After analyzing the data collected from NASA's successful Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) last year, the DART team found that the kinetic impactor mission "can be effective in altering the trajectory of an asteroid, a big step toward the goal of preventing future asteroid strikes on Earth." The findings were published in four papers in the journal Nature. From a NASA press release: The first paper reports DART's successful demonstration of kinetic impactor technology in detail: reconstructing the impact itself, reporting the timeline leading up to impact, specifying in detail the location and nature of the impact site, and recording the size and shape of Dimorphos. The authors, led by Terik Daly, Carolyn Ernst, and Olivier Barnouin of APL, note DART's successful autonomous targeting of a small asteroid, with limited prior observations, is a critical first step on the path to developing kinetic impactor technology as a viable operational capability for planetary defense. Their findings show intercepting an asteroid with a diameter of around half a mile, such as Dimorphos, can be achieved without an advance reconnaissance mission, though advance reconnaissance would give valuable information for planning and predicting the outcome. What is necessary is sufficient warning time -- several years at a minimum, but preferably decades. "Nevertheless," the authors state in the paper, DART's success "builds optimism about humanity's capacity to protect the Earth from an asteroid threat."

The second paper uses two independent approaches based on Earth-based lightcurve and radar observations. The investigation team, led by Cristina Thomas of Northern Arizona University, arrived at two consistent measurements of the period change from the kinetic impact: 33 minutes, plus or minus one minute. This large change indicates the recoil from material excavated from the asteroid and ejected into space by the impact (known as ejecta) contributed significant momentum change to the asteroid, beyond that of the DART spacecraft itself. The key to kinetic impact is that the push to the asteroid comes not only from colliding spacecraft, but also from this ejecta recoil. The authors conclude: "To serve as a proof-of-concept for the kinetic impactor technique of planetary defense, DART needed to demonstrate that an asteroid could be targeted during a high-speed encounter and that the target's orbit could be changed. DART has successfully done both."

In the third paper, the investigation team, led by Andrew Cheng of APL, calculated the momentum change transferred to the asteroid as a result of DART's kinetic impact by studying the change in the orbital period of Dimorphos. They found the impact caused an instantaneous slowing in Dimorphos' speed along its orbit of about 2.7 millimeters per second -- again indicating the recoil from ejecta played a major role in amplifying the momentum change directly imparted to the asteroid by the spacecraft. That momentum change was amplified by a factor of 2.2 to 4.9 (depending on the mass of Dimorphos), indicating the momentum change transferred because of ejecta production significantly exceeded the momentum change from the DART spacecraft alone. DART's scientific value goes beyond validating kinetic impactor as a means of planetary defense. By smashing into Dimorphos, the mission has broken new ground in the study of asteroids. DART's impact made Dimorphos an "active asteroid" -- a space rock that orbits like an asteroid but has a tail of material like a comet -- which is detailed in the fourth paper led by Jian-Yang Li of the Planetary Science Institute.

schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica, written by Eric Berger: One of the world's most important rocket companies, United Launch Alliance, may be sold later this year. The potential sale has not been disclosed publicly, but three sources confirmed to Ars that potential buyers have been contacted about the opportunity. These sources said a deal is expected to be closed before the end of this year and that investment firm Morgan Stanley and consulting firm Bain & Company are managing the transaction.

The sale of United Launch Alliance, or ULA as it is known within the industry, would mark the end of an era that has lasted for nearly two decades. The company was officially formed in 2005 as part of a deal brokered by the US government, ensuring the military had access to both Atlas and Delta rockets to put national security satellites into space. To form ULA, Lockheed Martin and Boeing merged their launch businesses into a single company, each taking a 50 percent stake. This union was profitable for both parent companies, as ULA held a monopoly on launching national security missions and, effectively, NASA science probes. In return for 100 percent mission success, ULA received large launch contracts and an approximately $1 billion annual subsidy from the US Department of Defense to maintain "launch readiness."

The emergence of SpaceX in the early 2010s with the increasingly reliable Falcon 9 rocket started to disrupt this profitable arrangement. SpaceX sold the Falcon 9 rocket at a substantial discount to ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV rockets. The company also successfully sued the US government to allow the Falcon 9 rocket to compete for national security missions, and SpaceX launched its first one in 2017. In recent years, SpaceX has come to dominate United Launch Alliance in terms of cadence. By the end of 2022, the upstart was launching as many rockets each month as ULA launched during a calendar year. During the last four years, in fact, SpaceX has landed more rockets than ULA has launched during its existence. However, ULA still holds a prominent place in the global launch industry, and there will likely be no shortage of suitors.

