained people lying facedown on the floor of the mosque with their legs and arms bound behind their backs, and others with their hands tied being led into a vehicle.

    Al-Aqsa has seen hundreds of thousands of worshipers offer prayers during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan this year. Jews are set to celebrate Passover on Wednesday evening.

    Over the last two weeks, there have been calls by Jewish extremist groups to slaughter goats at the mosque compound as part of an ancient Passover holiday ritual that is no longer practiced by most Jews. A greater number of Muslim worshipers stayed in the mosque after calls came to prevent those attempts.

    Last week, a Palestinian man was shot and killed by Israeli police at the entrance of the compound. Palestinian and Israeli sources disputed the circumstances that led to the killing of 26-year-old Muhammad Al-Osaibi.

    The mosque compound, frequently a flashpoint in tensions, is home to one of Islam’s most revered sites but also the holiest site in Judaism, known as the Temple Mount.

    The compound reopened for prayers shortly after.

    In a statement Wednesday, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh condemned the actions of the Israeli police, saying: “What is happening in Jerusalem is a major crime against worshipers.”

    “Israel does not want to learn from history, that al-Aqsa is for the Palestinians and for all Arabs and Muslims, and that storming it sparked a revolution against the occupation,” Shtayyeh added.

    The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Wednesday that nine rockets were fired from Gaza Strip toward Israel after the incident in Jerusalem.

    “Following the previous report regarding the sirens which sounded in Sderot, five rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip into Israeli territory,” said the IDF. “Four of them were intercepted by the aerial defense array.”

    The IDF also said four additional rockets launched from Gaza toward Israel but landed in open space.

    “Following the additional sirens that sounded in the surroundings of the Gaza Strip, four rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip that landed in open areas. No interceptors were launched according to protocol,” the IDF added.

    Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza, said in a statement that “the current Israeli occupation’s crimes at the al-Aqsa mosque are unprecedented violations that will not pass.”

    Later on Wednesday, the Israeli military said its fighter jets had struck weapons manufacturing and storage sites in the Gaza Strip belonging to Hamas.

    “This strike was carried out in response to rockets fired from the Gaza Strip toward Israeli territory earlier,” it said in a statement.

    Last year was the deadliest for both Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and for Israelis in nearly two decades, CNN analysis of official statistics on both sides showed.

    And this year has seen a violent beginning, too. At least 90 Palestinians have been killed, according to Palestinian Ministry of Health statistics. In addition to suspected militants being targeted by Israeli forces, the dead include Palestinians killing, wounding or attempting to kill Israeli civilians, people clashing with Israeli security and bystanders, CNN records show.

    In the same period, at least 15 Israelis have been killed in attacks by Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank, CNN records show – 14 civilians and a police officer who was hit by friendly fire after being stabbed by a Palestinian teenager while inspecting bus passengers.

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  • NASA set to unveil the crew of astronauts for moon flyby mission | CNN

    NASA set to unveil the crew of astronauts for moon flyby mission | CNN

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    Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



    CNN
     — 

    Four astronauts — including three Americans and one Canadian — will be tapped by NASA to complete a generation-defining mission to the moon’s orbit, returning humans to deeper into the solar system than has been reached in five decades.

    On Monday, the public will finally learn the crew members’ names.

    Scheduled to launch in 2024, Artemis II will be the program’s first crewed mission to orbit the moon, flying farther into space than any humans since the Apollo program. It will pave the way for the Artemis III crew to walk on the moon in 2025, all aboard the world’s most powerful rocket and at a price tag that by then will approach $100 billion.

    Following months of closed-door decision making, NASA officials plan to unveil the names of the crew members in a ceremony scheduled for Monday at 11 am ET.

    Though officials have remained tight-lipped about their choices, CNN previously spoke with nearly a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts to pull back the curtain on the secretive selection process.

    Reid Wiseman, a 47-year-old decorated naval aviator and test pilot who was first selected to be a NASA astronaut in 2009, is at the top of the list, according to CNN’s prior reporting.

    Wiseman served as chief of the astronaut office until November 2022. While the chief is not permitted to fly while holding the post, they are able to wrangle the best flight assignments upon stepping down, an “acknowledged perk” of the job, according to former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman.

    Before stepping down as astronaut chief, Wiseman was also responsible for the decision to broaden the pool of astronauts eligible to fly in order to include himself. While NASA had initially deemed 18 astronauts to be the “Artemis Team” and eligible to fly on moon missions, Wiseman expanded the group of candidates to all 41 active NASA astronauts.

    People familiar with the process also told CNN that along with Wiseman, there are a handful of other candidates atop the list:

    • Randy Bresnik, 55, is also a decorated naval aviator and test pilot who flew combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has flown two missions to the International Space Station: one on the Space Shuttle, another on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Bresnik is often mentioned as a top contender for Artemis because, since 2018, he has overseen the astronaut office’s development and testing of all rockets and spacecraft that will be used in the Artemis missions.
    • Anne McClain, 43, is a decorated army pilot and West Point graduate who flew more than 200 combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and went on to graduate from the US Naval Test Pilot School in 2013, the same year she was selected to be a NASA astronaut. After launching on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2018, she spent more than 200 days at the International Space Station and served as the lead of two spacewalks.
    • Stephanie Wilson is the most senior astronaut on this list. The 56-year-old joined NASA’s 1996 astronaut class, and she served as a mission specialist on three Space Shuttle flights, including the first flight after the 2003 Columbia disaster, which killed seven astronauts.
    • Christina Koch, 44, is a veteran of six spacewalks. She holds the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, with a total of 328 days in space. Koch is also an an electrical engineer who helped develop scientific instruments for multiple NASA mission. She’s also spent a year at the South Pole, an arduous stay that could well prepare her for the intensity of a moon mission.
    • Jessica Meir is 45-year-old biologist with a doctorate from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She was a member of a NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) mission in 2002, which involved spending days in an underwater research facility, and, in 2016, completed a two-week caving mission in Italy.

    Koch and Meir together conducted the first three all-female spacewalks in 2019 and 2020.

    Rounding out the Artemis II crew will be one astronaut from Canada, terms that were cemented in a 2020 treaty between the two countries.

    The Canadian Space Agency’s currently has a cadre of just four astronauts, but among them, Jeremy Hansen has generated the most buzz, according to CNN’s reporting. Hansen was selected to be an astronaut almost 14 years ago, but he’s still waiting for his first flight assignment. The 47-year-old fighter pilot recently became the first Canadian to be put in charge of training for a new class of NASA astronauts.

    NASA has also previously committed to selecting a crew with racial, gender and professional diversity.

    Those criteria have not historically been the case for high-profile missions. Going back to the Gemini era, astronauts selected for inaugural crewed missions have been only White and male, and typically come from a background as a military test pilot — a profile notably characterized in the 1979 book “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe.

    That has held true through NASA’s most recent inaugural crewed flight, of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule to the International Space Station in 2020, which included former military test pilots Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.

    And it may hold mostly true for the Artemis II mission as well: Nearly a dozen current and former NASA officials and astronauts told CNN they anticipated multiple test pilots being named.

    However, if Wiseman, a White man, is selected, that means the other spots will almost certainly need to go to at least one woman and at least one person of color.

    The Artemis II mission will build on Artemis I, an uncrewed test mission that sent NASA’s Orion capsule on a 1.4 million-mile voyage to lap the moon that concluded in December. The space agency deemed that mission a success and is still working to review all the data collected.

    If all goes to plan, Artemis II will take off around November 2024. The crew members, strapped inside the Orion spacecraft, will launch atop a NASA-developed Space Launch System rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

    The journey is expected to last about 10 days and will send the crew out beyond the moon, potentially further than any human has traveled in history, though the exact distance is yet to be determined.

    The “exact distance beyond the Moon will depend on the day of liftoff and the relative distance of the Moon from the Earth at the time of the mission,” NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton said via email.

