Have scientists discovered infrared radiation, evidence of waste heat generated by the energy-harvesting star-surrounding spheres first proposed by British American physicist Freeman Dyson? CNN reports: [A] new study that looked at 5 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy suggests that seven candidates could potentially be hosting Dyson spheres — a finding that's attracting scrutiny and alternate theories... Using historical data from telescopes that pick up infrared signatures, the research team looked at stars located within less than 1,000 light-years from Earth: "We started with a sample of 5 million stars, and we applied filters to try to get rid of as much data contamination as possible," said lead study author Matías Suazo, a doctoral student in the department of physics and astronomy of Uppsala University in Sweden. "So far, we have seven sources that we know are glowing in the infrared but we don't know why, so they stand out...."

Among the natural causes that could explain the infrared glow are an unlucky alignment in the observation, with a galaxy in the background overlapping with the star, planetary collisions creating debris, or the fact that the stars may be young and therefore still surrounded by disks of hot debris from which planets would later form...

An earlier study, published in March and using data from the same sources as the new report, had also found infrared anomalies among a sample dataset of 5 million stars in our galaxy. "We got 53 candidates for anomalies that cannot be well explained, but can't say that all of them are Dyson sphere candidates, because that's not what we are specifically looking for," said Gabriella Contardo, a postdoctoral research fellow at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, who led the earlier study. She added that she plans to check the candidates against Suazo's model to see how many tie into it. "You need to eliminate all other hypotheses and explanations before saying that they could be a Dyson sphere," she added. "To do so you need to also rule out that it's not some kind of debris disk, or some kind of planetary collision, and that also pushes the science forward in other fields of astronomy — so it's a win-win."

Both Contardo and Suazo agree that more research is needed on the data, and that ultimately they could turn to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope for more information, as it is powerful enough to observe the candidate stars directly. However, because of the lengthy, competitive procedures that regulate use of the telescope, securing access might take some time.

CNN adds that "A May 23 paper published in response to the one by Suazo and his colleagues suggests that at least three of the seven stars have been 'misidentified' as Dyson spheres and could instead be 'hot DOGs' — hot dust-obscured galaxies — and that the remaining four could probably be explained this way as well."

But "As for Dyson himself, if he were still alive, he also would be highly skeptical that these observations represent a technological signature, his son George argued: 'But the discovery of new, non-technological astronomical phenomena is exactly why he thought we should go out and look.' "

wgoodman shares a report from The Register: NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in action and conducting normal science operations for the first time since the veteran probe began spouting gibberish at the end of 2023. All four of the spacecraft's remaining operational instruments are now returning usable data to Earth, according to NASA. Some additional work is needed to tidy up the effects of the issue. Engineers need to resynchronize the timekeeping software of Voyager 1's three onboard computers to ensure that commands are executed at the correct times. Maintenance will also be performed on the digital tape recorder, which records some data from the plasma instrument for a six-monthly downlink to Earth.

Voyager 1's woes began in November 2023, when the spacecraft stopped transmitting usable data back to Earth. Rather than engineering and science data, NASA found itself faced with a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, as though the spacecraft was somehow stalled. Engineers reckoned the issue lay with the Flight Data System (FDS) and in March sent a command -- dubbed a "poke" -- to get the FDS to try some other software sequences and thus circumvent whatever was causing the problem. The result was a complete memory dump from the computer, which allowed engineers to pinpoint where the corruption had occurred. It appeared that a single chip was malfunctioning, and engineers were faced with the challenge of devising a software update that would work around the defective hardware.

Usable engineering data began to be returned later in April, and in May the mission team sent commands to instruct the probe to keep science data flowing. The result was that the plasma wave subsystem and magnetometer instrument began sending data immediately. According to NASA, the cosmic ray subsystem and low energy charged particle instrument required a little more tweaking but are now operational. The rescue was made all the more impressive by the fact that it takes 22.5 hours for a command to reach Voyager 1 and another 22.5 hours for a response to be received on Earth.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: NASA accidentally broadcast a simulation of astronauts being treated for decompression sickness on the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday, prompting speculation of an emergency in posts on social media. About 5:28 p.m. U.S. Central Time (2228 GMT), The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) live YouTube channel broadcast audio that indicated a crew member was experiencing the effects of decompression sickness (DCS), NASA said on its official ISS X account.