SpaceX is livestreaming coverage of its latest launch tonight. SpaceX and NASA were "preparing to launch a fresh crew to the International Space Station," reports CNN, "continuing the public-private effort to keep the orbiting laboratory fully staffed and return astronaut launches to U.S. soil

For this mission a reusable Falcon 9 rocket will eventually propel a Crew Dragon capsule into space — carrying six astronauts "from all over the world — two NASA astronauts, a Russian cosmonaut and an astronaut from the United Arab Emirates... to take over operations from the SpaceX Crew-5 astronauts who arrived at the space station in October 2022." They're expected to spend up to six months on board the orbiting laboratory, carrying out science experiments and maintaining the two-decade-old station.... During their stint in space, the Crew-6 astronauts will oversee more than 200 science-oriented projects, including researching how some substances burn in the microgravity environment and investigating microbial samples that will be collected from the exterior of the ISS.

They will play host to two other key missions that will stop by the ISS during their stay. The first is the Boeing Crew Flight Test, which will mark the first astronaut mission under a Boeing-NASA partnership. Slated for April, the flight will carry NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams to the space station, marking the last phase of a testing and demonstration program Boeing needs to carry out to certify its Starliner spacecraft for routine astronaut missions.

Then, in May, a group of four astronauts will arrive on a mission called AX-2 — a privately funded tourism mission to the space station. That mission, which will be carried out by a separate SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, will include former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, now a private astronaut with the Texas-based space tourism company Axiom, which brokered and organized the mission. It will also include three paying customers, similar to the AX-1 mission that visited the ISS last year.
"It's another paradigm shift," mission commander Stephen Bowen said in January. "Those two events — huge events — in spaceflight happening during our increment, on top of all the other work we get to do, I don't think we're going to fully be able to absorb it until after the fact."

Roughly 25 hours after the launch the crew capsule willdock with the space station. This will be SpaceX's seventh astronaut-carrying flight for NASA since 2020.

Pennsylvania State University has an announcement. "Six massive galaxies discovered in the early universe are upending what scientists previously understood about the origins of galaxies in the universe." "These objects are way more massiveâ than anyone expected," said Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, who modeled light from these galaxies. "We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we've discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe."

Using the first dataset released from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the international team of scientists discovered objects as mature as the Milky Way when the universe was only 3% of its current age, about 500-700 million years after the Big Bang.... In a paper published February 22 in Nature, the researchers show evidence that the six galaxies are far more massive than anyone expected and call into question what scientists previously understood about galaxy formation at the very beginning of the universe. "The revelation that massive galaxy formation began extremely early in the history of the universe upends what many of us had thought was settled science," said Leja. "We've been informally calling these objects 'universe breakers' — and they have been living up to their name so far."

Leja explained that the galaxies the team discovered are so massive that they are in tension with 99% of models for cosmology. Accounting for such a high amount of mass would require either altering the models for cosmology or revising the scientific understanding of galaxy formation in the early universe — that galaxies started as small clouds of stars and dust that gradually grew larger over time. Either scenario requires a fundamental shift in our understanding of how the universe came to be, he added. "We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find," Leja said. "It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question."
"My first thought was we had made a mistake and we would just find it and move on with our lives," Leja says in the statement. "But we have yet to find that mistake, despite a lot of trying."

"While the data indicates they are likely galaxies, I think there is a real possibility that a few of these objects turn out to be obscured supermassive black holes. Regardless, the amount of mass we discovered means that the known mass in stars at this period of our universe is up to 100 times greater than we had previously thought. Even if we cut the sample in half, this is still an astounding change."

Phys.org got a more detailed explantion from one of the paper's co-authors: It took our home galaxy the entire life of the universe for all its stars to assemble. For this young galaxy to achieve the same growth in just 700 million years, it would have had to grow around 20 times faster than the Milky Way, said Labbe, a researcher at Australia's Swinburne University of Technology. For there to be such massive galaxies so soon after the Big Bang goes against the current cosmological model which represents science's best understanding of how the universe works. According to theory, galaxies grow slowly from very small beginnings at early times," Labbe said, adding that such galaxies were expected to be between 10 to 100 times smaller. But the size of these galaxies "really go off a cliff," he said....