    After circling the moon, the spacecraft will return to Earth for a splashdown landing in the Pacific Ocean.

    Artemis II is expected to pave the way for the Artemis III mission later this decade, which NASA has vowed will put the first woman and person of color on the lunar surface. It will also mark the first time humans have touched down on the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972.

    The Artemis III mission is expected to take off later this decade. But much of the technology the mission will require, including spacesuits for walking on the moon and a lunar lander to ferry the astronauts to the moon’s surface, is still in development.

    NASA is targeting a 2025 launch date for Artemis III, though the space agency’s inspector general has already said delays will likely push the mission to 2026 or later.

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  • Blinded by the light: gamma ray burst brighter than any seen before

    Blinded by the light: gamma ray burst brighter than any seen before

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    Newswise — Australian astronomers have provided vital information in the global effort to understand the brightest-ever detected gamma ray burst, which swept through our Solar System on 9 October last year.

    Detailed findings of that explosion from another galaxy 1.9 billion light years away were published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

    PhD student James Leung from the University of Sydney said: “The exceptional brightness of this gamma-ray burst meant astronomers were able to study it in unprecedented detail in real-time as the light arrived from that distant galaxy.

    “This gave us a golden opportunity to test intricate physical models that describe what happens before, during and after the death of a star.”

    Mr Leung is co-author of a complementary study published on the online arXiv and submitted for publication in Nature Astronomy.

    Scientists believe gamma ray bursts – the brightest known explosions in the Universe – are the death throes of enormous stars as they collapse into black holes, emitting enormous amounts of energy in opposite directions as gamma rays and X-rays.

    At the time of its detection last year, the gamma ray burst GRB 221009A was dubbed as BOAT – the brightest of all time.

    “While that’s a bit of an exaggeration, GRB 221009A was likely the brightest burst at X-ray and gamma-ray energies to occur since human civilisation began,” said Assistant Professor Eric Burns at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and co‑author of The Astrophysical Journal Letters study.

    The burst was so bright it blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, which meant they could not measure the real intensity of the emission.

    Astronomers believe it to be a one in 10,000-year event. And while the energy from this gamma ray burst was not unusually large, the jets of energy were exceptionally narrow with one pointed directly at Earth, making it appear exceptionally bright.

    Working with scientists from the University of Oxford, the University of Sydney and the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, the astronomers provided vital and rapid follow-up observation of the cosmic event in the radio wave part of the electromagnetic (light) spectrum.

    This supported work by US astronomers piecing together missing data in shorter wavelengths (X-ray and gamma ray) using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and data collected from Russian and Chinese teams. Together they showed the burst was 70 times brighter than any seen before.

    University of Sydney scientists provided follow-up observation of the gamma ray burst using the CSIRO ASKAP telescope in Western Australia, detecting the effects of the dramatic emission of energy at longer radio wavelengths.

    Professor Tara Murphy, Head of the School of Physics at the University of Sydney and co-author on the Oxford University-led radio astronomy research, said: “One of the fascinating things about gamma ray bursts is, although they are over quite quickly – in just a matter of seconds – they leave afterglow emissions across the light spectrum in surrounding matter that echo for months and years afterwards.”

    Co-author and Sydney PhD student James Leung said: “This afterglow is produced by a forward shock from the material ejected by the gamma-ray burst and a reverse shock reflected backwards into the ejected material. This gives us further opportunities to observe these fascinating, powerful events.”

    Their observations showed a rapid, early brightening from the source of the event caused by the reverse shock of the gamma ray burst. This revealed evidence in radio waves that is difficult to explain within current theoretical explanations of gamma ray bursts.

    Mr Leung said: “Our observations provide unmatched insights into the reverse shock model for gamma-ray burst emission, showing it is very difficult for existing models to replicate the slow evolution of the energy peaks that we observed.

    “This means we have to refine and develop new theoretical models to understand these most extreme explosions in the Universe.”

    This detective work will help astronomers quickly pinpoint future gamma ray bursts, perhaps assisting in the discovery of predicted supernovae associated with the events.

    Co-author of the Oxford-led study, Dr Gemma Anderson (ICRAR-Curtin University), said: “The most interesting part of a cosmic explosion is the very beginning as the explosion expels material that is moving at nearly the speed of light. We therefore want the radio telescopes to be on target and observing GRBs as quickly as possible so that we can detect the very earliest radio light they emit.”

    With this type of GRB, astronomers expect to find a brightening supernova a few weeks later, but so far it has proven elusive.

    No gamma ray burst has so far been detected in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It has been predicted that if such an enormous explosion were to happen relatively close to Earth – and pointed in our direction – the gamma ray burst could knock out electronics or, at worst, strip Earth of its atmosphere leading to mass extinctions.

     

    DOWNLOAD animations, photos and other material at this link.

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    University of Sydney

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  • New study about the ‘tsunami’ in Venus’s clouds

    New study about the ‘tsunami’ in Venus’s clouds

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    Newswise — A group of scientists from the University of Seville, in collaboration with experts from the University of the Basque Country, has led the first detailed study of the evolution of the discontinuity of Venus’s clouds, a gigantic atmosphere wave with the appearance of a “tsunami” that is propagated in the planet’s deepest clouds and which, it is believed, may be playing a very significant role in the acceleration of Venus’s fast-moving atmosphere. The observations were carried out non-stop for more than 100 days. “This observational feat was possible thanks to the collaboration of amateur astronomers from various countries, who have been the leading lights in the worldwide campaign of observations coordinated with the Japanese mission Akatsuki in 2022,” explains the University of Seville researcher and member of this mission, Javier Peralta. 

    This paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics has also revealed a truly unexpected event, since the ultraviolet images taken in June by the UVI camera on board the Akatsuki mission (which allows us to see the highest clouds in Venus) seem to reflect the fact that the discontinuity was capable of propagating for a few hours to around 70 km above the surface of Venus. “This is surprising, because until now the discontinuity appeared ‘trapped’ in the deepest clouds and we had never observed it at such a high altitude,” explains Peralta.

    The astrophysicist Javier Peralta was responsible for designing in 2022 the strategy for WISPR’s Venus observations during the spacecraft’s approach/departure manoeuvres during Parker’s flybys. He also contributed to physical interpretation of the observations, comparing thermal emission images of the surface of Venus taken by WISPR (NASA-Parker) and the IR1 camera (JAXA-Akatsuki).

    In this vein, the Akatsuki images not only point to the fact that the discontinuity may have propagated to Venus’ upper clouds, but also help us to understand the reasons for this displacement. In general, regions where winds have the same speed as a wave act as a physical “barrier” for the propagation of that wave. Because winds gradually increase with height on Venus and have higher speeds than the discontinuity at the peak of the clouds, the discontinuity attempts to propagate upwards from the deep clouds, but meets this obstacle on its way and eventually dissipates. Thus, experts were surprised when they measured the winds in the high clouds with Akatsuki: they found that they were unusually slow in the first half of 2022, several times slower than the discontinuity itself. And if the winds grow much more slowly with height, the discontinuity takes longer to find atmospheric regions as fast as itself, allowing it to propagate to higher altitudes.

    “Measuring the winds on Venus is essential to try to explain why Venus’s atmosphere spins 60 times faster than the surface. This atmospheric phenomenon is known as superrotation. It also happens on the Saturn moon Titan and on many exoplanets, but after more than half a century o research we still cannot satisfactorily explain it,” explains this researcher.

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    University of Seville

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  • NASA’s Webb Spots Swirling, Gritty Clouds on Remote Planet

    NASA’s Webb Spots Swirling, Gritty Clouds on Remote Planet

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    Newswise — Researchers observing with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have pinpointed silicate cloud features in a distant planet’s atmosphere. The atmosphere is constantly rising, mixing, and moving during its 22-hour day, bringing hotter material up and pushing colder material down. The resulting brightness changes are so dramatic that it is the most variable planetary-mass object known to date. The team, led by Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona, also made extraordinarily clear detections of water, methane and carbon monoxide with Webb’s data, and found evidence of carbon dioxide. This is the largest number of molecules ever identified all at once on a planet outside our solar system.

