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Tag: Space and Astronomy

  • Archivists discovered the oldest known map of the stars under a Christian manuscript | CNN

    Archivists discovered the oldest known map of the stars under a Christian manuscript | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Archivists have uncovered a long-lost historical relic hidden underneath a Christian manuscript: the earliest known map of the stars, according to the Museum of the Bible.

    A copy of astronomer Hipparchus’ map of the stars was discovered underneath the Syriac text of John Climacus’ “Ladder of Divine Ascent,” a treatise written in around 600 CE, according to a news release from the Washington, DC-based Museum of the Bible.

    Scholars have long known about Hipparchus’ star catalog because other ancient texts made references about it – but their searches for the document itself were unsuccessful.

    “The newly discovered text is a remarkable breakthrough that highlights the creative use of multispectral imaging technology to read previously lost texts,” Brian Hyland, the museum’s associate curator of medieval manuscripts, said in the release. “It also attests to the accuracy of Hipparchus’s measurements.”

    Careful analysis showed that the ancient parchment was reused multiple times – like old-school recycling.

    First, in the fifth or sixth century, a Greek scribe copied Hipparchus’ “Star Catalogue.” Hipparchus worked as a Greek astronomer, geographer, and mathematician during the decades between 162 and 127 BCE. The early scientist is considered the father of trigonometry and one of the greatest astronomers in antiquity.

    Then, in the 10th or 11th century, a scribe at Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Egypt’s Mount Sinai recycled the older manuscript to write something new, says the Museum of the Bible.

    The scribe in Egypt must have gathered leaves of parchment, also called vellum, from at least ten different older manuscript, says the release. Then the scribe would have scraped off the existing ink and washed the parchment before writing a Syriac translation of the “Ladder of Divine Ascent.”

    But over time, the remnants of the scraped-off ink began to darken – so researchers realized the document was a palimpsest, with layers of different texts all written on the same material.

    The museum performed multispectral imaging of the leaves in the manuscript in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2018, says the release. Then they sent the manuscript to Tyndale House at Cambridge University to study the underlying text.

    The researchers published their findings this month in the peer-reviewed Journal for the History of Astronomy.

    In addition to confirming that Hipparchus’ text was hidden underneath the Christian treatise, the researchers also found that Hipparchus’ measurements were more accurate than those of his successor, the mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy.

    The Museum of the Bible was founded by the Green family, the owners of privately held arts and crafts retailer Hobby Lobby.

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  • International Space Station swerves to avoid Russian space debris, NASA says | CNN

    International Space Station swerves to avoid Russian space debris, NASA says | 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
     — 

    The International Space Station fired its thrusters to maneuver out of the way of a piece of oncoming Russian space junk, NASA said late Monday.

    The space agency said in a news release that the ISS conducted a five minute, five second burn to avoid a fragment of Russia’s Cosmos 1408 satellite, which the country destroyed in a weapons test in November last year.

    Officials at NASA have previously warned about the risks of the proliferation of debris in space, caused by a dramatic increase in the number of satellites in orbit and several instances of governments intentionally destroying satellites and creating new plumes of junk.

    The space station conducted a “Pre-Determined Debris Avoidance Maneuver,” or PDAM, to give the ISS “an extra measure of distance away from the predicted track of a fragment of Russian Cosmos 1408 debris,” the space agency said.

    “The thruster firing occurred at 8:25 p.m. EDT and the maneuver had no impact on station operations. Without the maneuver, it was predicted that the fragment could have passed within about three miles from the station.”

    The burn raised the space station’s altitude by 2/10 of a mile, according to the space agency.

    On November 15, 2021, Cosmos 1408, a no longer operational satellite, was destroyed, generating a cloud of debris including some 1,500 pieces of trackable space debris.

    US Space Command said Russia tested a direct-ascent anti-satellite, or DA-ASAT missile and strongly condemned the anti-satellite test, calling it “a reckless and dangerous act” and saying that it “won’t tolerate” behavior that puts international interests at risk.

    The ISS was forced to make a similar maneuver in June to avoid debris created by the anti-satellite test. In January, a piece of debris created by that test came within striking distance of a Chinese satellite, in an encounter the Chinese government called “extremely dangerous.”

    The ISS typically has to shift its orbit to avoid space junk around once a year, maneuvering away from the object if the chance of a collision exceeds one in 10,000, according to NASA.

    Invisible in the night sky, there are hundreds of millions of debris objects orbiting our planet. This debris is composed of parts of old satellites as well as entire defunct satellites and rocket bodies.

    According to a 2021 report by NASA, at least 26,000 of the pieces of space junk orbiting the Earth are the size of a softball or larger – big enough to wreck a satellite; more than 500,000 pieces of debris are marble-sized – capable of damaging spacecraft; while “over 100 million pieces are the size of a grain of salt that could puncture a spacesuit.”

    As these fragments knock into each other, they can create yet more pieces of smaller orbital debris.

    Russia said earlier this year it is planning to pull out of the International Space Station and end its decades-long partnership with NASA at the orbiting outpost, which is due to be retired by 2031.

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  • Opinion: Half-Earth Day is not a celebration, but a warning | CNN

    Opinion: Half-Earth Day is not a celebration, but a warning | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Lydia Strohl is a freelance writer in Washington, DC. More of her work can be found here. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author. View more opinion at CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    When I first learned that October 22 marks Half-Earth Day, I thought it was because the date is six months to Earth Day. (True.) But it’s got a message all its own.

    Half-Earth is the notion that for humans to survive, we must retain earth’s waning biodiversity by reserving half the planet for nature, stabilizing large swaths of ocean, prairie, rainforest and desert to house the birds, insects and ecosystems that affect the water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breathe. Not to mention the economies, cultures and past-times that sustain us.

    The Half-Earth Project was inspired by legendary Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson, who died in 2021 at the age of 92. In “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life,” Wilson wrote: “We would be wise to find our way as quickly as possible out of the fever swamp of dogmatic religious belief and inept philosophical thought through which we still wander. Unless humanity learns a great deal more about global biodiversity and moves quickly to protect it, we will soon lose most of the species composing life on Earth.”

    This means us, people, who Wilson calls a “lucky accident of primate evolution during the late Pleistocene.”

    Not a particularly happy accident, perhaps, for Planet Earth. Since 1970, the global population has doubled to nearly 8 billion. And in those five decades, monitored wildlife populations have declined by an average of 69%, warns the recent Living Planet Report, World Wildlife Fund’s study of the abundance of species worldwide (select vertebrate species; others are difficult to track). Freshwater populations have been hit the hardest, declining 83% over this time period. One million plant and animal species, out of the estimated 8 million out there, are in danger of extinction.

    It is time to change our ways, from using to stewarding earth’s resources. People cannot thrive at the expense of nature. Latin America has seen a whopping 94% decline in species populations. Meanwhile, deforestation for crops and cattle, legal and illegal mining and logging, development, and devastating wildfires have contributed to a 20% loss of the Amazon rainforest – an area the size of France. This doesn’t just affect the 350 indigenous communities and untold species of plants, animals and insects living there, but all of us, as the 400 billion trees that make up the Amazon rainforest produce an estimated 6% of earth’s oxygen.

    What makes humans more comfortable on earth now threatens the planet: energy, food production, growth in housing and commercial development. These are all systems Wilson believed we need to rethink. But just as the problem lies with us, so does the solution.

    To move people to action, Jennifer Morris, CEO of The Nature Conservancy, thinks it’s important to talk about what matters to them, citing health care, clean air and jobs. Morris spoke at a recent Half-Earth Day conference hosted by Smithsonian Institution and the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, bringing together government, community, corporate and conservation stakeholders like The Nature Conservancy, Audubon, and supporters like the Bezos Earth Fund. “Governments aren’t going to move until people move,” Morris said.

    The problems are thorny, however: even high-minded efforts can provoke Mother Nature. “The biggest threat to forests in Virginia is solar,” Morris said, referring to clean energy projects slated to take out thousands of acres of trees. “We can be smart where we put solar and wind … in a way that doesn’t undermine biodiversity,” Morris added.

    The Half-Earth Project looks at growth through the lens of nature, with tools that map richness and rarity in wildlife populations as well as human pressures and existing protections, hoping to inform both preservation and development. I dial their online map down to my community, close to the screaming orange urban mass of Washington, DC, but dotted with green conservation areas established by both public and private authorities.

    The E.O Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory – located in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, which was once decimated by civil war and other human ills – provides a blueprint not only for rebuilding biodiversity but also training new biologists and conservationists. The Half-Earth project also involves indigenous communities – which have traditionally balanced human needs with nature – in their programs, bringing together past and present, to work together towards a durable plan for our future.

    While the first Earth Day took place in 1970 to celebrate conservation efforts, Half-Earth Day is more of a caution. Whatever your beliefs on climate change, this much is clear. We’re losing whitetip sharks and harpy eagles, the inspiration for ‘Fawkes’ in the Harry Potter films. Gone are the Bramble Cay melomys, a small rodent whose habitat, food source and nesting sites were eradicated by storms and unprecedented flooding. You may never see a pink dolphin, but the interplay of plant, animal and insect species sustains us.

    Attacking a problem of this scale requires all of us – from those seated in governments and board rooms to our own kitchen tables – to come together. Too often, “solutions” whipsaw between administrations with their own political agendas. “Meanwhile, we thrash about, appallingly led, with no particular goal in mind other than economic growth, unfettered consumption, good health, and personal happiness,” Wilson wrote. He placed his faith in nature, and we should too.

    “We need to listen to what the birds are telling us. We’ve lost three billion birds in my lifetime,” says Audubon CEO Elizabeth Grey, who is in her 50s. “Birds are sentinels for healthy land and water – if birds are in trouble, people are too.”

    The canary is singing. Listen, before its voice is stilled.

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  • How Scientist Designed the Trajectory of Microsatellite Swarm From the Macro-Micro Perspective?

    How Scientist Designed the Trajectory of Microsatellite Swarm From the Macro-Micro Perspective?

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    Newswise — As an emerging multi-satellite cooperative flight mode, microsatellite swarm has become an important future research issue for distributed space systems due to their advantages of low cost, rapid response, and collaborative decision-making. To address the coordination of swarms for autonomous agents, a probabilistic guidance approach has been investigated, which contained sub-swarms with different mission objectives. Probabilistic swarm guidance enables autonomous microsatellites to generate their individual trajectories independently so that the entire swarm converges to the desired distribution shape. However, it is essential to avoid crowding for reducing the possibility of collisions between microsatellites, which brings challenges to the design of the collision avoidance algorithm. In a research paper recently published in Space: Science & Technology, Bing Xiao, from School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, proposed a Centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) and Model Predictive Control (MPC) based synthesis method, aiming to achieve macro-micro trajectory optimization of microsatellite swarm.