The newly discovered galaxies could indicate that things sped up far faster in the early universe than previously thought, allowing stars to form "much more efficiently," said David Elbaz, an astrophysicist at the French Atomic Energy Commission not involved in the research. is could be linked to recent signs that the universe itself is expanding faster than we once believed, he added.

This subject sparks fierce debate among cosmologists, making this latest discovery "all the more exciting, because it is one more indication that the model is cracking," Elbaz said.

In a keynote at FOSDEM 2023, NASA's science data officer Steve Crawford explored NASA's use of open-source software.

But LWN.net notes that the talk went far beyond just the calibration software for the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars Ingenuity copter's flight-control framework. In his talk, Crawford presented NASA's Open-Source Science Initiative. Its goal is to support scientists to help them integrate open-science principles into the entire research workflow. Just a few weeks before Crawford's talk, NASA's Science Mission Directorate published its new policy on scientific information.

Crawford summarized this policy with "as open as possible, as restricted as necessary, always secure", and he made this more concrete: "Publications should be made openly available with no embargo period, including research data and software. Data should be released with a Creative Commons Zero license, and software with a commonly used permissive license, such as Apache, BSD, or MIT. The new policy also encourages using and contributing to open-source software." Crawford added that NASA's policies will be updated to make it clear that employees can contribute to open-source projects in their official capacity....

As part of its Open-Source Science Initiative, NASA has started its five-year Transform to Open Science (TOPS) mission. This is a $40-million mission to speed up adoption of open-science practices; it starts with the White House and all major US federal agencies, including NASA, declaring 2023 as the "Year of Open Science". One of NASA's strategic goals with TOPS is to enable five major scientific discoveries through open-science principles, Crawford said.
Interesting tidbit from the article: "In 2003 NASA created a license to enable the release of software by civil servants, the NASA Open Source Agreement. This license has been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but the Free Software Foundation doesn't consider it a free-software license because it does not allow changes to the code that come from third-party free-software projects."

Thanks to Slashdot reader guest reader for sharing the article!

Russia launched a Soyuz spacecraft that will replace a capsule that sprang a coolant leak in December, leaving two cosmonauts and one NASA astronaut without a ride home. CNN reports: Liftoff of the capsule, called the Soyuz MS-23, took place out of Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in Kazakhstan on Thursday at 7:24 p.m. ET, which is 5:24 a.m. Friday local time. The uncrewed spacecraft will spend about two days in orbit, maneuvering toward the International Space Station It's expected to dock with the Poisk module -- which is on the space station's Russian-run portion -- just after 8 p.m. ET Saturday.

The Soyuz MS-23 will be the return vehicle for cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin and NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, all of whom traveled to the space station aboard the Soyuz MS-22 capsule in September. Rather than flying with crew members aboard, the Soyuz MS-23 launched on Thursday with only a "Zero-G indicator," which can be any object that is left in the cabin and is designed to float freely when the capsule enters microgravity. For this mission, the indicator is a teddy bear tethered by a string inside the cabin.

Images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal that China's Zhurong rover remains stationary on the Red Planet as China remains silent on the status of its spacecraft. SpaceNews reports: The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured images of the rover on March 11, 2022, a second on Sept. 8, 2022 and finally Feb. 7, 2023. The images were published Feb. 21 by the HiRISE Operations Center The images show that the solar-powered Zhurong -- which landed in May 2021 -- has not moved since at least September 2022. It had entered a planned hibernation state in May 2022 to ride out the low solar radiation levels of winter in Mars's Utopia Planitia region.

Zhurong was expected to autonomously resume activities around December, around the time of Spring solstice in the northern hemisphere, when temperatures and light levels reached levels allowing the rover's battery and solar arrays to generate sufficient electrical power. However Chinese space authorities have not provided an update on the status of the rover. The South China Morning Post reported Jan. 7, citing sources that do not wish to be named, that the mission team was yet to receive a signal from Zhurong.