    Cataloged as VHS 1256 b, the planet is about 40 light-years away and orbits not one, but two stars over a 10,000-year period. “VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from our Sun, which makes it a great target for Webb,” Miles said. “That means the planet’s light is not mixed with light from its stars.” Higher up in its atmosphere, where the silicate clouds are churning, temperatures reach a scorching 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (830 degrees Celsius).

    Within those clouds, Webb detected both larger and smaller silicate dust grains, which are shown on a spectrum. “The finer silicate grains in its atmosphere may be more like tiny particles in smoke,” noted co-author Beth Biller of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “The larger grains might be more like very hot, very small sand particles.”

    VHS 1256 b has low gravity compared to more massive brown dwarfs, which means that its silicate clouds can appear and remain higher in its atmosphere where Webb can detect them. Another reason its skies are so turbulent is the planet’s age. In astronomical terms, it’s quite young. Only 150 million years have passed since it formed – and it will continue to change and cool over billions of years.

    In many ways, the team considers these findings to be the first “coins” pulled out of a spectrum that researchers view as a treasure chest of data. In many ways, they’ve only begun identifying its contents. “We’ve identified silicates, but better understanding which grain sizes and shapes match specific types of clouds is going to take a lot of additional work,” Miles said. “This is not the final word on this planet – it is the beginning of a large-scale modeling effort to fit Webb’s complex data.”

    Although all of the features the team observed have been spotted on other planets elsewhere in the Milky Way by other telescopes, other research teams typically identified only one at a time. “No other telescope has identified so many features at once for a single target,” said co-author Andrew Skemer of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We’re seeing a lot of molecules in a single spectrum from Webb that detail the planet’s dynamic cloud and weather systems.”

    The team came to these conclusions by analyzing data known as spectra gathered by two instruments aboard Webb, the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Since the planet orbits at such a great distance from its stars, the researchers were able to observe it directly, rather than using the transit technique or a coronagraph to take these data.

    There will be plenty more to learn about VHS 1256 b in the months and years to come as this team – and others – continue to sift through Webb’s high-resolution infrared data. “There’s a huge return on a very modest amount of telescope time,” Biller added. “With only a few hours of observations, we have what feels like unending potential for additional discoveries.”

    What might become of this planet billions of years from now? Since it’s so far from its stars, it will become colder over time, and its skies may transition from cloudy to clear.

    The researchers observed VHS 1256 b as part of Webb’s Early Release Science program, which is designed to help transform the astronomical community’s ability to characterize planets and the disks where they form.

    The team’s paper, entitled “The JWST Early Release Science Program for Direct Observations of Exoplanetary Systems II: A 1 to 20 Micron Spectrum of the Planetary-Mass Companion VHS 1256-1257 b,” will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on March 22.

    For high-resolution imagery, visit https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-105

    The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

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    Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

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  • Astronaut crew heads home after five-month stay on the International Space Station | CNN

    Astronaut crew heads home after five-month stay on the International Space Station | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The four astronauts who make up the Crew-5 team aboard the International Space Station began their return trip home Saturday morning, marking the end of a five-month stay in space.

    The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule disembarked from the space station at 2:20 am ET, beginning the final leg of the astronauts’ journey. The spacecraft is set to splash down off Florida at around 9:02 p.m. ET Saturday.

    Rescue ships will be awaiting the team’s arrival, ready to haul the capsule out of the ocean and allow the crew to disembark, giving the astronauts their first breath of fresh air in nearly 160 days. Shortly afterward, the crew will depart for NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.

    The four crew members — NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, astronaut Koichi Wakata of JAXA, or Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and cosmonaut Anna Kikina of the Russian space agency Roscosmos — launched to the space station aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule this past October. They’ve spent the past few months carrying out research experiments and keeping up with maintenance of the two-decade-old orbiting laboratory.

    And for the past few days, the four have been handing off operations to the Crew-6 team of astronauts who arrived at the space station on March 3.

    Mann, a registered member of the Wailacki tribe of the Round Valley reservation, became the first Native American woman to travel into orbit. Like the other astronauts, she devoted time on her journey to public outreach, some of which focused on inspiring Indigenous children. During one outreach event in November 2022, Mann showed off a dream catcher — a traditional totem for Native Americans meant to ward off bad dreams — that she took with her to the space station.

    “I am very proud to represent Native Americans and my heritage,” Mann told reporters before launch. “I think it’s important to celebrate our diversity and also realize how important it is when we collaborate and unite, the incredible accomplishments that we can have.”

    Kikina’s participation in this flight came as part of a ride-sharing agreement by NASA and Roscosmos in July 2022. Despite geopolitical tensions between the United States and Russia as the war in Ukraine has escalated, NASA has repeatedly said its partnership with Roscosmos is vital to continuing the space station’s operations and the valuable scientific research carried out on board.

    The journey marked the first trip to space for Mann, Cassada and Kikina.

    Wakata previously flew on NASA’s space shuttle flights and Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft. This trip was the Japanese astronaut’s fifth spaceflight mission.

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  • Scientists call for global push to eliminate space junk

    Scientists call for global push to eliminate space junk

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    Newswise — Scientists have called for a legally-binding treaty to ensure Earth’s orbit isn’t irreparably harmed by the future expansion of the global space industry.

    In the week that nearly 200 countries agreed to a treaty to protect the High Seas after a 20-year process, the experts believe society needs to take the lessons learned from one part of our planet to another. 

    The number of satellites in orbit is expected to increase from 9,000 today to over 60,000 by 2030, with estimates suggesting there are already more than 100 trillion untracked pieces of old satellites circling the planet.

    While such technology is used to provide a huge range of social and environmental benefits, there are fears the predicted growth of the industry could make large parts of Earth’s orbit unusable.

    Writing in the journal Science, an international collaboration of experts in fields including satellite technology and ocean plastic pollution say this demonstrates the urgent need for global consensus on how best to govern Earth’s orbit.

    They acknowledge that a number of industries and countries are starting to focus on satellite sustainability, but say this should be enforced to include any nation with plans to use Earth’s orbit.

    Any agreement, they add, should include measures to implement producer and user responsibility for satellites and debris, from the time they launch onwards. Commercial costs should also be considered when looking at ways to incentivise accountability. Such considerations are consistent with current proposals to address ocean plastic pollution as countries begin negotiations for the Global Plastics Treaty.

    The experts also believe that unless action is taken immediately, large parts of our planet’s immediate surroundings risk the same fate as the High Seas where insubstantial governance has led to overfishing, habitat destruction, deep-sea mining exploration, and plastic pollution.

    The article was co-authored by researchers from the University of Plymouth, Arribada Initiative, The University of Texas at Austin, California Institute of Technology, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Spaceport Cornwall, and ZSL (Zoological Society of London).

    They include the academic who led the first ever study into marine microplastics, also published in Science almost 20 years ago, and scientists who contributed to the commitment to develop a Global Plastics Treaty signed by 170 world leaders at the United Nations Environment Assembly in March 2022.

    Dr Imogen Napper, Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth, led the newly-published study with funding from the National Geographical Society. She said: “The issue of plastic pollution, and many of the other challenges facing our ocean, is now attracting global attention. However, there has been limited collaborative action and implementation has been slow. Now we are in a similar situation with the accumulation of space debris. Taking into consideration what we have learnt from the high seas, we can avoid making the same mistakes and work collectively to prevent a tragedy of the commons in space. Without a global agreement we could find ourselves on a similar path”.

    Heather Koldewey, ZSL’s Senior Marine Technical Advisor, said: “To tackle planetary problems, we need to bring together scientists from across disciplines to identify and accelerate solutions. As a marine biologist I never imagined writing a paper on space, but through this collaborative research identified so many parallels with the challenges of tackling environmental issues in the ocean. We just need to get better at the uptake of science into management and policy.”