    First of all, the author formulated the transfer model of swarm microsatellites in 3D space and introduced the probabilistic swarm guidance law. Afterwards, since it was essential to avoid crowding for reducing the possibility of collisions between microsatellites, the safety analysis of collision avoidance wad conducted based on finding the lower bound of the minimum distance between all microsatellites at any time. To determine the collision-free guidance trajectory of each microsatellite from the current position to the target space, a collision avoidance algorithm was necessary. However, with high-level coordination that used the macroscopic models, collision-free trajectories were very hard to generate. Hence, the author presented a synthesis method, where the trajectory planning was divided into macro-planning and micro-planning.

    Then, the author presented the details of macro-planning and micro-planning of microsatellite swarm, respectively. In the Macro-planning of microsatellite swarm, the target position of each microsatellite was determined by the centroid generated through CVT algorithm, and all microsatellites moved to the corresponding centroid until the algorithm converges. According to the location of the centroid, the final distribution of the microsatellite swarm in the space was obtained. In the Micro-planning of microsatellite swarm, MPC was adopted to generate the optimal trajectories for each step and finally reached the specified position in the target cube. Specifically, the author established the orbital dynamics model considering J2 perturbation and implemented the convexification of collision avoidance constraints in the process of swarm reconfiguration. To achieve the real-time trajectory planning, model predictive control was introduced, which used a receding horizon to update the optimal trajectories based on the current state information. Significantly, the proposed method can not only realize collision avoidance of microsatellite swarm maneuvering at the macrolevel, but also provided optimal trajectories for each microsatellite of swarm individuals at the micro-level.

    Finally, the numerical simulation was carried out to verify the proposed macro-micro trajectory planning method of microsatellite swarm. The author gave a virtual central microsatellite and designed a large-scale (300) microsatellite swarm with an omnidirectional flight configuration. The CVT algorithm was used to divide regions, and so as to determine the position of the microsatellites to be transferred at the next moment. Then, one of the cubes was selected in the transfer process and performed CVT on it to determine the transfer position of the microsatellite. After 50 iterations, a stable configuration was obtained, and the position where the microsatellite moved at the next moment was determined. Due to the large scale of the microsatellite swarm, the process of achieving the final configuration required many transitions. To verify the proposed trajectory optimization based on model predictive control, one of the microsatellites was selected from the initial point to the next desired target point at a certain moment. The individual microsatellites can reach the desired point well. After the desired point was reached, the next iteration would be carried out, and due to the influence of orbital dynamics, the microsatellite may not remain the target point without control constraints. To make the mission of microsatellite swarm more practical, MPC was used in micro-planning to improve the performance of microsatellite swarm in terms of fuel consumption and resource utilization. Thus, simulation results about the collision-free guidance trajectory of microsatellites verified the benefits of the planning scheme, which accorded well with engineering practice.

     

    Reference

    Author: Xiwei Wu , Bing Xiao , Cihang Wu , and Yiming Guo

    Title of original paper: Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation and Model Predictive Control–Based Macro-Micro Trajectory Optimization of Microsatellite Swarm

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    Beijing Institute of Technology

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  • Henry Thomas reminisces about ‘E.T.’ as the movie turns 40 | CNN

    Henry Thomas reminisces about ‘E.T.’ as the movie turns 40 | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    As “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” celebrates its 40th anniversary, Henry Thomas, who starred as Elliott in the film, is reflecting on the movie and the fame that came with it.

    Thomas spoke to CNN this week as an updated 4K Ultra HD version of the movie was released. It includes 45 minutes of new bonus footage of the Steven Spielberg directed classic.

    Initially, Thomas said, he didn’t understand the little alien who came to live in Elliott’s house.

    “I remember as a kid, you know, I was really into ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Indiana Jones,’ Thomas recalled. “I was given a script and I read it and I thought, there’s no laser fighting? There’s no starships, or battles, or fights?”

    “But it works. It works somehow,” he said.

    Until he actually saw E.T. on set, Thomas said he thought “this guy with a finger that can heal you” was a silly concept. That changed when production started, the actor said, because Spielberg made everything so believable.

    “He was able to talk to you and make you feel like a peer and not feel as though you were being talked down to, which is important when you’re a kid,” Thomas said. “Especially when you’re a kid in an adult world, in an adult job.”

    Although Thomas hasn’t watched “E.T.” in 20 years (he said he can’t watch himself on screen), he understands why the movie has endured.

    “It speaks to our universal human compassion,” he said. “And we all have that. We all have the nurturer inside of us, right? So I think it speaks to that. It brings us back to being young.”

    Thomas said he still gets recognized as the boy from “E.T.” but doesn’t mind. It was harder when he was a kid, a shock to the system when strangers across the world started saying hello.

    Henry Thomas in 2019.

    “Suddenly, I wasn’t anonymous anymore. And that was a strange feeling as a boy,” Thomas recalled. “There was a book called ‘Never Talk to Strangers,’ and it was all about don’t talk to strangers, don’t talk to strange people that you don’t know, and unless your parents or your family know them, don’t talk to them, and then everybody’s talking to me.”

    After he got over the initial shock of fame, he learned that “E.T.” and the film’s director, have been wonderful to be associated with.

    “I imagine if it were a bad film that was universally reviled, we wouldn’t be talking about it now 40 years later,” Thomas said. “But also people, when they recognize me, they associate me with this great character, this kind of cool, rebellious young boy, and that’s a great thing.”

    Drew Barrymore and Henry Thomas in

    In addition to the never-before-seen footage of the movie, other bonus features in the new release include a look back on the movie, “40 Years of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” along with “TCM Classic Film Festival: An Evening With Steven Spielberg.” There are also interviews from the cast and crew and a talk with composer John Williams about the movie’s famous score. (TCM and CNN are both part of Warner Bros. Discovery.)

    Thomas said he recognizes how special “E.T.” is.

    “It is a rare and unique thing to be a part of, and I appreciate it so much more now because I know how rare it is to have a success in this industry,” he said. “Most films come and go in a couple of years and nobody remembers them. This one stuck around.”

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  • NASA’s Webb Uncovers Dense Cosmic Knot in The Early Universe

    NASA’s Webb Uncovers Dense Cosmic Knot in The Early Universe

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    Newswise — Astronomers looking into the early universe have made a surprising discovery using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope: a cluster of massive galaxies in the process of forming around an extremely red quasar. The result will expand our understanding of how galaxy clusters in the early universe came together and formed the cosmic web we see today.

    A quasar, a special type of active galactic nucleus (AGN), is a compact region with a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Gas falling into a supermassive black hole makes the quasar bright enough to outshine all the galaxy’s stars.

    The quasar Webb explored, called SDSS J165202.64+172852.3, existed 11.5 billion years ago. It is unusually red not just because of its intrinsic red color, but also because the galaxy’s light has been redshifted by its vast distance. That made Webb, having unparalleled sensitivity in infrared wavelengths, perfectly suited to examine the galaxy in detail.

    This quasar is one of the most powerful known galactic nuclei that’s been seen at such an extreme distance. Astronomers had speculated that the quasar’s extreme emission could cause a “galactic wind,” pushing free gas out of its host galaxy and possibly greatly influencing future star formation there.

    To investigate the movement of the gas, dust and stellar material in the galaxy, the team used the telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). This powerful instrument uses a technique called spectroscopy to look at the movement of various outflows and winds surrounding the quasar. NIRSpec can simultaneously gather spectra across the telescope’s whole field of view, instead of just from one point at a time, enabling Webb to simultaneously examine the quasar, its galaxy and the wider surroundings.

    Previous studies by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories called attention to the quasar’s powerful outflows, and astronomers had speculated that its host galaxy could be merging with some unseen partner. But the team was not expecting Webb’s NIRSpec data to clearly indicate it was not just one galaxy, but at least three more swirling around it. Thanks to spectra over a broad area, the motions of all this surrounding material could be mapped, resulting in the conclusion that the red quasar was in fact part of a dense knot of galaxy formation.

    “There are few galaxy protoclusters known at this early time. It’s hard to find them, and very few have had time to form since the big bang,” said astronomer Dominika Wylezalek of Heidelberg University in Germany, who led the study with Webb. “This may eventually help us understand how galaxies in dense environments evolve. It’s an exciting result.”

    Using the observations from NIRSpec, the team was able to confirm three galactic companions to this quasar and show how they are connected. Archival data from Hubble hint that there may be even more. Images from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 had shown extended material surrounding the quasar and its galaxy, prompting its selection for this study into its outflow and the effects on its host galaxy. Now, the team suspects they could have been looking at the core of a whole cluster of galaxies – only now revealed by Webb’s crisp imaging.

    “Our first look at the data quickly revealed clear signs of major interactions between the neighboring galaxies,” shared team member Andrey Vayner of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “The sensitivity of the NIRSpec instrument was immediately apparent, and it was clear to me that we are in a new era of infrared spectroscopy.”

    The three confirmed galaxies are orbiting each other at incredibly high speeds, an indication that a great deal of mass is present. When combined with how closely they are packed into the region around this quasar, the team believes this marks one of the densest known areas of galaxy formation in the early universe. “Even a dense knot of dark matter isn’t sufficient to explain it,” Wylezalek says. “We think we could be seeing a region where two massive halos of dark matter are merging together.” Dark matter is an invisible component of the universe that holds galaxies and galaxy clusters together, and is thought to form a “halo” that extends beyond the stars in these structures.

    The study conducted by Wylezalek’s team is part of Webb’s investigations into the early universe. With its unprecedented ability to look back in time, the telescope is already being used to investigate how the first galaxies were formed and evolved, and how black holes formed and influenced the structure of the universe. The team is planning follow-up observations into this unexpected galaxy proto-cluster, and hope to use it to understand how dense, chaotic galaxy clusters like this one form, and how it’s affected by the active, supermassive black hole at its heart.

    These results will be published in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters. This research was completed as part of Webb’s Early Release Science program #1335.

    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 CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

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    Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)

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  • Method for decoding asteroid interiors could help aim asteroid-deflecting missions

    Method for decoding asteroid interiors could help aim asteroid-deflecting missions

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    Newswise — NASA hit a bullseye in late September with DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, which flew a spacecraft straight at the heart of a nearby asteroid. The one-way kamikaze mission smashed into the stadium-sized space rock and successfully reset the asteroid’s orbit. DART was the first test of a planetary defense strategy, demonstrating that scientists could potentially deflect an asteroid headed for Earth.

    Now MIT researchers have a tool that may improve the aim of future asteroid-targeting missions. The team has developed a method to map an asteroid’s interior structure, or density distribution, based on how the asteroid’s spin changes as it makes a close encounter with more massive objects like the Earth.

    Knowing how the density is distributed inside an asteroid could help scientists plan the most effective defense. For instance, if an asteroid were made of relatively light and uniform matter, a DART-like spacecraft could be aimed differently than if it were deflecting an asteroid with a denser, less balanced interior.

    “If you know the density distribution of the asteroid, you could hit it at just the right spot so it actually moves away,” says Jack Dinsmore ’22, who developed the new asteroid-mapping technique as an MIT undergraduate majoring in physics.  

    The team is eager to apply the method to Apophis, a near-Earth asteroid that is estimated to pose a significant hazard if it were to make impact. Scientists have ruled out the likelihood of a collision during Apophis’ next flybys for at least a century. Beyond that, their forecasts grow fuzzy.   