The progression of the HiRISE images suggest that Zhurong may have accumulated a covering of Martian dust on its surface. This could impact the function of both its solar arrays and the pair of "windows" which allow a chemical called n-undecane to store heat energy during the day and release it during the night. Zhurong does not carry a radioisotope heater unit -- which are used by the country's Yutu lunar rovers -- instead using systems including n-undecane for heating and a coating of aerogel for insulation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As part of the state's biennial budget process, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has called on the state legislature to provide $350 million to create and fund a Texas Space Commission for the next two years. "With companies seeking to expand space travel in coming years, continued development of the space industry in the state will ensure Texas remains at the forefront not only in the United States, but the entire world," Abbott stated in his budget document for the 88th Legislature. "Further investment will cement Texas as the preeminent location for innovation and development in this rapidly growing industry. Due to increased competition from other states and internationally, further planning and coordination is needed to keep Texas at the cutting edge." Texas has a historic budget surplus this year due to oil prices, inflation, and other factors driving economic growth. The state is projected to have $188.2 billion available in general revenue for funding the business of the state over the 2024-2025 period, a surplus of $32.7 billion over spending during the previous two years.

In their initial drafts, both the House and the Senate budget bills for this legislative session include the full $350 million in funding for a space commission. The initiative is being led by the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Texas Rep. Greg Bonnen, whose district just south of Houston is adjacent to NASA's Johnson Space Center. A source said the bill "has all of the support it needs to pass" from leaders in both the House and Senate. Bonnen's office did not specify what the Texas Space Commission will address, including how the money would be spent. A second source in the Texas Legislature told Ars that details about the commission's funding priorities were expected to be worked out later in the legislative session, which ends on May 29.

However, the framework for the proposed space commission appears to have been prepared by a Houston-based workforce-development organization called TexSpace, which published an annual report in December calling for the creation of such a commission. According to this document, the commission would "focus on policy and arranging statewide strategy by monitoring local, state, and federal policies and opportunities and establishing an economic ecosystem for Texas' space enterprises." It would include 15 members, including those appointed by political officials, as well as an appointee each from SpaceX and Blue Origin. [...] The commission will likely seek to ensure that SpaceX and Blue Origin continue to grow their presence in the state and to nurture other, smaller startups. "Compared to the Texas proposal, Space Florida has a modest annual budget of $12.5 million," notes Ars.

"Florida leaders made the brilliant decision to invest in the commercial space industry years ago, and that investment has paid off," Anna Alexopoulos Farrar, a vice president of communications for Space Florida, told Ars. "Space Florida alone had a $5.9 billion economic impact on the state over the past 15 years, and we project a $1.1 billion impact every year starting this year. It's not surprising that other states want to emulate our proven model, and we welcome the challenge from our friends in Texas -- competition yields the best outcomes for both businesses and taxpayers."

The CBC reports: You may have seen stories over the past week or so with headlines like, "Part of the sun breaks free and forms a strange vortex, baffling scientists," or "Unbelievable moment a piece of the sun BREAKS OFF baffles scientists" or even "NASA captures piece of sun breaking off, baffles scientists." It all started with a harmless, informative tweet. Tamitha Skov, a space weather forecaster and science communicator, just broke away from the main filament... Implications for understanding the sun's atmospheric dynamics above 55 degrees here cannot be overstated!"

But are scientists actually baffled? Tamitha Skov laughs. "No," she said....

The eight-hour event started off with a solar prominence (also known as a solar filament), that began to rise up near the north pole of the sun, which is seen at the top in satellite images. Prominences are made up of plasma, a hot gas of electrically charged hydrogen and helium. They are common on the sun, but it was the location of this one — at the sun's north pole — that was of particular interest to heliophysicists. "What ended up happening was something that started off as a very normal, average, what we call a polar crown filament. It became this kind of tweeted her excitement that "material from a northern prominence big tower, like a big volcano that was beginning to rise up near the very northern pole," Skov explained. The prominence was near the top of the north pole, above 60 degrees latitude where it got caught in an electromagnetic wind. "And it began to yank and pull at some of the material in that prominence," Skov said.

"So it was rising like a hot air balloon, so to speak, up in the air. And as it cooled, instead of just cooling back down and falling, or perhaps erupting, like a normal polar crown filament, part of it got ripped off in this wind. And as it shredded off into this wind, we got to watch it cool down, swirl in a vortex. And that is a very rare, if not, fundamentally new observation."
It looks like the material ultimately just returns to the surface of the sun -- albeit providing clues about the sun's polar winds and the specifics of its magnetic activity cycle.