    Dr Moriba Jah, Associate Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, said: “Ancient TEK (traditional ecological knowledge) informs us how we must embrace stewardship because our lives depend on it. I’m excited to work with others in highlighting the links and interconnectedness amongst all things and that marine debris and space debris are both an anthropogenic detriment that is avoidable.”

    Dr Kimberley Miner, Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said: “Mirroring the new UN ocean initiative, minimizing the pollution of the lower Earth orbit will allow continued space exploration, satellite continuity, and the growth of life-changing space technology.”

    Melissa Quinn, Head of Spaceport Cornwall, said: “Satellites are vital to the health of our people, economies, security and Earth itself. However, using space to benefit people and planet is at risk. By comparing how we have treated our seas, we can be proactive before we damage the use of space for future generations. Humanity needs to take responsibility for our behaviours in space now, not later. I encourage all leaders to take note, to recognise the significance of this next step and to become jointly accountable.”

    Professor Richard Thompson OBE, Head of the International Marine Litter Research Unit at the University of Plymouth, said: “I have spent most of my career working on the accumulation of plastic litter in the marine environment; the harm it can bring and the potential solutions. It is very clear that much of the pollution we see today could have been avoided. We were well aware of the issue of plastic pollution a decade ago, and had we acted then the quantity of plastic in our oceans might be half of what it is today. Going forward we need to take a much more proactive stance to help safeguard the future of our planet. There is much that can be learned from mistakes made in our oceans that is relevance to the accumulation of debris in space.”

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  • Japan’s new rocket fails on debut launch in setback for space program | CNN

    Japan’s new rocket fails on debut launch in setback for space program | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Japan’s maiden launch of its new flagship space rocket ended in failure on Tuesday when controllers issued a destruct command just 15 minutes after liftoff, the country’s space agency said.

    “A destruct command has been transmitted to H3 around 10:52 a.m. (Japan Standard Time), because there was no possibility of achieving the mission,” a statement from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said.

    A report from public broadcaster NHK said the second stage of the H3 rocket did not ignite.

    The rocket, which took off from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan, was carrying the Advance Land Observation Satellite-3 (ALOS-3), a ground-mapping and imaging orbiter that the space agency said was planned to become a key tool in disaster management efforts.

    ALOS-3 “would cover all of the land areas of not only Japan but also across the whole world,” it said.

    Tuesday’s failure occurred on JAXA’s second attempt to launch the H3. On February 17, two secondary booster engines strapped to the side of the space vehicle did not ignite on the launch pad and the H3 failed to take off.

    The space agency has touted the H3 as the successor to Japan’s H-2A and H-2B rockets, with flexible configurations based on what it would need to lift into orbit. It has previously touted the expected ability of the H3 to launch both government and commercial missions.

    JAXA said the H3 would be more economical than many other launch vehicles because its uses “commercial-off-the-shelf products of other domestic industries such as the automobile industry rather than products exclusive to space use.”

    “With several configurations, the H3 offers performance and price suitable for purposes of each satellite,” it said, adding that it was looking for regular launches over the long term.

    “We are aiming to create an operational world where Japanese industrial base can be underpinned by steadily launching the H3 six times or so annually for 20 years,” JAXA said.

    Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is the prime contractor for the rocket. NHK reported that JAXA and Mitsubishi have spent more that $1.5 billion on the project since its inception nine years ago.

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  • Russia to launch replacement spacecraft for astronauts stranded by coolant leak | CNN

    Russia to launch replacement spacecraft for astronauts stranded by coolant leak | CNN

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    Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



    CNN
     — 

    Russia is gearing up to launch a Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station that will replace a capsule that sprang a coolant leak in December, leaving two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut without a ride home.

    Liftoff of the capsule, called the Soyuz MS-23, is expected to occur out of Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in Kazakhstan on Thursday at 7:24 p.m. ET, which is 5:24 a.m. Friday local time. NASA will air coverage of the event beginning at 7 p.m. ET Thursday.

    The uncrewed spacecraft will spend two days in orbit, maneuvering toward the orbiting laboratory. It’s expected to dock with the Poisk module — which is on the space station’s Russian-run portion — just after 8 p.m. ET Saturday.

    The Soyuz MS-23 will be the return vehicle for cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, all of whom traveled to the space station aboard the Soyuz MS-22 capsule in September.

    About two months into the three men’s journey, the MS-22 experienced a coolant leak, leaving the cabin at temperatures deemed unsafe for the crewmates. The Russian space agency Roscosmos and NASA quickly worked to establish plans to send a replacement vehicle. Roscosmos officials said they had determined that the leak resulted from a small hole caused by an impact with a micrometeoroid.

    Plans to launch the rescue vehicle, however, were drawn into question when a Russian cargo ship, called Progress, experienced a similar coolant leak after docking with the space station on February 11. Three days later, Roscosmos had said in a post on the social media site Telegram, that it would delay the Soyuz MS-23 launch until at least March while the agency investigated the cause of the Progress vehicle’s coolant leak.

    On Tuesday, however, Roscosmos said in an updated Telegram post that it had determined the cause of the Progress spacecraft leak was “external influences.”

    “The Russians are continuing to take a very close look at both the Soyuz and the Progress coolant leaks,” Dana Weigel, the space station’s deputy manager for NASA, said during a Wednesday briefing.

    “They formed a state commission that is assessing the anomalies,” she added, noting that the team is analyzing potential causes from the time the capsules launched through their journey in orbit.

    Originally, Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara were expected to launch to the space station on March 16 aboard MS-23.

    Instead, Prokopyev, Petelin and Rubio’s time will be extended on the space station until they can return to Earth aboard Soyuz MS-23 later this year. That return could happen in September, according to a report from Russia state-run media outlet TASS.

    If that timeline holds, the three crewmates will have extended their expected six-month stay in space to about one year.

    When asked about the extended stay, Joel Montalbano, the space station’s program manager for NASA, said the crew remains in good health and there is no reason to expedite their journey home.

    The crew is “willing to help wherever we ask,” Montalbano said during a January 11 news conference. “They’re excited to be in space, excited to work and excited to do the research that we do on orbit. So they are ready to go with whatever decision that we give them.”

    He added, “I may have to fly some more ice cream to reward them.”

    The launch of the Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft comes just days before NASA and SpaceX will launch their Crew-6 mission. Expected to lift off early Monday morning, Crew-6 will carry NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg as well as Sultan Alneyadi, an astronaut with the United Arab Emirates, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

    Shortly after those four arrive at the space station, NASA’s Crew-5 astronauts will return home from their five-month stay there aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. NASA officials said this week that the coolant leaks experienced on the Soyuz and Progress vehicles would not have any impact on the SpaceX missions and that no similar issues were discovered on Crew Dragon vehicles.

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  • Improving the performance of satellites in low Earth orbit

    Improving the performance of satellites in low Earth orbit

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    Newswise — A database updated in 2022 reported around 4,852 active satellites orbiting the earth. These satellites serve many different purposes in space, from GPS and weather tracking to military reconnaissance and early warning systems. Given the wide array of uses for satellites, especially in low Earth orbit (LEO), researchers are constantly trying to develop better ones. In this regard, small satellites have a lot of potential. They can reduce launch costs and increase the number of satellites in orbit, providing a better network with wider coverage. However, due to their smaller size, these satellites have lesser radiation shield. They also have a deployable membrane attached to the main body for a large phased-array transceiver, which causes non-uniform radiation degradation across the transceiver. This affects the performance of the satellite’s radio due to the variation in the strength of signal they can sense—also known as gain variation. Thus, there is a need to mitigate radiation degradation to make small satellites more viable.