    “Apophis will miss Earth in 2029, and scientists have cleared it for its next few encounters, but we can’t clear it forever,” says Dinsmore, who is now a graduate student at Stanford University. “So, it’s good to understand the nature of this particular asteroid, because if we ever need to redirect it, it’s important to understand what it’s made of.”

    Dinsmore and Julien de Wit, assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), detail their new method in a study appearing today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

    Spinning boiled versus raw

    The seeds of the team’s asteroid-mapping method grew out of an MIT class Dinsmore took last year, taught by de Wit. The class, 12.401 (Essentials of Planetary Sciences), introduces the basic principles and formation mechanisms of planets, asteroids, and other objects in the solar system. As a final project, Dinsmore explored how an asteroid behaves during a close encounter.

    In class, he wrote a code to simulate various shapes and sizes of asteroids as well as how their orbital and spin dynamics change when influenced by the gravitational pull of a more massive object like the Earth.

    “I initially just tried to ask, what happens when an asteroid passes by Earth? Does it respond at all? Because I wasn’t sure,” Dinsmore recalls. “And the answer is, it does, in a way that depends very strongly on the shape and physical properties of the asteroid.”

    That initial realization prompted another question: Could the dynamics of an asteroid’s close encounter be used to predict not just its shape and size, but also its internal makeup? To get at an answer, Dinsmore continued the project with de Wit, through the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), which enables students to perform original research with a faculty member.

    He and de Wit took a deeper dive into the dynamics of a close encounter, writing out a more complex code, which they used to simulate a zoo of different asteroids, each with a different size, shape, and internal composition, or distribution of density. They then ran the simulation forward to see how each asteroid’s spin should wobble or shift as it passes close to an object of a certain mass and gravitational pull.  

    “It’s similar to how you can tell the difference between a raw and boiled egg,” de Wit offers. “If you spin the egg, the egg responds and spins differently depending on its interior properties. The same goes for an asteroid during a close encounter: You can get a grasp of what’s happening on the inside just by looking on how it responds to the strong gravitational forces it experiences during a flyby.”

    A close match

    The team is presenting their results in a new software “toolkit,” which they name AIME, for Asteroid Interior Mapping from Encounters (the acronym also translates as “love” in French). The software can be used to reconstruct the internal density distribution of an asteroid, from observations of its spin change during a close encounter.

    The researchers say that, if scientists can take more detailed measurements of asteroids and their spin dynamics during close encounters, these measurements could be used to improve AIME’s reconstructions of asteroid interiors.

    Their best chance, they say, may come with Apophis. During its forthcoming close encounters, de Wit and Dinsmore hope astronomers will point their telescopes at the space rock to measure its size, shape, and spin evolution as it streaks past. They could then feed these measurements into AIME to find a match — a simulated asteroid with the same size, shape, and spin dynamics as Apophis, that also relates to a particular interior density distribution.

    “Then, with AIME, you could publish a density map that most likely represents Apophis’ interior,” Dinsmore says.

    “Understanding the interior properties of asteroids helps us understand the extent to which close encounters could be of concern, and how to deal with them, as well as where they formed and how they got here,” de Wit adds. “Now with this framework, there’s a new way of getting a look inside an asteroid.”

    This research was supported, in part, by the MIT UROP office.

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    Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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  • James Webb Space Telescope captures new details of iconic ‘Pillars of Creation’ | CNN

    James Webb Space Telescope captures new details of iconic ‘Pillars of Creation’ | 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
     — 

    The James Webb Space Telescope captured a highly detailed snapshot of the so-called Pillars of Creation, a vista of three looming towers made of interstellar dust and gas that’s speckled with newly formed stars.

    The area, which lies within the Eagle Nebula about 6,500 light-years from Earth, had previously been captured by the Hubble Telescope in 1995, creating an image deemed “iconic” by space observers.

    The fact that new stars are brewing within the eerie columns of cosmic dust and gas is what earned the area its name.

    The Webb telescope used its Near-Infrared Camera, also called NIRCam, to give astronomers a new, closer look at the region, glimpsing through some of the dusty plumes to reveal more infant stars that glow bright red.

    “Newly formed protostars are the scene-stealers,” reads a news release from the European Space Agency. “When knots with sufficient mass form within the pillars of gas and dust, they begin to collapse under their own gravity, slowly heat up, and eventually form new stars.”

    Since Hubble first imaged the area in the 1990s, astronomers have returned to the scene several times. The ESA William Herschel Telescope, for example, has also captured an image of the distinctive area of star birth, and Hubble created its own followup image in 2014. Each new instrument that sets its sights on the region gives researchers new insight, according to ESA.

    “Along the edges of the pillars are wavy lines that look like lava. These are ejections from stars that are still forming. Young stars periodically shoot out jets that can interact within clouds of material, like these thick pillars of gas and dust,” according to a news release.

    “This sometimes also results in bow shocks, which can form wavy patterns like a boat does as it moves through water,” it reads. “These young stars are estimated to be only a few hundred thousand years old, and will continue to form for millions of years.”

    Webb is operated by NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. The $10 billion space observatory, launched last December, has enough fuel to continue snapping unprecedented images of the cosmos for about 20 years.

    Compared with the capabilities of other telescopes, the space observatory’s powerful, massive mirror and infrared light technology can uncover faint, distant galaxies that are otherwise invisible — and Webb has the potential to enhance our understanding of the origins of the universe.

    Some of Webb’s first images, which have been rolling out since July, have highlighted the observatory’s capabilities to reveal previously unseen aspects of the cosmos, like star birth shrouded in dust.

    However, astronomers are also using the telescope’s stable and precise image quality to illuminate our own solar system, and so far it has taken images of Mars, Jupiter and Neptune.

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  • Researchers discover new monster black hole ‘practically in our back yard’

    Researchers discover new monster black hole ‘practically in our back yard’

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    Newswise — HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (Oct. 19, 2022) – The discovery of a so-called monster black hole that has about 12 times the mass of the sun is detailed in a new Astrophysical Journal research submission, the lead author of which is Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti, a physics professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH).

    “It is closer to the sun than any other known black hole, at a distance of 1,550 light years,” says Dr. Chakrabarti, the Pei-Ling Chan Endowed Chair in the Department of Physics at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System. “So, it’s practically in our back yard.”

    Black holes are seen as exotic because, although their gravitational force is clearly felt by stars and other objects in their vicinity, no light can escape a black hole so they can’t be seen in the same way as visible stars.

    “In some cases, like for supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, they can drive galaxy formation and evolution,” Dr. Chakrabarti says.

    “It is not yet clear how these noninteracting black holes affect galactic dynamics in the Milky Way. If they are numerous, they may well affect the formation of our galaxy and its internal dynamics.” 

    To find the black hole, Dr. Chakrabarti and a national team of scientists analyzed data of nearly 200,000 binary stars released over the summer from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite mission.

    “We searched for objects that were reported to have large companion masses but whose brightness could be attributed to a single visible star,” she says. “Thus, you have a good reason to think that the companion is dark.”

    Interesting sources were followed up with spectrographic measurements from various telescopes, including the Automated Planet Finder in California, Chile’s Giant Magellan Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. 

    “The pull of the black hole on the visible sun-like star can be determined from these spectroscopic measurements, which give us a line-of-sight velocity due to a Doppler shift,” says Dr. Chakrabarti. A Doppler shift is the change in frequency of a wave in relation to an observer, like how the pitch of a siren’s sound changes as an emergency vehicle passes.

    “By analyzing the line-of-sight velocities of the visible star – and this visible star is akin to our own sun – we can infer how massive the black hole companion is, as well as the period of rotation, and how eccentric the orbit is,” she says. “These spectroscopic measurements independently confirmed the Gaia solution that also indicated that this binary system is composed of a visible star that is orbiting a very massive object.”

    The black hole has to be inferred from analyzing the motions of the visible star because it is not interacting with the luminous star.  Noninteracting black holes don’t typically have a doughnut-shaped ring of accretion dust and material that accompanies black holes that are interacting with another object. Accretion makes the interacting type relatively easier to observe optically, which is why far more of that type have been found.

    “The majority of black holes in binary systems are in X-ray binaries – in other words, they are bright in X-rays due to some interaction with the black hole, often due to the black hole devouring the other star,” says Dr. Chakrabarti. “As the stuff from the other star falls down this deep gravitational potential well, we can see X-rays.”

    These interacting systems tend to be on short-period orbits, she says. “In this case we’re looking at a monster black hole but it’s on a long-period orbit of 185 days, or about half a year,” Dr. Chakrabarti says. “It’s pretty far from the visible star and not making any advances toward it.”   

    The techniques the scientists employed should apply to finding other noninteracting systems, as well.

    “This is a new population that we’re just starting to learn about and will tell us about the formation channel of black holes, so it’s been very exciting to work on this,” says Peter Craig, a doctoral candidate at the Rochester Institute of Technology who is advised on his thesis by Dr. Chakrabarti.

    “Simple estimates suggest that there are about a million visible stars that have massive black hole companions in our galaxy,” says Dr. Chakrabarti. “But there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, so it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. The Gaia mission, with its incredibly precise measurements, made it easier by narrowing down our search.”

    Scientists are trying to understand the formation pathways of noninteracting black holes.

    “There are currently several different routes that have been proposed by theorists, but noninteracting black holes around luminous stars are a very new type of population,” Dr. Chakrabarti says. “So, it will likely take us some time to understand their demographics, and how they form, and how these channels are different – or if they’re similar – to the more well-known population of interacting, merging black holes.” 

     

    About The University of Alabama in Huntsville

    Launched from America’s quest to conquer space, The University of Alabama in Huntsville is one of America’s premier doctoral-granting, research-intensive universities. Located in the second largest research park in the United States, UAH has robust capabilities in astrophysics, cybersecurity, data analytics, logistics and supply chain management, optical systems and engineering, reliability and failure analysis, rotorcraft and unmanned systems, severe weather, space propulsion and more. UAH prepares students for demanding positions in engineering, the sciences, business, nursing, education, the arts, humanities and social sciences. 

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  • Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX says it can no longer pay for critical satellite services in Ukraine, asks Pentagon to pick up the tab | CNN Politics

    Exclusive: Musk’s SpaceX says it can no longer pay for critical satellite services in Ukraine, asks Pentagon to pick up the tab | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Since they first started arriving in Ukraine last spring, the Starlink satellite internet terminals made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX have been a vital source of communication for Ukraine’s military, allowing it to fight and stay connected even as cellular phone and internet networks have been destroyed in its war with Russia.

    So far roughly 20,000 Starlink satellite units have been donated to Ukraine, with Musk tweeting on Friday the “operation has cost SpaceX $80 million and will exceed $100 million by the end of the year.”

    But those charitable contributions could be coming to an end, as SpaceX has warned the Pentagon that it may stop funding the service in Ukraine unless the US military kicks in tens of millions of dollars per month.