Skov also says that the sun's magnetic polar fields "flip" during its 22-year solar cycle, which increases the odds of non-charged particles traveling to the poles, according to the article. "So scientists weren't baffled, since they already had some knowledge about this type of activity. But they were thrilled to be able to witness it."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader aduxorth for sharing the news.

The idea of using dirt on the Moon to manufacture solar cells, which could power a permanent human settlement, may seem outlandish, but two companies say they've made big progress on that front: they each say they've already made solar cells using fake Moon dirt. From a report: Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin says it's been making solar cells this way since 2021 but just made that information public in a blog post on Friday. Separately, Lunar Resources, which aims to develop technologies for the "large-scale industrialization of Space," told The Verge in a call today that it's been doing the same for the last couple of years. Each company still has to make an enormous leap: from crafting solar cells out of fake dirt in Earth-bound labs to accomplishing the same thing on the harsh surface of the Moon. But this is a dream decades in the making. And if their technologies succeed, they could help make it possible to build outposts on the Moon. The idea of tapping the Moon's resources to support human settlements, called in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) in technical speak, has only recently moved out of the realm of science fiction. Now, with its Artemis program, NASA is looking to establish "the first long-term presence on the Moon."

Russia's space agency will hold off returning three astronauts from the International Space Station as it works with NASA to investigate a coolant leak issue that impacted an uncrewed freighter spacecraft last weekend. The Register reports: The Progress MS-21 -- also known as the Progress 82 spacecraft -- arrived at the floating space lab in October 2022 carrying water and other supplies. After months of being docked to the station's Poisk module, the vehicle suddenly began spewing liquid coolant. On February 11, engineers at the Russian Mission Control Center detected a drop in pressure inside its coolant loop, but the station and the crew onboard are safe.

The Progress 82 spacecraft is currently being filled with trash and is scheduled to undock on February 17 and be disposed of over the Pacific Ocean. It began leaking coolant just as the Russian uncrewed Progress 83 cargo spacecraft successfully docked with the station's Zvezda service module. NASA and Roscosmos are now investigating the coolant glitch on Progress 82 as it's the second Soyuz incident of late after the Soyuz MS-22 began leaking in December. It's not clear what might have caused that malfunction, although one possibility that has been floated is that a micrometeoroid pierced an exterior radiator.

Yury Borisov, Roscosmos's director general, said cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, as well as NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, will have to remain onboard until March at the earliest while officials examine the coolant loop's depressurization, according to Reuters. Their space ferry had been due to launch on February 20 but that has been pushed back to March 10 at the earliest. "Officials are monitoring all International Space Station systems and are not tracking any other issues," NASA concluded.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, in a blog post not even promoted by the company's Twitter account or a news release, Blue Origin quietly said its "Blue Alchemist" program has been working on [using the dusty lunar surface to manufacture solar panels] for the last two years. The company, founded by Jeff Bezos, has made both solar cells and electricity transmission wires from simulated lunar soil -- a material that is chemically and mineralogically equivalent to lunar regolith. The engineering work is based on a process known as "molten regolith electrolysis," and Blue Origin has advanced the state of the art for solar cell manufacturing. In this process, a direct electric current is applied to the simulated regolith at a high temperature, above 1,600-degrees Celsius. Through this electrolysis process, iron, silicon, and aluminum can be extracted from the lunar regolith. Blue Origin says it has produced silicon to more than 99.999 percent purity through molten regolith electrolysis.

The key advance made by Blue Alchemist is that its engineers and scientists have taken the byproducts of this reaction -- and these materials alone -- to fabricate solar cells as well as the protective glass cover that would allow them to survive a decade or longer on the lunar surface. Blue Origin will attempt to market the technology to NASA for use by its Artemis program to return humans to the Moon in a "sustainable" way. NASA and its international partners seek to differentiate Artemis from the Apollo program by more extended stays on the Moon and building infrastructure such as power systems.