A female voice asks crew members to "get commander back in his suit", check his pulse and provide him with oxygen, later saying his prognosis was "tenuous", according to copies of the audio posted on social media. NASA did not verify the recordings or republish the audio. Several space enthusiasts posted a link to the audio on X with warnings that there was a serious emergency on the ISS. "This audio was inadvertently misrouted from an ongoing simulation where crew members and ground teams train for various scenarios in space and is not related to a real emergency," the ISS account post said. "There is no emergency situation going on aboard the International Space Station," it added.

Crew members on the ISS were in their sleep period at the time of the audio broadcast as they prepared for a spacewalk at 8 a.m. EDT on Thursday, the ISS post said. NASA's ISS YouTube channel -- at the time the audio was accidentally broadcast -- now shows an error message saying the feed has been interrupted.

The sun fired off a volley of radiation-riddled outbursts in May. When they slammed into Earth's magnetic bubble, the world was treated to iridescent displays of the northern and southern lights. But our planet wasn't the only one in the solar firing line. From a report: A few days after Earth's light show, another series of eruptions screamed out of the sun. This time, on May 20, Mars was blitzed by a beast of a storm. Observed from Mars, "this was the strongest solar energetic particle event we've seen to date," said Shannon Curry, the principal investigator of NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution orbiter, or MAVEN, at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

When the barrage arrived, it set off an aurora that enveloped Mars from pole to pole in a shimmering glow. If they were standing on the Martian surface, "astronauts could see these auroras," Dr. Curry said. Based on scientific knowledge of atmospheric chemistry, she and other scientists say, observers on Mars would have seen a jade-green light show, although no color cameras picked it up on the surface. But it's very fortunate that no astronauts were there. Mars's thin atmosphere and the absence of a global magnetic shield meant that its surface, as registered by NASA's Curiosity rover, was showered by a radiation dose equivalent to 30 chest X-rays -- not a lethal dose, but certainly not pleasant to the human constitution.

"Virgin Galactic launched six people to suborbital space on Saturday, launching a Turkish astronaut and three space tourists," reports Space.com, "on what was the final voyage of the VSS Unity space plane." Unity, attached to the belly of its carrier plane Eve, took off from runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico at 10:31 a.m. EDT (1431 GMT) and carried to an altitude of 44,562 feet (13,582 meters) over the next hour, where it was dropped and ignited its rocket engine to carry two pilots and four passengers to space and back. The mission, called Galactic 07, reached an altitude of 54.4 miles (87.5 km) and marked the seventh commercial spaceflight by Virgin Galactic on Unity, which is being retired to make way for the company's new "Delta" class of spacecraft rolling out in 2026.

"I will need much more time to try and process what just happened," Tuva Atasever, the Turkish Space Agency astronaut on the flight, said in a post-flight press conference, adding that the view of Earth was indescribable. "It's not something you can describe with adjectives. It's an experiential thing ... you just feel it in your gut."
One of the space tourists was a principal propulsion engineer at SpaceX, who wore the flags of the U.S. and India on his spacesuit to honor both his home country and that of his parents. The other two were a New York-based real estate developer and a London-based hotel and resort investment strategy advisor.

The flight landed 70 minutes later at 11:41 a.m. EDT (1541 GMT), according to the article, "marking only its seventh commercial spaceflight for Virgin Galactic and 12th crewed spaceflight overall." In all, Virgin Galactic flew the space plane just 32 times, including non-space test flights... "This vehicle was revolutionary," Virgin Galactic president Mike Moses said in the post-launch press conference. "We tested it, we flew it, we demonstrated and prove to the world that commercial human spaceflight is possible with private funding for private companies... Seven commercial space flights, a single vehicle flying six times in six months last year, that's groundbreaking," Moses said. "The fact that we can take this vehicle back to back to back on a monthly basis is is really revolutionary."

The new Delta class of spacecraft will be able to fly at least twice a week, about eight times the rate of SpaceShipTwo, with Virgin Galactic planning to build at least two to start its new fleet. "We're going to field in 2026 two spaceships, our mothership Eve, that's 750 astronauts a year going to space," Moses said of the new fleet's flight capacity. "That's more than have gotten to space in the 60 year history of spaceflight to date...."