    Documents obtained by CNN show that last month Musk’s SpaceX sent a letter to the Pentagon saying it can no longer continue to fund the Starlink service as it has. The letter also requested that the Pentagon take over funding for Ukraine’s government and military use of Starlink, which SpaceX claims would cost more than $120 million for the rest of the year and could cost close to $400 million for the next 12 months.

    “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales wrote to the Pentagon in the September letter.

    Among the SpaceX documents sent to the Pentagon and seen by CNN is a previously unreported direct request made to Musk in July by the Ukrainian military’s commanding general, General Valerii Zaluzhniy, for almost 8,000 more Starlink terminals.

    In a separate cover letter to the Pentagon, an outside consultant working for SpaceX wrote, “SpaceX faces terribly difficult decisions here. I do not think they have the financial ability to provide any additional terminals or service as requested by General Zaluzhniy.”

    The documents, which have not been previously reported, provide a rare breakdown of SpaceX’s own internal numbers on Starlink, detailing the costs and payments associated with the thousands of terminals in Ukraine. They also shed new light on behind-the-scenes negotiations that have provided millions of dollars in communications hardware and services to Ukraine at little cost to Kyiv.

    The letters come amid recent reports of wide-ranging Starlink outages as Ukrainian troops attempt to retake ground occupied by Russia in the eastern and southern parts of the country.

    Sources familiar with the outages said they suddenly affected the entire frontline as it stood on September 30. “That has affected every effort of the Ukrainians to push past that front,” said one person familiar with the outages who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. “Starlink is the main way units on the battlefield have to communicate.”

    There was no warning to Ukrainian forces, a second person said, adding that now when Ukraine liberates an area a request has to be made for Starlink services to be turned on.

    The Financial Times first reported the outages which resulted in a “catastrophic” loss of communication, a senior Ukrainian official said. In a tweet responding to the article, Musk didn’t dispute the outage, saying that what is happening on the battlefield is classified.

    SpaceX’s suggestion it will stop funding Starlink also comes amid rising concern in Ukraine over Musk’s allegiance. Musk recently tweeted a controversial peace plan that would have Ukraine give up Crimea and control over the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions.

    After Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky raised the question of who Musk sides with, he responded that he “still very much support[s] Ukraine” but fears “massive escalation.”

    Musk also argued privately last month that Ukraine doesn’t want peace negotiations right now and that if they went along with his plan, “Russia would accept those terms,” according to a person who heard them.

    “Ukraine knows that its current government and wartime efforts are totally dependent on Starlink,” the person familiar with the discussions said. “The decision to keep Starlink running or not rests entirely in the hands of one man. That’s Elon Musk. He hasn’t been elected, no one decided to give him that power. He has it because of the technology and the company he built.”

    On Tuesday Musk denied a report he has spoken to Putin directly about Ukraine. On Thursday, when a Ukrainian minister tweeted that Starlink is essential to Ukraine’s infrastructure, Musk replied: “You’re most welcome. Glad to support Ukraine.”

    More than seven months into the war, it’s hard to overstate the impact Starlink has had in Ukraine. The government in Kyiv, Ukrainian troops as well and NGOs and civilians have relied on the nimble, compact and easy-to-use units created by SpaceX. It’s not only used for voice and electronic communication but to help fly drones and send back video to correct artillery fire.

    CNN has seen it used at numerous Ukrainian bases.

    Elon Musk pauses and looks down as he speaks during a press conference at SpaceX's Starbase facility near Boca Chica Village in South Texas on February 10, 2022.

    “Starlink has been absolutely essential because the Russians have targeted the Ukrainian communications infrastructure,” said Dimitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank. “Without that they’d be really operating in the blind in many cases.”

    Though Musk has received widespread acclaim and thanks for responding to requests for Starlink service to Ukraine right as the war was starting, in reality, the vast majority of the 20,000 terminals have received full or partial funding from outside sources, including the US government, the UK and Poland, according to the SpaceX letter to the Pentagon.

    SpaceX’s request that the US military foot the bill has rankled top brass at the Pentagon, with one senior defense official telling CNN that SpaceX has “the gall to look like heroes” while having others pay so much and now presenting them with a bill for tens of millions per month.

    According to the SpaceX figures shared with the Pentagon, about 85% of the 20,000 terminals in Ukraine were paid – or partially paid – for by countries like the US and Poland or other entities. Those entities also paid for about 30% of the internet connectivity, which SpaceX says costs $4,500 each month per unit for the most advanced service. (Over the weekend, Musk tweeted there are around 25,000 terminals in Ukraine.)

    In his July letter to Musk, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, Gen. Zaluzhniy, praised the Starlink units’ “exceptional utility” and said some 4,000 terminals had been deployed by the military. However, around 500 terminals per month are destroyed in the fighting, Zaluzhniy said, before asking for 6,200 more terminals for the Ukrainian military and intelligence services and 500 per month going forward to offset the losses.

    SpaceX said they responded by asking Zaluzhniy to instead take up his request to the Department of Defense.

    On September 8 the senior director of government sales for SpaceX wrote the Pentagon saying the costs have gotten too high, approaching $100 million. The official asked the Department of Defense to pick up Ukraine’s new request as well as ongoing service costs, totaling $124 million for the remainder of 2022.

    Those costs, according to the senior defense official, would reach almost $380 million for a full year.

    SpaceX declined repeated requests for comment on both the outages and their recent request to the Pentagon. A lawyer for Musk did not reply to a request for comment. Defense Department spokesman Bob Ditchey told CNN, “The Department continues to work with industry to explore solutions for Ukraine’s armed forces as they repel Russia’s brutal and unprovoked aggression. We do not have anything else to add at this time.”

    Early US support for Starlink came via the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) which according to the Washington Post spent roughly $3 million on hardware and services in Ukraine. The largest single contributor of terminals, according to the newly obtained documents, is Poland with payment for almost 9,000 individual terminals.

    US Pentagon in Washington DC building looking down aerial view from above

    The US has provided almost 1,700 terminals. Other contributors include the UK, NGOs and crowdfunding.

    The far more expensive part, however, is the ongoing connectivity. SpaceX says it has paid for about 70% of the service provided to Ukraine and claims to have offered that highest level – $4,500 a month – to all terminals in Ukraine despite the majority only having signed on for the cheaper $500 per month service.

    The terminals themselves cost $1500 and $2500 for the two models sent to Ukraine, the documents say, while consumer models on Starlink’s website are far cheaper and service in Ukraine is just $60 per month.

    That’s just 1.3% of the service rate SpaceX says it needs the Pentagon to start paying.

    “You could say he’s trying to get money from the government or just trying to say ‘I don’t want to be part of this anymore,’” said the person familiar with Ukraine’s requests for Starlink. Given the recent outages and Musk’s reputation for being unpredictable, “Feelings are running really high on the Ukrainian side,” this person said.

    Musk is the biggest shareholder of the privately-held SpaceX. In May, SpaceX disclosed that its valuation had risen to $127 billion and it has raised $2 billion this year, CNBC reported.

    Last week, Musk faced a barrage of criticism on Twitter – including from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – after presenting in a series of tweets his peace plan to end the war. It would include giving Crimea to Russia and re-do referenda, supervised by the United Nations this time, in the four regions Russia recently illegally annexed.

    It echoed comments he’d made last month at an exclusive closed-door conference in Aspen, Colorado called “The Weekend,” at which Musk told a room full of attendees that Ukraine should seek peace now because they’ve had recent victories.

    “This is the time to do it. They don’t want to do it, that’s for sure. But this is the time to do it,” he said, according to a person in the room. “Everyone wants to seek peace when they’re losing but they don’t want to seek peace when they’re winning. For now.”

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  • ‘We’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before:’ Black Hole Spews Out Material Years After Shredding Star

    ‘We’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before:’ Black Hole Spews Out Material Years After Shredding Star

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    Newswise — Cambridge, Mass. – In October 2018, a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years away from Earth. Though it may sound thrilling, the event did not come as a surprise to astronomers who occasionally witness these violent incidents while scanning the night sky.

    But nearly three years after the massacre, the same black hole is lighting up the skies again — and it hasn’t swallowed anything new, scientists say.

    “This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and lead author of a new study analyzing the phenomenon.

    The team concludes that the black hole is now ejecting material traveling at half of the speed of light, but are unsure why the outflow was delayed by several years. The results, described this week in the Astrophysical Journal, may help scientists better understand black holes’ feeding behavior, which Cendes likens to “burping” after a meal.

    The team spotted the unusual outburst while revisiting tidal disruption events (TDEs) — when encroaching stars are spaghettified by black holes — that occurred over the last several years.

    Radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico showed that the black hole had mysteriously reanimated in June 2021. Cendes and the team rushed to examine the event more closely.

    “We applied for Director’s Discretionary Time on multiple telescopes, which is when you find something so unexpected, you can’t wait for the normal cycle of telescope proposals to observe it,” Cendes explains. “All the applications were immediately accepted.”

    The team collected observations of the TDE, dubbed AT2018hyz, in multiple wavelengths of light using the VLA, the ALMA Observatory in Chile, MeerKAT in South Africa, the Australian Telescope Compact Array in Australia, and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in space.

    Radio observations of the TDE proved the most striking.

    “We have been studying TDEs with radio telescopes for more than a decade, and we sometimes find they shine in radio waves as they spew out material while the star is first being consumed by the black hole,” says Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and the CfA, and co-author on the new study. “But in AT2018hyz there was radio silence for the first three years, and now it’s dramatically lit up to become one of the most radio luminous TDEs ever observed.”

    Sebastian Gomez, a postdoctoral fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute and co-author on the new paper, says that AT2018hyz was “unremarkable” in 2018 when he first studied it using visible light telescopes, including the 1.2-m telescope at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Arizona.

    Gomez, who was working on his doctoral dissertation with Berger at the time, used theoretical models to calculate that the star torn apart by the black hole was only one tenth the mass of our Sun. 

    “We monitored AT2018hyz in visible light for several months until it faded away, and then set it out of our minds,” Gomez says.

    TDEs are well-known for emitting light when they occur. As a star nears a black hole, gravitational forces begin to stretch, or spaghettify, the star. Eventually, the elongated material spirals around the black hole and heats up, creating a flash that astronomers can spot from millions of light years away.

    Some spaghettified material occasionally gets flung out back into space. Astronomers liken it to black holes being messy eaters — not everything they try to consume makes it into their mouths.

    But the emission, known as an outflow, normally develops quickly after a TDE occurs — not years later. “It’s as if this black hole has started abruptly burping out a bunch of material from the star it ate years ago,” Cendes explains.

    In this case, the burps are resounding.

    The outflow of material is traveling as fast as 50 percent the speed of light. For comparison, most TDEs have an outflow that travels at 10 percent the speed of light, Cendes says.

    “This is the first time that we have witnessed such a long delay between the feeding and the outflow,” Berger says. “The next step is to explore whether this actually happens more regularly and we have simply not been looking at TDEs late enough in their evolution.”

    Additional co-authors on the study include Kate Alexander and Aprajita Hajela of Northwestern University; Ryan Chornock, Raffaella Margutti and Daniel Brethauer of the University of California, Berkley; Tanmoy Laskar of Radboud University; Brian Metzger of Columbia University; Michael Bietenholz of York University and Mark Wieringa of the Australia Telescope National Facility.