"Although our vision is technically ambitious, our technology is real now," the company said in its blog post. "Blue Origin's goal of producing solar power using only lunar resources is aligned with NASA's highest priority Moon-to-Mars infrastructure development objective." This is a notable research breakthrough, as the same electrolysis process could also be used to produce metals for building habitats and other structures, as well as oxygen. These are all important for "living off the land" if humans are to avoid the expense of needing to bring everything from Earth to live and work in space. While it is a long way from lab experiments to manufacturing on the Moon, these experiments are a critical first step.

"In the foothills of a Martian mountain, NASA's Curiosity rover found stunning new evidence of an ancient lake in the form of rocks etched with the ripples of waves," reports CNN.

But they add that the evidence "appeared in an unlikely place." The rover is traversing an area of Mars called the "sulfate-bearing unit" that researchers previously thought would only show evidence of mere trickles of water, as scientists believed the rocks there formed as the surface of the red planet was drying out. Instead, the rover found some of the clearest evidence yet of ancient waters.

"This is the best evidence of water and waves that we've seen in the entire mission," said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. "We climbed through thousands of feet of lake deposits and never saw evidence like this — and now we found it in a place we expected to be dry...."

"Billions of years ago, waves on the surface of a shallow lake stirred up sediment at the lake bottom, over time creating rippled textures left in rock," according to a NASA news release.
From NASA's announcement: Having climbed nearly a half-mile above the mountain's base, Curiosity has found these rippled rock textures preserved in what's nicknamed the 'Marker Band' — a thin layer of dark rock that stands out from the rest of Mount Sharp....

Far ahead of the Marker Band, scientists can see another clue to the history of Mars' ancient water in a valley named Gediz Vallis. Wind carved the valley, but a channel running through it that starts higher up on Mount Sharp is thought to have been eroded by a small river.

Google published an online advertisement in which its much anticipated AI chatbot Bard delivered an inaccurate answer. From a report: The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a "launchpad for curiosity" that would help simplify complex topics. In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?" Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate. The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.

Google is working on a ChatGPT competitor named Bard. From a report: Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced the project in a blog post today, describing the tool as an "experimental conversational AI service" that will answer users' queries and take part in conversations. The software will be available to a group of "trusted testers" today, says Pichai, before becoming "more widely available to the public in the coming weeks." It's not clear exactly what capabilities Bard will have, but it seems the chatbot will be just as free ranging as OpenAI's ChatGPT. A screenshot encourages users to ask Bard practical queries, like how to plan a baby shower or what kind of meals could be made from a list of ingredients for lunch.

Writes Pichai: "Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills." Pichai also notes that Bard "draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses," suggesting it may be able to answer questions about recent events -- something ChatGPT struggles with. Further reading: An important next step on our AI journey (Google blog).

Satellite navigation systems for lunar settlements will require local atomic clocks. Scientists are working out what time they will keep. From a report: It's not obvious what form a universal lunar time would take. Clocks on Earth and the Moon naturally tick at different speeds, because of the differing gravitational fields of the two bodies. Official lunar time could be based on a clock system designed to synchronize with UTC, or it could be independent of Earth time. Representatives of space agencies and academic organizations worldwide met in November 2022 to start drafting recommendations on how to define lunar time at the European Space Research and Technology Centre of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Decisions must be made soon, says Patrizia Tavella, who leads the time department at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, France. If an official lunar time is not established, space agencies and private companies will come up with their own solutions, she says. "This is why we want to raise an alert now, saying let's work together to take a common decision." The most pressing need for lunar time comes from plans to create a dedicated global satellite navigation system (GNSS) for the Moon, similar to how GPS and other satellite navigation networks enable precise location tracking on Earth.

Space agencies plan to install this lunar GNSS from around 2030. ESA approved a lunar satellite navigation project called Moonlight at its ministerial council meeting on 22 and 23 November 2022 in Paris, and NASA established a similar project, called Lunar Communications Relay and Navigation Systems, last January. Until now, Moon missions have pinpointed their locations using radio signals sent to large antennas on Earth at scheduled times. But with dozens of missions planned, "there's just not enough resources to cover everybody," says Joel Parker, an engineer who works on lunar navigation at the Goddard Center.