Since 2018, Virgin Galactic has flown payloads as part of NASA's Flight Opportunities program and most recently was selected to be a contracted flight provider for NASA for the next five years.
Phys.org reports that with the Delta-class rockets, "The future of the company is at stake as it seeks at long last to get into the black. Virgin is burning through cash, losing more than $100 million in each of the past two quarters, with its reserves standing at $867 million at the end of March." It also laid off 185 people, or 18 percent of its workforce, late last year. Its shares are currently trading at 85 cents, down from $55 in 2021, the year Branson himself flew, garnering global headlines.
Saturday's flight also became "a suborbital science lab" for microgravity research, according to a statement from the company. Phys.org reports that during the flight, astronaut Atasever "wore custom headgear with brain activity monitoring sensors to collect physiological data, a dosimeter, and two commercially available insulin pens to examine the ability to administer accurate insulin doses in microgravity, Virgin said in a statement." And Virgin Galactic said their flight also carried "rack-mounted" autonomous payloads from both Purdue ("to study propellant slosh in fuel tanks of maneuvering spacecraf") and U.C. Berkeley ("testing a new type of 3D printing"), as well as "multiple human-tended experiments." "Discovery and innovation are central to our mission at Virgin Galactic," said Michael Colglazier, CEO of Virgin Galactic. "We're excited to build on our successful record of facilitating scientific experiments in suborbital space, and we look forward to continuing to expand our role in suborbital research going forward."

"The first European Space Agency instrument to land on the Moon has detected the presence of negative ions on the lunar surface produced through interactions with the solar wind," according to a statement from the agency, collecting over three hours of data, "three times more than what the science teams needed for mission success..." The solar wind is a constant flow of radiation and particles from the Sun. Earth's magnetic field acts as a shield. In contrast, the Moon has no magnetic field and a very tenuous atmosphere, called the exosphere. When the solar wind hits the Moon,âthe surface reacts, kicking up secondary particles... While the positively charged particles have been measured from orbit before, measuring negative particles was a challenge. Negative ions are short-lived and cannot make it to orbit.
The instrument was dropped off by China's Chang'e-6 lunar lander, and Europe's ground stations are also providing support for that mission. Futurism reports: Within just over 48 hours, China's Chang'e-6 lunar touched down on the far side of the Moon, successfully scooped up samples, and kicked off once again. It was an extraordinary feat, representing the first-ever samples ever collected from the side of the Moon that permanently faces away from us. During its brief visit, the lander also dropped off several scientific payloads on the lunar service, including the European Space Agency's Negative Ions at the Lunar Surface instrument.
The lander also unfurled China's red and gold flag for the first time on the far side of the moon, according to the Associated Press. And then... Its ascender lifted off Tuesday morning at 7:38 a.m. Beijing time, with its engine burning for about six minutes as it entered a preset orbit around the moon, the China National Space Administration said. The agency said the spacecraft withstood a high temperature test on the lunar surface, and acquired the samples using both drilling and surface collection before stowing them in a container inside the ascender of the probe as planned. The container will be transferred to a reentry capsule that is due to return to Earth in the deserts of China's Inner Mongolia region about June 25.
The samples "could help researchers figure out why the moon's two sides are so starkly different," writes Science News: Spacecraft observations of the farside show very little volcanic activity. Some scientists suspect that this is because the nearside crust is much thinner, which would have allowed more magma to come up from below the surface, says Kerri Donaldson Hanna, a planetary geologist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

There is evidence that some volcanism occurred in the South Pole-Aitken basin and in Apollo crater, though it appears this activity happened roughly 3.5 billion years ago. It's possible the impact that created both Aiken and Apollo weakened the lunar crust, forming fractures and allowing magma to flow. The samples onboard Chang'e-6 could contain clues as to whether or not this happened.

Both Chinese and international researchers will be able to study the material. Donaldson Hanna is looking forward to seeing what insights will be gleaned from Chang'e-6 as well as future landers, such as those in NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.
Thanks to Slashdot reader cusco for sharing the news.