     

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    About the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

    The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian is a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian designed to ask—and ultimately answer—humanity’s greatest unresolved questions about the nature of the universe. The Center for Astrophysics is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with research facilities across the U.S. and around the world.

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  • 5 things to know for Oct. 11: Ukraine, Rail strike, Trump, School shootings, Speeding | CNN

    5 things to know for Oct. 11: Ukraine, Rail strike, Trump, School shootings, Speeding | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    If you’re planning to take a trip this winter, now’s the time to pounce on the best prices available for airfares. Some travel experts recommend securing holiday flights before Halloween because prices typically increase considerably as Thanksgiving gets closer.

    Here’s what else you need to know to Get Up to Speed and On with Your Day.

    (You can get “5 Things You Need to Know Today” delivered to your inbox daily. Sign up here.)

    Air raid sirens sounded in multiple regions of Ukraine today after Russia launched new missile attacks. This comes after Russia unleashed a wave of attacks across Ukraine on Monday, killing at least 19 people and injuring more than 100 others, according to Ukrainian officials. Critical infrastructure was hit in several regions and in the capital Kyiv, where dozens of fires broke out, Ukraine’s emergency services said. Numerous areas in the region are still without power today following the barrage of Russian strikes that were partly targeted at energy facilities to leave Ukrainians without electricity. President Joe Biden spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Monday, condemning the strikes and pledging continued US security assistance “including advanced air defense systems.”

    The threat of a freight rail strike is back after a major union of railroad workers rejected a tentative agreement Monday with the nation’s freight carriers. More than half of the 23,000 members in one of the largest rail unions opposed the agreement, meaning the two parties will now enter negotiations in hopes of reaching a deal. Without a new deal, there could be a strike that significantly impacts the nation’s already struggling supply chains. But such a strike would not occur until at least November 19, according to the union. The Biden administration has been desperate to avoid a strike because major railroads carry 30% of the nation’s freight and a strike could cause shortages and higher prices for essentials like food and gasoline. A strike could also force factories without parts to close and leave store shelves empty during the holiday shopping season. 

    Romans: There is a move afoot here for better quality of living

    New emails released by the General Services Administration debunk claims made by former President Donald Trump and his allies that the government agency is to blame for packing boxes from the White House that ended up at his Mar-a-Lago residence after his presidency. Former presidents are allowed to take certain government materials and office equipment to set up a permanent office away from the White House. But that does not include the sort of classified documents Trump took to Mar-a-Lago – which are at the center of an ongoing Justice Department criminal investigation. Trump and his allies have said GSA was responsible for classified documents being at his Florida home. The newly released emails, however, make clear that the boxes had already been packed and sat shrink-wrapped in an empty office space.

    Here’s why Trump-appointed judge Aileen Cannon’s decisions are under scrutiny

    Prosecutors and defense attorneys will present closing arguments today in the sentencing trial of the Parkland school shooter. This will be the last opportunity for them to make their cases before the jury will help decide whether the gunman will be sentenced to death or to life in prison. The imminent conclusion of the trial comes almost a year after the 24-year-old shooter pleaded guilty to 17 counts of murder and other charges for the February 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which 14 students and three school staff members were killed. Separately, in Uvalde, Texas, the school district’s superintendent announced his retirement Monday after new details surfaced about the Robb Elementary School massacre, which left 19 students and two teachers dead.

    Families of victims and survivors testify in Parkland shooter trial

    The National Transportation Safety Board has recommended a new vehicle system that could stop drivers from speeding. The technology essentially recognizes speed limits and either issues visual or audible alerts when a driver is speeding or prevents vehicles from going above those limits. New York City has become the first city in the US to test the speed-limiting technology in 50 of its fleet vehicles. “There’s no reason today, with so much technology and so much awareness, that anybody should die at the hands of an automobile,” said Meera Joshi, New York City’s Deputy Mayor for Operations. After more than 20,000 deaths on US roads this year alone, the NTSB has called on the federal government to start incentivizing car makers to put speed-limiting systems in new cars, according to a report. It will be up to automobile manufacturers whether they introduce the technology.

    Actor William Shatner shares what it’s like traveling to space

    “Everything I had expected to see was wrong,” Shatner wrote in a new biography. Learn about the actor’s life-changing experience aboard a suborbital space tourism flight.

    Football player Sebastian Gutierrez swaps pizza shop for the New England Patriots

    A former pizza shop worker is now earning his dough in the NFL! Read his inspirational story here.

    How dogs changed the course of civilization

    Did you know dogs were the first animal that humans ever domesticated? Here’s how adorable fur babies became a part of our daily lives.

    Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd reunion delights ‘Back to the Future’ fans

    The pair had an epic reunion at Comic Con 37 years after the release of the sci-fi comedy. (Can you believe it’s been 37 years? Take a second to remember those good old days.)

    Shaquille O’Neal reiterates his desire to buy an NBA team

    The four-time NBA champion shared a cryptic message about his wish to buy an NBA team “back home.” Here are some possibilities where that could be.

    Eileen Ryan, a veteran actress and the mother of actor Sean Penn, has died, Penn’s publicist shared in a statement. She was 94. Ryan appeared in more than 60 television shows and films over her long career, including the acclaimed films “Magnolia” and “I Am Sam.”

    $18 million

    That’s the prize Dustin Johnson won after clinching the inaugural LIV Golf championship, tournament officials announced Monday. The 38-year-old made the switch from the PGA Tour to the Saudi-backed rebel series in June. The controversial LIV Golf series has caused a rift in professional golf, as LIV golfers have been banned from the PGA Tour for participating in the breakaway series.

    “No child should ever be subjected to such racist, mean and dehumanizing comments, especially from a public official.”

    – Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin and his husband, issuing a family statement after his fellow council member, Nury Martinez, made racist remarks about him and his Black child. In leaked audio obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Martinez says Bonin, a White man, appeared with his son on a float in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade and “handled his young Black son as though he were an accessory.” The Times reported that Martinez also said of Bonin’s child, “Parece changuito,” or “He’s like a monkey.” Following the backlash for an array of offensive comments heard in the audio, Martinez resigned as Los Angeles City Council president on Monday.

    Fall temperatures for the Northeast as rain hits Florida

    Check your local forecast here>>>

    Today is National Coming Out Day

    Every year on October 11, National Coming Out Day celebrates the act of “coming out” – when an LGBTQ person decides to publicly share their gender identities or sexual orientation. Watch this 2-minute video to learn how the rainbow flag became a symbol of LGBTQ pride. (Click here to view)

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  • A failed truce renewal in Yemen could further complicate US-Saudi relations | CNN

    A failed truce renewal in Yemen could further complicate US-Saudi relations | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.


    Abu Dhabi, UAE
    CNN
     — 

    After a rare six months of relative calm, Yemen’s warring sides last week failed to renew a truce deal, with calls from the United Nations for an extension falling on deaf ears.

    With one side backed by Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia, it remains to be seen whether the US will support its Middle Eastern ally after last week’s whopping oil cut – seen as a snub from the oil-rich kingdom to the Biden administration ahead of the US midterm elections.

    The country’s Iran-backed Houthis and their rival Saudi-led coalition had agreed on a nationwide truce in April, the first since 2016. The two-month truce was renewed twice but came to an end last week over eleventh-hour demands put forward by the Houthis with regards to public sector wages.

    At the last minute, the Houthis imposed “maximalist and impossible demands that the parties simply could not reach, certainly in the time that was available,” said US Special Envoy for Yemen Tim Lenderking in a statement, adding that diplomatic efforts by the US and the UN continue.

    “The unannounced reasons [for not renewing the truce] are speculated to be that the Iranians asked the Houthis, directly, to help escalate things in the region,” said Maged Almadhaji, director of the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies.

    “Iranians and Houthis are in a difficult political position,” Almadhaji told CNN, adding that Iranians are under immense pressure amid raging protests at home and might be trying to keep Gulf rivals at bay by keeping them occupied with Yemen’s conflict.

    The few months of ceasefire were a breath of fresh air for millions of Yemenis who, in the last seven years of conflict, were driven to “acute need,” the UN said. The peace period saw the monthly rate of people displaced internally dip by 76%, and the number of civilians killed or injured by fighting lowered by 54%, said the UN last week.

    Yemen has been described by the UN as the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis.

    Lenderking said that some aspects of the initial truce are still being upheld, such as relatively low violence, continued fuel shipments that can still offload into the Houthi-held Hodeidah port as well as resumed civilian-commercial flights from Sanaa airport. But the risks are very high.

    The Houthis have already warned investors to steer clear of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as they are “fraught with risks” – a message seen as a direct threat that the Iran-backed group is ready to strike once again.

    “With the Houthis, it is always risky not to take their threats seriously,” Peter Salisbury, consultant at International Crisis Group, told CNN.

    Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis have previously launched attacks on the oil-rich countries, mainly targeting oil fields and key airports. In March, Houthis claimed responsibility for an attack on an Aramco oil storage facility in Jeddah. And in January, they said they were behind a drone strike on fuel trucks near the airport in Abu Dhabi.

    Saudi Arabia has previously sounded alarms to its powerful US security ally over these attacks, criticizing the Biden administration over what it perceived as waning US security presence in the volatile Middle East.

    Security agitation among Gulf monarchies was exacerbated by US nuclear talks with Iran earlier this year, where the possibility of lifted economic sanctions posed the risk of an emboldened Tehran that, it was feared, would, in turn, further empower and arm its regional proxies – predominantly the Houthis.

    But the Houthis are already arguably emboldened, said Gregory Johnsen, a former member of the United Nations’ Panel of Experts on Yemen.

    “I think Iran would like nothing better than to leave the Houthis in Sanaa on Saudi’s border as check against future Saudi behavior,” Johnsen told CNN.

    Saudi Arabia’s strongest security ally has been the US, and traditionally the two countries’ unwritten agreement has been oil in exchange for security – namely against Iranian hostility.

    But now, as Saudi Arabia defies the US with its latest OPEC oil cut, the two countries’ friendship is under increased strain. And with already existing reluctance in congressional politics to increase military support to Saudi Arabia, it remains unclear whether the US will respond with swift support to its Middle Eastern ally should violence flare, said Salisbury.

    A number of US Democratic politicians have accused Saudi Arabia of siding with Russia, saying the oil cut should be seen as a “hostile act” against the US.

    The threats made by certain US senators against Saudi Arabia after Wednesday’s OPEC oil cut – some of whom have called on US President Joe Biden to “retaliate” – are not credible, said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political science professor in the UAE, adding that the response from the Biden administration “has been more restrained.”

    It is in America’s interest to protect Middle Eastern oil producers, Abdulla told CNN, especially as supply tightens amid the Ukraine war and stalled nuclear talks with Iran.

    “At this moment in history, America needs Saudi Arabia, needs the UAE, just as much as we need them for security purposes,” Abdulla said.