A small asteroid is flying very close to Earth on Thursday night, less than a week after astronomers discovered the object. The New York Times reports: The asteroid, named 2023 BU, was scheduled to pass over the southern tip of South America at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time. The asteroid is fairly small -- less than 30 feet across, about the size of a truck -- and will be best visible in the skies to the west of southern Chile. For space watchers unable to view 2023 BU firsthand, the Virtual Telescope Project will be broadcasting the event on its website and YouTube channel. The asteroid will not hit Earth but will make one of the closest approaches ever by such an object, hurtling past Earth at just 2,200 miles above its surface, according to a news release from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This encounter puts the asteroid "well within the orbit of geosynchronous satellites," the statement noted, but the asteroid is not on track to hit any.

2023 BU was unknown to NASA, or anyone, until last Saturday. Gennadiy Borisov, an amateur astronomer in Crimea, noticed the asteroid from the MARGO Observatory, a setup of telescopes that he has used to discover other interstellar objects. Astronomers then determined 2023 BU's orbit around the sun and impending trip past Earth using data from the Minor Planet Center, a project sanctioned by the International Astronomical Union. It publishes positions of newly found space objects, including comets and satellites, from information of several observatories worldwide.

The United States plans to test a spacecraft engine powered by nuclear fission by 2027 as part of a long-term NASA effort to demonstrate more efficient methods of propelling astronauts to Mars in the future, the space agency's chief said Tuesday. From a report: NASA will partner with the U.S. military's research and development agency, DARPA, to develop a nuclear thermal propulsion engine and launch it to space "as soon as 2027," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said during a conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

"NASA's tiny Ingenuity helicopter now has 40 off-Earth flights under its belt," reports Space.com: The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity lifted off yet again on Thursday (Jan. 19), staying aloft for nearly 92 seconds on a sortie that covered about 584 feet (178 meters) of horizontal distance. The flight repositioned Ingenuity, moving it from "Airfield Z" on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater to "Airfield Beta," according to the mission's flight log. That journey took the little chopper over some sand dunes, as imagery captured during the hop shows....

Ingenuity is a technology demonstrator designed to show that aerial exploration is possible on Mars despite the planet's thin atmosphere. The helicopter's prime mission covered just five flights, which Ingenuity knocked out shortly after touching down inside Jezero. The chopper then shifted into an extended mission, during which it has been pushing its flight capabilities and serving as a scout for Perseverance. The helicopter's aerial observations help the rover team identify potentially interesting scientific targets and pick the best routes through the rugged landscapes on Jezero's floor.

Watch a rare launch of SpaceX's massive Falcon Heavy rocket livestreamed on SpaceX's YouTube channel.

"Nearly five years have passed since the massive Falcon Heavy rocket made its successful debut launch in February 2018," writes Ars Technica.

"Since then, however, SpaceX's heavy lift rocket has flown just three additional times." Why? It's partly because there is simply not all that much demand for a heavy lift rocket. Another factor is that SpaceX has increased the performance of its Falcon 9 rocket so much that it can complete a lot of the missions originally manifested on the Falcon Heavy. However the main reason for the low cadence has been due to a lack of readiness of payloads for the new rocket, particularly from the US Department of Defense. But now this trickle of Falcon Heavy launches may turn into a flood. [Sunday's launch is the first of potentially five launches this year]

SpaceX completed a hot fire test of the rocket on Tuesday, and declared that the vehicle was ready for liftoff. The rocket will use a brand new core stage, and side-mounted boosters that have flown into space one time, as side-mounted boosters on the USSF-44 Falcon Heavy mission that launched on November 1 2022.
What's it carrying? Space.com writes: The main payload is a military communications satellite called Continuous Broadcast Augmenting SATCOM 2, which the Falcon Heavy will send to geostationary orbit, about 22,200 miles (35,700 kilometers) above Earth. Also flying Saturday is a rideshare spacecraft called Long Duration Propulsive ESPA (LDPE)-3A, a payload adapter that can hold up to six small satellites, according to EverydayAstronaut.com. LDPE-3A will carry five Space Force payloads on USSF-67. Among them are "two operational prototypes for enhanced situational awareness and an operational prototype crypto/interface encryption payload providing secure space-to-ground communications capability," Space Force officials said in an emailed statement on Friday....

If all goes according to plan, the two side boosters will come back to Earth shortly after liftoff on Sunday, making vertical touchdowns at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which is next door to NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The central booster will not return, instead ditching into the Atlantic Ocean....

USSF-67 is part of a busy week for SpaceX. The company also plans to launch 51 of its Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit atop a Falcon 9 on Thursday, January 19.