Longtime Slashdot reader destinyland shared a story from Space.com reporting on Boeing's missed opportunity to dock with the International Space Station, after five of the 28 thrusters that help control Starliner's movement in space stopped operating. NASA has since been able to recover four of the thrusters to successfully dock Boeing's Starliner capsule with the ISS. From the report: There are now two U.S.-built crew spacecraft docked with the ISS for the first time. Boeing's Starliner joined SpaceX's Dragon capsule "Endeavour," which arrived in March. Boeing's Starliner launched successfully on Wednesday to begin the crew flight test. The mission represents a final major step before NASA certifies Boeing to fly crew on operational missions. [...]

NASA flight controllers called off a previously scheduled approach to resolve issues with Starliner's propulsion system. Starliner has 28 jets, known as its reaction control system, or RCS, engines, that help the spacecraft make small movements in orbit. The crew on Starliner, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, were told by NASA capsule communicator, or CAPCOM, Neal Nagata, that the 12:15 p.m. docking attempt had to be called off to resolve the spacecraft's propulsion issue. CAPCOM Nagata noted that the ISS has a zero fault tolerance for a spacecraft control problem.

The agency and Boeing had to troubleshoot five of the RCS jets that were not operating. Four of Starliner's malfunctioning jets were recovered after Wilmore and Williams worked with flight controllers to test fire the thrusters. CAPCOM Nagata had the astronauts hold the spacecraft beyond the "keep out sphere," an invisible boundary around the ISS that serves as a safety measure, while diagnosing the problematic thrusters.

Slashdot readers destinyland and LazarusQLong share a report from CNN: The third attempt was the charm for Boeing's Starliner mission after launching its first crewed flight test Wednesday in a milestone that has been a decade in the making. The new spacecraft's maiden voyage with humans on board lifted off atop an Atlas V rocket at 10:52 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are riding aboard the Starliner capsule on a journey that takes them to the International Space Station. The mission, known as the Crew Flight Test, is the culmination of Boeing's efforts to develop a spacecraft to rival SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule and expand the United States' options for ferrying astronauts to the space station under NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The federal agency's initiative aims to foster collaboration with private industry partners.

The flight marks only the sixth inaugural journey of a crewed spacecraft in US history, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson noted in a May news conference. "It started with Mercury, then with Gemini, then with Apollo, the space shuttle, then (SpaceX's) Dragon -- and now Starliner," Nelson said. Williams also made history as the first woman to fly aboard such a mission. NASA has a live recording of the launch on YouTube.

The 34-year-old Hubble Space Telescope is now operating with its final two working gyroscopes, necessitating a switch to a less productive "one-gyro" mode to extend its operational life. This contingency plan will reduce Hubble's productivity by over 12%, limit its ability to track fast-moving objects, and decrease the portion of the sky it can observe. That said, NASA expects it to keep functioning through 2035. Science.org reports: Normally, Hubble measures its location in space with a system that includes three gyroscopes -- rapidly spinning wheels that can sense forces in three directions. But in a 4 June press conference, NASA officials said one of the telescope's three remaining gyroscopes is on the fritz. The agency is now invoking a contingency plan: a "one-gyro" mode that keeps the other functioning gyroscope in reserve. The mode will reduce the telescope's productivity by more than 12% but preserve its ability to observe for years to come, Mark Clampin, NASA's astrophysics division director, said at the press conference. "We believe this is our best approach to support Hubble science through this decade and into the next."

Hubble's gyroscopes, which spin at 19,200 revolutions per minute, are extremely precise but finicky. The agency has flown a total of 22 gyroscopes across various servicing missions and is now down to the last two of the six currently onboard. In one-gyro mode, Hubble must rely on its less precise star trackers and other sensors to verify its position, a slower process that leads to reduced productivity. "It will take us more time to slew from one target attitude to the next, and to be able to lock on to that science target," said Patrick Crouse, Hubble's project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

A one-gyro Hubble will also struggle to track fast-moving targets, such as asteroids within the orbit of Mars, and to swivel to spot transient distant phenomena such as supernovae, according to a 2016 report (PDF) from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble. In addition, the inefficiencies of one-gyro mode will reduce the portion of the sky that Hubble can safely point to at any given moment, from 82% to roughly 40%, including a larger avoidance zone near the Sun. It won't be able to observe Venus or the Moon, nor will it be able to reliably spot comets when they're near the Sun. Its ability to scrutinize distant exoplanets will also be hampered, especially in gathering the spectral measurements used to discern alien atmospheres. Furthermore, a one-gyro Hubble won't be able to perform as many simultaneous observations with the new JWST space observatory. Moving forward, the two telescopes' fields of view at any given moment may overlap by less than 20%, according to a 2019 estimate anticipating this event from a Hubble advisory committee.