    US policy toward Yemen has in recent years been in disarray, analysts say. The Obama administration first backed the Saudi-led coalition in 2016, but levels of support later changed as evidence emerged of civilian casualties in the Saudi-led air campaign.

    Saudi Arabia enjoyed extensive support for its Yemen policy during the Trump administration. In late 2019, Biden promised to make the kingdom a pariah and, a little over a year later, he slashed US support for Saudi Arabia’s offensive operations in Yemen, “including relevant arms sales.”

    The US continues, however, to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia through the loophole of “defense.”

    The Biden administration last August approved and notified Congress of possible multibillion-dollar weapons sales to both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, citing defense against Houthi attacks as a legitimate cause for concern.

    “Now, the US is frustrated with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, while it has no leverage with the Houthis,” said Johnsen. “The US has been lost at sea for the past year and a half when it comes to a Yemen policy,” he added, labelling it a situation largely “of its own making.”

    While there is pressure within the US to sternly react to Saudi Arabia’s energy policies, it is yet to be seen how the US will respond to the developments in Yemen, where some say Washington would be wise to uphold its security guarantees.

    “I don’t think it is in the best interest of America to reduce their military assistance to Saudi Arabia,” said Abdulla. “If they do, it will backfire on America more than many of these senators would imagine.”

    At least 185 people, including at least 19 children, have been killed in nationwide protests across Iran since September, said Iran Human Rights (IHR), an Iran-focused human rights group based in Norway, on Saturday.

    CNN cannot independently verify death toll claims. Human Rights Watch said that, as of September 30, Iranian state-affiliated media placed the number of deaths at 60.

    Now in their third week, protests have swept across Iranian cities following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died after being arrested by morality police and taken to a “re-education center” for not abiding by the country’s conservative dress code.

    Here is the latest on this developing story:

    • Iranian police on Sunday dispersed high school girls who gathered to protest in southwestern Tehran. Meanwhile, an eyewitness told CNN that in the southeastern part of the city, girls took to the street shouting “woman, life, freedom” and “death to the dictator.”
    • The death toll from the crackdown on Saturday’s protests in Iran’s Kurdish city of Sanandaj has increased to at least four, according to the Iranian human rights group Hengaw on Sunday.
    • Iran’s state broadcaster IRINN (Islamic Republic of Iran News Network) was allegedly hacked during its nightly news program on Saturday, according to the pro-reform IranWire outlet, which shared a clip of the hacking. Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency reported on the hacking, saying that IRIB/IRINN’s 9 p.m. newscast was hacked for a few moments by anti-revolutionary elements.
    • The internet connectivity monitoring service NetBlocks on Saturday said that Iran had shut off the internet in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj in an attempt to curb a growing protest movement amid reports of new killings.

    Violent weekend as four Palestinians killed in West Bank, Israeli soldier killed in Jerusalem shooting

    An Israeli soldier has died following a rare shooting at a military checkpoint in East Jerusalem on Saturday, the Israel Defense Forces said. The attack comes after a violent two days in the occupied West Bank where Israeli forces killed four Palestinians, Palestinian authorities said.

    • Background: The shooting happened at a checkpoint of the normally quiet area near the Shuafat Refugee Camp in northeast Jerusalem, an area considered occupied territory by most of the international community. Video of the incident shows a man coming up to a group of soldiers and shooting them point blank before running away. Noa Lazar, an 18-year-old female soldier, was killed, and a 30-year-old guard was critically injured. In a statement, Prime Minister Yair Lapid called the attacker a “vile terrorist” and said Israel will “not rest until we bring these heinous murderers to justice.” Prior to the checkpoint attack, Israeli forces killed four Palestinians in the occupied West Bank over two days, according to Palestinian authorities. Two were killed in the Jenin Refugee Camp on Saturday when, the IDF said, clashes broke out as they came to arrest an “Islamic Jihad operative” that the IDF claimed was “involved in terrorist activities, planning and carrying out shooting attacks towards IDF soldiers in the area.” Another two, including a 14-year-old boy, were killed in separate incidents elsewhere in the territories. The occupied West Bank, especially the areas of Jenin and Nablus, is in an increasingly volatile and dangerous situation, as near-daily clashes take place between the Israeli military and increasingly armed Palestinians.
    • Why it matters: More than 105 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces so far this year, making it the deadliest year for Palestinians in the occupied territories since 2015, according to Palestinian health authorities. Israel says most Palestinians killed were engaging violently with soldiers during military operations, although dozens of unarmed civilians have been killed as well, human rights groups including B’Tselem have said. Some 21 civilians and soldiers have been killed so far this year in attacks targeting Israelis.

    US says a failed rocket attack targeted US and partnered forces in Syria

    One rocket was launched at a base housing US and coalition troops in Syria on Saturday night, according to US Central Command. No US or coalition forces were injured in the attack, and no facilities or equipment were damaged, CENTCOM said in a statement.

    • Background: The rocket was a 107mm rocket, and additional rockets were found at the launch site, CENTCOM said. The attack is under investigation. On September 18, a similar rocket attack using 107mm rockets was launched against Green Village in Syria, a base housing US troops. Three 107mm rockets were launched and a fourth was found at the launch site.
    • Why it matters: The attack comes two days after US forces killed two top ISIS leaders in an airstrike in northern Syria, and three days after a US raid killed an ISIS smuggler. Although there is no attribution for the attack, such rocket launches are frequently used by Iranian-backed militias in Syria.

    UAE president to meet with Putin during visit to Russia on Tuesday

    UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a visit to Russia on Tuesday, UAE state-run news agency WAM said.

    • Background: “During his visit, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed will discuss with President Putin the friendly relations between the UAE and Russia along with a number of regional and international issues and developments of common interest,” WAM said.
    • Why it matters: The visit comes less than a week after OPEC+, the international cartel of oil producers, announced a significant cut to output in an effort to raise oil prices. The UAE is a member of the organization led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. CNN has reached out to the UAE government for comment.

    Before clicking enter on your Google search today, take a minute to check out today’s ‘Google Doodle.’ Standing by a library and a lighthouse is prominent Egyptian historian Mostafa El-Abbadi, who would have turned 94 today.

    Hailed as “champion of Alexandria’s Resurrected Library” by the New York Times, he was the key player in resurrecting the Great Library of Alexandria.

    The son of the founder of the College of Letters and Arts at the University of Alexandria, El-Abbadi’s love for academia came at a very young age.

    The intellectual went on to graduate from the University of Cambridge and returned home as a professor of Greco-Roman studies at the University of Alexandria, where his love for the Library of Alexandria grew.

    El-Abbadi sought to restore the glory of the “Great Library” which disappeared between 270 and 250 A.D. – and he succeeded.

    Combined efforts by the Egyptian government, UNESCO, and other organizations led to the opening of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina on October 16, 2002.

    Despite being the main driver of the project, El-Abbadi was not invited to the ceremony after he became a critic of how the scheme was handled by the authorities.

    “It became the project of the presidents, of the people who cut the rope, the people who stood on the front stage, and not of Mostafa El-Abbadi,” said Prof. Mona Haggag, a former student of El-Abbadi and head of the department of Greek and Roman archaeology at the University of Alexandria, according to the New York Times.

    By Mohammed Abdelbary

    Models present creations by Italy's iconic fashion house Stefano Ricci at the temple of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Hatshepsut on the west bank of the Nile river, off Egypt's southern city of Luxor, on October 9.

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  • After Fire and Monsoons, DESI Resumes Cataloguing the Cosmos

    After Fire and Monsoons, DESI Resumes Cataloguing the Cosmos

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    Newswise — On June 11, lightning struck a remote ridge in the Baboquivari Mountain range outside of Tucson, Arizona. Within days, the Contreras Fire had traveled eight miles and climbed Kitt Peak, a 6,800-foot mountain dotted with white telescope domes. Within one was the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), the heart of a next-generation sky survey that is creating the largest 3D map of the universe.

    Researchers use DESI to study dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the expansion of our universe. It’s a clue into the fundamental workings of nature, how the universe evolved, and how it may end.

    Collaborators who had spent years designing, building, and running the instrument watched the flames sweep over the observatory’s southern ridge on webcams – until the power went out. They switched to watching the curlicue paths of planes dropping fire retardant. 

    When the smoke had cleared, teams returned to find something astounding: All of the scientific equipment was intact. For several weeks, they carefully cleaned components and turned DESI’s systems on one by one. On Sept. 10, DESI began imaging the night sky once again.

    “We’re relieved to return to our science with equipment that is performing almost as well as it was before the fire,” said Michael Levi, director of the international DESI collaboration and a scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which manages the project. “I’m eternally grateful to the firefighters and the crews who secured the site, and their patience and ingenuity getting things running again.”  

    It’s not entirely business as usual yet, since the fire knocked out power lines and the high-speed network normally used to transmit data. The telescope is temporarily powered by a generator, and the information recorded each night has to take a more circuitous route to researchers around the globe. Each day, the data (roughly 80 gigabytes worth on a clear night, capturing about 150,000 celestial objects) is loaded onto an external hard drive and driven down the winding mountain road, past the recently charred mesquite and rebounding wild grasses, for processing in Tucson.

    DESI owes much of the successful restart to quick actions by crews on the mountain who secured the precious equipment.

    “We’ve performed tests during the restart and found little loss in performance despite the terrible conditions that the mountain experienced,” said Claire Poppett, one of DESI’s lead observers and a physicist at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. “The work that the crew did to protect the instrument was phenomenal, and we wouldn’t be in the good shape we are in without it.”

    Fire on the mountain

    DESI is housed in the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. As the fire approached, non-essential staff evacuated. A small team stayed behind to secure the site as best they could. They rotated the telescope to face away from the oncoming smoke, powered off electronics, and covered the mirror and lenses that image galaxies billions of light-years away.

    “The most important thing was the optics,” said Matthew Evatt, the mechanical engineering manager at NSF’s NOIRLab, which operates the Mayall Telescope with funding provided by DOE. “We scrounged around and found tarps and plastic left over from way earlier in DESI.”

    Evatt and Bob Stupak, the electronics maintenance supervisor at NOIRLab, climbed ladders and secured the plastic sheets over the 4-meter-diameter mirror using bungee cords, ratchet straps, and electrical tape. They maneuvered the telescope and a scissor lift to access and cover DESI’s corrector barrel, which holds six glass lenses in alignment. Soon, they too evacuated, leaving behind only firefighters and two NOIRLab employees familiar with the site: Fred Wortman and Zade Arnold.

    “This place is a second home to me,” said Arnold, the site’s environmental health and safety technician who grew up close to the observatory, which sits on Tohono O’odham land. Rising above the Sonoran Desert below, Kitt Peak (or Iolkam Du’ag) is considered a “Sky Island”: a remote mountaintop with a unique ecosystem, including some unexpected inhabitants, such as bears. 

    “It’s a little piece of paradise I go to every day, and I wanted to keep it safe,” Arnold said.

    As hotshot crews cleared brush, controlled backburns, and put out spot fires, Wortman and Arnold supported their efforts, providing information on the site’s hydrant and water systems. When teams later cut power to avoid potential flare-ups, the hydrant system shut off, so the two rigged a gravity-fed water system for responders to drink and fill their trucks. “Fred and Zade’s efforts were vital,” Levi said.