    Fortunately, a team of researchers led by Associate Professor Atsushi Shirane of Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) have reported a novel phased array receiver strategy to reduce the effects of radiation degradation in these satellites. Their findings have been shared and published in the 2023 International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Dr. Shirane explains, “We propose a new phased array receiver strategy which involves on-chip distributed radiation sensors and current-sharing techniques. This helps to drastically reduce the effects of radiation degradation on the radio and power consumption.”

    The team of researchers found out that in the conventional design of the phased-array transceiver on small satellites, the signal from the main lobe degraded by 3.1 dB in a year due to ionizing radiation. To solve this the researchers created a phased-array transceiver with on-chip distributed radiation sensors. These sensors can detect the gain variation between the chips of the antenna. This was combined with current-sharing techniques to mitigate the gain variation and thus reduce the impact of non-uniform ionizing radiation on the radio and power consumption. Upon testing this new strategy, the researchers found that it led to less than 10% of the typical gain variation seen in small satellites. The current sharing techniques also brought down the power consumption of the satellite to the lowest reported value. Overall, this strategy was able to reduce the main lobe degradation and bring down gain variation while using a minimal amount of power, solving two major problems faced by existing small satellites.

    “Using the distributed on-chip radiation sensors and the current sharing techniques, we were able to drastically reduce the impact of radiation degradation and make the phased-array transceiver more energy efficient. This strategy,” concludes Dr. Shirane, “was found to be comparable to other state-of-the-art technologies at reducing gain variation. Thus, we believe that given its performance and efficiency, our strategy may lead to an even greater number of small satellites in lower Earth orbit, and a more well-connected world.”

    We have our fingers crossed for this future!

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    Tokyo Institute of Technology

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  • Astrophysics: Scientists observe high-speed star formation

    Astrophysics: Scientists observe high-speed star formation

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    Newswise — Gas clouds in the Cygnus X Region, a region where stars form, are composed of a dense core of molecular hydrogen (H2) and an atomic shell. These ensembles of clouds interact with each other dynamically in order to quickly form new stars. That is the result of observations conducted by an international team led by scientists at the University of Cologne’s Institute of Astrophysics and at the University of Maryland. Until now, it was unclear how this process precisely unfolds. The Cygnus X region is a vast luminous cloud of gas and dust approximately 5,000 light years from Earth. Using observations of spectral lines of ionized carbon (CII), the scientists showed that the clouds have formed there over several million years, which is a fast process by astronomical standards. The results of the study ‘Ionized carbon as a tracer for the assembly of interstellar clouds’ will appear in the next issue of Nature Astronomy. The paper is already accessible online.

    The observations were carried out in an international project led by Dr Nicola Schneider at the University of Cologne and Prof Alexander Tielens at the University of Maryland as part of the FEEDBACK programme on board the flying observatory SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy). The new findings modify previous perceptions that this specific process of star formation is quasi-static and quite slow. The dynamic formation process now observed would also explain the formation of particularly massive stars.

    By comparing the distribution of ionized carbon, molecular carbon monoxide and atomic hydrogen, the team found that the shells of interstellar gas clouds are made of hydrogen and collide with each other at speeds of up to twenty kilometres per second. “This high speed compresses the gas into denser molecular regions where new, mainly massive stars form. We needed the CII observations to detect this otherwise ‘dark’ gas,” said Dr Schneider. The observations show for the first time the faint CII radiation from the periphery of the clouds, which could not be observed before. Only SOFIA and its sensitive instruments were capable of detecting this radiation.

    SOFIA was operated by NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) until September 2022. The observatory consisted of a converted Boeing 747 with a built-in 2.7-metre telescope. It was coordinated by the German SOFIA Institute (DSI) and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). SOFIA observed the sky from the stratosphere (above 13 kilometres) and covered the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum, just beyond what humans can see. The Boeing thus flew above most of the water vapour in the Earth’s atmosphere, which otherwise blocks out infrared light. This allowed the scientists to observe a wavelength range that is not accessible from Earth. For the current results, the team used the upGREAT receiver installed on SOFIA in 2015 by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn and the University of Cologne.

    Even though SOFIA is no longer in operation, the data collected so far are essential for basic astronomical research because there is no longer an instrument that extensively maps the sky in this wavelength range (typically 60 to 200 micrometres). The now active James Webb Space Telescope observes in the infrared at shorter wavelengths and focuses on spatially small areas. Therefore, the analysis of the data collected by SOFIA is ongoing and continues to provide important insights – also regarding other star-forming regions: “In the list of FEEDBACK sources, there are other gas clouds in different stages of evolution, where we are now looking for the weak CII radiation at the peripheries of the clouds to detect similar interactions as in the Cygnus X region,” Schneider concluded.

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    University of Cologne

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  • NASA’s Webb Uncovers New Details in Pandora’s Cluster

    NASA’s Webb Uncovers New Details in Pandora’s Cluster

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    Newswise — Astronomers have revealed the latest deep field image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, featuring never-before-seen details in a region of space known as Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744). Webb’s view displays three clusters of galaxies – already massive – coming together to form a megacluster. The combined mass of the galaxy clusters creates a powerful gravitational lens, a natural magnification effect of gravity, allowing much more distant galaxies in the early universe to be observed by using the cluster like a magnifying glass.

    Only Pandora’s central core has previously been studied in detail by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. By combining Webb’s powerful infrared instruments with a broad mosaic view of the region’s multiple areas of lensing, astronomers aimed to achieve a balance of breadth and depth that will open up a new frontier in the study of cosmology and galaxy evolution.

    “The ancient myth of Pandora is about human curiosity and discoveries that delineate the past from the future, which I think is a fitting connection to the new realms of the universe Webb is opening up, including this deep-field image of Pandora’s Cluster,” said astronomer Rachel Bezanson of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, co-principal investigator on the “Ultradeep NIRSpec and NIRCam ObserVations before the Epoch of Reionization” (UNCOVER) program to study the region.

    “When the images of Pandora’s Cluster first came in from Webb, we were honestly a little star struck,” said Bezanson. “There was so much detail in the foreground cluster and so many distant lensed galaxies, I found myself getting lost in the image. Webb exceeded our expectations.” The new view of Pandora’s Cluster stitches four Webb snapshots together into one panoramic image, displaying roughly 50,000 sources of near-infrared light.

    In addition to magnification, gravitational lensing distorts the appearance of distant galaxies, so they look very different than those in the foreground. The galaxy cluster “lens” is so massive that it warps the fabric of space itself, enough for light from distant galaxies that passes through that warped space to also take on a warped appearance.

    Astronomer Ivo Labbe of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, co-principal investigator on the UNCOVER program, said that in the lensing core to the lower right in the Webb image, which has never been imaged by Hubble, Webb revealed hundreds of distant lensed galaxies that appear like faint arced lines in the image. Zooming in on the region reveals more and more of them.

    “Pandora’s Cluster, as imaged by Webb, shows us a stronger, wider, deeper, better lens than we have ever seen before,” Labbe said. “My first reaction to the image was that it was so beautiful, it looked like a galaxy formation simulation. We had to remind ourselves that this was real data, and we are working in a new era of astronomy now.”

    The UNCOVER team used Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) to capture the cluster with exposures lasting 4-6 hours, for a total of about 30 hours of observing time. The next step is to meticulously go through the imaging data and select galaxies for follow-up observation with the Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), which will provide precise distance measurements, along with other detailed information about the lensed galaxies’ compositions, providing new insights into the early era of galaxy assembly and evolution. The UNCOVER team expects to make these NIRSpec observations in the summer of 2023.

    In the meantime, all of the NIRCam photometric data has been publicly released so that other astronomers can become familiar with it and plan their own scientific studies with Webb’s rich datasets. “We are committed to helping the astronomy community make the best use of the fantastic resource we have in Webb,” said UNCOVER co-investigator Gabriel Brammer of the Niels Bohr Institute’s Cosmic Dawn Center at the University of Copenhagen. “This is just the beginning of all the amazing Webb science to come.”