"The seemingly star-cross Boeing Starliner — within minutes of its long-delayed blastoff on the spacecraft's first piloted test flight — was grounded again Saturday," writes CBS News, "when one of three redundant computers managing the countdown from the base of the launch pad ran into a problem, triggering a last-minute scrub."

More details from NPR: With 3:50 left in the countdown, the rocket's computer initiated a hold. The next launch attempt won't happen until at least Wednesday, NASA said.

An issue with one of the three redundant computer systems at the base of the launch pad that are responsible for initiating the launch sequence prompted the automatic halt, said Tory Bruno, the head of United Launch Alliance, the government contractor trying to launch the Starliner. "We do require all three systems to be running — triple redundancy," ULA President and CEO Bruno said at a Saturday afternoon press briefing. "Those three big computers do a health check. ... Two came up normally. The third one came up, but it was slow to come up, and that tripped a red line that created an automatic hold." ULA engineers don't know why the computer halted, and will troubleshoot ground support equipment overnight, NASA said in an update on Saturday evening.

With the help of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers discovered a galaxy at a redshift of 14.32, indicating it existed just 290 million years post-Big Bang. In a NASA release today, Stefano Carniani from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, and Kevin Hainline from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, described how this source was found and what its unique properties tell us about galaxy formation: "The instruments on Webb were designed to find and understand the earliest galaxies, and in the first year of observations as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), we found many hundreds of candidate galaxies from the first 650 million years after the big bang. In early 2023, we discovered a galaxy in our data that had strong evidence of being above a redshift of 14, which was very exciting, but there were some properties of the source that made us wary. The source was surprisingly bright, which we wouldn't expect for such a distant galaxy, and it was very close to another galaxy such that the two appeared to be part of one larger object. When we observed the source again in October 2023 as part of the JADES Origins Field, new imaging data obtained with Webb's narrower NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) filters pointed even more toward the high-redshift hypothesis. We knew we needed a spectrum, as whatever we would learn would be of immense scientific importance, either as a new milestone in Webb's investigation of the early universe or as a confounding oddball of a middle-aged galaxy.

In January 2024, NIRSpec observed this galaxy, JADES-GS-z14-0, for almost ten hours, and when the spectrum was first processed, there was unambiguous evidence that the galaxy was indeed at a redshift of 14.32, shattering the previous most-distant galaxy record (z = 13.2 of JADES-GS-z13-0). Seeing this spectrum was incredibly exciting for the whole team, given the mystery surrounding the source. This discovery was not just a new distance record for our team; the most important aspect of JADES-GS-z14-0 was that at this distance, we know that this galaxy must be intrinsically very luminous. From the images, the source is found to be over 1,600-light years across, proving that the light we see is coming mostly from young stars and not from emission near a growing supermassive black hole. This much starlight implies that the galaxy is several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun! This raises the question: How can nature make such a bright, massive, and large galaxy in less than 300 million years?

The data reveal other important aspects of this astonishing galaxy. We see that the color of the galaxy is not as blue as it could be, indicating that some of the light is reddened by dust, even at these very early times. JADES researcher Jake Helton of Steward Observatory and the University of Arizona also identified that JADES-GS-z14-0 was detected at longer wavelengths with Webb's MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument), a remarkable achievement considering its distance. The MIRI observation covers wavelengths of light that were emitted in the visible-light range, which are redshifted out of reach for Webb's near-infrared instruments. Jake's analysis indicates that the brightness of the source implied by the MIRI observation is above what would be extrapolated from the measurements by the other Webb instruments, indicating the presence of strong ionized gas emission in the galaxy in the form of bright emission lines from hydrogen and oxygen. The presence of oxygen so early in the life of this galaxy is a surprise and suggests that multiple generations of very massive stars had already lived their lives before we observed the galaxy.