    In the early hours of June 17, the fire swept over the main observatory site, causing the white domes to glow red with reflected firelight.

    The fire and smoke wrapped around the peak and continued north, burning a total of around 30,000 acres before being contained. At the observatory, four support buildings burned, but all the scientific equipment and telescopes survived.   

    Road to recovery

    It took several weeks to secure the site and restore basic functions like power and water. The fire had damaged the observatory access road, burning away all of the guardrails and miles of power poles. It was followed closely by monsoons, causing mudslides. With the charred vegetation unable to stabilize the soil, a boulder the size of a car fell onto the road. Crews accessing the site to assess damage and begin clean up traveled together in a daily caravan to minimize disruptions to road repair.

    “The amount of work it takes to recover from something like this is always surprising,” said Stupak. “This facility is pretty much a small town up here. We’re pretty isolated. Everything from potable water to data is a huge effort by a lot of people.”

    DESI collaborators took a methodical approach, starting up and quadruple-checking one system at a time. Experts looked for any smoke damage, changed out air filters, and cleaned the optical components with a special wash of carbon dioxide. They checked the 5,000 robotic positioners that rotate and lock onto galaxies, and placed the spectrographs (tools that measure the wavelength of light) under vacuum, removing all the air over several days. The last step was turning on sensitive image sensors known as CCDs, which turn light into data and operate in extreme cold. It all worked. When the monsoons finally cleared, DESI resumed cataloguing the cosmos. 

    The sky survey uses the distance and speed of far-off galaxies, collecting data known as “redshifts.” During the first year of observations leading up to the fire, researchers were already ahead of schedule, having collected 14 million galaxy and quasar redshifts – a whopping 30% of the total they plan to gather during the instrument’s five-year run. The collaboration doesn’t expect any long-term impact from the fire and is working towards a large data release in early 2023.

    In the coming months, crews will continue to repair the larger site and improve the instrument, doing additional cleaning on the optics to return them to pre-fire condition.

    “It feels really great to be back on sky again,” said Poppett, who has worked on DESI for more than a decade. “The fact that the telescope and instrument is still there is all we need – and it just needs a small tune-up to be as good as before.”

    DESI, including operations of the Mayall telescope, is supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Science and Technologies Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico, the Ministry of Economy of Spain, and by the DESI member institutions.

    Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) is a program of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab.

    The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation.

    ###

    Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest scientific challenges are best addressed by teams, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Today, Berkeley Lab researchers develop sustainable energy and environmental solutions, create useful new materials, advance the frontiers of computing, and probe the mysteries of life, matter, and the universe. Scientists from around the world rely on the Lab’s facilities for their own discovery science. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory, managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

    DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

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  • SpaceX, NASA to launch 3 astronauts and 1 cosmonaut to the ISS. Here’s everything you need to know | CNN

    SpaceX, NASA to launch 3 astronauts and 1 cosmonaut to the ISS. Here’s everything you need to know | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    SpaceX and NASA are set to launch a crew of astronauts who hail from all over the world on a trip to the International Space Station.

    The mission, which will include some historic firsts, is moving forward even as rising geopolitical tensions brew on the ground.

    The four crew members — astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada of NASA, astronaut Koichi Wakata of JAXA, or Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and cosmonaut Anna Kikina of Roscosmos — are on track to launch aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft at 12 p.m. ET Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. If bad weather or other issues interfere, the teams could try again Thursday at 11:38 a.m. ET.

    A live broadcast on NASA’s website kicked off just after 8:30 a.m. ET Wednesday. NASA will also stream a post-event briefing, tentatively scheduled for 1:30 p.m. ET, to discuss the launch.

    Dubbed Crew-5, the mission is the sixth astronaut flight launched as a joint endeavor between NASA and SpaceX, a privately held aerospace company, to the space station.

    The upcoming spaceflight marks a historic moment, as Mann will not only become the first Native American woman ever to travel to space. She’ll also serve as mission commander, making her the first woman ever to take on such a role for a SpaceX mission.

    What’s more, Kikina will be the first Russian to join a SpaceX mission as part of a ride-sharing deal NASA and Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, inked in July. Her participation in the flight is the latest clear signal that, despite mounting tensions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the decades-long US-Russia partnership in space will persist — at least for now.

    After the anticipated launch on Wednesday, the Crew Dragon spacecraft will separate from the SpaceX rocket that boosts it to orbit and begin a slow, precise trek to the ISS, which orbits about 200 miles (322 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface. The spacecraft is aiming to dock with the space station on Thursday around 5 p.m. ET.

    Launching NASA astronauts to the space station aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft is nothing new. The space agency collaborated with SpaceX for years to transition the task of shuttling people to and from the space station after NASA retired its Space Shuttle Program in 2011.

    With the return of astronaut launches from US soil, SpaceX has offered a stage for several historic firsts. The Crew-4 Dragon mission, for example, carried NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins, the first Black woman ever to join the ISS crew.

    On this flight, Mann, a registered member of the Wailacki tribe of the Round Valley Reservation, will become the first Native American woman ever to travel to orbit.

    “I am very proud to represent Native Americans and my heritage,” Mann said. “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.”

    In her role as commander, Mann will be responsible for ensuring the spacecraft is on track from the time it launches until it docks with the ISS and again when it returns home with the four Crew-5 astronauts next year. Never before has a woman taken on the commander role on a SpaceX mission, though a couple of women served in that position during the Space Shuttle Program.

    Kikina, the Roscosmos cosmonaut, will become the first Russian ever to launch on a SpaceX vehicle at a time when US-Russian relations are hitting near fever pitch over the Ukraine war.

    But officials at NASA have said repeatedly that joint operations with Russia on the ISS, where the two countries are the primary operators, will remain isolated from the fray. Kikina’s flight comes just weeks after NASA’s Dr. Frank Rubio launched to the ISS aboard a Roscosmos Soyuz capsule.

    “I really love my crewmates,” Kikina told reporters after she arrived at the Florida launch site on Saturday. “I really feel good, comfortable. … We will do our job the best way: happy.”

    READ MORE: Meet the space trailblazers of color who empowered others to dream

    Mann and her fellow NASA astronaut Josh Cassada, who grew up in White Bear Lake, Minnesota, both joined NASA in 2013. Cassada has described Mann as one of his “closest friends on the planet.”

    As with Mann, this mission will be the first trip to space for Cassada and Kikina.

    For veteran astronaut Wakata, who has previously flown on both NASA’s space shuttle and Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft, this trip marks his fifth spaceflight mission.

    “I still remember when I first flew and saw our beautiful home planet,” he recalled during an August press conference. “It was so wonderful, such a beautiful planet, then I felt very lucky to be able to call this planet our home.”

    After reaching the ISS, the crew will join the seven astronauts already aboard the ISS — including four NASA astronauts, a European Space Agency astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts.

    There will be a handover period, where the current ISS crew will help the newly arrived astronauts settle in before a separate Crew Dragon spacecraft brings the four astronauts who were part of SpaceX’s Crew-4 mission back home.

    Then the Crew-5 astronauts will set to work conducting spacewalks, during which astronauts exit the ISS, to maintain the space station’s exterior, as well as performing more than 200 science experiments.

    “Experiments will include studies on printing human organs in space, understanding fuel systems operating on the Moon, and better understanding heart disease,” according to NASA.

    Crew-5 is slated to return from space in about five months.

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  • Out-of-service satellites must be removed within 5 years, FCC says | CNN Business

    Out-of-service satellites must be removed within 5 years, FCC says | CNN Business

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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.


    Washington
    CNN Business
     — 

    Satellites that are no longer in service must get out of the sky far more quickly under a new rule adopted by US federal regulators Thursday — and it’s all in the name of combating the garbage in Earth’s orbit.

    Unused satellites in low-Earth orbit, which is the area already most congested with satellites, must be dragged out of orbit “as soon as practicable, and no more than five years following the end of their mission,” according to the new Federal Communications Commission rule.

    That’s far less time than the long-standing rule of 25 years that has been criticized as too lax. Even NASA advised years ago that the 25-year timeline should be reduced to five years.

    “Twenty-five years is a long time. There is no reason to wait that long anymore, especially in low-Earth orbit,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said at Thursday’s meeting. The FCC rule passed unanimously.

    The goal of this rule is prevent the dangerous proliferation of junk and debris in space. Already, there’s estimated to be more than 100 million pieces of space junk traveling uncontrolled through orbit, ranging in size from a penny to an entire rocket booster. Much of that debris, experts say, is too small to track.

    Collisions in space have happened before. And each collision can span thousands of new pieces of debris, each of which risk setting off even more collisions. One well-known theory, called “Kessler Syndrome,” warns that it’s possible for spaceborne garbage to set of disastrous chain reactions, potentially causing Earth’s orbit to become so cluttered with junk that it could render future space exploration and satellite launches impractical and even impossible.

    More than half of the roughly 10,000 satellites the world has sent into orbit since the 1950s are now obsolete and considered “space junk,” Rosenworcel said, adding that the debris poses risks to communication and safety.

    The FCC plan had been questioned by some US lawmakers who have said the rules could create “conflicting guidance” and without clear congressional authority. But Thursday’s vote moved forward nonetheless.

    “At risk is more than the $279 billion-a-year satellite and launch industries and the jobs that depend on them,” according to an FCC document released earlier this month. “Left unchecked, orbital debris could block all of these benefits and reduce opportunities across nearly every sector of our economy.”

    The number of satellites in low-Earth orbit, which is the sphere of orbit extending about 2,000 km or 1,200 miles out, has grown exponentially in recent years, thanks in large part to massive, new “megaconstellations” of small satellites pouring into space, largely by commercial companies. Most notably, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched about 3,000 satellites to space for its space-based internet service, Starlink.

    There’s also plans to put tens of thousands of new satellites in low-Earth orbit in years to come, FCC commissioner Nathan Simington noted during Thursday’s meeting.

    Commercial companies have routinely promised to take the debris issue seriously, and SpaceX had already agreed to comply with the recommended five-year rule for getting defunct satellites out of orbit.

    But there has long been a broader push within the space community to codify new regulations. So the FCC announced plans in early September to at least vote on updates to US regulations.

    The FCC also specified that it will apply the rule not only to the US satellite operators it oversees but also to “non-US-licensed satellites and systems seeking US market access.”

    “A veritable Cambrian explosion of commercial space operations is just over the horizon, and we had better be ready when it arrives,” said Simington.

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  • Firefly successfully launches unmanned rocket | CNN Business

    Firefly successfully launches unmanned rocket | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Texas-based commercial rocket company Firefly launched a rocket into space Friday morning, about a year after a previous attempt ended in an explosion.

    The company announced “100% Mission success” on Twitter.

    The Alpha rocket launched at 12:01 a.m. Pacific time from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

    It was originally set to launch September 11, but that was scrapped because the rocket’s helium pressure dropped, affiliate KSBY reported.