    The imaging mosaics and catalog of sources on Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744) provided by the UNCOVER team combine publicly available Hubble data with Webb photometry from three early observation programs: JWST-GO-2561, JWST-DD-ERS-1324, and JWST-DD-2756.

    The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

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    Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

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  • Palestinian man killed and 13 injured in Israeli raid in West Bank, say Palestinian officials | CNN

    Palestinian man killed and 13 injured in Israeli raid in West Bank, say Palestinian officials | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A Palestinian man was killed and 13 were injured in an Israeli raid in Nablus early Monday, Palestinian health officials said, in what Israeli authorities said was an operation to arrest suspects in the fatal shooting of an Israeli soldier last year.

    The Palestinian Ministry of Health said Amir Ihab Bustami, 21, “was shot by the Israeli occupation soldiers and killed at dawn today in Nablus.”

    Six people were wounded by live bullets during the raid in Nablus and seven others were injured “as a result of the army’s pursuit of them,” the Palestinian Red Crescent said. The agency said one person was hospitalized, and that they had also handled 75 cases of tear gas inhalation.

    The Israeli military said the overnight raid was in response to the killing of Ido Baruch in an attack near the settlement of Shavei Shomron in the occupied West Bank on October 11, 2022.

    “[Israeli forces] apprehended the assailants Obkamel Guri and Asama Tuille, from Nablus, who carried out the shooting attack during which Staff Sergeant Ido Baruch was killed,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement on Monday. “The forces also apprehended three additional suspects who were with the assailants.”

    The Israeli forces exchanged fire with the suspects and confiscated two rifles at an apartment in Nablus, the IDF said, adding that two of the suspects were injured during the raid.

    Lion’s Den, a Palestinian militant group that emerged in Nablus last year, claimed responsibility for the killing of Baruch. The group put out a statement Monday saying it had lured Israeli soldiers into an ambush in Nablus and killed them, but there was no evidence to support that claim. The IDF said no Israeli injuries were reported in the raid.

    The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that Israeli forces “surrounded one of the residential buildings” in Nablus and heavy gunfire and an explosion were heard.

    Separately, the Israeli military launched airstrikes in Gaza, targeting “an underground complex” belonging to Hamas for manufacturing rockets, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement early Monday. The airstrikes came after a rocket was launched from Gaza into Israel on Saturday, which the IDF said was intercepted.

    Hamas confirmed in a statement that one of its sites was hit in West Gaza on Monday. Israeli warplanes “launched about 10 air raids targeting a site of the resistance,” al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said in a statement early Monday, adding that there were no casualties.

    Following the strikes, four rockets were launched from Gaza into Israel, according to a later statement by the IDF that said it struck Hamas military posts in response.

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  • Opinion: Balloons aren’t the only strange objects flying in US airspace | CNN

    Opinion: Balloons aren’t the only strange objects flying in US airspace | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    Last month, the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report about “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” — in plain English, unidentified flying objects or UFOs.

    The US military on February 4 shot down a Chinese spy balloon (which Beijing said was a weather balloon), followed by the downing of two unidentified flying objects on Friday and Saturday in US and Canadian airspace, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told ABC were likely also balloons.

    Then on Sunday, the US military shot down a fourth flying object, this time over Lake Huron in Michigan.

    In the wake of those actions, the report by America’s intelligence community is worth examining since it may shed some light on what is happening here.

    January’s UFO report had a striking finding: The number of UFO sightings significantly increased between March 2021 and August 2022, during which time 247 new sightings were reported, mostly by US Navy and Air Force pilots and personnel. That’s almost double the 144 UFO sightings reported in the 17-year period between 2004 to 2021.

    The report suggested that the increase may be because there is less “stigma” associated with reporting UFO sightings, now that the Pentagon is actively pushing service personnel to report any “anomalies” seen in the sky.

    Indeed, in July, the Pentagon established a new entity, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, to investigate credible sightings of UFOs by the US military and intelligence community.

    This is part of a relatively new push by Congress and the Pentagon to make sense of more than 500 credible UFO sightings over the past couple of decades.

    The report by the US intelligence community found that a large number of those sightings, 163, were balloons or “balloon-like entities,” while 26 were unmanned aircraft systems, i.e., drones. An unspecified number of sightings were “attributable to sensor irregularities or variances, such as operator or equipment error.”

    There were 171 unidentified object sightings, however, for which no explanation was found, and some of those objects “demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities.”

    The report also noted that UFO sightings “continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight.” It added that the sightings could point to “adversary collection activity,” suggesting that UFOs found around sensitive US military installations could be a foreign power spying on them.

    There is undoubtedly much more to learn about those 171 UFO sightings, which still have no good explanations. Are they the work of a foreign power probing US air defenses? Are they relatively innocuous, such as errant balloons?

    Congress should convene hearings to get to the bottom of this. The public has a right to understand why objects are flying around in American airspace that the Pentagon and the US intelligence community can’t identify.

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  • Second Trump attorney met with Mar-A-Lago probe grand jury in recent weeks | CNN Politics

    Second Trump attorney met with Mar-A-Lago probe grand jury in recent weeks | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Trump attorney Christina Bobb appeared before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC, in recent weeks in connection with the investigation into former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents, two sources have told CNN.

    Bobb’s appearance marks the second Trump lawyer involved with Trump’s handling of government documents to meet with the grand jury recently. CNN reported that Trump attorney Evan Corcoran appeared before the grand jury last month.

    The Wall Street Journal first reported Bobb’s appearance.

    The disclosure of the testimony by the Trump lawyers comes amid a steady drip of recent moves by special counsel Jack Smith to obtain grand jury testimony from very close contacts of the former president, in many cases about what Trump was told and what he said at the end of his presidency and afterward.

    It also comes amid an escalation of activity in Smith’s other Trump probe, looking into the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and efforts to impede the transfer of power following the 2020 election.

    Smith issued a subpoena in that investigation to former Vice President Mike Pence in recent days, seeking documents and testimony. Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien also received a subpoena, as CNN first reported.

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  • Unusual discoveries shake up what we know about ancient diets | CNN

    Unusual discoveries shake up what we know about ancient diets | CNN

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    A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    Buzz started to build about a decade ago around the meat-heavy paleo diet — an approach to eating that’s based on what our Stone Age relatives supposedly liked to consume.

    But the truth is that we know relatively little about what our earliest ancestors ate, and what we’ve learned in recent years suggests that there was more than just mammoth steak on the menu.

    Groundbreaking new discoveries, including some featured in this week’s CNN science newsletter, have revealed that the diets of early humans were surprisingly varied and that those ancient meals may have involved more sophisticated preparations than previously thought.

    Neanderthals who lived 90,000 years ago in a seafront cave in what’s now Portugal regularly caught and ate crabs, roasting them on coals, according to a new study.

    The finding is significant because it builds upon evidence challenging the long-standing notion that a taste for seafood — rich in omega-3 fatty acids that are important for brain growth — was one of the unique factors that made our own species, Homo sapiens, cognitively smarter than our extinct Neanderthal counterparts.

    Meanwhile, in Kenya, another archaeological dig has revealed that early hominins feasted on hippo 2.9 million years ago, butchering the carcasses with the help of distinctive and unexpected implements.

    The discovery may shed light on a key question in human evolution: Who first used stone tools?

    In the HBO show “The Last of Us,” characters identify zombies among them by the fungi that burst from their bodies. Those fungal parasites manipulate their hosts to infect the communities around them, creating more monsters as a consequence. (HBO, like CNN, is a unit of Warner Bros. Discovery.)

    In real life, the type of fungus that inspired the story, Ophiocordyceps, affects insects and does not cause problems for people.

    However, the threat from fungal pathogens is increasing, experts say, and may grow much worse in a warmer, wetter and sicker world.