All of these observations, together, tell us that JADES-GS-z14-0 is not like the types of galaxies that have been predicted by theoretical models and computer simulations to exist in the very early universe. Given the observed brightness of the source, we can forecast how it might grow over cosmic time, and so far we have not found any suitable analogs from the hundreds of other galaxies we've observed at high redshift in our survey. Given the relatively small region of the sky that we searched to find JADES-GS-z14-0, its discovery has profound implications for the predicted number of bright galaxies we see in the early universe, as discussed in another concurrent JADES study (Robertson et al., recently accepted). It is likely that astronomers will find many such luminous galaxies, possibly at even earlier times, over the next decade with Webb. We're thrilled to see the extraordinary diversity of galaxies that existed at Cosmic Dawn!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The slashing of pollution from shipping in 2020 led to a big "termination shock" that is estimated have pushed the rate of global heating to double the long-term average, according to research. Until 2020, global shipping used dirty, high-sulphur fuels that produced air pollution. The pollution particles blocked sunlight and helped form more clouds, thereby curbing global heating. But new regulations at the start of 2020 slashed the sulphur content of fuels by more than 80%. The new analysis calculates that the subsequent drop in pollution particles has significantly increased the amount of heat being trapped at the Earth's surface that drives the climate crisis. The researchers said the sharp ending of decades of shipping pollution was an inadvertent geoengineering experiment, revealing new information about its effectiveness and risks.

Dr Tianle Yuan, at the University of Maryland, US, who led the study, said the estimated 0.2 watts per sq meter of additional heat trapped over the oceans after the pollution cut was "a big number, and it happened in one year, so it's a big shock to the system." "We will experience about double the warming rate compared to the long-term average" since 1880 as a result, he said. The heating effect of the pollution cut is expected to last about seven years. The research, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, combined satellite observations of sulphur pollution and computer modeling to calculate the impact of the cut. It found the short-term shock was equivalent to 80% of the total extra heating the planet has seen since 2020 from longer-term factors such as rising fossil-fuel emissions.

The scientists used relatively simple climate models to estimate how much this would drive up average global temperatures at the surface of the Earth, finding a rise of about 0.16C over seven years. This is a large rise and the same margin by which 2023 beat the temperature record compared with the previous hottest year. However, other scientists think the temperature impact of the pollution cut will be significantly lower due to feedbacks in the climate system, which are included in the most sophisticated climate models. The results of this type of analysis are expected later in 2024. [...] The new analysis indicates that this type of geoengineering would reduce temperatures, but would also bring serious risks. These include the sharp temperature rise when the pumping of aerosols stopped -- the termination shock -- and also potential changes to global precipitation patterns, which could disrupt the monsoon rains that billions of people depend on. "We should definitely do research on this, because it's a tool for situations where we really want to cool down the Earth temporarily," like an emergency brake, said Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. "But this is not going to be a long-term solution, because it doesn't address the root cause of global warming," which is emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Witnessing the blood-red fires of a volcanic eruption on Earth is memorable. But to see molten rock bleed out of a volcano on a different planet would be extraordinary. That is close to what scientists have spotted on Venus: two vast, sinuous lava flows oozing from two different corners of Earth's planetary neighbor. From a report: "After you see something like this, the first reaction is 'wow,'" said Davide Sulcanese, a doctoral student at the Universita d'Annunzio in Pescara, Italy, and an author of a study reporting the discovery in the journal Nature Astronomy, published on Monday. Earth and Venus were forged at the same time. Both are made of the same primeval matter, and both are the same age and size. So why is Earth a paradise overflowing with water and life, while Venus is a scorched hellscape with acidic skies?

Volcanic eruptions tinker with planetary atmospheres. One theory holds that, eons ago, several apocalyptic eruptions set off a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, turning it from a temperate, waterlogged world into an arid desert of burned glass. To better understand its volcanism, scientists hoped to catch a Venusian eruption in the act. But although the planet is known to be smothered in volcanoes, an opaque atmosphere has prevented anyone from seeing an eruption the way spacecraft have spotted them on Io, the hypervolcanic moon of Jupiter. In the 1990s, NASA's spacecraft Magellan used cloud-penetrating radar to survey most of the planet. But back then, the relatively low-resolution images made spotting fresh molten rock a troublesome task.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: The first crewed test flight of Boeing's long-delayed Starliner spacecraft won't take off as planned Saturday and could face a longer postponement as engineers evaluate a stubborn leak of helium from the capsule's propulsion system. NASA announced the latest delay of the Starliner test flight late Tuesday. Officials will take more time to consider their options for how to proceed with the mission after discovering the small helium leak on the spacecraft's service module.