    “The Alpha is an economical small satellite launch vehicle,” Vandenberg reported on its website. “Firefly had three educational payloads aboard and successfully inserted into an elliptical transfer orbit, coast to apogee, and performed a circularization burn.”

    It was the company’s second unmanned launch ever from Vandenberg.

    In September 2021, a rocket appeared to have a smooth liftoff but then malfunctioned. US Space Force officials ordered the company to destroy the rocket in mid-air to prevent hurting people or property below. No one was injured.

    Firefly and other commercial rocket companies are trying to make space a place of competitive business rather than the sole domain of governments.

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  • Exploring Europa Possible with Silicon-Germanium Transistor Technology

    Exploring Europa Possible with Silicon-Germanium Transistor Technology

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    Newswise — Europa is more than just one of Jupiter’s many moons – it’s also one of most promising places in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life. Under 10 kilometers of ice is a liquid water ocean that could sustain life. But with surface temperatures at -180 Celsius and with extreme levels of radiation, it’s also one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system. Exploring Europa could be possible in the coming years thanks to new applications for silicon-germanium transistor technology research at Georgia Tech.

    Regents’ Professor John D. Cressler in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and his students have been working with silicon-germanium heterojunction bipolar transistors (SiGe HBTs) for decades and have found them to have unique advantages in extreme environments like Europa.

    “Due to the way that they’re made, these devices actually survive those extreme conditions without any changes made to the underlying technology itself,” said Cressler, who is the project investigator. “You can build it for what you want it to do on Earth, and you then can use it in space.”

    The researchers are in year one of a three-year grant in the NASA Concepts for Ocean Worlds Life Detection Technology (COLDTech) program to design the electronics infrastructure for upcoming Europa surface missions. NASA plans to launch the Europa Clipper in 2024, an orbiting spacecraft that will map the oceans of Europa, and then eventually send a landing vehicle, Europa Lander, to drill through the ice and explore its ocean. But it all starts with electronics that can function in Europa’s extreme environment.

    Cressler and his students, together with researchers from NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and the University of Tennessee (UT), demonstrated the capabilities of SiGe HBTs for this hostile environment in a paper presented at the IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference in July.

    Europa’s Challenge

    Like Earth, Jupiter also has a liquid metal core that generates a magnetic field, producing radiation belts of high-energy protons and electrons from the impinging solar wind. Unfortunately, as a moon of Jupiter, Europa sits squarely in those radiation belts. In effect, any technology designed for Europa’s surface would not only need to be able to survive the cold temperatures but also the worst radiation encountered in the solar system.

    Fortunately, SiGe HBTs are ideal for this hostile environment. The SiGe HBT introduces a nanoscale Si-Ge alloy inside a typical bipolar transistor to nano-engineer its properties, effectively producing a much faster transistor while maintaining the economy-of-scale and low cost of traditional silicon transistors.  SiGe HBTs have the unique ability to maintain performance under extreme radiation exposure, and their properties naturally improve at colder temperatures. Such a unique combination makes them ideal candidates for Europa exploration.

    “It’s not just doing the basic science and proving that SiGe works,” Cressler said. “It’s actually developing electronics for NASA to use on Europa. We know SiGe can survive high levels of radiation. And we know it’s remains functional at cold temperatures. What we did not know is if it could do both at the same time, which is needed for Europa surface missions.”

    Testing the Transistors

    To answer this question, the GT researchers used JPL’s Dynamitron, a machine that shoots high-flux electrons at very low temperatures to test SiGe in Europa-type environments. They exposed ­­SiGe HBTs to one million Volt electrons to a radiation dose of five million rads of radiation (200-400 rads is lethal to humans), at 300, 200, and 115 Kelvins (-160 Celsius).

    “What had never been done was to use electronics like we did in that experiment,” Cressler said. “So, we worked literally for the first year to get the results that are in that paper, which is in essence definitive proof that what we claimed is, in fact, true—that SiGe does survive Europa surface conditions.” 

    In the next two years, the GT and UT researchers will develop actual circuits from SiGe that could be used on Europa, such as radios and microcontrollers. Yet more importantly, these devices could then be seamlessly used in almost any space environment, including on the moon and Mars.

    “If Europa is the worst-case environment in the solar system, and you can build these to work on Europa, then they will work anywhere,” Cressler said. “This research ties together past research that we have done in my team here at Georgia Tech for a long time and shows really interesting and novel applications of these technologies. We pride ourselves on using our research to break new innovative ground and thereby enable novel applications.”

    Citation:  J.W. Teng, G.N. Tzintzarov, D. Nergui, J.P. Heimerl, Y. Mensah, J.P. Moody, D.O. Thorbourn, L. Del Castillo, L. Scheick, M.M. Mojarradi, B.J. Blalock, and J.D. Cressler, “Cryogenic Total-Ionizing-Dose Response of 4th-Generation SiGe HBTs using 1-MeV Electrons for Europa-Surface Applications,” IEEE Nuclear and Space Radiation Effects Conference, July 2022.

     

    ####

    The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

    The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 46,000 students, representing 50 states and more than 150 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

    As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society. 

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  • Images from the James Webb Telescope Do Not Disprove The Big Bang Theory

    Images from the James Webb Telescope Do Not Disprove The Big Bang Theory

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    The Big Bang theory is currently the most popular model we have for the birth of our universe. Observations on the expanding universe, as well as observations of Cosmic background radiation, lingering electromagnetic radiation from the Big Bang, have helped back this theory. However, rumors have spread on the internet that the newly released images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) somehow suggest the big bang is wrong. We find this claim to be mostly false. Although the spectacular images from JWST may have surprised scientists in how they might change theories on galaxy formation, they by no means negate the Big Bang theory.

    Much of the argument stems from an article written by Eric Lerner (author of the book “The Big Bang Never Happened”). Lerner’s article, published in IAI news, argues that the new James Webb Space Telescope images contradict The Big Bang Hypothesis. Lerner appears to suggest that the distant galaxies seen in the images are older than the Big Bang theory would allow since they seemed to resemble fully formed galaxies. However, the data from JWST suggest that galaxies form more quickly than we think, not that they necessarily contain elements from before the Big Bang or that the universe is not expanding. The observation of these well-formed galaxies at such an early time does not debunk a theory as well supported as the Big Bang. Lerner also cherrypicks quotes from astronomer Allison Kirkpatrick, who said in an article published in Nature, “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.” Kirkpatrick has since explained that she was reacting in awe of what astronomers have learned from the first JWST images, not as proof of astronomers panicking that the Big Bang Theory has been debunked. In an article on CNET, Kirkpatrick suggests that images from JWST “support the Big Bang model because they show us that early galaxies were different than the galaxies we see today – they were much smaller!”

    As reported by Brian Koberlein at Universe Today…

    It’s a common misconception that redshift proves that galaxies are speeding away from us. They aren’t. Distant galaxies aren’t speeding through space. Space itself is expanding, putting greater distance between us. It’s a subtle difference, but it means that galactic redshift is caused by cosmic expansion, not relative motion. It also means that distant galaxies appear a bit larger than they would in a static universe. They are distant and tiny, but the expansion of space gives the illusion of them being larger. As a result, the surface brightness of distant galaxies dims only proportional to redshift.

    Professor Jason Steffen, a former NASA scientist who worked on the agency’s Kepler mission and an expert in astronomy/physics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, responds to the article questioning the Big Bang Hypothesis.

    In short, the evidence is still overwhelmingly in favor of a hot Big Bang as the origin of the universe.  There are many pieces of evidence that come together to motivate this model.  If the Big Bang were to be wrong, it would not likely be wrong for the reasons described, and it is not wrong because of any observations from JWST.

    While the origins of the model stem from observations of the expansion of the universe from galaxy redshifts (the Hubble Law), most of the detailed evidence for the Big Bang comes from the very early universe, the relative abundances of light elements, and the properties of the cosmic microwave background.  The processes that made these occurred within the first half-million years after the Big Bang.  The JWST images are looking at galaxies as they were a half-billion (or more) years after the Big Bang—a factor of 1000 later in time. 

    There is much more uncertainty with how galaxies form and how the first stars form, which are very complicated processes that involve lots of different physical effects, than there is about the first 500,000 years, which was a relatively simple hot plasma of Hydrogen and Helium ions.  (And before that, it was similar to the conditions in the core of the Sun, which we also understand.)

     

     

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    Newswise

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  • Arizona senator leans on astronaut past to call for climate crisis action amid blistering heat wave | CNN Politics

    Arizona senator leans on astronaut past to call for climate crisis action amid blistering heat wave | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly on Sunday leaned into his experience as an astronaut to call for climate crisis action amid a blistering heatwave across the United States, including his home state of Arizona.

    “When I went into space four times, I mean, I could see how thin the atmosphere is over this planet. It’s as thin as a contact lens on an eyeball, and we have got to do a better job taking care of it,” Kelly told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    “I have not seen in my time in the Senate many folks that deny that the climate is changing. That was a thing of the past. Now is: What do we do about it? We passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which is a big down payment on reducing the amount of carbon we put up into the atmosphere. That will make a difference over time. We obviously have to do more,” he added.

    As the climate crisis ratchets temperatures higher and higher, scientists have warned there’s a growing likelihood that 2023 could be the Earth’s hottest year on record. Heat kills more Americans than any other form of severe weather, including flooding, hurricanes or extreme cold, according to National Weather Service data.

    These climate crisis warnings have been especially potent in recent days as more than 85 million people remain under heat alerts while the weekslong heat wave continues and intensifies in the Southwest. Dangerously high temperatures have continued to plague the western parts of the US throughout the weekend, with temperatures expected to grow hotter in the South in the coming days.

    More than 100 temperature records could be set through Monday across the West and South.

    “My view hasn’t really changed. We are suffering a heat wave here in Arizona. It is typically very hot in the summer. This is obviously dangerous to seniors and folks who are living on the streets,” Kelly said Sunday.

    While scientists say the heat records are alarming, most are unsurprised – though frustrated that their warnings have been largely ignored for decades.

    The world is “walking into an uncharted territory,” Carlo Buontempo, director of the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told CNN earlier this month. “We have never seen anything like this in our life.”

    Kelly also said Sunday he was “concerned” about the impact the group “No Labels” – which is pushing for a third-party unity ticket in 2024 – could have on President Joe Biden’s reelection bid.

    “I don’t think ‘No Labels’ is a political party. I mean, this is a few individuals putting dark money behind an organization, and that’s not what our democracy should be about; it should not be about a few rich people,” he told Tapper. “So I’m obviously concerned about what’s going on here in Arizona and across the country.”

    Arizona Democrats have sued over the recognition of No Labels as a political party with the ability to place candidates on the state’s ballot – and potentially play a spoiler role in 2024, when Arizona, which Biden won by less than half a point in 2020, is poised to be a critical swing state.

    No Labels is set to host an event Monday in New Hampshire, with centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia as a keynote speaker. Kelly said he had spoken to Manchin about the issue but did not offer any details.

    “I’m not going to go into details of conversations I have with my fellow senators. That’s sort of a policy of mine,” he said.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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