    The climate crisis may also be contributing to the rise of drug-resistant superbugs, a new UN report has warned, with rising temperatures increasing the rate of bacterial growth and the rate of the spread of antibiotic-resistant genes between microorganisms.

    Codebreakers have revealed the secrets within a lost trove of letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots, between 1578 and 1584 — during the 19-year period she was imprisoned by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I.

    Written in cipher, the 57 letters from Mary Stuart to the French ambassador to England had been tucked away, wrongly labeled, in France’s national library.

    The contents of the letters “will be a literary and historical sensation,” according to Dr. John Guy, a fellow in history at Clare College in Cambridge, England, and author of “Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart.”

    Just as impressive is how researchers deciphered the letters — the process involved computer algorithms, linguistic analysis and manual codebreaking techniques.

    Geoscientists know little about the innermost reaches of our planet, but what happens deep beneath our feet is a source of fascination for many people. News last month that Earth’s inner core may have stopped turning was CNN’s most read science story in January.

    Now, scientists have detected a previously unknown layer of partially molten rock 100 miles (161 kilometers) below Earth’s crust.

    The revelation could help researchers learn more about the movements of the planet’s tectonic plates, which not only create mountains and earthquakes like this week’s devastating Turkey-Syria quake but also contributed to forming environments with the right chemical and physical conditions to support life in Earth’s earliest days.

    Meanwhile, around 15 million people are at risk of experiencing “inland tsunamis,” according to a new report on glacial lakes.

    This artist's impression shows an irregularly shaped gray asteroid against a dark background.

    Astronomers have spotted 12 previously unknown moons orbiting Jupiter, bringing its total number of confirmed moons to 92, the most of any planet in the solar system. The largest ones of the new batch will get names later this year.

    The moons weren’t the only newly identified celestial bodies made public this week. An asteroid the size of Rome’s Colosseum photobombed an image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, and astronomers found a dwarf planet with a ring that defies what’s known about celestial mechanics.

    Also hanging out in the cosmic wilderness is a cherry red Tesla roadster launched into space five years ago by Elon Musk. To keep tabs on the sports car’s predicted location, NASA has an entry for the vehicle in the Horizons database for tracking space objects, but it’s difficult to say where the vehicle is with absolute certainty — or whether it’s still in one piece.

    Check out these insightful stories:

    — The first Black woman to join an International Space Station crew told CNN what inspired her to become an astronaut.

    — How are scientists kept fed and happy in one of the most remote places on Earth? (Hint: It involves cheese.)

    — See the snow leopard image that won in the wildlife photography awards.

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  • California state agencies investigating conditions at the two sites of the Half Moon Bay mass killing | CNN

    California state agencies investigating conditions at the two sites of the Half Moon Bay mass killing | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Two California state agencies are investigating whether there were potential labor and workplace safety and health violations at the two Half Moon Bay, California, farms where seven people were fatally shot last month.

    The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health and the state’s Labor Commissioner’s Office “want to ensure that employees are being afforded all the protections of California labor laws,” a state official told CNN in an emailed statement.

    The statement did not offer further details about the probe, saying neither agency comments on ongoing investigations.

    The suspect worked on one of the mushroom farms where he is suspected of fatally shooting four of his coworkers. The site, owned by California Terra Garden, is a mushroom farm where the suspected gunman worked and lived on for at least seven years, according to officials and a spokesperson for that company. A California Terra Garden spokesperson has said there were several mobile homes and trailers for employees on the property.

    The suspect was also a former employee of another nearby farm where he’s accused of killing three former colleagues, San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus previously said.

    In a news conference the day after the massacre, California Gov. Gavin Newsom highlighted the living conditions the farm workers faced.

    “Some of you should see where these folks are living, the conditions they’re in. Living in shipping containers,” the governor said. “Folks getting nine bucks an hour … no healthcare, no support, no services, but taking care of our health, providing a service to each and every one of us every single day.”

    And in a statement several days later, the governor’s office called the workers’ living conditions “deplorable.”

    “California is investigating the farms involved in the Half Moon Bay shooting to ensure workers are treated fairly and with the compassion they deserve,” according to a January 26 statement posted on Twitter by Daniel Villaseñor, the governor’s deputy press secretary.

    At the time, a California Terra Garden spokesperson responded to the accusations, saying the governor’s comments did not reflect the living conditions of farm workers.

    “The salary of all employees range from $16.50 to $24,” the spokesperson said, adding that workers receive “vacation days, company-sponsored health insurance, life/disability insurance, workman’s compensation insurance, and access to a 401(k) plan.” CNN has reached out to California Terra Garden for further details on how its employees are paid and for comment on the state agencies’ investigations.

    The spokesperson said last month that the eight families who lived on the property lived in “mobile homes and large recreational vehicles” equipped with kitchens, bathrooms, showers and “standard living amenities.”

    “No one lives in anything like shipping containers or tents as was erroneously reported. The families pay approximately $300 a month to rent these living spaces, well below market rate,” the company spokesperson said.

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  • China wants to dominate the ‘near space’ battlefield. Balloons are a key asset | CNN

    China wants to dominate the ‘near space’ battlefield. Balloons are a key asset | CNN

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    In China’s eyes, the newest superpower battlefield sits between 12 and 60 miles above the Earth’s surface in a thin-aired layer of the atmosphere it calls “near space.”

    Lying above the flightpaths of most commercial and military jets and below satellites, near space is an in-between area for spaceflight to pass through – but it is also a domain where hypersonic weapons transit and ballistic missiles cross.

    China has paid close attention to other countries’ developments in this region, which has been hailed by Chinese military experts as “a new front for militarization” and “an important field of competition among the world’s military powers.”

    In addition to developing high-tech vessels such as solar-powered drones and hypersonic vehicles, China is also reviving a decades-old technology to utilize this area of the atmosphere – lighter-than-air vehicles. They include stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons – similar to the one identified over the continental United States and shot down on Saturday.

    China maintains the balloon is a civilian research airship, despite claims by US officials that the device was part of an extensive Chinese surveillance program.

    While questions remain about that incident, an examination of Chinese state media reports and scientific papers reveal the country’s growing interest in these lighter-than-air vehicles, which Chinese military experts have touted for use toward a wide range of purposes, from communication relay, reconnaissance and surveillance to electronic countermeasures.

    Chinese research on the high-altitude balloons dates back to the late 1970s, but over the past decade there’s been renewed focus on using older technology equipped with new hardware as major powers around the world have bulked up their capabilities in the sky.

    “With the rapid development of modern technology, the space for information confrontation is no longer limited to land, sea, and the low altitude. Near space has also become a new battlefield in modern warfare and an important part of the national security system,” read a 2018 article in the PLA Daily, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

    And a range of “near-space flight vehicles” will play a vital role in future joint combat operations that integrate outer space and the Earth’s atmosphere, the article said.

    Chinese leader Xi Jinping has urged the PLA Air Force to “speed up air and space integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities” as early as 2014, and military experts have designated “near space” as a crucial link in the integration.

    Searches on CNKI, China’s largest online academic database, show Chinese researchers, both military and civilian, have published more than 1,000 papers and reports on “near space,” many of which focus on the development of “near space flight vehicles.” China has also set up a research center to design and develop high-altitude balloons and stratospheric airships, or dirigibles, under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a top government think tank.

    One particular area of interest is surveillance. While China already deploys a sprawling satellite network for sophisticated long-range surveillance, Chinese military experts have highlighted the advantages of lighter-than-air vehicles.

    Unlike rotating satellites or traveling aircraft, stratospheric airships and high-altitude balloons “can hover over a fixed location for a long period of time” and are not easily detected by radar, wrote Shi Hong, the executive editor of Shipborne Weapons, a prominent military magazine published by a PLA-linked institute, in an article published in state media in 2022.

    In a 2021 video segment run by state news agency Xinhua, a military expert explains how near-space lighter-than-air vehicles can surveil and take higher resolution photos and videos at a much lower cost compared to satellites.