The space agency did not describe what options are on the table, but sources said they range from flying the spacecraft "as is" with a thorough understanding of the leak and confidence it won't become more significant in flight, to removing the capsule from its Atlas V rocket and taking it back to a hangar for repairs. Theoretically, the former option could permit a launch attempt as soon as next week. The latter alternative could delay the launch until at least late summer.

"The team has been in meetings for two consecutive days, assessing flight rationale, system performance, and redundancy," NASA said in a statement Tuesday night. "There is still forward work in these areas, and the next possible launch opportunity is still being discussed. NASA will share more details once we have a clearer path forward."

"Albert Einstein was right," reports CNN. "There is an area at the edge of black holes where matter can no longer stay in orbit and instead falls in, as predicted by his theory of gravity."

The proof came by combining NASA's earth-orbiting NuSTAR telescope with the NICER telescope on the International Space Station to detect X-rays: A team of astronomers has for the first time observed this area — called the "plunging region" — in a black hole about 10,000 light-years from Earth. "We've been ignoring this region, because we didn't have the data," said research scientist Andrew Mummery, lead author of the study published Thursday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "But now that we do, we couldn't explain it any other way."
Mummery — also a Fellow in Oxford's physics department — told CNN, "We went out searching for this one specifically — that was always the plan. We've argued about whether we'd ever be able to find it for a really long time. People said it would be impossible, so confirming it's there is really exciting."

Mummery described the plunging region as "like the edge of a waterfall." Unlike the event horizon, which is closer to the center of the black hole and doesn't let anything escape, including light and radiation, in the "plunging region" light can still escape, but matter is doomed by the powerful gravitational pull, Mummery explained. The study's findings could help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of black holes. "We can really learn about them by studying this region, because it's right at the edge, so it gives us the most information," Mummery said...

According to Christopher Reynolds, a professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, College Park, finding actual evidence for the "plunging region" is an important step that will let scientists significantly refine models for how matter behaves around a black hole. "For example, it can be used to measure the rotation rate of the black hole," said Reynolds, who was not involved in the study.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: A thick atmosphere has been detected around a planet that's twice as big as Earth in a nearby solar system, researchers reported Wednesday.

The so-called super Earth — known as 55 Cancri e — is among the few rocky planets outside our solar system with a significant atmosphere, wrapped in a blanket of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The exact amounts are unclear. Earth's atmosphere is a blend of nitrogen, oxygen, argon and other gases. "It's probably the firmest evidence yet that this planet has an atmosphere," said Ian Crossfield, an astronomer at the University of Kansas who studies exoplanets and was not involved with the research.

The research was published in the journal Nature.
"The boiling temperatures on this planet — which can reach as hot as 4,200 degrees Fahrenheit (2,300 degrees Celsius) — mean that it is unlikely to host life," the article points out.

"Instead, scientists say the discovery is a promising sign that other such rocky planets with thick atmospheres could exist that may be more hospitable."

"Does a levitating robot train on the moon sound far-fetched?" asks LiveScience.

"NASA doesn't seem to think so, as the agency has just greenlit further funding for a study looking into the concept." The project, called "Flexible Levitation on a Track" (FLOAT), has been moved to phase two of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) , which aims to develop "science fiction-like" projects for future space exploration. The FLOAT project could result in materials being transported across the moon's surface as soon as the 2030s, according to the agency... According to NASA's initial design, FLOAT will consist of magnetic robots levitating over a three-layer film track to reduce abrasion from dust on the lunar surface. Carts will be mounted on these robots and will move at roughly 1 mph (1.61 km/h). They could transport roughly 100 tons (90 metric tons) of material a day to and from NASA's future lunar base.
"A durable, long-life robotic transport system will be critical to the daily operations of a sustainable lunar base in the 2030's," according to NASA's blog post, arguing it could be used to

• Transport moon materials mined to produce on-site resources like water, liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, or construction materials

• Transport payloads around the lunar base and to and from landing zones or other outposts

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.