    In the video, Cheng Wanmin, an expert at the National University of Defense Technology, highlighted the progress by the US, Russia and Israel in developing these vehicles, adding China has also made its own “breakthroughs.”

    An example of advances China has made in this domain is the reported flight of a 100-meter-long (328 feet) unmanned dirigible-like airship known as “Cloud Chaser.” In a 2019 interview with the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper, Wu Zhe, a professor at Beihang University, said the vehicle had transited across Asia, Africa and North America in an around-the-world flight at 20,000 meters (65, 616 feet) above the Earth.

    Another scientist on the team told the newspaper that compared with satellites, stratospheric airships are better for “long-term observation” and have a range of purposes from disaster warning and environmental research to wireless network construction and aerial reconnaissance.

    Cheng Wanmin, an expert at the National University of Defense Technology, discusses the development of lighter-than-air vehicles in a video segment run by state news agency Xinhua in 2021.

    It’s also clear that China is not alone in seeing new uses for a technology that’s been leveraged for military reconnaissance as far back as the late 18th century, when French forces employed a balloon corps.

    The US has also been bolstering its capacity to use lighter-than-air vehicles. In 2021, the US Department of Defense contracted an American aerospace firm to work on using their stratospheric balloons as a means “to develop a more complete operating picture and apply effects to the battlefield,” according to a statement from the firm, Raven Aerostar, at the time.

    “This isn’t just a China thing. The US, and other nations as well, have been working on and developing high-altitude aerostats, balloons and similar vehicles,” said Brendan Mulvaney, director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute (CASI), a research center serving the US Air Force.

    “They are cheap, provide long-term persistent stare for collection of imagery, communications and other information – including weather,” said Mulvaney, who authored a 2020 paper that detailed China’s interest in using lighter-than-air vehicles for “near-space reconnaissance.”

    China also appears acutely aware of the potential for other countries to use balloons to spy.

    In 2019, a documentary series on China’s border defense forces produced by a state-owned television channel featured an incident where the PLA Air Force spotted and shot down a suspected high-altitude surveillance balloon that “threatened (China’s) air defense safety.”

    The documentary did not provide further detail about the time and location of the incident, but a paper published last April by researchers in a PLA institute noted air-drift balloons were spotted over China in 1997 and 2017.

    Other experts have pointed to the potential use of balloons in data collection that can aid China’s development of hypersonic weapons that transit through near space.

    “Understanding the atmospheric conditions up there is critical to programming the guidance software” for ballistic and hypersonic missiles, according to Hawaii-based analyst Carl Schuster, a former director of operations at the US Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

    Chinese state media reports show China has also used balloons to test advanced hypersonic vehicles. In 2019, state broadcaster CCTV’s military channel showed footage of a balloon lifting off for what it described as maiden testing of three miniaturized models of “wide-range aircraft,” which according to Chinese media reports, can fly at a wide range of speeds, up to five times the speed of sound.

    A 2019 report broadcast by state broadcaster CCTV's military channel showed footage of a balloon lifting off for what it described as maiden testing of three miniaturized models of

    US intelligence officials believe the Chinese balloon identified over the US in recent days is part of an extensive, Chinese military-run surveillance program involving a fleet of balloons that has conducted at least two dozen missions over at least five continents in recent years, CNN reported on Tuesday.

    Beijing on Thursday said the assessment was “likely part of the US’ information and public opinion warfare” against China. It has maintained that the device identified over the US is civilian in nature, and linked it to “companies,” though it declined to provide more information on which entity manufactured the balloons.

    Both the self-governing island of Taiwan and Japan have acknowledged past, similar sightings, though it is not clear if they are related to the US incident.

    A US military commander on Monday acknowledged that the US has a “domain awareness gap” that allowed three other suspected Chinese spy balloons to transit the continental US undetected during the previous administration.

    An FBI team is working on understanding more about the equipment reclaimed from the balloon shot down over the sea – including what kind of data it could collect and whether it could transmit that in real time.

    CASI’s Mulvaney said that whether the balloon itself is characterized as “dual use” or “state-owned,” data collected would have gone back to China, which is now receiving another kind of information from the incident.

    “At the end of the day responses and (tactics, techniques, and procedures) from the US and other countries on how they react, or fail to – all of that has value to China and the PLA.”

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  • SpaceX put a Tesla sportscar into space five years ago. Where is it now? | CNN

    SpaceX put a Tesla sportscar into space five years ago. Where is it now? | CNN

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    Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.



    CNN
     — 

    It’s now been half a decade since SpaceX turned heads around the world with its decision to launch Elon Musk’s personal Tesla roadster into outer space, sending the car on an endless journey into the cosmic wilderness where it’s expected to remain for millennia to come.

    As of Monday, February 6, the cherry-colored sports car has officially been in space for exactly five years.

    At the time of its anniversary, data estimates show that it had completed about three and one quarter loops around the sun and was positioned about 203 million miles (327 million kilometers) from Earth, according to the tracking website whereisroadster.com.

    The roadster has logged more than 2.5 billion miles in space (4 billion kilometers), mostly through a barren vacuum. Though, in 2020, the vehicle made its first close approach to Mars, passing within 5 million miles of the planet, or about 20 times the distance between the Earth and the moon.

    It is difficult, however, to say where the vehicle is with absolute certainty — or to determine if it’s still in one piece, as it’s possible the car may have been dinged or obliterated by a meteoroid or eroded beyond recognition by radiation. There haven’t been any direct observations of the roadster since 2018, in the weeks just after it was blasted into orbit atop a three-million-pound Falcon Heavy rocket. Current data is based only on calculated estimates of the car’s trajectory.

    Astronomers don’t have much incentive to actively track the car, as it doesn’t offer much scientific value.

    The Tesla was ultimately intended to serve as a throw-away “dummy payload” for the Falcon Heavy’s first mission in February 2018, a launch that even Musk had predicted would have only a 50-50 shot at success.

    But the launch did, after all, go off without a hitch. And the car has been circling the sun ever since, taking an oblong path that swings as far out as Mars’ orbital path and as close to the sun as Earth’s orbit.

    As of Monday, it was just intersecting with Mars’ path, though the planet itself was on the opposite side of the sun.

    Before its 2018 launch, SpaceX loaded up the car with various Easter eggs. Behind the wheel was a spacesuit-clad mannequin, nicknamed Starman, and on the dashboard, a sign that read “Don’t Panic,” a reference to the famed science fiction story, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” There was also a data storage device loaded with the works of sci-fi writer Isaac Asminov and a plaque inscribed with the names of thousands of SpaceX employees.

    Musk said at the time of launch that he hoped humans will one day establish settlements on other planets in the solar system — a long-running Musk fantasy that also underpins SpaceX’s stated mission to colonize Mars. If and when that happens, Musk said he hopes his “descendants will be able to drag (the roadster) back to a museum.”

    For now, however, the roadster isn’t likely to pass near another planet until 2035 when it’ll brush by Mars again. It’ll then make two passes within a few million miles of Earth in 2047 and 2050, according to NASA data.

    One 2018 academic paper also estimated that the chances the car collides with the Earth within the next 15 million years at about 22%. The odds of it crashing into Venus or the Sun each stand at 12%.

    If the car does wind up taking a crash course with Earth, we’ll have to hope it’s ripped into pieces as it slams back into the thick atmosphere. (Spaceborne objects running into Earth are actually fairly common, and typically burn up in the atmosphere during entry. Such hits rarely impact populated areas.)

    To keep tabs on the roadster’s predicted location, it has its own entry in NASA’s Horizons database, which follows all the “bodies” of the solar system, including exploration probes, planets, moons, comets and asteroids. The Tesla is listed as object -143205, “SpaceX Roadster (spacecraft) (Tesla).”

    To view a simulation of the Tesla’s orbit (based on the data in Horizons), go to OrbitSimulator.com and search for “roadster.”

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