Last week, NASA announced it is working with a technology development company on a new propulsion system that could transport humans to Mars in only two months -- down from the current nine month journey required to reach the Red Planet. Gizmodo reports: NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program recently selected six promising projects for additional funding and development, allowing them to graduate to the second stage of development. The new "science fiction-like concepts," as described by John Nelson, NIAC program executive at NASA, include a lunar railway system and fluid-based telescopes, as well as a pulsed plasma rocket.

The potentially groundbreaking propulsion system is being developed by Arizona-based Howe Industries. To reach high velocities within a shorter period of time, the pulsed plasma rocket would use nuclear fission -- the release of energy from atoms splitting apart -- to generate packets of plasma for thrust. It would essentially produce a controlled jet of plasma to help propel the rocket through space. Using the new propulsion system, and in terms of thrust, the rocket could potentially generate up to 22,481 pounds of force (100,000 Newtons) with a specific impulse (Isp) of 5,000 seconds, for remarkably high fuel efficiency. [...]

The pulsed plasma rocket would also be capable of carrying much heavier spacecraft, which can be then equipped with shielding against galactic cosmic rays for the crew on board. Phase 2 of NIAC is focused on assessing the neutronics of the system (how the motion of the spacecraft interacts with the plasma), designing the spacecraft, power system, and necessary subsystems, analyzing the magnetic nozzle capabilities, and determining trajectories and benefits of the pulsed plasma rocket, according to NASA.

"Out of an abundance of caution," Boeing says its historic Starliner launch has been postponed, citing an issue with the oxygen relief valve on the Atlas V rocket's upper stage. It was expected to launch tonight at 10:34 p.m. ET. TechCrunch reports: There are backup launch opportunities on May 7, 10 and 11. After years of delays and over $1 billion in cost overruns, the mission is set to be Boeing's first attempt to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. Once the issue is resolved with the upper stage, the United Launch Alliance Atlas V will carry the CST-100 Starliner capsule to orbit along with the two onboard astronauts -- Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams -- from Florida's Cape Canaveral at 10:34 PM local time Monday evening. The mission also marks the first time ULA's Atlas will carry crew. The rocket boasts a success rate of 100% across 99 missions. (ULA is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.)

The astronauts would now dock at the station at the earliest on Thursday, where they would remain for at least eight days. The two astronauts will return to Earth in the capsule no earlier than May 16. If all goes to plan, Boeing will be able to finally certify its Starliner for human transportation and begin fulfilling the terms of its $4.2 billion NASA astronaut taxi contract. That contract, under the agency's Commercial Crew Program, was awarded in 2014. Elon Musk's SpaceX was also granted a contract under that program, for its Crew Dragon capsule, and has been transporting astronauts to and from the ISS since 2020.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: The heat shield of the Orion spacecraft intended one day to carry astronauts to the moon under NASA's Artemis program suffered unexpected damage in more than 100 places as the spacecraft returned to Earth during an uncrewed test flight in 2022, according to a watchdog report released late Wednesday.

While the capsule withstood the fiery tumult of reentry, when temperatures reached 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it plunged through the atmosphere at nearly 25,000 mph, the damage the heat shield suffered was far greater than NASA engineers had expected and more severe than NASA had revealed previously. Photos of the heat shield in the report showed gouges that look like small potholes. "Should the same issue occur on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew," the report, by NASA's inspector general, concluded... The IG report provides the most detailed description of the issue to date. It also highlighted other problems with the spacecraft that could create significant challenges for the space agency as it seeks to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years.

Portions of the heat shield "wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed," according to the report. That, in turn, "could have caused enough structural damage to cause one of Orion's parachutes to fail...." In addition to the heat shield erosion on Orion, which is manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the IG said several bolts on the crew module "experienced an exposed gap that allowed for increased heating to the bolt interior and greater than expected melting and erosion."
Earlier this year, NASA announced the next flight for its moon program — sending a crew of four around the moon — would be delayed, according to the article. The moon-orbiting mission would now occur "no earlier than September 2025, largely because officials wanted to study the heat shield issue further and understand why it eroded as it did."

The article adds that this new report "casts doubt on both NASA's rosy original assessment of the test flight" — as well as the likelihood that a lunar landing will occur by late 2026.